Traditional roof coverings in the North York Moors National Park

Purpose – The paper seeks to deal with vernacular roofing practices within the North York Moors National Park. Design/methodology/approach – Initially the paper carries out a literature review of the geography and geology of the area and identifies what makes it physically unique. The paper then examines the development of various roofing materials, including thatch, stone slates and pantiles with case studies of old practice and modern methods from around the Park. Findings – Roofing styles are simplistic and have steered away from the intricate in favour of the indigenous or readily available. The paper demonstrates the much-regionalised nature of the roofing materials and recognises this as one of the special cultural features worthy of conservation. Research limitations/implications – The results are limited to the North York Moors National Park but the approach taken could be extended to other conservation areas. Practical implications – The results of the research will benefit those involved in the conservation of vernacular buildings in the North York Moors National Park. Originality/value – The paper calls for additional guidance for roofers and specifiers on traditional vernacular techniques and for existing funding under the Environmental Stewardship Scheme to be extended to include rural communities in National Parks

John Komlos, What Every Economics Student Needs to Know, and Doesn’t Get in the Usual Principles Text

Book Revie

THE EFFECT OF DEVELOPMENT OF GEOGRAPHY, VITAMIN D, WEALTH, AND AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY ON TUBERCULOSIS MORTALITY: THE CASE OF THE 19TH CENTURY US

Tuberculosis remains a major cause of international mortality, and researchers and policy advocates continue to seek a cost effective prevention and treatment. To better understand the current dilemma, this paper considers the physical and material environments associated with 19th century US tuberculosis mortality. Vitamin D was an historical remedy for tuberculosis, and sunlight-the primary source of vitamin D production and time of year-are documented here to have been associated with lower tuberculosis mortality rates. Occupations were also related with the physical environment and tuberculosis mortality, and workers in outdoor occupations, such as farmers and unskilled workers, were less likely than workers in other occupations to die from tuberculosis. Absolute wealth and agricultural productivity were associated with the likelihood of dying from tuberculosis, and people who lived in high wealth and low agriculturally productive states were less likely to die from tuberculosis.19th Century US Tuberculosis Mortality, Insolation, Wealth, Agricultural Productivity

Breuil-Kisin modules and Hopf orders in cyclic group rings

For $K$ an extension of $\mathbb{Q}_{p}$ with ring of integers $R$ we show how Breuil-Kisin modules can be used to determine Hopf orders in $K$-Hopf algebras of $p$-power dimension. We find all cyclic Breuil-Kisin modules, and use them to compute all of the Hopf orders in the group ring $K\Gamma$ where $\Gamma$ is cyclic of order $p$ or $p^{2}.$ We also give a Laurent series interpretation of the Breuil-Kisin modules that give these Hopf orders.Comment: 17 page

Reconciling the Returns to Education in Off-FarmWage Employment in Rural China

Previous studies have found that the returns to education in rural China are far lower than estimates for other developing economies. In this paper, we seek to determine why previous estimates are so low and provide estimates of what we believe are more accurate measures of the returns. Whereas estimates for the early 1990s average 2.3 percent, we find an average return of 6.4 percent. Furthermore, we find even higher returns among younger people, migrants,and for post-primary education. The paper demonstrates that, although part of the difference between our estimate and previous estimates can be attributed to increasing returns during the 1990s, a larger part of the difference is due to the nature of the data and the methodological approaches used by other authors.

Household Investment through migration in Rural China

In this paper, we strive to better understand how household investment is affected by participation in migration in rural China. After we describe investment patterns across different regions of rural China, we use a theoretical model to describe a relationship between migration and investment and to generate hypotheses about the relationship consistent with our descriptive findings. We test the hypotheses using household data collected in rural China in 2000 and find that in poorer areas migration increases consumptive investment by nearly 20 percent. We find no evidence of a link between migration and productive investment.China, migration, development, household investment, dynamic panel data

Editing OWL through generated CNL

Abstract. Traditionally, Controlled Natural Languages (CNLs) are de-signed either to avoid ambiguity for human readers, or to facilitate auto-matic semantic analysis, so that texts can be transcoded to a knowledge representation language. CNLs of the second kind have recently been adapted to the requirements of knowledge formation in OWL for the Semantic Web. We suggest in this paper a variant approach based on automatic generation of texts in CNL (as opposed to automatic analy-sis), and argue that this provides the best of both worlds, allowing us to pursue human readability in addition to a precise mapping from texts to a formal language.