A tale of two capitalisms: preliminary spatial and historical comparisons of homicide rates in Western Europe and the USA

This article examines comparative homicide rates in the United States and Western Europe in an era of increasingly globalized neoliberal economics. The main finding of this preliminary analysis is that historical and spatial correlations between distinct forms of political economy and homicide rates are consistent enough to suggest that social democratic regimes are more successful at fostering the socio-cultural conditions necessary for reduced homicide rates. Thus Western Europe and all continents and nations should approach the importation of American neo-liberal economic policies with extreme caution. The article concludes by suggesting that the indirect but crucial causal connection between political economy and homicide rates, prematurely pushed into the background of criminological thought during the ‘cultural turn’, should be returned to the foreground

Evidence of Hypertext in the Scholarly Archive

Quantitative studies of archive use by researcher

From The English Poetry Full-Text Database to seven flavours of Literature Online: ten years of digital publishing in the humanities at Chadwyck-Healey, 1991-2001, and a look into the next ten.

Chadwyck-Healey have been at the forefront in creating electronic research and teaching tools for humanities academics, scholars and students around the world for over 10 years. Not surprising during that time research and teaching requirements, the legal environment, technology and user expectations have changed dramatically. Through sharing our experience of creating and publishing digital resources I will explore how many of the key issues influencing the creation and publishing of these resources have evolved during that time and take a look at the what the future may hold. I will specifically explore the issues and decisions that were taken in project/collection selection, rights acquisition, digital content creation, aggregation & integration of content, delivery platforms, customer expectations & usage and commercial models from both an editorial and commercial perspective. The presentation will draw heavily on comparisons between a 1992 landmark Chadwyck-Healey project English Poetry on CD-Rom and our new British History Online, publishing in June 2001.Hosted by the Scholarly Text and Imaging Service (SETIS), the University of Sydney Library, and the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (RIHSS), the University of Sydney

Marshall University Music Department Presents an Eighth Annual Festival of New Music

https://mds.marshall.edu/music_perf/1765/thumbnail.jp

Migration of Price Discovery With Constrained Futures Markets

This paper investigates the information content of futures option prices when the futures price is regulated while the futures option price itself is not. The New York Board of Trade provides the empirical setting for this type of dichotomy in regulation. Most commodity derivatives markets regulate prices of all derivatives on a particular commodity simultaneously. NYBOT has taken an almost unique position by imposing daily price limits on their futures contracts while leaving the options prices on these futures contracts unconstrained. The study takes a particular interest in the volatility and futures prices of the options-implied risk neutral density when the underlying futures contract is locked limit.option implied density; price limits

The return of interpersonal violence in the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process

This thesis argues that orthodox social constructionist and culturalist explanations of the mutation of interpersonal violence in the Anglo-American world over the past three decades need to be challenged. Macro-patterns of interpersonal violence appearing over historical time and social space indicate a direct correlation with changes in political economy. It is argued here that specific forms of physical and sublimated symbolic violence were functional to the development of mercantile and classic industrial capitalism, and thus they were cultivated and harnessed in complex forms across this time period. This suggests that the 'civilizing process' formulated in terms of evolving social relationships and emotional sensibilities is inadequate as an explanation for the decline in the murder and serious violence rates in Europe, and this concept needs to be reformulated in a direct relationship with political economy. The new concept of the 'pseudo-pacification process' arose from an attempted reformulation, which represents the internal pacification of the population as an accidental and rather fragile by-product of capitalism's functional requirements. Current rises in t he rates o f m urder and s erious interpersonal violence i n vortices appearing in the shift from the classical productivist economy managed by interventionist state politics to a consumer/service economy managed by neo-liberal politics suggests that indeed the aetiological connection between political economy and violence rates needs to be returned to the foreground of criminological theory. The putative 'sensibilities' at the heart of the civilizing process are more likely to be emotional attachments to the rules and affectations that evolved as protective insulation for the brutally competitive practices that energise the capitalist economic project, and they are in danger of disintegrating as the pseudo-pacification process loses m uch o fit s functional v alue in t he c onsumer e conomy and b egins t o b reak down

Who pays business rates?

Non-domestic rates are a tax that is formally levied on the occupiers of nondomestic property in the United Kingdom. This does not imply that it is only the occupiers of business and other non-domestic property who are made worse off by the imposition of ‘business rates’. Some or all of the effective burden of nondomestic rates may be shifted backwards from the occupiers of business property to the owners of business property. This occurs if the rents that property owners can charge their tenants are reduced by the imposition of business rates. In this case, the total cost of occupying a business property (i.e. rent plus rates) is increased by less than the full amount of the non-domestic rates paid by occupiers, and part of the burden of business rates is borne by property owners in the form of lower rental income than they would otherwise have received. The effective incidence of non-domestic rates is then said to fall partly on property owners, and only partly on occupiers.

Opportunities and Obstacles in the Transition to a Distributed Network of Rooftop Solar: A Multi-Method Approach

This paper investigates the feasibility and viability of providing power to Ada County, Idaho, using a distributed network of rooftop solar photovoltaic panels. Using a multi-disciplinary and multi-method modeling approach, a detailed simulation is performed where existing structures are retro-fitted with grid-tied solar photovoltaic systems using currently available technology. Feasibility is determined using simulated supply and demand per building, while viability is determined through standard financial metrics used in the energy sector. A major critique of solar energy comes from the vast amounts of space required to efficiently capture solar power, along with the inefficiencies created by transmission loss and intermittency. Under a system where structures become both producers and consumers of energy, with PV panels deployed in unused rooftop space, this paper mitigates those critiques and analyzes the results. Four case scenarios are discussed based on the perspectives of differing energy stakeholders; consumers, private firms, public utilities, and national governments