A Decade of Urban History: The Historical Urban Studies Series

The first half of the 1990s was a pivotal period in the development and growth of urban history in Europe. In Britain the Urban History Group began to convene again after a decade in abeyance, work commenced on the three-volume Cambridge Urban History of Britain, the Urban History Yearbook became Urban History whilst the European Association of Urban Historians organized their first conference. It was in this climate that Ashgate Publishing commissioned a new monograph series, Historical Urban Studies, under the editorship of Richard Rodger, editor of Urban History, and Jean-Luc Pinol, the leading French urban historian and a key figure in the European Association of Urban Historians (EAUH). The aim of the series was and is to be comparative over both time and space, drawing on multiple locations to explore what is common and what distinctive about the urban experience of diverse towns and nations. The broad agenda for the series was shaped by an overarching concern with the administration and governance of the city which underpinned attempts to manage the social, economic and political challenges wrought by 300 years of urban change. In particular, the editors stress the importance of the comparative element which should allow historians to distinguish ‘which were systematic factors and which were of a purely local nature’. The editors set themselves an ambitious agenda and this essay aims to explore how the series has developed over the ten or so years since it commenced publication; the degree to which it has provided a platform for advancing the sub-discipline of urban history; and to consider some future directions which urban history might take

Do Asymmetric Central Bank Preferences Help Explain Observed Inflation Outcomes?

When the central banker’s loss function is asymmetric, changes in the volatility of inflation and/or unemployment affect equilibrium inflation. This suggests that changing macroeconomic volatilities may be an important driving force behind trends in observed inflation. Previous evidence, which has offered support for this idea, suffers from a spurious regression problem. Once this problem is controlled for, the evidence suggests that the volatility of unemployment does not help explain inflation outcomes. There is some evidence of a relationship between inflation and its volatility, but overall the data does not support the view that changing economic volatility, as filtered through asymmetric central bank preferences, is an important driver of inflation trends.Inflation, Monetary Policy, Asymmetric Loss Function.

Do Asymmetric Central Bank Preferences Help Explain Observed Inflation Outcomes?

Recent theoretical work shows that changes in the volatility of inflation and/or unemployment affect equilibrium inflation outcomes when the central banker's loss function is asymmetric. We show that previous evidence offered in support of the proposition that the volatility of unemployment helps explain inflation outcomes suffers from a spurious regression problem. Once this problem is controlled for, the evidence suggests that the volatility of unemployment does not help explain inflation outcomes. There is some evidence of a relationship between inflation and its volatility, but the data is not strongly supportive of the view that asymmetric central bank preferences are an important driver of inflation.inflation; monetary policy; asymmetric loss

Testing Commitment Models of Monetary Policy: Evidence from OECD Economies

Inflation rates in a number of OECD follow a common trend over the past four decades: inflation starts out low in the 1960s, rises for a time before peaking in the 1970s or early 1980s, and then falls back to initial levels. This similarity in the behavior of trend inflation suggests that any explanation of long run inflation trends ought to apply across OECD countries. Ireland (1999) shows that a simple time inconsistency model of monetary policy, modified to allow for a time-varying NAIRU, can explain long run trends in U.S. inflation. In this paper we show that this result cannot serve as an explanation of the common trend in OECD inflation, as it fits the data only in the U.S.. We investigate two important variants of the hypothesis: i) that time inconsistency was an important component of central bank behavior in earlier decades, but has become less significant in recent years, and ii) that time inconsistency problems drive U.S. inflation, which affects inflation rates in other countries as a result of central bankers' attempts to manage nominal exchange rate movements vis a vis the U.S. dollar. We find that the first hypothesis fits the data no better than the baseline model. We find some support for the international spillovers version of the model, but the behavior of non-U.S. central bankers with respect to domestic unemployment rates is not well described by the time inconsistency mechanism.monetary policy; inflation; time incosistency

An analysis of voice and language characteristics in an oral recall situation

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

The Ways of the Images in Charles Williams\u27 \u3ci\u3eThe Place of the Lion\u3c/i\u3e

Notes the importance of imagery to Williams, and shows how The Place of the Lion presents “three basic ways of how imagery is used and various examples of each way”: perversion, affirmation, and rejection. Charts

The structure of elite power in the early twentieth century city: Norwich 1900-1935

Through a study of middle-class power in Norwich in the first third of the twentieth century, this paper tests a number of hypotheses concerning the behaviour of British urban elites. Analysis of networks (freemasons, business organizations and family) assesses the level of social unification among the middle class; elite involvement in chapel, charities and voluntary organizations addresses the question of social leadership; whilst elite politics is considered through three questions: did they become unified behind a single anti-socialist stance? Did the more important members of the elite leave urban politics? And did they abandon faith in grand civic projects? Its conclusions suggest that the power and involvement of the elite continued into the 1930s, maintaining a positive approach to the scope and function of municipal authority

'Urban Liberalism and the "Lost Generation": Politics and middle-class culture in Norwich, 1900-1935'

This article utilizes the metaphor of the post-war Lost Generation to investigate the chronology of middle class political realignment and Liberal decline. It suggests that the Liberalism of twentieth-century Norwich owed its existence to the perpetuation of a closed culture based on business, chapel and urban residence. It questions the degree to which dissenting Liberals had been assimilated into the dominant ideology before 1914 by reference to marriage ties and associational links such as the freemasons. It asserts that the downfall of this Liberal culture in the long run, though not immediately, was the result of the Great War, which allowed the younger generation to break out of their insular world and mix more freely with the Anglican upper-middle class. However, it also demonstrates that the closed culture was such that those of the Edwardian political generation, although affected by the War, did not reject their Liberalism. Most continued to actively support the party into the 1930s, questioning the view that the middle classes had largely deserted the Liberals by 1924. Rather, it was the political maturation in the 1930s of the War generation which heralded the end of urban Liberalism and the triumph of middle class Conservatism

Survey of Technologies for Web Application Development

Web-based application developers face a dizzying array of platforms, languages, frameworks and technical artifacts to choose from. We survey, classify, and compare technologies supporting Web application development. The classification is based on (1) foundational technologies; (2)integration with other information sources; and (3) dynamic content generation. We further survey and classify software engineering techniques and tools that have been adopted from traditional programming into Web programming. We conclude that, although the infrastructure problems of the Web have largely been solved, the cacophony of technologies for Web-based applications reflects the lack of a solid model tailored for this domain.Comment: 43 page