Functions of genus zero for which the fast escaping set has Hausdorff dimension two

We study a family of transcendental entire functions of genus zero, for which all of the zeros lie within a closed sector strictly smaller than a half-plane. In general these functions lie outside the Eremenko-Lyubich class. We show that for functions in this family the fast escaping set has Hausdorff dimension equal to two

Simply connected fast escaping Fatou components

We give an example of a transcendental entire function with a simply connected fast escaping Fatou component, but with no multiply connected Fatou components. We also give a new criterion for points to be in the fast escaping set

Julia and escaping set spiders' webs of positive area

We study the dynamics of a collection of families of transcendental entire functions which generalises the well-known exponential and cosine families. We show that for functions in many of these families the Julia set, the escaping set and the fast escaping set are all spiders' webs of positive area. This result is unusual in that most of these functions lie outside the Eremenko-Lyubich class B. This is also the first result on the area of a spider's web

“Witness” to violence? Psychological discourses of children in situations of domestic violence

This paper takes a critical discursive and feminist perspective on psychological accounts of children who experience domestic violence. Academic, popular and professional discourses around domestic violence (DV) tend to represent children and young people (CYP) as passive witnesses and victims - as individuals who watch, who suffer from and who are damaged by the violence (e.g. Rivett and Howarth, 2006; Spilsbury et al, 2007). We consider how constructs like ‘witness’, ‘trauma’ and ‘exposure’ operate in psychological and other health and social care discourses of children, exploring the implications of such constructions for young people’s identities. In particular we explore how such accounts constrain the articulation of more agentic and resistant subjectivities in children living with domestic violenc

Evaluation of the Third Age series : final report.

The "Third Age" series comprised 10 programmes transmitted between October 21st and December 23rd 1993, on BBC2 at 2.00pm on Thursdays. The series succeeded others for I older viewers, such as "Prime Time", but was to be of a very different character, both in terms of its "message" and format. The BBC also produced a free magazine to accompany the series, with financial support from the European Commission as part of the European I Year of the Elderly and Solidarity between the generations. The title, "The Third Age\u27, refers to that time of life after a person\u27s main career or job has finished and children have left home and before the "Fourth Age", the time of increasing frailty, dependence and finally, death. Broadly speaking this is the years between ages 50 and 75, which now accounts for about 13 million people in Britain. Unlike the common social images of old age, the vast majority of these people are fit, active and independent. The research had two objectives. Firstly, information has been provided on reactions to the programme, in terms of likes and dislikes, viewing preferences and behaviours and attitudes towards the programmes. However, a second and more fundamental aim has been to assess whether the series has had an impact on the attitudes and behaviour of its target audience. Did the underlying message of the programme - to make the most out of life in the later years -get translated into new ways of thinking about later life and the uptake of new activities, hobbies and interests? This question was approached in two ways: (1) by asking viewers whether the programmes had influenced them; and (2) by independently monitoring changes in attitudes and behaviour

Topics in Transcendental Dynamics

We study the iteration of a transcendental entire function, f; in particular, the fast escaping set, A(f). This set consists of points that iterate to infinity as fast as possible, and plays a significant role in transcendental dynamics. First we investigate functions for which A(f) has a structure called a spider's web. We construct several new classes of function with this property. We show that some of these classes have a degree of stability under changes in the function, and that new examples of functions with this property can be constructed by composition, by differentiation, and by integration of existing examples. We use a property of spiders' webs to give new results concerning functions with no unbounded Fatou components. When A(f) is a spider's web, it contains a sequence of fundamental loops. We next explore the structure of these fundamental loops for functions with a multiply connected Fatou component, and show that there exist functions for which some fundamental loops are analytic curves and approximately circles, while others are geometrically highly distorted. We do this by introducing a real-valued function which measures the rate of escape of points in A(f), and show that this function has a number of interesting properties. Next we study functions with a simply connected Fatou component in A(f). We give an example of a function with this property, which - in contrast to the only other known functions of this type - has no multiply connected Fatou components. To do this we also prove a new criterion for points to be in A(f). Finally, we investigate the much studied Eremenko-Lyubich class of transcendental entire functions with a bounded set of singular values. We give a new characterisation of this class, and a new result regarding direct singularities which are not logarithmic