The Railway Clerks' Association, 1919-1939

This thesis analyses the history of the Railway Clerks' Association between 1919 and 1939. At the beginning of this period the Association was the largest and strongest white-collar trade union in the country; in 1920 it had recruited nearly 90 per cent of the railway white-collar work-force. Although the membership numbers declined after 1920 they soon stabilized at 50 to 60 per cent of its potential membership which was significantly greater than the overall density of trade union membership amongst the male labour force between 1921-1939. At the beginning of the period, in 1919, the Association obtained negotiating recognition from the railway companies. Even so, it continued to use parliamentary methods to influence its members' employers and to sponsor its members as parliamentary candidates: at first to gain parliamentary influence to further its own aims, later to help with the Labour Party's long-term aims. Its best success in this field was in 1929, when eight members of the Association were elected. It called its members out on strike in 1926 - the only white-collar trade union to do this. The response from its membership was not overwhelming, but the importance of this gesture is that it happened and there was a visible response. After commenting on theories concerning white collar trade unions, the working conditions of railway clerks and the organisation of the Association, the thesis discusses, within the framework of Michels' theory of organisations, selected aspects of the Association's work: wage negotiations, including the negotiations that secured recognition; parliamentary and electoral work; the Association's efforts to persuade the railway companies to provide better pension funds; its experiences during the General Strike; and how it dealt with internal dissension. The thesis concludes with an assessment of the Association as an example of a white-collar trade union and the level of organization and experience it had achieved by 1939, in relation to the challenge of war and its aftermath that the Association was to face

Native American Agencies for Native American Children: Fulfilling the Promise of the Indian Child Welfare Act

The Indian Child Welfare Act seeks to protect Indian children from family and cultural disruption. The Act mandates minimum standards for the removal of Indian children and for their placement in foster care. However, a recent national survey suggests that requirements for Indian foster homes are not being met in public agency substitute care programs. At the same time, Native American child welfare agencies have developed a range of services for Native American children. The authors show that the intent of the Act will be better served if the case management of Native American children in public agency care is transferred to Native American child welfare agencies

Is life getting better for young women?

[Extract] The real difficulty is that people have no idea of what education truly is. We assess the value of education in the same manner as we assess the value of land or of shares in the stock-exchange market. We want to provide only such education as would enable the student to earn more. We hardly give any thought to the improvement of the character of the educated. The girls, we say, do not have to earn; so why should they be educated? As long as such ideas persist there is no hope of our ever knowing the true value of education. M. K. Gandhi cited in (National Council for Teacher Education, Undated) Introduction. The United Nations Millennium Campaign started in 2000.147 heads of State and 189 member states of the United Nations, through the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), agreed, interalia, to deliver universal education and eliminate gender disparity. Two of the eight MDGs are focused on education, particularly the education of girls. MDG 2 targets universal primary education by 2015 while MDG 3 seeks to eliminate gender disparity in primary education by 2005 and all other levels of education by 2015. The attention on girls follows increasing evidence that educating girls has multiple flow-on effects including improved maternal health and a reduction in infant mortalities, limiting the spread of HIV/AIDS, empowering women and reducing poverty (Archer, 2005). As the saying goes “If you educate a man, you educate an individual, but if you educate a woman, you educate the nation” (UnitedNations Economic and Social Council, 28/02/2006))

Sampling Based Motion Planning with Reachable Volumes

Motion planning for constrained systems is a version of the motion planning problem in which the motion of a robot is limited by constraints. For example, one can require that a humanoid robot such as a PR2 remain upright by constraining its torso to be above its base or require that an object such as a bucket of water remain upright by constraining the vertices of the object to be parallel to the robot’s base. Grasping can be modeled by requiring that the end effectors of the robot be located at specified handle positions. Constraints might require that the robot remain in contact with a surface, or that certain joints of the robot remain in contact with each other (e.g., closed chains). Such problems are particularly difficult because the constraints form a manifold in C-space, and planning must be restricted to this manifold. High degree of freedom motion planning and motion planning for constrained systems has applications in parallel robotics, grasping and manipulation, computational biology and molecular simulations, and animation. In this work, we introduce a new concept, reachable volumes, that are a geometric representation of the regions the joints and end effectors of a robot can reach, and use it to define a new planning space, called RV-space, where all points automatically satisfy a problem’s constraints. Visualizations of reachable volumes can enable operators to see the regions of workspace that different parts of the robot can reach. Samples and paths generated in RV-space naturally conform to constraints, making planning for constrained systems no more difficult than planning for unconstrained systems. Consequently, constrained motion planning problems that were previously difficult or unsolvable become manageable and in many cases trivial. We provide tools and techniques to extend the state of the art sampling based motion planning algorithms to RV-space. We define a reachable volume sampler, a reachable volume local planner and a reachable volume distance metric. We showcase the effectiveness of RV-space by applying these tools to motion planning problems for robots with constraints on the end effectors and/or internal joints of the robot. We show that RV-based planners are more efficient than existing methods, particularly for higher dimensional problems, solving problems with 1000+ degrees of freedom for multi-loop, and tree-like linkages

