Can Labour convince the electorate that their New Economics is credible?

In Lent Term 2016, Mr John McDonnell, MP for Hayes and Harlington and Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, discussed Labour’s economic policy as part of the British Government @ LSE public lecture series. Second year undergraduate Joshua Manby assesses ‘The New Economics,’ and argues that although this concept is a pleasing vision for the future, there remains some way to go before it becomes a fully formed plan supported by the electorate and the media

Citizenship and state succession in the Sudans

Bronwen Manby is senior programme adviser on Africa with the Open Society Foundations, and author of two books on nationality law in Africa. She is an expert adviser on citizenship for UNHCR’s Khartoum office and wrote an article on citizenship issues and the options for resolving them in advance of the secession of South Sudan. She is currently on sabbatical leave, based in the Centre for Human Rights at LSE. This post also appears on the Open Society Foundations blog

Exact nonadditive kinetic potentials for embedded density functional theory

We describe an embedded density functional theory (DFT) protocol in which the nonadditive kinetic energy component of the embedding potential is treated exactly. At each iteration of the Kohn–Sham equations for constrained electron density, the Zhao–Morrison–Parr constrained search method for constructing Kohn–Sham orbitals is combined with the King-Handy expression for the exact kinetic potential. We use this formally exact embedding protocol to calculate ionization energies for a series of three- and four-electron atomic systems, and the results are compared to embedded DFT calculations that utilize the Thomas–Fermi (TF) and the Thomas–Fermi–von Weisacker approximations to the kinetic energy functional. These calculations illustrate the expected breakdown due to the TF approximation for the nonadditive kinetic potential, with errors of 30%–80% in the calculated ionization energies; by contrast, the exact protocol is found to be accurate and stable. To significantly improve the convergence of the new protocol, we introduce a density-based switching function to map between the exact nonadditive kinetic potential and the TF approximation in the region of the nuclear cusp, and we demonstrate that this approximation has little effect on the accuracy of the calculated ionization energies. Finally, we describe possible extensions of the exact protocol to perform accurate embedded DFT calculations in large systems with strongly overlapping subsystem densities

The LSE Undergraduate political review

Josh Manby, who is studying a BSc Government & Economics in the Department of Government and is Editor of the LSE Undergraduate Political Review (UPR), talks about the forthcoming UPR Colloquium as well as the aims and future goals of the UPR

Book review: Nigeria: a new history of a turbulent centuryby Richard Bourne

Richard Bourne has provided an excellent overview of the main political events of Nigeria’s first hundred years, but no deeper analysis of the reasons for which Nigeria has stayed together, according to LSE’s Bronwen Manby