Community Land Trusts: NEcase studies

Lack of affordable housing is recognised as a problem in most urban and rural areas in the United Kingdom today. It is one of the issues that gives rise to social exclusion of disadvantaged individuals and can contribute to weakening of community cohesion overall within a local community, mainly through people leaving to seek housing elsewhere. Arthurson, K and Jacobs, K (2003) note the concept of social exclusion is a difficult one, as cause and effect of social exclusion are almost impossible to evaluate clearly. The concept does, however, highlight the relativity of the phenomenon as exclusion implies there is something to be excluded from – in this case access to local housing that does not consume an unreasonable proportion of income. There are clearly degrees of social exclusion as Somerville, P (1998) states, expanding to make the point that some may be excluded from rented housing as well as ownership and some may be excluded only from ownership. Fundamentally Somerville puts the case that the effect of exclusion is to deny certain social groups or individuals control over their daily lives, or impairs enjoyment of their wider citizenship rights

Improved sorting networks with O(log n) depth

The sorting network described by Ajtai, KomlOs and Szemeredi was the first to achieve a depth of O(Iog n). The networks introduced here are simplifications and improvements based strongly on their work. While the constants obtained for the depth bound still prevent the construction being of practical value, the structure of the presentation offers a convenient basis for further development

On the complexity of string folding

A fold of a finite string S over a given alphabet is an embedding of S in some fixed infinite grid, such as the square or cubic mesh. The score of a fold is the number of pairs of matching string symbols which are embedded at adjacent grid vertices. Folds of strings and sets of strings in two- and three-dimensional meshes are considered, and the corresponding problems of optimizing the score or achieving a given target score are shown to be NP-hard

Reducing the external environmental costs of pastoral farming in New Zealand: experiences from the Te Arawa lakes, Rotorua

Decades of nutrient pollution have caused water quality to decline in the nationally iconic Te Arawa (Rotorua) lakes in New Zealand. Pastoral agriculture is a major nutrient source, and therefore this degradation represents an external environmental cost to intensive farming. This cost is borne by the wider community, and a major publically funded remediation programme is now under way. This article describes the range of actions being taken to reduce nutrient loads from internal (lake bed sediments) and external (primarily diffuse) sources in the lake catchments. The high economic cost and uncertain efficacy of engineering-based actions to reduce internal nutrient loads is highlighted. Major changes to land management practices to control diffuse nutrient pollution are required throughout New Zealand if the need for costly and lengthy remediation programmes elsewhere is to be avoided. More action to educate farmers and the public about eutrophication issues, development and enforcement of environmental standards, and further consideration of the use of market-based instruments are proposed as ways to correct the current market failure

The depth of all Boolean functions

It is shown that every Boolean function of n arguments has a circuit of depth n+1 over the basis {f|f:{0,1}^2 -> {0,1}}

Reducing the external environmental costs of pastoral farming in New Zealand: experiences from the Te Arawa lakes, Rotorua

Decades of nutrient pollution have caused water quality to decline in the nationally iconic Te Arawa (Rotorua) lakes in New Zealand. Pastoral agriculture is a major nutrient source, and therefore this degradation represents an external environmental cost to intensive farming. This cost is borne by the wider community, and a major publically funded remediation programme is now under way. This article describes the range of actions being taken to reduce nutrient loads from internal (lake bed sediments) and external (primarily diffuse) sources in the lake catchments. The high economic cost and uncertain efficacy of engineering-based actions to reduce internal nutrient loads is highlighted. Major changes to land management practices to control diffuse nutrient pollution are required throughout New Zealand if the need for costly and lengthy remediation programmes elsewhere is to be avoided. More action to educate farmers and the public about eutrophication issues, development and enforcement of environmental standards, and further consideration of the use of market-based instruments are proposed as ways to correct the current market failure

Finding the median

An algorithm is described which determines the median of n elements using in the worst case a number of comparison asymptotic to 3n

It Takes a Lot of Lights to Make a City

“It Takes a Lot of Lights to Make a City” is a collection of short stories set in Halifax, Nova Scotia between 2010 and 2017, a period during which the city, long reliant on its heritage as the basis of its cultural identity, experienced a rapid shift toward modernization and urbanization. The characters of “It Takes a Lot of Light” experience forms of psychic displacement in response to the city’s socioeconomic transformation. These characters, including an unemployed university dropout, a social-climbing landscaper, and a middle-aged professional stifled by her retired husband, form a community of disparate individuals affected directly or indirectly by Halifax’s shifting economic landscape. This community is reflected in the structural approach to the short story collection; The six stories that comprise “It Takes a Lot of Lights” operate both individually, and as components of a larger unified work, linked by geography, character, and a recurrent focus on class disparity. This approach to the short story collection aims to explore the genre’s potential to function as a network of individual stories whose thematic context is transformed and expanded via their relationships with one another

On log concavity for order-preserving and order-non-reversing maps of partial orders

Stanley used the Aleksandrov-Fenchel inequalities from the theory of nixed volumes to prove the following result. Let P be a partially ordered set with n elements, and let x ∊ P. If Ni* is the number of linear extensions , ⋋ : P + (1 , 2,...,n) satisfying ⋋ (x) = i, then the sequence N*1,…,N*n is log concave (and therefore unimodal). Here the analogous results for both order-preserving and order-non-reversing maps are proved using an explicit injection. Further, if vc is the number of order-preserving maps of P into a chain of length c, then vc is shown to be 1-og concave, and the corresponding result is established for order-non-reversing maps