Abandonment of land and the Scottish Coal case : was it Unprecedented?

The support of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland in the provision of a research incentive grant that contributed to this note is gratefully acknowledged.Peer reviewedPostprin

Abandonment of land and the Scottish coal case : was it unprecedented?

Owners of land do not usually wish to abandon it. Land is scarce and is normally a valuable commodity. It seems strange that there might be circumstances where someone would seek to relinquish a slice of Scotland in exchange for no benefit. Notwithstanding, the liquidators of a landowner recently tried to do this in relation to certain sites that had been used for coal mining. In the Scottish Coal case,1 those liquidators petitioned the Court of Session for guidance as to whether it was possible to abandon land and, if so, the proper procedure for doing so. It was ultimately held that it was not competent to abandon land in Scots law

First evidence for interpersonal violence in Ukraine's Trypillian farming culture : Individual 3 from Verteba Cave, Bilche Zolote

This paper presents the initial stages of an interdisciplinary study of human skeletal remains interred at Verteba Cave, western Ukraine. This site has been described previously as a “ritual site of the Trypillian culture complex” by Nikitin et al. in Comprehensive site chronology and ancient mitochondrial DNA analysis from Verteba Cave – a Trypillian culture site of Eneolithic Ukraine, Interdisciplinaria Archaeologica: Natural Sciences in Archaeology 1, 9–18., and the material considered here is one of seven crania recovered during excavations at Verteba between 2008 and 2010. Palaeopathological analysis of the individual considered here indicates that this is a young adult female with evidence for peri-mortem injury, cranial surgery and into early stage Trypillia culture inter-personal interactions and burial ritual in this region of Ukraine. Paper published in Proceedings of the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology 13th and 14th Annual Conferences in Edinburgh (2nd-4th September 2011) and Bournemouth (14th–16th September 2012)

Eye of the World: John L. Baird and Television (part 2)

IN THE FIRST ARTICLE of this series,(1) Adrian Hills has skilfully brought us through John Logie Baird's early life to the "birth of television," the first public demonstration in 1926. In this part I will write of the years from 1926 until my father's death in 1946, and also comment on how the perceptions of his work have changed since 1946. This article is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Margaret Baird (1907-1996). Early Television AchievementsThe first public demonstration of television, in the cramped London attic room in January 1926, marked a turning point for Baird. One of the scientists at the demonstration was heard to comment "Well, he got it right. It's only a matter of .s.d. to carry on developments." Public interest was immense and the small company that had been formed six months earlier, Television Limited, was able to expand. One of its..

Quantum and classical surface acoustic wave induced magnetoresistance oscillations in a 2D electron gas

We study theoretically the geometrical and temporal commensurability oscillations induced in the resistivity of 2D electrons in a perpendicular magnetic field by surface acoustic waves (SAWs). We show that there is a positive anisotropic dynamical classical contribution and an isotropic non-equilibrium quantum contribution to the resistivity. We describe how the commensurability oscillations modulate the resonances in the SAW-induced resistivity at multiples of the cyclotron frequency. We study the effects of both short-range and long-range disorder on the resistivity corrections for both the classical and quantum non-equilibrium cases. We predict that the quantum correction will give rise to zero-resistance states with associated geometrical commensurability oscillations at large SAW amplitude for sufficiently large inelastic scattering times. These zero resistance states are qualitatively similar to those observed under microwave illumination, and their nature depends crucially on whether the disorder is short- or long-range. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results for current and future experiments on two dimensional electron gases.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure

Bose Hubbard model in the presence of Ohmic dissipation

We study the zero temperature mean-field phase diagram of the Bose-Hubbard model in the presence of local coupling between the bosons and an external bath. We consider a coupling that conserves the on-site occupation number, preserving the robustness of the Mott and superfluid phases. We show that the coupling to the bath renormalizes the chemical potential and the interaction between the bosons and reduces the size of the superfluid regions between the insulating lobes. For strong enough coupling, a finite value of hopping is required to obtain superfluidity around the degeneracy points where Mott phases with different occupation numbers coexist. We discuss the role that such a bath coupling may play in experiments that probe the formation of the insulator-superfluid shell structure in systems of trapped atoms.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Error found in v1, now corrected, leads to qualitative changes in result