RESPECT: A personal development programme for young people at risk of social exclusion - Final Report

This is the final, summary report in the series of reports written on the RESPECT evaluation.The RESPECT programme was funded for three years from the Government’s Invest to Save initiative. It brought together a number of elements of Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service’s earlier work with young people in a concerted attempt to tackle wider challenges pertinent to the fire services and partner agencies. RESPECT was a targeted intervention for young people living in Cheshire, Halton and Warrington who were aged 11 to 16 years and who were disaffected and/or displayed antisocial behaviour.The RESPECT programme was funded for three years from the Government’s 'Invest to Save' initiative. The RESPECT partnership was made up of the following organisations: Cheshire Fire Service; The Youth Federation; Cheshire County Council; Halton Borough Council; Warrington Borough Council; and Cheshire & Warrington Connexions

Sure Start Blacon reach report, April 2004 - March 2005

This project report discusses Sure Start computerised records (covering personal details of all registrations within the Sure Start programme and records of each serivce and which service users have accessed them) which allow the 'reach' of the local programme across Blacon to be established between 1 April 2004 and 31 March 2005

Obsolescence and the Cityscape of the former GDR

Paul Ricoeur claims that it is on the scale of urbanism that we best catch sight of the work of time in space. This article establishes two paradigmatic ways of seeing time in the city, the synchronic urban gaze and the urban memorial gaze, in order to explore how visualisations of the cityscape of the former GDR negotiate the significance of obsolescence, both ideological and physical. These paradigmatic forms can be associated with the ‘official vision’ of the cityscape, and ‘alternative’ visions respectively. While the state vision is evident in its urban planning, and the visual discourses at its disposal, the alternative visions are expressed in forms of visual culture (film and photography) that also explicitly engage with the visual discourses of urbanism. The article thus begins with an analysis of the official vision, through a consideration of the demolition of the Berlin Stadtschloss in 1950 as an act that may have been underpinned by both the ideological and physical obsolescence of the Schloss, but was ultimately justified by the need to create urban space for ideologically-motivated circulation. It then charts the changing relationship to obsolescence on the part of the regime's urban planners in the late 1960s, showing how this ostensibly dovetails with alternative ‘subjective’ visions of the cityscape in the 1970s in films such as Die Legende von Paul und Paula and Solo Sunny, and in the photography of Ulrich Wüst. Such visions are widespread and largely permissible by the 1980s (with the notable exception of Helga Paris's study of Halle); and Peter Kahane's 1990s film, Die Architekten, is read as offering a summary of these positions, as well as of the tensions between official and alternative ways of framing the manifestation of time in the cityscape. The article concludes by considering the afterlife of the obsolescent cityscapes of the former capital of the GDR within the new ‘official’ regime of representation that dominates in the ‘new’ Berlin

Simulating star formation in molecular cloud cores I. The influence of low levels of turbulence on fragmentation and multiplicity

We present the results of an ensemble of simulations of the collapse and fragmentation of dense star-forming cores. We show that even with very low levels of turbulence the outcome is usually a binary, or higher-order multiple, system. We take as the initial conditions for these simulations a typical low-mass core, based on the average properties of a large sample of observed cores. All the simulated cores start with a mass of $M = 5.4 M_{\odot}$, a flattened central density profile, a ratio of thermal to gravitational energy $\alpha_{\rm therm} = 0.45$ and a ratio of turbulent to gravitational energy $\alpha_{\rm turb} = 0.05$. Even this low level of turbulence is sufficient to produce multiple star formation in 80% of the cores; the mean number of stars and brown dwarfs formed from a single core is 4.55, and the maximum is 10. At the outset, the cores have no large-scale rotation. The only difference between each individual simulation is the detailed structure of the turbulent velocity field. The multiple systems formed in the simulations have properties consistent with observed multiple systems. Dynamical evolution tends preferentially to eject lower mass stars and brown dwarves whilst hardening the remaining binaries so that the median semi-major axis of binaries formed is $\sim 30$ au. Ejected objects are usually single low-mass stars and brown dwarfs, yielding a strong correlation between mass and multiplicity. Our simulations suggest a natural mechanism for forming binary stars that does not require large-scale rotation, capture, or large amounts of turbulence.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figures submitted to A&

Material, Image, Sign: on the Value of Memory Traces in Public Space

This essay collection examines the dynamics of memory organization and the way it varies among different media and modes of discourse in post-unification Germany. German unification has put the post-war period into a historical perspective. Such a rupture raises questions concerning the appropriate commemoration, preservation and reinterpretation of the past. The processes of reorientation after unification influenced the self-perception of literary authors as well as the social role, position and status of German literature. They also affected the way writers viewed the competition in which they found themselves pitted against visual and electronic media as rival windows on the past. In the context of several debates on German literature during the 1990s the discussion revolved not only around the adequate aesthetic representation of the historical and cultural heritage but even more so around the role of literature itself in that process. The contributions look at different discourses that were and still are concerned with reinterpreting and creating new collective symbols and narrative patterns in relation to Germany's past. The volume focuses on the effects of the characteristic discourses of the press, literature and its different genres, film, the internet and memorials on the depiction and performance of memories

Urban Memory and Visual Culture in Berlin

As sites of turbulence and transformation, cities are machines for forgetting. And yet archiving and exhibiting the presence of the past remains a key cultural, political and economic activity in many urban environments. This book takes the example of Berlin over the past four decades to chart how the memory culture of the city has responded to the challenges and transformations thrown up by the changing political, social and economic organization of the built environment. The book focuses on the visual culture of the city (architecture, memorials, photography and film). It argues that the recovery of the experience of time is central to the practices of an emergent memory culture in a contemporary 'overexposed' city, whose spatial and temporal boundaries have long since disintegrated

Responsible Ruins: W. G. Sebald and the Responsibility of the German Writer

THIS OBSERVATION from Andreas Huyssen comes in the context of a generally positive consideration of the work of W. G. Sebald. In the same article, Huyssen expresses admiration for this work, “which gains some of its power precisely because it remains outside of such reductive alternatives.” The reductive alternatives (autonomous aestheticism or social engagement) are the terms in which the responsibility of the German writer is couched in the so-called Literaturstreit of the 1990s. In both his essays and his literary writings, Sebald's position appears on the surface to have little to do with those terms. Yet our reading of how Sebald configures the writer's responsibility has to take into account the fact that Huyssen's admiration is tempered by his disquiet that in his later writings, and particularly in his lectures on Luftkrieg und Literatur, Sebald “had yielded to the temptation […] to interpret the most recent historical developments simply as natural history.”2 This is, in Huyssen's eyes, irresponsible, since “the discourse of the natural history of destruction remains too closely tied to metaphysics and to the apocalyptic philosophy of history so prominent in the German tradition.”3 Huyssen's concern is shared by other critics, such as Peter Morgan, who have found that Sebald fails to take “responsible ownership” of history. For Morgan, despite the works' “intertextual complexity and European urbanity […], Sebald's ‘linke Melancholie’ […] is the manifestation of extreme disappointment with the outcomes of quotidian post-enlightenment rationality in its social, cultural and political aspects. He is a traumatised

Mapping and gapping services for children, young people and families in Blacon

This research report provides a map of the services available to children and families in Blacon and explores whether there are any gaps in provision.Blacon Education Villag