Evolution or revolution? a study of price and wage volatility in England, 1200-1900

Using annual data 1209-1914, this paper examines whether there are structural breaks in the movements of prices and wages that correspond to the major ‘revolutions’ identified in historical narratives. Econometric modelling of trend and volatility in prices and wages confirms the importance of the Commercial Revolution and the Glorious Revolution, but suggests that the Industrial Revolution may be better described in evolutionary terms. The evidence also points to a late medieval revolution at the time of the Good Parliament, shortly after the Black Death and just before the Peasant’s Revolt. This supports Britnell and Campbell’s commercialisation hypothesis - that the institutional pre-conditions for the Industrial Revolution began to develop at a very early date.Economic evolution; Economic revolution; Historical economics;

The theory of international business: the role of economic models

This paper reviews the scope for economic modelling in international business studies. It argues for multi-level theory based on classic internalisation theory. It present a systems approach that encompasses both firm-level and industry-level analysis

On the slice genus of links

We define Casson-Gordon sigma-invariants for links and give a lower bound of the slice genus of a link in terms of these invariants. We study as an example a family of two component links of genus h and show that their slice genus is h, whereas the Murasugi-Tristram inequality does not obstruct this link from bounding an annulus in the 4-ball.Comment: Published by Algebraic and Geometric Topology at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/agt/AGTVol3/agt-3-30.abs.htm

Revolutionary change and structural breaks: A time series analysis of wages and commodity prices in Britain 1264-1913

In this paper we empirically test the hypothesis that economic revolutions are associated with structural breaks in historical economic data. A simple test for structural breaks in economic time series is applied to British wage and price data from the medieval to the modern period. Evidence for structural change is found in nearly half of the series studied -- suggesting that structural breaks are an intrinsic feature of such historic data. Structural changes are most closely linked to the Commercial Revolution followed by the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, with changes linked to an underlying process of price stabilisation as measured by a decrease in the long-term level of volatility.historical economics; economic revolutions; structural breaks; price stabilisation

Evaluating tourism community preferences

A short online survey of Kingman Arizona residents included two approaches for determining the relative importance of social, cultural, environmental, and economic attributes to community quality of life. A simple multiattribute choice approach gave noticeably different results from a standard independent attribute ranking approach and lead researchers to recommend socially oriented tourism development projects over economically oriented ones

Human activity recognition from inertial sensor time-series using batch normalized deep LSTM recurrent networks

In recent years machine learning methods for human activity recognition have been found very effective. These classify discriminative features generated from raw input sequences acquired from body-worn inertial sensors. However, it involves an explicit feature extraction stage from the raw data, and although human movements are encoded in a sequence of successive samples in time most state-of-the-art machine learning methods do not exploit the temporal correlations between input data samples. In this paper we present a Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) deep recurrent neural network for the classification of six daily life activities from accelerometer and gyroscope data. Results show that our LSTM can processes featureless raw input signals, and achieves 92 % average accuracy in a multi-class-scenario. Further, we show that this accuracy can be achieved with almost four times fewer training epochs by using a batch normalization approach

Geodesic laminations revisited

The Bratteli diagram is an infinite graph which reflects the structure of projections in a C*-algebra. We prove that every strictly ergodic unimodular Bratteli diagram of rank 2g+m-1 gives rise to a minimal geodesic lamination with the m-component principal region on a surface of genus g greater or equal to 1. The proof is based on the Morse theory of the recurrent geodesics on the hyperbolic surfaces.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, revised versio

Disconnected and unplugged: experiences of technology induced anxieties and tensions while traveling

The purpose of this study is to explore the experience of being disconnected while traveling for technologically savvy travelers. This paper will explore how new technologies ‘separate’ travelers from the physical and embodied travel experience, and how experiences and tensions caused by being disconnected or unplugged are negotiated. For this study, travelers’ experiences were elicited through a series of online interviews conducted primarily through email and Facebook. Pearce and Gretzel (2012)’s technology-induced tensions and recent literature on internet/technology addiction provide a conceptual framework for the analysis

Prioritising a sense of belonging within the rural nexus: An empirical study of five rural church primary schools

The rural church primary school exists in a nexus of connections between school, home, and the institutional Church (parochial, diocesan, and national). This article applies Walker’s model of belonging to God through church to the sense of belonging expressed by families whose children attend a rural Church of England primary school. The data drawn from the Faith in the Nexus project undertaken at Canterbury Christ Church University, consists of 24 semi-structured focus group interviews, and 8 individual interviews with school and church leaders from parents, school staff, clergy, and governors across five rural Church of England primary schools. The findings highlight how rural church school families develop and sustain a sense of belonging through events, people, place, and activities. The discussion considers the value of Walker’s model of belonging, the fragility of the rural nexus and a need to acknowledge the relational nature of belonginess expressed by parents and pupils

Faith in the nexus: Church schools and children’s exploration of faith in the home: A NICER research study of twenty church primary schools in England

A nexus is a focus for connection, where multiple lines from different places come into relationship around a point of focus. In this project, the Nexus refers to the connections between church school, the local church, and the home. The Faith in the Nexus project aimed to reveal the influence of these connections in children’s developing spiritual life, and, specifically, how what happens in school (collaboration with church and others) impacts on children’s faith and spiritual life at home