From Queen Caroline to Lady Dedlock: Dickens and the popular radical imagination

On an autumn day in 1842, William Hone lay dying. He was by now an obscure figure, but through the services of an old friend, George Cruikshank, he sent a request to Charles Dickens that he might shake his hand before he died. The famous novelist agreed to the request, and for a brief moment Dickens, Cruikshank, and William Hone came together in Hone's shabby London home. The meeting apparently meant little to Dickens who, subsequently attending Hone's funeral, recounted with comic viciousness Cruikshank's histrionics as his old friend was laid to rest. Writing to an American friend, Cornelius Felton, Dickens described how he found himself “almost sobbing with laughter at the funereal absurdities of George Cruikshank and others” (Ackroyd 407). The encounter between Dickens, Cruikshank, and Hone in 1842 is a little-known but with hindsight a significant convergence; for despite Dickens's seeming disregard for the ailing and rather threadbare old bookseller, the deathbed tableau crystallizes an important and much overlooked connection between Dickens's writings and an earlier popular radical tradition.

Funds of Funds: A Closer Look at Age-Based Investing

Over the next 20 years, 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 will hit the half-century mark. For most, this means facing up to the hard questions of how, or even if, they will be able to afford retirement. Only 40% of Americans feel as if their retirement investment vehicles are adequately funded. A major problem with the inadequate funding of the other 60% of these individuals’ portfolios is the fact that they are not capturing potential returns due to their failure to properly diversify among different asset classes. Over the last decade, mutual fund companies have recognized this significant business opportunity and have begun to tailor funds that target retirees specifically. Companies now offer products that give clients a one ticket diversification solution providing retirement income at a later date, usually indicated by the funds name; for example, Target Retirement 2040. These mutual funds are inherently funds of funds that pursue their investment objective by investing in other mutual funds rather than individually picking stocks and bonds. Life-cycle funds, primarily sold through 401(k)s, are designed to offer a riskier asset allocation in early years and then become more conservative as the investor’s target retirement date comes closer. The retirement funds industry has been growing rapidly with assets under management increasing exponentially. This growth is partly explained by the Pension Protection Act, passed this past year, which automatically helps employers to enroll employees in retirement plans. The law also makes it easier to designate life-cycle funds as default investments in retirement plans

Skorokhod's M1 topology for distribution-valued processes

Skorokhod's M1 topology is defined for c\`adl\`ag paths taking values in the space of tempered distributions (more generally, in the dual of a countably Hilbertian nuclear space). Compactness and tightness characterisations are derived which allow us to study a collection of stochastic processes through their projections on the familiar space of real-valued c\`adl\`ag processes. It is shown how this topological space can be used in analysing the convergence of empirical process approximations to distribution-valued evolution equations with Dirichlet boundary conditions.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure

At the Mercy of the Common Noise: Blow-ups in a Conditional McKean--Vlasov Problem

We extend a model of positive feedback and contagion in large mean-field systems, by introducing a common source of noise driven by Brownian motion. Although the driving dynamics are continuous, the positive feedback effect can lead to `blow-up' phenomena whereby solutions develop jump-discontinuities. Our main results are twofold and concern the conditional McKean--Vlasov formulation of the model. First and foremost, we show that there are global solutions to this McKean--Vlasov problem, which can be realised as limit points of a motivating particle system with common noise. Furthermore, we derive results on the occurrence of blow-ups, thereby showing how these events can be triggered or prevented by the pathwise realisations of the common noise.Comment: 43 pages, 3 figures, substantial revision with generalisation of results in Section 2 and improved presentation overal

A McKean--Vlasov equation with positive feedback and blow-ups

We study a McKean--Vlasov equation arising from a mean-field model of a particle system with positive feedback. As particles hit a barrier they cause the other particles to jump in the direction of the barrier and this feedback mechanism leads to the possibility that the system can exhibit contagious blow-ups. Using a fixed-point argument we construct a differentiable solution up to a first explosion time. Our main contribution is a proof of uniqueness in the class of c\`{a}dl\`{a}g functions, which confirms the validity of related propagation-of-chaos results in the literature. We extend the allowed initial conditions to include densities with any power law decay at the boundary, and connect the exponent of decay with the growth exponent of the solution in small time in a precise way. This takes us asymptotically close to the control on initial conditions required for a global solution theory. A novel minimality result and trapping technique are introduced to prove uniqueness.Comment: 35 pages, 5 figures. Latest version clarifies an imprecision in statement and proof of Theorem 1.8, emphasising that it applies only to physical solution

Contraceptive choices for women with learning disabilities

‘Contraceptive choices for women with learning disabilities’ is an Open University research project, supported by a grant from Open Society Foundations (Grant No: OR2014-12989). This inclusive project set out to explore women’s contraceptive decision-making and sought to include women with mild to moderate learning disabilities as well as women with high support needs. Between December 2014 and April 2015 we interviewed 19 women living in several locations across the United Kingdom

A multiple profile approach to the palynological reconstruction of Norse landscapes in Greenland's Eastern Settlement

Acknowledgments The Leverhulme Trust is thanked for financial support. Gordon Cook provided radiocarbon dates. Thanks are also due to Andy McMullen for botanical identifications and assistance in the field, and to Sikuu Motzfeld for hospitality during fieldwork. We are also grateful to Emilie Gauthier, Mike Kaplan, Pete Langdon and Alan Gillespie for their comments.Peer reviewedPostprin

Book review: how to stop Brexit (and make Britain great again) - Nick Clegg

In How to Stop Brexit (and Make Britain Great Again), Nick Clegg offers a short, accessible book seeking to persuade the ambivalent or undecided that Brexit should be stopped; to suggest what the average voter can do about it; and to propose an alternative model for relations between Britain and Europe. While this is an engaging and lively read with a number of thought-provoking ..

Book review: the despot’s accomplice: how the West is aiding and abetting the decline of democracy by Brian Klaas

In The Despot’s Accomplice: How the West is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy, Brian Klaas provides a frontline account of the contemporary history of democracy, the current state of democracy promotion and the fundamental flaws in the West’s approach. This dynamic book offers convincing insight into the impact of current policy and proposals for future strategies that should be required reading for policymakers and practitioners engaged in democracy promotion, recommends Robert Ledger