Bursting the bubble or opening the door? Appraising the impact of austerity on playwork and playwork practitioners in the UK

Introductory essay for special issue on 'Playwork in Times of Austerity

Sport in Asia: Globalization, Glocalization, Asianization

[Extract] Sport is now a truly global cultural institution, one that is no longer the preserve of occidental culture or dominated and organized by Western nations, the growing presence and power of non-occidental culture and individual nations now makes it a truly globalized product and commodity. The insatiable appetite for sport of the enormous Asian markets is redirecting the global flow of sport, with the wider Asia Pacific region now providing massive new audiences for televised sports as the economies of the region continue their growth

The foreign architectural book society and architectural elitism

This study investigates the Foreign Architectural Book Society [F. A. B. S. ] and its members from its foundation in 1859 through to the 1930s. Particular attention is given to the second generation of F. A. B. S. members, active between 1890 and 1920, who shared scholarly interests apparent in the architectural values they promoted in publications and their own buildings. In this period these F. A. B. S. members also occupied positions of power within the profession and influenced their contemporaries by encoding Beaux-Arts values in a reformed architectural education system. These developments are analysed using certain aspects of elite theory: this highlights the protectionist aspects of this education system and explains the survival into the 1930s of architectural values promoted by F. A. B. S. members. The F. A. B. S. was founded with the intention of internally circulating foreign architectural books and this study examines how the society operated. The functioning of the F. A. B. S is analysed in relation to other societies its members joined, establishing their high social standing and a network of scholarly organisations through which architectural values were formed. An analysis of publications and buildings by the second generation of F. A. B. S. members reveals the fact that they promoted two architectural styles, Neo-Wrenaissance and Monumental Classicism. It is argued that Wren's influence was central to the formation of the values embodied in these styles. In the case of the Neo- Wrenaissance it is shown that this is a more appropriate term to describe works usually noted as examples of Neo-Georgian architecture. When examining Monumental Classicism it is noted that F. A. B. S. members used Beaux-Arts compositional devices, as encoded in architectural education, but promoted it as a national style by invoking the example of Wren. In conclusion it was argued that F. A. B. S. members encoded these stylistic values in the reformed architectural education system and this partially explains how the outmoded values of the Neo- Wrenaissance and Monumental Classicism managed to survive as valid stylistic options until the end of the 1930s

Flush communication channels: Effective implementation and verification

Flush communication channels, or F-channels, generalize more conventional asynchronous communication paradigms. A distributed system which uses an F-channel allows a programmer to define the delivery order of each message in relation to other messages transmitted on the channel. Unreliable datagrams and FIFO (first-in-first-out) communication channels have strictly defined delivery semantics. No restrictions are allowed on message delivery order with unreliable datagrams--message delivery is completely unordered. FIFO channels, on the other hand, insist messages are delivered in the order of their transmission. Flush channels can provide either of these delivery order semantics; in addition, F-channels allow the user to define the delivery of a message to be after the delivery of all messages previously transmitted or before the delivery of all messages subsequently transmitted or both. A system which communicates with a flush channel has a message delivery order that is a partial order.;Dynamically specifying a partial message delivery order complicates many aspects of how we implement and reason about the communication channel. From the system\u27s perspective, we develop a feasible implementation protocol and prove its correctness. The protocol effectively handles the partially ordered message delivery. From the user\u27s perspective, we derive an axiomatic verification methodology for flush applications. The added flexibility of defining the delivery order dynamically slightly increases the complexity for the application programmer. Our verification work helps the user effectively deal with the partially ordered message delivery in flush communication