DAzLE: The Dark Ages z (redshift) Lyman-alpha Explorer

DAzLE is an near infrared narrowband differential imager being built by the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, in collaboration with the Anglo-Australian observatory. It is a special purpose instrument designed with a sole aim; the detection of redshifted Lyman-alpha emission from star forming galaxies at z>7. DAzLE will use pairs of high resolution (R=1000) narrowband filters to exploit low background `windows' in the near infrared sky emission spectrum. This will enable it to reach sensitivities of ~2E-21 W/m^2, thereby allowing the detection of z>7 galaxies with star formation rates as low as a few solar masses per year. The design of the instrument, and in particular the crucial narrowband filters, are presented. The predicted performance of DAzLE, including the sensitivity, volume coverage and expected number counts, is discussed. The current status of the DAzLE project, and its projected timeline, are also presented.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, to appear in Proceedings of SPIE Vol. 5492, Ground-based Instrumentation for Astronom

A Graphic Method For Depicting Horizontal Direction Data On Vertical Outcrop Photographs

Outcrop photographs which show two-dimensional representations of three-dimensionally dipping surfaces (e.g., bedding planes, cross-bed foresets) are commonly utilized in the description of sedimentary strata. In many instances, accurate depiction of the dip direction of such features is paramount for understanding their interpretation, and for visualizing the true form of three-dimensional bodies (e.g., conceptualizing the form of an architectural element in a cliff-face, preserved as a vertical slice that has been cut oblique to paleocurrent direction). However, as an outcrop photograph often presents information on a vertical plane and directional data refers to a horizontal plane, the accurate co-depiction of both sets of information may be challenging. There is presently no universal method for illustrating such measurements on outcrop photographs: techniques in common usage are often imprecise, and the lack of uniformity hinders comparison between different images. Here we present a method for accurately depicting horizontal direction data on vertical outcrop photographs which permits instant visualization of dip relative to the illustrated outcrop geometry. The method is simple to apply, does not compromise primary data, and is unobtrusive to other visual information within images; thus having utility across a broad spectrum of geological investigations

A back-translational study of descending interactions with the induction of hyperalgesia by high-frequency electrical stimulation in rat and human

In humans and animals, high-frequency electrocutaneous stimulation (HFS) induces an “early long-term potentiation-like” sensitisation, where synaptic plasticity is underpinned by an ill-defined interaction between peripheral input and central modulatory processes. The relative contributions of these processes to the initial pain or nociceptive response likely differ from those that underpin development of the heightened response. To investigate the impact of HFS-induced hyperalgesia on pain and nociception in perception and neural terms, respectively, and to explore the impact of descending inhibitory pathway activation on the development of HFS-induced hyperalgesia, we performed parallel studies utilising identical stimuli to apply HFS concurrent to (1) a conditioned pain modulation paradigm during psychophysical testing in healthy humans or (2) a diffuse noxious inhibitory controls paradigm during in vivo electrophysiological recording of spinal neurones in healthy anaesthetised rats. High-frequency electrocutaneous stimulation alone induced enhanced perceptual responses to pinprick stimuli in cutaneous areas secondary to the area of electrical stimulation in humans and increased the excitability of spinal neurones which exhibited stimulus intensity–dependent coded responses to pinprick stimulation in a manner that tracked with human psychophysics, supporting their translational validity. Application of a distant noxious conditioning stimulus during HFS did not alter perceived primary or secondary hyperalgesia in humans or the development of primary or secondary neuronal hyperexcitability in rats compared with HFS alone, suggesting that, upon HFS-response initiation in a healthy nervous system, excitatory signalling escapes inhibitory control. Therefore, in this model, dampening facilitatory mechanisms rather than augmenting top-down inhibitions could prevent pain development

Creating a Resilient Watering System to Benefit Kids with Exceptional Needs at Farm and Nature-Based School

Research shows exposure to nature is critical for child development. Turn Back Time, Inc., (TBT) provides farm and nature-based programs for children, including those with exceptional needs, to learn and develop through play in nature. The farm’s gardens provide the context, materials, tools, and opportunities needed to run TBT’s programs. A drought in 2016 dried up the farm’s water source, killing the gardens. The purpose of this project was to engineer a resilient watering system to reduce the gardens’ vulnerability to drought while ensuring TBT’s programs, and their associated benefits, can continue