Politicking the personal: examining academic literature and British National Party beliefs and wishes about intimate interracial relationships and mixed heritage

Drawing heavily on our earlier work in this area (Perry and Sutton 2006; forthcoming), this article discusses the issue of intimate interracial relationships (IIRs) within the context of the UK Government's current concerns with social cohesion and provides an overview of the literature on hate and prejudice against those in IIRs in the UK and USA. Following an examination of the official statistics and the numbers of mixed race people in England and Wales, we move on to provide a brief but disturbing glimpse of what it would mean if the BNP's long-term dream of winning a national election were actually to happen in light of their official website published proposed policies against IRRs and mixed heritage people

Adopting a holistic approach to the valuation of learning programmes deployed in corporate environments.

As Director of Learning for one of the country’s largest training providers I have access to the most senior learning and development professionals in many of the nation’s largest organisations. This access gives me a unique insight into the nature of their major challenges and an understanding of the business drivers that underpin their decision-making. What is becoming very clear is that whilst there is an increasing acceptance of the role of learning in providing competitive advantage, there is also an increasing dissatisfaction with the ability of traditional training methods to supply that need. The result is that organisations are looking for more innovative means of providing access to learning and for clear evidence that the investments they make in training and learning are indeed generating value. Organisations are increasingly committing significant capital investment in their learning programmes and are naturally keen to be able to demonstrate quantitative benefits. But experience shows that the current evaluation models are difficult to deploy and produce little information that is valuable to the operational managers that commission the training programmes. The most recent trend in evaluation has been an attempt to overlay existing models with simple financial justification techniques such as ROI (Return on Investment) calculations. It is my contention that this approach is too simplistic and prone to emphasise cost avoidance rather than increased human capital. The organisations I work with are crying out for an evaluation model that clearly demonstrates the real value generated by their training and learning programmes; a model that can be consistently deployed and one that provides real insight into the effectiveness of their decisions. This research programme grew out of my daily work and a desire to better understand the drivers of value creation in learning programmes. At the outset I envisioned the purpose of this research to be to examine the current state of practice in training evaluation in order to determine what is generally considered to be acceptable evidence of success

The Feynman-Wilson gas and the Lund model

We derive a partition function for the Lund fragmentation model and compare it with that of a classical gas. For a fixed rapidity ``volume'' this partition function corresponds to a multiplicity distribution which is very close to a binomial distribution. We compare our results with the multiplicity distributions obtained from the JETSET Monte Carlo for several scenarios. Firstly, for the fragmentation vertices of the Lund string. Secondly, for the final state particles both with and without decays.Comment: Latex, 21+1 pages, 11 figure

Species Composition and Diversity of Hawk Populations in Northeastern Arkansas

Species composition and diversity of hawk populations were analyzed for northeastern Arkansas by the use of roadside censuses conducted in September through April from 1974- 1977. Data from 10 years of Jonesboro Christmas Bird Counts were also analyzed. During the roadside survey 20,174 miles were driven and 1819 raptors were counted. Ten species were observed with the Red-tailed Hawk being most abundant followed by the Marsh Hawk and the American Kestrel. Eight species were recorded from the 10 years of Christmas Bird Counts. Annual breeding bird surveys and spot records turned up three additional species making a total of 14 species in 15 years of study. Although hawk populations fluctuate from year to year, the data do not reveal any downward trend in numbers in northeastern Arkansas. Large concentrations of hawks do not appear in this region of the state until after mid-September. Populations reach a peak in December after which they decline in January. A second peak is reached in February followed by a gradual decline such that in April the American Kestrel is the only species consistently seen from the roadside. After April only a few hawks remain to nest. Both Krider\u27s and melanistic Red-tails occur here but from a total of 864 Red-tailed Hawks observed only 26 Krider\u27s and 31 melanistic or Buteo iamaicensis harlanii were recorded

Black and Asian police officers and support staff: prejudice, identity, agency and social cohesion

This primary research paper presents a review of research that finds that the British Government’s new social cohesion agenda does hold promise for racial and ethnic prejudice reduction – but that social cohesion policies and practice must include at their core policies to reduce institutional racism in British police services. Analysis of the literature reveals that considerably more research is required to examine the precise nature and dynamics of institutional racism within the police services. There is a need to understand how racism against Black and minority ethnic (BME) police employees, and police racism against BME communities, influences social cohesion. That this is important, given the British government’s current social cohesion policy agenda, is patently clear. Considerably more research is about to be undertaken in this area by the authors of this paper and the results will be published in the academic press, disseminated at conferences and presented in training programmes

Understanding structure of concurrent actions

Whereas most work in reinforcement learning (RL) ignores the structure or relationships between actions, in this paper we show that exploiting structure in the action space can improve sample efficiency during exploration. To show this we focus on concurrent action spaces where the RL agent selects multiple actions per timestep. Concurrent action spaces are challenging to learn in especially if the number of actions is large as this can lead to a combinatorial explosion of the action space. This paper proposes two methods: a first approach uses implicit structure to perform high-level action elimination using task-invariant actions; a second approach looks for more explicit structure in the form of action clusters. Both methods are context-free, focusing only on an analysis of the action space and show a significant improvement in policy convergence times