Constitutional institutions are splendid things : an analysis of the Conservative Party's constitutional positions From 1832 To 2020

The Conservative Party is the most electorally successful party in British policies. It has been the party of Government more than its political rivals. This is an important fact for the study of the British constitution or the policies of any British political parties towards the constitution as constitutional major changes, reforms or amendments are unlikely to be implemented without being in Government. Therefore, to understand where the Conservative Party’s constitutional policies might bend towards after Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, it is necessary to analysis the party’s constitutional policies of the past. This is the core aim of this thesis; that is, to longitudinally analysis the Conservative Party election addresses and/or manifestos from the 1832 Reform Act to March 2020 (arguably the end of the Age of Brexit) with the main focus on the period between 1900 and 2019. To enable this a discussion on conservative principles will be conducted to provide a framework for analysis. The study utilises qualitative methods to gather and analyse the data. In particular, semi-structured interviews with elite actors within the Conservative Party; a document analysis of the manifestos and elections addresses of party leaders as well as other key actors; an analyse of letters, memorandums and internal reports from the Conservative Party Archive at the Bodleian Library, Oxford and the Churchill Archive Centre, Churchill College as well as other archives. This research found that generally the Conservative manifestos did not address constitutional issues qua constitutional issues. There were multiple uses of other prisms such as financial, economic, efficiency, foreign policy, and international trade to name a few rather than a constitutional one. Thus, it is difficult to have a coherent constitutionally conservative position on constitution, if it is not viewed through a constitutional prism. Moreover, it was also found that the manifesto shifted in the rhetoric utilised from standard constitutional language to catch-all terms, such as democracy and this was driven by pathos. The use of non-constitutional prisms meant there was a lack of an overall vision, and this raises the question of institutional memory loss within the Conservative Party. This has a major implication; that is, constitutional issues are unlikely to be solved by a coherent constitutional policy suite in the future as they are seen through the perspective of other prims. Finally, the Conservative Party has dwelt in the paradigm of homo economicus (especially since 1997) or in other words, the party has fallen into its modern comfort zone of economics and out of is historical one of, what I have called, ‘constitutional man’

Reading experience shapes the mental timeline but not the mental number line

People conceptualize both time and numbers as unfoldingalong a horizontal line, either from left to right or from rightto left. The direction of both the mental timeline (MTL) andthe mental number line (MNL) are widely assumed to dependon the direction of reading and writing within a culture.Although experimental evidence supports this assumptionregarding the MTL, there is no clear evidence that readingdirection determines the direction of the MNL. Here wetested effects of reading experience on the direction of boththe MTL and MNL. Participants read English text eithernormally (from left to right) or mirror-reversed (from right toleft). After normal reading, participants showed the space-time associations and space-number associations typical ofWesterners. After mirror reading, participants’ space-timeassociations were significantly reduced but their space-number associations were unchanged. These results suggestthat the MTL and MNL have different experiential bases.Whereas the MTL can be shaped by reading experience, theMNL is shaped by other culture-specific practices throughwhich people experience numbers arrayed in left-right space

It Takes at Least a Minute to Protect and Restore the Colorado River Delta [abstract]

2 pages

A Delta Once More: Restoring Riparian and Wetland Habitat in the Colorado River Delta

Outlines the delta's history and current political context, documents recent findings about the delta's partial recovery, and makes recommendations for maintaining existing flows to further benefit and sustain the remnant wetland ecosystems

On the Modelling of Energetic Multi-jet QCD Events

Physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) may be unveiled by studying events with a high number of outgoing jets, produced at the LHC with energies above the TeV scale (energetic multi-jet events). Such events are dominated by QCD processes, where the calculations rely on some sort of approximation. Therefore, it is important to develop a robust approach for modeling such events that could probe the existence of BSM signals. In this note, jet spatial distributions in energetic multi-jet processes were compared using several state-of-the-art MC event generators. Slight differences were found, indicating modelling limitations. Therefore, a data-driven technique for the estimation of processes with a final state that contains a large number of jets is proposed. This procedure can predict jet multiplicities up to a precision of ~25\% in energetic multi-jet events.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. To appear in EPJ

www.Betfair.com: World-Wide Wagering

Many industries are being fundamentally changed as entrepreneurs discover how to use the Internet to create higher customer value. Betfair has turned the gaming industry upside down with its exchange for gamblers. It has found a very efficient and effective way to match those who want to make and take bets, and also made these gamblers 10 percent better off compared to betting via traditional channels. The case describes the development of Betfair, its business model, and addresses the problems it faces as it expands beyond the boundaries of the United Kingdom

Accuracy analysis of TDRSS demand forecasts

This paper reviews Space Network (SN) demand forecasting experience over the past 16 years and describes methods used in the forecasts. The paper focuses on the Single Access (SA) service, the most sought-after resource in the Space Network. Of the ten years of actual demand data available, only the last five years (1989 to 1993) were considered predictive due to the extensive impact of the Challenger accident of 1986. NASA's Space Network provides tracking and communications services to user spacecraft such as the Shuttle and the Hubble Space Telescope. Forecasting the customer requirements is essential to planning network resources and to establishing service commitments to future customers. The lead time to procure Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS's) requires demand forecasts ten years in the future a planning horizon beyond the funding commitments for missions to be supported. The long range forecasts are shown to have had a bias toward underestimation in the 1991 -1992 period. The trend of underestimation can be expected to be replaced by overestimation for a number of years starting with 1998. At that time demand from new missions slated for launch will be larger than the demand from ongoing missions, making the potential for delay the dominant factor. If the new missions appear as scheduled, the forecasts are likely to be moderately underestimated. The SN commitment to meet the negotiated customer's requirements calls for conservatism in the forecasting. Modification of the forecasting procedure to account for a delay bias is, therefore, not advised. Fine tuning the mission model to more accurately reflect the current actual demand is recommended as it may marginally improve the first year forecasting

Multi-directional mappings in the minds of the Tsimane’:Size, time, and number on three spatial axes

From early in life, people implicitly associate time, number,and other abstract conceptual domains with space. Accord-ing to the Generalized Magnitude System proposal, these men-tal mappings reflect a common neural system for represent-ing various magnitudes, and share a common spatial organiza-tion. In a test of this proposal, here we measured mappings ofsize, time, and number in the Tsimane’, an indigenous Ama-zonian group with few of the cultural practices (like readingand math) that spatialize size, time, and number in the expe-rience of industrialized adults. On three spatial axes, the Tsi-mane’ systematically arranged imagistic stimuli according totheir magnitudes, but they showed no directional preferencesoverall and individuals often mapped different domains in op-posite directions. The results are inconsistent with predictionsof the Generalized Magnitude System proposal but can be ex-plained by Hierarchical Mental Metaphor Theory, accordingto which mental mappings initially reflect a set of correlationsobservable in the natural world