"My Dear God-Like Sculptor..." RLS & Saint-Gaudens

The portrait-relief of Robert Louis Stevenson in Saint Giles Church in Edinburgh is a graceful memorial to a much-loved writer. It is also Scotland’s only example of the work of the great American sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907). Westminster has a reduction of his standing statue of Lincoln from Chicago; Dublin has the Parnell Monument, to a large extent the work of his studio when Saint-Gaudens himself was dying. But, in the Stevenson Memorial, Edinburgh has a work which held greater personal significance for the sculptor: it commemorates a friend

Imprisoned Princesses: Princess Tarakanova & the Regent Tsarevna Sof'ya

The images of characters presented in 19C history painting reflect their historical reputations at the time of painting. In depicting women from earlier times, artists often projected on to them images of contemporary femininity and concepts of ‘appropriate’ feminine behaviour. However, even in 19C, some artists were prepared to resist pressure to make their works conform to sexual stereotyping, by attempting to portray their subjects more truthfully. An examination of Konstantin Flavitskii’s 'Princess Tarakanova' (1864) and Il’ya Repin’s 'The Regent Tsarevna Sof’ya Alekseevna, in the Year after her Imprisonment in the Novodevichii Convent, during the Execution of the Strel’tsy and the Torture of her Serving-Women, October 1698' (1879; both in the Tret’yakov Gallery, Moscow) demonstrates the contrast in approaches

Skill-biased Technology Adoption: Evidence for the Chilean manufacturing sector

We examine the evolution of the demand for skilled workers relative to unskilled workers in the Chilean manufacturing sector following Chile’s liberalization of trade in the late 1970’s. Following such trade reforms, the standard Heckscher-Olin model predicts that a low labor-cost country like Chile should experience an increased demand for low skilled workers relative to high skilled workers. Alternatively, if trade liberalization is associated with the adoption of new technologies, and technology is skill-biased, the relative demand for skilled workers may rise. Using a newly available plant-level data set that spans the sixteen year period 1979-1995, we find that the relative demand for skilled workers rose sharply during the 1979-1986 period and then stabilized. The sharp increase in demand for skilled workers coincided with an increased propensity to adopt new technologies as measured by patent usage. Plant-level analysis of labor demand confirms a significant relationship between the relative demand for skilled workers and technology adoption as measured by patent usage and other technology indicators. Our results suggest that skill-biased technological change is a significant determinant of labor demand and wage structures in developing economies.

Imprisoned Princesses: Princess Tarakanova & the Regent Tsarevna Sof'ya

The images of characters presented in 19C history painting reflect their historical reputations at the time of painting. In depicting women from earlier times, artists often projected on to them images of contemporary femininity and concepts of ‘appropriate’ feminine behaviour. However, even in 19C, some artists were prepared to resist pressure to make their works conform to sexual stereotyping, by attempting to portray their subjects more truthfully. An examination of Konstantin Flavitskii’s 'Princess Tarakanova' (1864) and Il’ya Repin’s 'The Regent Tsarevna Sof’ya Alekseevna, in the Year after her Imprisonment in the Novodevichii Convent, during the Execution of the Strel’tsy and the Torture of her Serving-Women, October 1698' (1879; both in the Tret’yakov Gallery, Moscow) demonstrates the contrast in approaches

Optimal tracking for pairs of qubit states

In classical control theory, tracking refers to the ability to perform measurements and feedback on a classical system in order to enforce some desired dynamics. In this paper we investigate a simple version of quantum tracking, namely, we look at how to optimally transform the state of a single qubit into a given target state, when the system can be prepared in two different ways, and the target state depends on the choice of preparation. We propose a tracking strategy that is proved to be optimal for any input and target states. Applications in the context of state discrimination, state purification, state stabilization and state-dependent quantum cloning are presented, where existing optimality results are recovered and extended.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures. Extensive revision of text, optimality results extended, other physical applications include

REAL WORLD HEAD IMPACT DATA MEASUREMENTS ON JOCKEYS

A novel instrumentation system previously implemented on American football helmets (Greenwald et al. 2008) has been adapted and validated against a Hybrid III head and neck for use in an equestrian environment. This has been used to determine the forces applied to jockeys’ heads during fall impacts in competition racing