The construction and form of modern cities: exploring identities and community

‘Urban historians’, we are told, are ‘obliged to be more eclectic’ than other scholars of the city. The volumes covered by this review certainly speak to the rich diversity of urban history making.* While the others can take a ‘well-defined disciplinary perspective’ – as sociologists, geographers, etc. – only we are expected to ‘study the interaction of the urban fabric on the social fabric’ in its ‘unique spatial setting’ across social, economic and political boundaries (and of course through time). This is a rhetoric – an ideal, perhaps – with which most of us, doubtless, are already familiar. But how does it translate into practice? In our everyday imperfect world of time constraints a nominal commitment to eclecticism can instead spawn specialization, and thus a lack of cross-disciplinary ‘cohesion’, so that the ‘umbrella’ of diversity instead becomes an agency for introversion. To be truly eclectic, therefore, presumably urban historians need to be not only better read (and/or brighter) than other academic colleagues, but also better resourced! Yet before we all rush to our respective departmental heads to make a claim, we need to ask, too, whether this declaration of eclecticism is little more than yet another ‘idealized’ story that we tell about ourselves: part of our identity, of how we would like to be seen, an affirmation of our self-view. Is it as ‘imagined’, for example, as other forms of identity – a construct to serve a purpose? Is it there to make us feel special, valued and privileged

'Calculating class': housing, lifestyle and status in the provincial English city, 1900-1950

The multifarious ‘objective’ indicators used to place individuals by class (for example, occupation, wealth, income), or proxies thereof, capture only a part of who we are. More important is our ‘style of life’: our tastes, how we spend what we earn and how this interplays socially to include or exclude us from ‘society’. Of these the most significant cultural site was an individual’s house and home, against which, using local property tax records, we can place a defined numeric value. This article analyses class in relation to housing and property values in Nottingham in the first half of the twentieth century

'Humanising' construction? The languages of industrial relations reform, full employment and productivity after 1945

The impact of “human relations” ideology remains contentious. This article examines how such ideas were deconstructed in the British building industry during the postwar battle to raise productivity. Construction offers a useful testing bed for a strategy based on organic, workplace co-operation: it has the dichotomous attributes of past “human neglect” within a reputed industrial relations framework of harmonious mutuality. The industry suffered heavily from unemployment before 1939. It might be expected, therefore, that mindsets changed significantly with the onset of full employment. But did a common understanding of “human relations” exist to disable workplace antagonisms and past insecurity? Indeed were such constructs viewed as a priority, and in that sense have meaning? This article concludes that the past continued to haunt the industry, and that meanings were ambiguous and misconstrued, but that nevertheless a new purposeful, common agenda arose

Energy consumption analysis of the Venus Deep Space Station (DSS-13)

This report continues the energy consumption analysis and verification study of the tracking stations of the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, and presents an audit of the Venus Deep Space Station (DSS 13). Due to the non-continuous radioastronomy research and development operations at the station, estimations of energy usage were employed in the energy consumption simulation of both the 9-meter and 26-meter antenna buildings. A 17.9% decrease in station energy consumption was experienced over the 1979-1981 years under study. A comparison of the ECP computer simulations and the station's main watt-hour meter readings showed good agreement

Fault Testing for Reversible Circuits

Applications of reversible circuits can be found in the fields of low-power computation, cryptography, communications, digital signal processing, and the emerging field of quantum computation. Furthermore, prototype circuits for low-power applications are already being fabricated in CMOS. Regardless of the eventual technology adopted, testing is sure to be an important component in any robust implementation. We consider the test set generation problem. Reversibility affects the testing problem in fundamental ways, making it significantly simpler than for the irreversible case. For example, we show that any test set that detects all single stuck-at faults in a reversible circuit also detects all multiple stuck-at faults. We present efficient test set constructions for the standard stuck-at fault model as well as the usually intractable cell-fault model. We also give a practical test set generation algorithm, based on an integer linear programming formulation, that yields test sets approximately half the size of those produced by conventional ATPG.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figures. to appear in IEEE Trans. on CA

Civic perceptions: housing and local decision-making in English cities in the 1920s

The adoption of non-traditional housing by local authorities is customarily explained in terms of economic factor shortages or a nationally determined policy discourse. This underestimates the significance of distinctly local understandings of civic responsibility. Based on Leicester and Nottingham, this article argues that those influences frequently used to predict outcomes – like party political allegiance – mattered less in decision-making than a city's intrinsic view of itself. Such perceptions were grounded in subtle constructions of civic community, perceived need and political reinterpretation. Particularly important was the role of the local press. Even cities with similar problems, therefore, could be represented, and subsequently see themselves, in very dissimilar terms and act accordingly