Burton Clark's half century: selected writings 1956-2006

The work of Burton Clark extended over more than half a century - and also from its original base in sociology to embrace wider inter-disciplinary studies. His identification of the major research themes in higher education continues to be valid, despite the substantial changes that have taken place in the scale, structure and values of the system. Although his work continued to evolve taking in new topics such as the entrepreneurial university, it continued to be reflect the 'sociological imagination' which had been his starting point - and which explained its conceptual clarity and methodological integrity. © 2010 Institute of Education

The symmetry of intersection numbers in group theory

For suitable subgroups of a finitely generated group, we define the intersection number of one subgroup with another subgroup and show that this number is symmetric. We also give an interpretation of this number.Comment: 19 pages. Published copy, also available at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTVol2/paper2.abs.html . Includes erratum added to the original, published 19 Mar 199

Selling owner-occupation to the working-classes in 1930's Britain

The 1930s witnessed Britain’s first major boom in working-class owner-occupation. Purchasers typically came from cramped, rented, inner-urban accommodation, and, only a few years previously, would not have considered the possibility of buying a new house. Such perceptions were transformed by an aggressive marketing campaign by the building societies and building industry, to create a new mass market for owner-occupation. During the 1930s they developed a number of extremely sophisticated marketing strategies, including strong elements of `lifestyle marketing’, to transform the popular image of a mortgage from `a millstone round your neck’ to a key element of a new, suburbanized, aspirational lifestyle. This both contributed to the fastest rate of growth in working-class owner-occupation during the twentieth century and had a substantial impact on consumption patterns for families who moved to the new estates. After briefly discussing the causes and dimensions of the housing boom and the extent of working-class participation, this article examines the marketing campaigns launched by the building societies and the building industry to entice working-class customers. The analysis draws both on supply-side evidence - advertising material and business archives - and demand-side data – a qualitative database of 58 accounts by working-class people who moved into owner-occupation during this period, assembled from oral history archives, published and unpublished autobiographies, and other sources (hereafter Life Histories Database) together with a quantitative database of working-class family budgets.ii The paper also examines the ways in which opportunistic marketing contributed to an eventual crisis in the sector. The 1930s

Beyond the Tutorial: Complex Content Models in Fedora 3

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Fedora User Group PresentationsDate: 2009-05-21 08:30 AM – 10:00 AMThe University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center recently began a pilot project to create a digital collection of learning objects stored in a Fedora 3.1 repository. This pilot project is the proof-of-concept of many ideas and discussions, extending back for over five years, concerning the problem of storing, searching, and retrieving heterogeneous objects and object types, linked together in complex relations, in a way that is loosely coupled with front-end user display applications. During the course of this presentation, we will describe the issues we've confronted implementing increasingly rich digital collections over the past decade (including some real-life examples of complex digital objects), models we have developed with to resolve many of those issues, and how we have started implementing those models in Fedora 3.1, using the new Content Model functionality

Splittings of groups and intersection numbers

We prove algebraic analogues of the facts that a curve on a surface with self-intersection number zero is homotopic to a cover of a simple curve, and that two simple curves on a surface with intersection number zero can be isotoped to be disjoint.Comment: 40 pages. Published copy, also available at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTVol4/paper6.abs.htm

The homeomorphism problem for closed 3-manifolds

We give a more geometric approach to an algorithm for deciding whether two hyperbolic 3-manifolds are homeomorphic. We also give a more algebraic approach to the homeomorphism problem for geometric, but non-hyperbolic, 3-manifolds.Comment: first version: 12 pages. Replacement: 14 pages. Includes minor improvements to exposition in response to referee's comment

Graduating live and on line: the multimedia webcast of the Open Universitys worldwide virtual degree ceremony

As the foremost international open learning institution, the UK Open University has now webcast two live and on-line degree ceremonies. Most higher education establishments routinely videotape degree presentations and many now broadcast these videos as ways of including remote family and friends who could not attend the physical event. In contrast, the UKOU has presented live ceremonies at which the graduands themselves, plus guests, family and friends were all remote and online! The first worldwide virtual degree ceremony took place at 15:00 GMT/UT on March 31st 2000. This ceremony was the first in the Open University’s calendar for 2000, and therefore the first formal ceremony of this leading open learning institution in the new millennium. The second online ceremony took place on 18th April 2001, and further ceremonies are planned as part of the routine of open learning

Configurations of curves and geodesics on surfaces

We study configurations of immersed curves in surfaces and surfaces in 3-manifolds. Among other results, we show that primitive curves have only finitely many configurations which minimize the number of double points. We give examples of minimal configurations not realized by geodesics in any hyperbolic metric.Comment: 13 pages. Published copy, also available at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTMon2/paper11.abs.htm