The Conservatives in crisis

The Conservatives in crisis provides a timely and important analysis of the Conservative Party's spell in opposition following the 1997 general election. It includes chapters by leading academic experts on the party and commentaries by three senior Conservative politicians: Lord Parkinson, Andrew Lansley MP and Ian Taylor MP. Having been the dominant force in British politics in the twentieth century, the Conservative Party suffered its heaviest general election defeats in 1997 and 2001. This book explores the party's current crisis and assesses the Conservatives' failure to mount a political recovery under the leadership of William Hague. The Conservatives in crisis includes a detailed examination of the reform of the Conservative Party organisation, changes in ideology and policy, the party's electoral fortunes, and Hague's record as party leader. It also offers an innovative historical perspective on previous Conservative recoveries and a comparison with the revival of the US Republican Party. In the conclusion the editors assess the failures of the Hague period and examine the party's performance under Iain Duncan Smith. The Conservatives in crisis will be essential reading for students of contemporary British politics

Neutral evolution and turnover over centuries of English word popularity

Here we test Neutral models against the evolution of English word frequency and vocabulary at the population scale, as recorded in annual word frequencies from three centuries of English language books. Against these data, we test both static and dynamic predictions of two neutral models, including the relation between corpus size and vocabulary size, frequency distributions, and turnover within those frequency distributions. Although a commonly used Neutral model fails to replicate all these emergent properties at once, we find that modified two-stage Neutral model does replicate the static and dynamic properties of the corpus data. This two-stage model is meant to represent a relatively small corpus (population) of English books, analogous to a `canon', sampled by an exponentially increasing corpus of books in the wider population of authors. More broadly, this mode -- a smaller neutral model within a larger neutral model -- could represent more broadly those situations where mass attention is focused on a small subset of the cultural variants.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

Total systemic failure?

While the world argues about whether climate change is real, what if all systems are failing? This paper seeks to ignite further discussion concerning human impact on all aspects of our environment as we move further into the Anthropocene, not only in terms of the pressure we produce, but also how our activity changes the nature of the relationships between Earth's systems. The paper suggests that we currently lack the tools and analytical capacity to understand the significance of these changes and therefore we cannot answer the question, "are all systems failing?". We discuss how complexity theory, complex networks, and Artificial Intelligence, could contribute part of a solution

No evidence for compensatory thermal adaptation of soil microbial respiration in the study of Bradford et al. (2008)

Bradford et al. (2008) conclude that thermal adaptation will reduce the response of soil microbial respiration to rising global temperatures. However, we question both the methods used to calculate mass-specific respiration rates and the interpretation of the results. No clear evidence of thermal adaptation reducing soil microbial activity was produced

Mapping Mental Health and the UK University Sector: Networks, Markets, Data

The mental health and well-being of university staff and students in the UK are reported to have seriously deteriorated. Rather than taking this ‘mental health crisis’ at face value, we carry out network and discourse analyses to investigate the policy assemblages (comprising social actors, institutions, technologies, knowledges and discourses) through which the ‘crisis' is addressed. Our analysis shows how knowledges from positive psychology and behavioural economics, disciplinary techniques driven by metrics and data analytics, and growing markets in digital therapeutic technologies work as an ensemble. Together, they instrumentalise mental health, creating motivational ecologies that allow economic agendas to seep through to subjects who are encouraged to monitor and rehabilitate themselves. Mental health’ as a problem for UK universities has come to be largely defined through the outcomes of ‘resilience’ and ‘employability’ and is addressed through markets that enable training, monitoring, measuring and ‘nudging’ students and staff towards these outcomes

An Initial Framework Assessing the Safety of Complex Systems

Trabajo presentado en la Conference on Complex Systems, celebrada online del 7 al 11 de diciembre de 2020.Atmospheric blocking events, that is large-scale nearly stationary atmospheric pressure patterns, are often associated with extreme weather in the mid-latitudes, such as heat waves and cold spells which have significant consequences on ecosystems, human health and economy. The high impact of blocking events has motivated numerous studies. However, there is not yet a comprehensive theory explaining their onset, maintenance and decay and their numerical prediction remains a challenge. In recent years, a number of studies have successfully employed complex network descriptions of fluid transport to characterize dynamical patterns in geophysical flows. The aim of the current work is to investigate the potential of so called Lagrangian flow networks for the detection and perhaps forecasting of atmospheric blocking events. The network is constructed by associating nodes to regions of the atmosphere and establishing links based on the flux of material between these nodes during a given time interval. One can then use effective tools and metrics developed in the context of graph theory to explore the atmospheric flow properties. In particular, Ser-Giacomi et al. [1] showed how optimal paths in a Lagrangian flow network highlight distinctive circulation patterns associated with atmospheric blocking events. We extend these results by studying the behavior of selected network measures (such as degree, entropy and harmonic closeness centrality)at the onset of and during blocking situations, demonstrating their ability to trace the spatio-temporal characteristics of these events.This research was conducted as part of the CAFE (Climate Advanced Forecasting of sub-seasonal Extremes) Innovative Training Network which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 813844

Safety, Complexity, and Automated Driving : Holistic Perspectives on Safety Assurance

This article extends safety assurance approaches for automated driving by explicitly acknowledging the complexity of the emergent system behavior. We introduce a framework for reasoning about factors that contribute to this complexity as a means of structuring the interdisciplinary perspectives required to achieve an acceptable level of residual risk