History teaching in Higher Education: breaking down the barriers to progression and dialogue

Paper given at History in British Education (first conference

Growing Pains: Getting past the complexities of scaling social impact

In communities across the UK, organisations develop new ideas to improve the lives of those around them. And yet despite growing demand for charity services, concerted attempts to take proven approaches to scale are few and far between, and successful examples are rarer still. This paper aims to bring about a change in tack by proposing a way of assessing the viability of scaling in different contexts

H.W.H., Cowell, and new music

Wiley Hitchcock’s championing of Charles Ives is internationally recognized. What is perhaps less well known is that Wiley was a supporter of—and in many cases friends with—innumerable other American composers, including Virgil Thomson (whose Four Saints in Three Acts, in an edition by Wiley and Charles Fussell, is planned for publication by MUSA), John Cage, and Kyle Gann. But perhaps the American composer on whose behalf Wiley expended most energy—much of it covert, and seldom recognized through public channels—was Henry Cowell (1897–1965). Whether Wiley actually knew Cowell I am not sure; but he most certainly knew, corresponded with, supported, and honored Cowell’s widow, Sidney Robertson Cowell (1903–1995), not least in the edited compilation of her reminiscences and vignettes, A Chapbook of Cheer, which he had published privately in the year of her passing

Physical ageing in semi-crystalline polyethylene terephthalate

The polymer industry is growing at an extremely large rate and with the recycling of plastics and polymers from packaging and containers at an all time high, there is a greater need to understand the physical elements that affect the structure of these polymers. There has been much previous work in the field of crystallisation, glass transition and polymer ageing. Many scientists have studied their findings on the work of L.C.E Struik who led the way in polymer science. However, there has been, as far as research shows, no work on Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) and the effects ageing can have on this polymer. Two sets of testing were performed, the first on a Thermo-mechanical Analyser (TMA) and the second on a Differential Scanning Calorimeter (DSC). The glasstransition temperatures and physical ageing effects were tested on the TMA, whilst on the DSC, only the physical ageing effects were tested. During the ageing experiments 3 samples of varying crystallinity were created, one sample was completely amorphous (0% crystalline), the other samples were 28% crystalline and 65% crystalline. The results showed that physical ageing can take place in PET. The definitive conclusion is that as the crystallinity increased the amount of ageing decreased. This shows that physical ageing primarily affects the amorphous regions of polymers; it is here that there is no organisation within the microstructure giving molecules larger areas of free volume to occupy

Preventing child pedestrian injuries and deaths arising from vehicle-child accidents in domestic driveways: An action research project

This research was a three-fold investigation into the viability of previous recommendations for vehicle-related child driveway accident safety . Firstly, the groups most at risk of these types of accidents were determined in order that they could be specifically considered when reviewing the practicalities of previous recommendations . Secondly, the feasibility of previous recommendations was systematically examined through both an extensive literature review and key and expert informant interviews . Based on these, the likelihood of implementation of previous safety recommendations for the identified high risk groups was ascertained, providing a basis on which to abandon some previous recommendations, remove obstacles to others which would enhance practicability and generate further recommendations that would be tenable for the at-risk groups in particular. The key findings of this research were, foremost, that there is a noticeable lack of specific reference to vehicle-related child driveway accidents in any legislation or safety guidelines, as well as a shortage of official data that deal expressly with this type of accident. Further, it was found that the major obstacles to the implementation of previous recommendations - particularly the environmental ones - were cost, autonomy, and spatial constraints. While several recommendations were abandoned due to factors such as unproven or dubious effectiveness and/or prohibitive cost, it was found that the most viable recommendations were characterised by their relatively low cost for the families involved. These recommendations were typically environmental or educational in nature. Thus, the recommendations in this report include some moderate regulatory changes to facilitate greater uptake of environmental and behaviour-modifying recommendations as well as practical ideas that all need to be part of a cohesive campaign to address the issue of vehicle-related child driveway accidents in New Zealand

Resolving the electron temperature discrepancies in HII Regions and Planetary Nebulae: kappa-distributed electrons

The measurement of electron temperatures and metallicities in H ii regions and Planetary Nebulae (PNe) has-for several decades-presented a problem: results obtained using different techniques disagree. What it worse, they disagree consistently. There have been numerous attempts to explain these discrepancies, but none has provided a satisfactory solution to the problem. In this paper, we explore the possibility that electrons in H ii regions and PNe depart from a Maxwell-Boltzmann equilibrium energy distribution. We adopt a "kappa-distribution" for the electron energies. Such distributions are widely found in Solar System plasmas, where they can be directly measured. This simple assumption is able to explain the temperature and metallicity discrepancies in H ii regions and PNe arising from the different measurement techniques. We find that the energy distribution does not need to depart dramatically from an equilibrium distribution. From an examination of data from Hii regions and PNe it appears that kappa ~ 10 is sufficient to encompass nearly all objects. We argue that the kappa-distribution offers an important new insight into the physics of gaseous nebulae, both in the Milky Way and elsewhere, and one that promises significantly more accurate estimates of temperature and metallicity in these regions.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables, published in Ap