World city network research at a theoretical impasse::On the need to re-establish qualitative approaches to understanding agency in world city networks

From the late 1990s, the establishment of a new relational ‘turn’ in the study of world city connectedness in globalization has run parallel to the wider relational turn occurring in economic geography. Early work, built firmly upon a qualitative approach to the collection and analyses of new inter-city datasets, considered cities as being constituted by their relations with other cities. Subsequent research, however, would take a strong quantitative turn, best demonstrated through the articulation of the inter-locking world city network (ILWCN) ‘model’ for measuring relations between cities. In this paper, we develop a critique of research based around the ILWCN model, arguing that this ‘top down’ quantitative approach has now reached a theoretical impasse. To address this impasse, we argue for a move away from Structural approaches in which the firm is the main unit of analysis, towards qualitative approaches in which individual agency and practice are afforded greater importance

Alaska Criminal Statute Cross-Reference Guide

This guide provides cross-references between Alaska criminal statutes and National Criminal Information Center (NCIC), Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), Alaska OBTS, and Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) codes. The guide also includes brief annotations of each statute. The guide is also available in a computerized version. An accompanying volume, Conversion Tables for Use with the Alaska OBTS Database and the Alaska Criminal Statute Cross-Reference Guide, is designed for use with printed versions of the guide. The guide reflects legislative changes in Alaska Statutes through 1997, but is no longer updated.Bureau of Justice Statistics. Grant No. 94-BJ-CX-KOO

Some observations on the effect of certain drugs on the human blood pressure

The investigations hereafter recorded were made with the object of determining what effect, if any, certain drugs, commonly supposed to act as blood pressure elevators, have on the systolic and diastolic pressure of healthy individuals. lay observations have been limited to the immediate effect of the drugs experimented with, as one of the objects of the research was to endeavor to compare their values as possible remedies for combating dangerous hypotension. Most of the statements made regarding the pressor action of certain medicaments are based on the results of laboratory experiments on animals, and the conclusions so formed, as has been frequently demonstrated, do not always hold when drugs are given to patients in ordinary doses. My observations have been made on persons with normal arterial tension rather than on patients suffering from marked hypotension; partly because of the difficulty or impossibility in such cases of insuring with reasonable certainty that the blood pressure of the patient remains unaffected by anything but the drug administered, but chiefly because the condition of the vessels in cases of marked hypotension . has not yet been definitely determined. Until recently Crile's theory (Surgical Shock, 1899), that the vessels are relaxed in those cases as a result of exhaustion of the vaso-motor centre, has been generally accepted; but the opposite view first put forward by Malcolm (The Physiology of Death from Traumatic Fever, 1893), that there is a general contraction of the vessels, has now many supporters. Most of my observations were made on the effect of drugs on my own blood pressure. I am 26 years of age, in sound health, and have an average systolic and diastolic pressure of about the generally accepted normal. In a few instances the conclusions arrived at were confirmed by observations made on other healthy individuals. In order that the results obtained might be comparable, every care was taken during the investigations to maintain as nearly identical conditions as practicable, and to exclude as well as possible all transitory factors influencing the normal arterial tension. There is not, as far as I am aware, any published record of a similar series of investigations, but Edgecombe (Practitioner, April 1911, pp. 531 -536) has recorded his observations on the sustained effect of certain reputedly pressor drugs when administered for several days to a subject with a persistently low blood pressure

In situ generation of Mes2Mg as a non-nucleophilic carbon-centred base reagent for the efficient one-pot conversion of ketones to silyl enol ethers

Treatment of commercially available MesMgBr with 1,4-dioxane produces the key Mes2Mg reagent in situ which then mediates the deprotonation of ketones to deliver trimethylsilyl enol ethers, at readily accessible temperatures and without any nucleophilic addition, in an expedient and high yielding one-pot process

Sound practice: a relational economic geography of music production in and beyond the recording studio

This thesis develops a relational geography perspective on creative work and practice, with a specific focus on the recording studio sector. Drawing on an extensive social network analysis, a questionnaire survey, and nineteen semi-structured interviews with recording studio engineers and producers in London (UK), the thesis reveals how recording studios are constituted by a number of types of relations. Firstly, studios are spaces that involve a material and technological relationality between studio workers and varied means of production. Studios are material and technological spaces that influence and shape human actions and social inter-actions. Secondly, studios are sites of relationality between social actors, including engineers, musicians and artists. The thesis reveals how the ability to construct and maintain social relations, and perform emotional labour , is of particular importance to the management of the creative process of producing and recording music, and to building the individual social capital of studio workers. Finally, the thesis argues that studios are sites of changing employment relations between studio workers and studio as employer. In the recording studio sector, a complex and changing set of employment practices have re-defined the relationship between employee and employer and resulted in a set of employment relations characterised by constant employment uncertainty for freelance studio workers. It is argued that the three types of relations revealed in this thesis, manifest at a multiplicity of geographical scales, construct recording studios as distinctive social and economic creative spaces. In conclusion, it is argued that a relational perspective is central to progressing geographical accounts of creative work and of project-based industries in general

‘Cities’

Non peer reviewedPublisher PD

The problem with problems : fundamental to applied research using palladium

The studies are very grateful for the support we have received from the following sources for the chemistry described in this Account: EPSRC (EP/R025754/1), The Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2015-308), and GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca for several CASE awards and iCASE studentships.This Account describes the development of our cross-coupling and medicinal chemistry research from its origins at the outset of my independent career through to the present day. Throughout, the decisions and motivations as well as the mistakes and pitfalls are discussed.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

'Place'

Non peer reviewedPublisher PD

Replacement of dichloromethane within chromatographic purification : a guide to alternative solvents

Replacement of dichloromethane as the bulk medium within chromatographic purification has been evaluated with a broad range of molecules containing functionality common within Medicinal Chemistry programmes. Analysis of the data set has generated a set of general guidelines to assist in the selection of alternative solvents for CH2Cl2 as the bulk media in these ubiquitously employed processes

Transnational freelancing:ephemeral creative projects and mobility in the music recording industry

Drawing on Gernot Grabher’s work on projects and project ecologies, there has developed a significant literature concerned with project-based organisations, recognising the fluid, transient, skills-based and localised nature of such forms. Yet, despite the inherent need within projects to draw on highly skilled labour, such literature has tended to overlook the importance of freelance, mobile labour within project ecologies, instead focusing on localised labour pools. In this paper, through a unique case study of transnational freelancing in the music recording industry, we provide a critique and development of Grabher’s conceptualisation of projects. Specifically, we focus on freelance labour to reveal the ways in which transnational mobility can reproduce social processes that have assumed to be localised, and thus the ways in which project work can stimulate mobility. Emphasising the very high degrees of ephemerality and latency with social networks, we argue that the social context in which projects operates needs to be considered well beyond local geographical contexts, with mobility acting to bridge extended periods of latency and reproduce project networks. Further, we extend the notion of social proximity within projects by considering how new ecologies of physical and virtual mobility are redefining freelance labour in the music recording industry