A Directly Elected Upper House: Lessons from Italy and Australia

One obvious way of achieving the 'more democratic' upper house which the Labour government has promised would be for its members to be elected. Many other countries elect their upper houses and this briefing looks at what lessons can be drawn from two of them - Italy and Australia. Would a directly elected second chamber simply mirror the lower house? Would it be too powerful? What electoral system would it be appropriate to use? What would be the impact on the British political system? The briefing seeks to answer some of these questions

An explicit bijection between semistandard tableaux and non-elliptic sl_3 webs

The sl_3 spider is a diagrammatic category used to study the representation theory of the quantum group U_q(sl_3). The morphisms in this category are generated by a basis of non-elliptic webs. Khovanov- Kuperberg observed that non-elliptic webs are indexed by semistandard Young tableaux. They establish this bijection via a recursive growth algorithm. Recently, Tymoczko gave a simple version of this bijection in the case that the tableaux are standard and used it to study rotation and joins of webs. We build on Tymoczko's bijection to give a simple and explicit algorithm for constructing all non-elliptic sl_3 webs

Biological Altruism and the cultural-evolutionary roots of religion

The unselfish, altruistic behavior of insect societies can be explained by way of unusually close genetic relatedness, while the cooperative behavior of chimpanzee and other distantly related mammalian social groups results from their daily, social \"fit-for-tat\" trading of favors. These sociobioiogical explanations, however, are inadequate to explain altruistic behavior among human groups with members numbering in the thousands or millions, groups consisting for the most part of genetically unrelated individuals with little or no daily social contact. Religion, cultural evolutionary theory suggests, may be the glue that binds them together

CFTP: a caching FTP server

By analyzing the log files generated by the UK National Web Cache and by a number of origin FTP sites we provide evidence that an FTP proxy cache with knowledge of local (national) mirror sites could significantly reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred across already overused networks. We then describe the design and implementation of CFTP, a caching FTP server, and report on its usage over the first 10 months of its deployment. Finally we discuss a number of ways in which the software could be further enhanced to improve both its efficiency and its usability

Flow visualization of film cooling with spanwise injection from a small array of holes and compound-angle injection from a large array

Film injection from discrete holes in a smooth, flat plate was studied for two configurations: (1) spanwise injection through a four hole staggered array; and (2) compound angle injection through a 49 hole staggered array. The ratio of boundary layer thicknesses to hole diameter and the Reynolds number were typical of gas turbine film cooling applications. Streaklines showing the motion of the injected air were obtained by photographing small, neutrally buoyant, helium-filled soap bubbles that followed the flow field

Length and bursting of separation bubbles: A physical interpretation

A physical interpretation of the observed form of the pressure distribution beneath a two-dimensional separation bubble which modified the external inviscid pressure distribution only locally is given in terms of boundary layer concepts. A simple method for estimating along a mean streamline entrained into the underside of a growing shear layer through the transition region is discussed, and predictions of bubble bursting conditions and a lower bound on the bubble length are compared with experiment