Some are more equal than others: responses to political violence

While it is true that the US has, for once, signed up to a UN Security Council statement which calls for an "immediate and unconditional humanitarian cease-fire”, this might still be considered a tactical step to prevent more strongly worded resolutions against Israel being proposed in the Security Council

Ethics in educational research: review boards, ethical issues and researcher development

Educational research, and research in the Social Sciences more generally, has experienced a growth in the introduction of ethical review boards since the 1990s. Increasingly, universities have set up ethics review procedures that require researchers to submit applications seeking approval to conduct research. Review boards and the rules and conditions under which they operate have been criticised as obstructive, unnecessarily bureaucratic, and even unethical. At the same time, review boards and their procedures have been acknowledged as contributing to consideration of the ethical conduct of research. This paper explores the issues related to ethical review and examines the wider ethical considerations that may arise during the research process. The paper concludes that a purely administrative process of review is inadequate to ensure the ethical conduct of research, especially qualitative research. Rather, it is argued that ethical research entails the resolution of a potential series of ethical dilemmas as they arise during research. As such, the ethical conduct of research is a matter of researcher formation and development

Krapp's last tape in Great Britain : production history amid changing practice

This book chapter investigates the production history of the play, Krapp's last tape

Temperature scaling, glassiness and stationarity in the Bak-Sneppen model

We show that the emergence of criticality in the locally-defined Bak-Sneppen model corresponds to separation over a hierarchy of timescales. Near to the critical point the model obeys scaling relations, with exponents which we derive numerically for a one-dimensional system. We further describe how the model can be related to the glass model of Bouchaud [{\em J. Phys. I France {\bf 2}, 1705 (1992)}], and we use this insight to comment on the usual assumption of stationarity in the Bak-Sneppen model. Finally, we propose a general definition of self-organised criticality which is in partial agreement with other recent definitions.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures; differences to previous work clarified. To appear in EPJ

Ephesus and its coinage

The following is from an article in the Saturday Review, from Head's "Ephesus and Its Coinage," and serves to show the importance numismatics occupies as a key to historical problems