English funding of the Scottish armies in England and Ireland 1640-1648

The rebellion against Charles I's authority that began in Edinburgh in 1637 involved the Scots in successive invasions of England and armed intervention in Ireland. Historians have almost universally taken a negative view of Scottish involvement in these wars, because it has been assumed that the Scottish political leadership sacrificed all other considerations in order to pursue an unrealistic religious crusade. This article suggests that aspects of the Anglo-Scottish relationship need to be reappraised. Using estimates of English payments to the Scots during the 1640s, it will be argued that the Scottish leadership made pragmatic political decisions based on a practical appreciation of the country's military and fiscal capacity. Substantial payouts from the English parliament enabled the Scottish parliamentary regime to engage in military and diplomatic activities that the country could not otherwise have afforded. The 1643 treaty that brought the Scots into the English Civil War on the side of parliament contrasts favourably with the 1647 Engagement in support of the king. It will be shown that, although the English parliament did not honour all of its obligations to the Scots, it does not automatically follow that the alliance was a failure in financial terms

Reader Expectation and the Ethnic Rhetorics: The Problem of the Passing Subaltern in Who Would Have Thought It?

Mrs. Norval... hoped...Lola might be now all black or all white, no matter which, only not with those ugly white spots. - Who Would Have Thought It? 1872 (78) But these snowy, equable and smooth spots ... sometimes occur amongst our own people. I have myself had the opportunity of observing two instances of this kind .. .The skin of each was brownish, studded here and there with very white spots of different sizes. - Mulattos The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, 1865 (220) As illustrated by these two excerpts, the mixed blood provoked in Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, as it does in Marfa Amparo Ruiz de Burton\u27s Mrs. Norval, a kind of tension, a sometimes explicit, often insidious fear of racial unreadability and its implications for white domination

Collections for people: museums' stored collections as a public resource

Collections in UK museums grew enormously in the latter half of the 20th century yet museum collections, mostly maintained at public expense, are perceived as an underused resource. The Museums Association’s 2005 report, Collections for the Future1, together with press comments and books such as Treasures on Earth (2002)2 and Fragments of the World (2005)3, brought this issue into sharp focus. Collections for People set out to understand the scale of museum stored collections, and the main parameters of their access and use: • What is the size and nature of collections as a resource? How are they distributed, geographically and among different types of museum? • How much are different types of collection used by people other than museum staff? What sort of people use collections? What do they use them for: research, teaching and learning, creative activities, visits for enjoyment such as store tours? • How do users perceive this service? Do museums actively market collections access? Do they publicise what is in their collections? • How do museums facilitate collections use? What are the factors associated with greater use of collections? What do museums see as the barriers to more use

Chemochemical caries removal: a review of the techniques and latest developments

Chemomechanical caries removal involves the chemical softening of carious dentine followed by its removal by gentle excavation. The reagent involved is generated by mixing amino acids with sodium hypochlorite; N-monochloroamino acids are formed which selectively degrade demineralised collagen in carious dentine. The procedure requires 5-15 minutes but avoids the painful removal of sound dentine thereby reducing the need for local anaesthesia. It is well suited to the treatment of deciduous teeth, dental phobics and medically compromised patients. The dentine surface formed is highly irregular and well suited to bonding with composite resin or glass ionomer. When complete caries removal is achieved, the dentine remaining is sound and properly mineralised. The system was originally marketed in the USA in the 1980's as Caridex. Large volumes of solution and a special applicator system were required. A new system, Carisolv, has recently been launched on to the market. This comes as a gel, requires volumes of 0.2-1.0 ml and is accompanied by specially designed instruments

Complete Renormalization Group Improvement-Avoiding Factorization and Renormalization Scale Dependence in QCD Predictions

For moments of leptoproduction structure functions we show that all dependence on the renormalization and factorization scales disappears, provided that all the ultraviolet logarithms involving the physical energy scale Q are completely resummed. The approach is closely related to Grunberg's method of Effective Charges. A direct and simple method for extracting the universal dimensional transmutation parameter of QCD from experimental data is advocated.Comment: 16 pages, no figure

Considerations Concerning the Radiative Corrections to Muon Decay in the Fermi and Standard Theories

The FAC, PMS, and BLM optimization methods are applied to the QED corrections to the muon lifetime in the Fermi V-A theory. The FAC and PMS scales are close to m_e, while the BLM scale nearly concides with the geometric average \sqrt{m_e m_\mu}. The optimized expressions are employed to estimate the third order coefficient in the \alpha(m_\mu) expansion and the theoretical error of the perturbative series. Using arguments based on effective field theory and a simple examination of Feynman diagrams, it is shown that, if contributions of O(\alpha m_\mu^2/M_W^2) are neglected, the corrections to muon decay in the SM factorize into the QED correction of the Fermi V-A theory and the electroweak amplitude g^2/(1-\Delta r), both of which are strictly scale-independent. We use the results to clarify how the QED corrections to muon decay and the Fermi constant G_F should be used in the SM, and what is the natural choice of scales if running couplings are employed.Comment: 11 pages, latex, no figures To be published in Nucl. Phys.

Mass distributions in a variational model

The time-dependent Hartree-Fock approach may be derived from a variational principle and a Slater Determinant wavefunction Ansatz. It gives a good description of nuclear processes in which one-body collisions dominate and has been applied with success to giant resonances and collisions around the barrier. It is inherently unable to give a good description of two-body observables. A variational principle, due to Balian and Veneroni has been proposed which can be geared to good reproduction of two-body observables. Keeping the Slater Determinant Ansatz, and restricting the two-body observables to be the squares of one-body observables, the procedure can be implemented as a modification of the time-dependent Hartree-Fock procedure. Applications, using the Skyrme effective interaction, are presented for the mass distributions of fragments following de-excitation of the giant dipole resonance in S-32. An illustration of the method's use in collisions is given.Comment: 5 pages, proceedings of XXXII Symposium on Nuclear Physics, Cocoyoc, Mexic

Cause of the charge radius isotope shift at the \emph{N}=126 shell gap

We discuss the mechanism causing the `kink' in the charge radius isotope shift at the N=126 shell closure. The occupation of the 1$i_{11/2}$ neutron orbital is the decisive factor for reproducing the experimentally observed kink. We investigate whether this orbital is occupied or not by different Skyrme effective interactions as neutrons are added above the shell closure. Our results demonstrate that several factors can cause an appreciable occupation of the 1$i_{11/2}$ neutron orbital, including the magnitude of the spin-orbit field, and the isoscalar effective mass of the Skyrme interaction. The symmetry energy of the effective interaction has little influence upon its ability to reproduce the kink.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, to be submitted to proceedings of INPC 201