From Voss to New York: Norwegian transmigration to America and the use of virtual worlds in historical research

The discipline of history has embraced the research opportunities offered by the rapid development in digital humanities over the past decade or so. Computer technology has enabled text mining and the analysis of large bodies of data to an extent that would have been impossible a generation earlier. The latest generation of interactive applications and user-generated content (‘Digital History 2.0’), however, allows for a different approach to presenting and researching the past. In the research project which underpins this article we use an online 3D virtual world not only to portray emigration from Norway to America but also to pioneer a new approach to historical research. Freely available virtual world software (Open Sim) was used to recreate the journey of an emigrant travelling from Voss to New York in the early 1880s. The Voss farm and the port of Bergen are included in the virtual world, as is New York. A particular emphasis, however, is the lesser-studied ‘England leg’ of the journey, via Hull and Liverpool, which had become the standard emigration route by the 1870s, and we describe this journey in some detail. We also describe the experience of creating a historical virtual world to guide others interested in this means of historiography. Aside from official records, there is frustratingly little evidence of the experience of Norwegian migration, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of individuals were involved. Just as fictional accounts have gained credibility as valuable sources of information ‘from below’, we make the case that the “indirect personal stories” of descendants and their contribution to microhistory need to be given proper consideration as potential sources. Given how widely dispersed the informants are, we argue that online interactive spaces are an essential tool for historians, and we should not be put off by current technological limitations and challenges

Impact: Linguistics in the real world

There is currently an emphasis in the funding of universities in the UK on the demonstrable impact of research. In this article we explore the work of the second generation of the Anglo-Scandinavian School, those linguists who were amongst the first to take the formal study of modern languages at university level out into the schools. We argue that their work is an excellent historical example of research into language having an impact in the real world, and we go on to argue that it was able to do so because the desire to make a difference was built into their research from the outset

Modern Foreign Languages Get a Voice: The Role of Journals in the Reform Movement

This chapter investigates the significance of specialized journals for the development of modern language teaching. It begins by explaining the development of language journals up to the point at which language teaching reform really took off with the emergence of the so-called Reform Movement in the 1880s. The principal journal for this movement was Phonetische studien [Phonetic Studies] founded in 1888 and renamed Die neueren Sprachen [Modern languages] in 1894. The style of the early issues of this journal allows modern readers an insight into the discourse practices of that community of language scholars and teachers, the opportunity to hear its characteristic ‘voice’ and recreate the means by which modern foreign language teaching became an independent discipline

A Complementary Resistive Switch-based Crossbar Array Adder

Redox-based resistive switching devices (ReRAM) are an emerging class of non-volatile storage elements suited for nanoscale memory applications. In terms of logic operations, ReRAM devices were suggested to be used as programmable interconnects, large-scale look-up tables or for sequential logic operations. However, without additional selector devices these approaches are not suited for use in large scale nanocrossbar memory arrays, which is the preferred architecture for ReRAM devices due to the minimum area consumption. To overcome this issue for the sequential logic approach, we recently introduced a novel concept, which is suited for passive crossbar arrays using complementary resistive switches (CRSs). CRS cells offer two high resistive storage states, and thus, parasitic sneak currents are efficiently avoided. However, until now the CRS-based logic-in-memory approach was only shown to be able to perform basic Boolean logic operations using a single CRS cell. In this paper, we introduce two multi-bit adder schemes using the CRS-based logic-in-memory approach. We proof the concepts by means of SPICE simulations using a dynamical memristive device model of a ReRAM cell. Finally, we show the advantages of our novel adder concept in terms of step count and number of devices in comparison to a recently published adder approach, which applies the conventional ReRAM-based sequential logic concept introduced by Borghetti et al.Comment: 12 pages, accepted for IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems (JETCAS), issue on Computing in Emerging Technologie

British Council (Uzbekistan) English Medium Instruction Project Impact Evaluation

This report assesses the 'EMI (English Medium Instruction) in Higher Education' project, a joint initiative of the British Council and the Ministry of Higher and Secondary Specialised Education of the Republic of Uzbekistan, organised as a response to national reform in HE. The project being evaluated here set out to train a team of EMI professionals who would deliver high-quality EMI programmes at 16 state universities which would then cascade their knowledge of EMI pedagogy to EMI teachers across the sector. This report details the collected data and draws out research-driven strategic recommendations for EME stakeholders in Higher Education in Uzbekistan

Tolerance and Control. Developing a language policy for an EMI university in Uzbekistan

This article presents a practical project to develop a language policy for an English-Medium-Instruction university in Uzbekistan. Although the university is de facto English-only, it presents a complex language ecology, which in turn has led to confusion and disagreement about language use on campus. The project team investigated the experience, views and attitudes of over a thousand people, including faculty, students, administrative and maintenance staff, in order to arrive at a proposed policy which would serve the whole community, based on the principle of tolerance and pragmatism. After outlining the relevant language and educational context and setting out the methods and approach of the underpinning research project, the article goes on to present the key findings. One of the striking findings was an appetite for control and regulation of language behaviours. Language policies in Higher Education invariably fall down at the implementation stage because of a lack of will to follow through on their principles and their specific guidelines. Language policy in international business on the other hand is characterised by a control stage invariably lacking in language planning in education. Uzbekistan is a polity used to control measures following from policy implementation. The article concludes by suggesting that Higher Education in Central Asia may stand a better chance of seeing through language policies around English-Medium Instruction than, for example, in northern Europe, based on the tension between tolerance on the one hand and control on the other

Deepwater Drilling: Law, Policy, and Economics of Firm Organization and Safety

Although the causes of the Deepwater Horizon spill are not yet conclusively identified, significant attention has focused on the safety-related policies and practices—often referred to as the safety culture—of BP and other firms involved in drilling the well. This paper defines and characterizes the economic and policy forces that affect safety culture and identifies reasons why those forces may or may not be adequate or effective from the public’s perspective. Two potential justifications for policy intervention are that: a) not all of the social costs of a spill may be internalized by a firm; and b) there may be principal-agency problems within the firm, which could be reduced by external monitoring. The paper discusses five policies that could increase safety culture and monitoring: liability, financial responsibility (a requirement that a firm’s assets exceed a threshold), government oversight, mandatory private insurance, and risk-based drilling fees. We find that although each policy has a positive effect on safety culture, there are important differences and interactions that must be considered. In particular, the latter three provide external monitoring. Furthermore, raising liability caps without mandating insurance or raising financial responsibility requirements could have a small effect on the safety culture of small firms that would declare bankruptcy in the event of a large spill. The paper concludes with policy recommendations for promoting stronger safety culture in offshore drilling; our preferred approach would be to set a liability cap for each well equal to the worst-case social costs of a spill, and to require insurance up to the cap.Deepwater Horizon, BP oil spill, safety culture, government policy, liability caps, financial responsibility, insurance