Montpelier Community Nursery

Montpelier Community Nursery is a small building in Kentish Town, London designed for Camden Community Nurseries. The project has wide reach as a model for participatory design processes in dense urban neighbourhoods. It responds to a number of research questions: How can the design of a small public building serve as an instrument of community building and urban regeneration? What responsible environmental strategies can be incorporated into the design of a nursery? How can natural play be promoted in the design of a nursery? How can the sustainability of a nursery be assured? How can the autobiography of the building be recorded? Boulanger was involved in all stages of the project, generating community awareness, bringing together different parties to participate in its design, fundraising, designing, supervising the building’s construction and recording and disseminating the process. The new building was designed around a flexible space opening onto a wooded outdoor area. Daylight is brought into the building through strip windows located within the roof with a north-south orientation, spanning the floor plan diagonally. Deep overhangs allow passive solar heat gain during times of the year as needed, but block out high summer sun. The superstructure is made of a pre-fabricated solid timber panel system, which facilitated an efficient building sequence. The project was recorded and disseminated through film, photographic documentation and exhibition, a children-focused workshop and a collaborative project of site visits with local primary school children. The building has been widely lauded, receiving a 2013 RIBA London Regional Award, a 2013 RIBA National Award and the 2013 Steven Lawrence Prize, which rewards the best example of a project with a construction budget of less than £1 million. This output will also be returned by Yeoryia Manolopoulou for University College London

A spectral approach to the linking number in the 3-torus

Given a closed Riemannian manifold and a pair of multi-curves in it, we give a formula relating the linking number of the later to the spectral theory of the Laplace operator acting on differential one forms. As an application, we compute the linking number of any two multi-geodesics of the flat torus of dimension 3, generalising a result of P. Dehornoy.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figure

Gravitational Couplings of Higher Spins from String Theory

We calculate the interaction 3-vertex of two massless spin 3 particles with a graviton using vertex operators for spin 3 fields in open string theory, constructed in our previous work. The massless spin 3 fields are shown to interact with the graviton through the linearized Weyl tensor, reproducing the result by Boulanger, Leclercq and Sundell. This is consistent with the general structure of the non-Abelian $2-s-s$ couplings, implying that the minimal number of space-time derivatives in the interaction vertices of two spin s and one spin 2 particle is equal to $2s-2$.Comment: 19 page

Modulation of Direct Payments: A crossed analysis of incremental schemes

The progressive attempt and implementation of direct payment limitations since the 1992 CAP reform has developed a “modulation mechanism” aiming to transfer funds from market support and direct payment schemes (CAP first pillar) towards rural development measures (CAP second pillar). Under the 2007-2013 European financial perspectives, the annual 5% rate of modulation is expected to increase. The paper focuses on the financial impacts of four scenarios together with corresponding political and institutional feasibilities. The paper imposes on itself three sound constraints: (i) expanding modulation should not jeopardise the future in-depth reform of the direct payment regime, (ii) modulation should be compulsory and consistent with rural development financial needs, and (iii) present direct payment per farm should not be capped or subject to complex and differentiated reduction rates. Then, the paper suggests adopting a dynamic and uniform modulation rate to be increased by 1 percent per year from 2009 and then by 2 percent during the final step reaching 10 percent in 2012 (2013 financial year). It would deliver certainty to farmers and contribute to an efficient use in European spending, with no need for a controversial equity instrument. Direct payment reductions raise subsidiarity and budgetary issues which should be discussed within the European budget review. Considering the modulation mechanism as a related past-policy tool, renewed European decision making process and actors should outline from 2009 a new paradigm in direct payment regime. Since farmers are increasingly becoming entrepreneurs, the sooner an agreement on the CAP beyond 2013 is reached, the better.direct payments, rural development, European budget, Agricultural Finance,

A note on local BRST cohomology of Yang-Mills type theories with free abelian factors

We extend previous work on antifield dependent local BRST cohomology for matter coupled gauge theories of Yang-Mills type to the case of gauge groups that involve free abelian factors. More precisely, we first investigate in a model independent way how the dynamics enters the computation of the cohomology for a general class of Lagrangians in general spacetime dimensions. We then discuss explicit solutions in the case of specific models. Our analysis has implications for the structure of characteristic cohomology and for consistent deformations of the classical models, as well as for divergences/counterterms and for gauge anomalies that may appear during perturbative quantization.Comment: 31 page

Strong obstruction of the Berends-Burgers-van Dam spin-3 vertex

In the eighties, Berends, Burgers and van Dam (BBvD) found a nonabelian cubic vertex for self-interacting massless fields of spin three in flat spacetime. However, they also found that this deformation is inconsistent at higher order for any multiplet of spin-three fields. For arbitrary symmetric gauge fields, we severely constrain the possible nonabelian deformations of the gauge algebra and, using these results, prove that the BBvD obstruction cannot be cured by any means, even by introducing fields of spin higher (or lower) than three.Comment: 19 pages, no figur