Aesthetic sense and social cognition: : a story from the Early Stone Age

Human aesthetic practices show a sensitivity to the ways that the appearance of an artefact manifests skills and other qualities of the maker. We investigate a possible origin for this kind of sensibility, locating it in the need for co-ordination of skill-transmission in the Acheulean stone tool culture. We argue that our narrative supports the idea that Acheulean agents were aesthetic agents. In line with this we offer what may seem an absurd comparison: between the Acheulean and the Quattrocento. In making it we display some hidden complexity in human aesthetic responses to an artefact. We conclude with a brief review of rival explanations—biological and/or cultural—of how this skills-based sensibility became a regular feature of human aesthetic practices

Residential movement into elderly person households: evidence from the 1991 sample of anonymised records.

In this paper we use data from the 1% British Household Sample of Anonymised Records (SAR) to examine coresident households which have been formed by the movement of people under the age of sixty five into the homes of elderly people. The SAR does not give information on why such moves have taken place. However, an examination of the characteristics of the movers and their elderly receivers, and the relationships between the two, sheds some light on the issue. Analysis shows that most movement into the homes of elderly people is by people who are related to them -- mainly their children and their children's partners and/or children. It is often assumed that coresidence between elderly people and their younger relatives is driven by the care needs of the older generation. However, in this paper we cast doubt on this simple assumption, arguing that it is equally necessary to look at the characteristics and circumstances of movers in order to understand coresidence in the elderly households under examination

Breaking the boundaries: Integrating 200 years of the Census using GIS.

The census and similar sources of data have been published for two centuries so the information that they contain should provide an unparalleled insight into the changing population of Britain over this time period. To date, however, the seemingly trivial problem of changes in boundaries has seriously hampered the use of these sources as they make it impossible to create long run time series of spatially detailed data. The paper reviews methodologies that attempt to resolve this problem by using geographical information systems and areal inter-polation to allow the reallocation of data from one set of administrative units onto another. This makes it possible to examine change over time for a standard geography and thus it becomes possible to unlock the spatial detail and the temporal depth that are held in the census and in related sources