Community Reclamation: the Hybrid Building

Reclamation of a city involves reusing abandoned buildings in conjunction with new construction. These negative spaces of disuse generated by a changing infrastructure are often overlooked or destroyed. If they are instead viewed as positive spaces for reuse, a city’s infrastructure and its residents can adapt and grow. Recognizing these newly positive spaces produces a chance to examine what social needs of the community are not being met. Pushing the modern concept of the hybrid building creates a unique opportunity; flexibility of use derived from flexibility of space. A community building can best serve the social needs of its residents by having the ability to adapt to changes in those needs

Ethics and health care 'underfunding'

There are continual “crises” in health care systems worldwide as producer and patient groups unify and decry the “underfunding” of health care. Sometimes this cacophony is the self interest of profit seeking producers and often it is advocacy of unproven therapies. Such pressure is to be expected and needs careful management by explicit rationing criteria which determine who gets access to what health care. Science and rationality, however, are unfortunately, rarely the rules of conduct in the medical market-place

Anthropology of the Crowd, Blog 8

Student blog posts from the Great VCU Bike Race Book

Dense clusters of primes in subsets

We prove a generalization of the author's work to show that any subset of the primes which is `well-distributed' in arithmetic progressions contains many primes which are close together. Moreover, our bounds hold with some uniformity in the parameters. As applications, we show there are infinitely many intervals of length $(\log{x})^{\epsilon}$ containing $\gg_\epsilon \log\log{x}$ primes, and show lower bounds of the correct order of magnitude for the number of strings of $m$ congruent primes with $p_{n+m}-p_n\le \epsilon\log{x}$.Comment: 35 pages; clarified some statement

Primes represented by incomplete norm forms

Let $K=\mathbb{Q}(\omega)$ with $\omega$ the root of a degree $n$ monic irreducible polynomial $f\in\mathbb{Z}[X]$. We show the degree $n$ polynomial $N(\sum_{i=1}^{n-k}x_i\omega^{i-1})$ in $n-k$ variables formed by setting the final $k$ coefficients to 0 takes the expected asymptotic number of prime values if $n\ge 4k$. In the special case $K=\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt[n]{\theta})$, we show $N(\sum_{i=1}^{n-k}x_i\sqrt[n]{\theta^{i-1}})$ takes infinitely many prime values provided $n\ge 22k/7$. Our proof relies on using suitable `Type I' and `Type II' estimates in Harman's sieve, which are established in a similar overall manner to the previous work of Friedlander and Iwaniec on prime values of $X^2+Y^4$ and of Heath-Brown on $X^3+2Y^3$. Our proof ultimately relies on employing explicit elementary estimates from the geometry of numbers and algebraic geometry to control the number of highly skewed lattices appearing in our final estimates.Comment: 103 pages; v2 is significant rewrite of v1, main results unchange

International Lattice Data Grid: Turn on, plug in,and download

In the beginning there was the internet, then came the world wide web, and now there is the grid. In the future perhaps there will be the cloud. In the age of persistent, pervasive, and pandemic networks I review how the lattice QCD community embraced the open source paradigm for both code and data whilst adopting the emerging grid technologies, and why having your data persistently accessible via standardized protocols and services might be a good idea.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figur

The Agricultural Labourer in Worcestershire: Responses to Economic Change and Social Dislocation 1790-1841.

The study of rural history and social unrest in the English countryside has concentrated largely on East Anglia and southern England. Apart from one or two recent studies, the western agricultural counties have been relatively ignored. More importantly, apart from giving some detailed accounts of the lives of rural political activists, many historians have paid less attention to the daily lives of the majority of agricultural labourers. This has led to a general acceptance that most labourers were part of a rural proletariat whose loss of common rights and declining living standards culminated in the Last Labourers’ Revolt of 1830. This thesis seeks to broaden this view by providing a more holistic view of labourers’ lives in Worcestershire in order to determine what social and economic changes had the most impact on rural life in general and on three settlements in particular. The introduction demonstrates how romantic views of the past have influenced some historians’ attitudes. It then determines the empirical basis for this study