Thermometer screens and the geographies of uniformity in nineteenth-century meteorology

By the 1860s a number of thermometer stands, screens and boxes were being used at public observatories and in private settings. The ultimate object of these humble pieces of scientific infrastructure was to protect the thermometers from precipitation and radiation. In response to concerns over the quality of designs and the comparability of results a trial of the various apparatuses was staged at Strathfield Turgiss, Hampshire, in 1868, and subsequent discussions were organized by Britain's Meteorological Society (from 1883 the Royal Meteorological Society). In an attempt to guarantee uniformity of exposure, the Society recommended the adoption of the Stevenson screen, a double-louvred box designed by Thomas Stevenson in 1866. It was promoted as an essential part of the Society's network of second-order and climatological stations across England. Despite the Meteorological Society's aim of overcoming the idiosyncrasies of geography through recourse to a uniform pattern screen, their chosen design ended up embodying a particular geography: the aesthetic and moral codes of the suburban domestic garden

Weather instruments all at sea: meteorology and the Royal Navy in the nineteenth century

No abstract available

Unsigning the Rome Statute: Examining the Relationship Between the United States and the International Criminal Court

Presently, 120 states are parties to the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC). A state that one will not find on the list, however, would be the United States. This project examines the relationship between the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the United States. The United States took part in the negotiating process, signing the Rome Statute under President Bill Clinton, but was not fully satisfied with the agreement reached. Under President Bush, however, the Rome Statute was unsigned. Presently, the United States remains unsigned on the Rome Statute. The relationship between the Court and the United States is important in determining the future of the Court, in terms of effectiveness and legitimacy. I will begin with a brief historical background on the development of the ICC, its structure, and the extent of its jurisdiction. From there, I will detail several problems with the court from America’s perspective. These include third-party jurisdiction and constitutional issues. I will also examine the relationship between the United States and the ICC under the three Presidents in office since the court’s conception: Clinton, Bush, and Obama. Finally, I argue that the Court needs the support of the United States to survive, but that the problems with the Court from America’s perspective will continue to stand in the way of American support for the court until U.S. interests are met

The Formative Influence of French Colonialism on the Life and Thought of Malek Bennabi (Malik bn Nabi)

Malek Bennabi (1905–73) fut un intellectuel algérien de premier rang. Cet article étudie l’effet du colonialisme sur sa vie et ses idées. L’étude considère ses livres et offre une comparaison entre Bennabi et Frantz Fanon. Bennabi montre qu’il n’était pas « colonisable » à cause de sa formation et sa conscience historique

Using iPads as a learning tool in cross-curricular collaborative initial teacher education

Mobile technologies are becoming more and more prevalent in learning environments. This means that teacher education must keep pace with the use of mobile technologies. Baran (2014) argues that the ‘greatest added value of mobile learning vis-a-vis PC learning lies in the aspects that extend classroom interaction to other locations via communication networks’. (p. 18) This article outlines a pilot study developed to support collaborative working between the English and science pre-service teachers, in which mobile technologies were used to extend students interactions outside the classroom, using iPads in authentic, fieldwork situations

THE EFFECTS OF ENTRY IN BILATERAL OLIGOPOLY

We show that a firm’s profits under Cournot oligopoly can be increasing in the number of firms in the industry if wages are determined by (decentralised) bargaining in unionized bilateral oligopoly. The intuition for the result is that increased product market competition following an increase in the number of firms is mirrored by increased labor market rivalry which induces (profit-enhancing) wage moderation. Whether the product or labor market effect dominates depends both on the extent of union bargaining power and on the nature of union preferences. A corollary of the results derived is that if the upstream agents are firms rather than labor unions, then profits are always decreasing in the number of firms, as in the standard Cournot model. We also show that if bargaining is centralized then there is no wage moderation effect and wages are the same independent of the number of firms, as in the standard model with exogenous factor costs.Unionized bilateral oligopoly ; wage bargaining ; firm profits

Quantum Fluctuations for de Sitter Branes in Bulk AdS(5)

The vacuum expectation value of the square of the field fluctuations of a scalar field on a background consisting of {\it two} de Sitter branes embedded in an anti-de Sitter bulk are considered. We apply a dimensional reduction to obtain an effective lower dimensional de Sitter space equation of motion with associated Kaluza-Klein masses and canonical commutation relations. The case of a scalar field obeying a restricted class of mass and curvature couplings, including massless, conformal coupling as a special case, is considered. We find that the local behaviour of the quantum fluctuations suffers from surface divergences as we approach the brane, however, if the field is {\it constrained} to its value on the brane from the beginning then surface divergences disappear. The ratio of $$ between the Kaluza-Klein spectrum and the lowest eigenvalue mode is found to vanish in the limit that one of the branes goes to infinity.Comment: 14 pages, no figures, to appear in Prog. Theor. Phy