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No full textThe new drug strategy is based on various assumptions about the nature and extent of drug related crime. While most of these are soundly-based on research evidence~ there are others that are less well grounded. It is important that the reality of drug-related crime is properly understood if it is to be the target of a multl-million pound strategy
Improving the impact resistance of masonry parapet walls
No full textIn the UK and other countries roadside masonry parapet walls are commonplace. Such walls were, however, generally not designed from the outset to resist out-of-plane impact loadings from highway vehicles. The consequences of an impact can obviously be severe, particularly in the case of railway overbridges. Following a programme of experimental impact tests performed in the 1990s on unreinforced masonry walls, this paper describes an investigation of the performance of reinforced masonry walls, tested under carefully controlled conditions in the laboratory. A total of 17 tests were performed on unreinforced and reinforced walls. The reinforced walls incorporated either bed joint reinforcement or one of two different types of drilled-in reinforcement. Whereas the bed-joint reinforcement was found to be largely ineffectual, the drilled-in reinforcing systems were found to be capable of enhancing the ability of plain masonry walls to resist impacts, ensuring a ductile response to the applied transient loading. The effect of drilled-in reinforcement on the resistance of walls with low-strength mortar was found to be particularly dramatic, changing the response from that of penetration and disintegration of the masonry to ductile behaviour, with the integrity of the wall maintained and only minimal wall displacement.EPSR
Achievement goals and gender effects on multidimensional anxiety in national elite sport
No full textObjectives: The present paper examined the roles of achievement orientation, perception of the motivational climate, and perceived ability on performance trait anxiety in a sample of national level elite athletes. Gender differences in these relationships were also examined. Design: Cross-sectional. Methods: One hundred and ninety national elite athletes (male, n ¼ 101 and female, n ¼ 89) from individual sport completed Norwegian measures of goal orientation, perceived motivational climate, perceived ability, and multidimensional performance anxiety. Results: Female and male national elite athletes were similar in achievement orientations and had similar perceptions of the motivational climate. Females reported higher levels of performance worry, concentration disruption and somatic anxiety than males. Orientations did not predict performance anxiety for either gender, however perceptions of a performance climate predicted performance worry for both genders, and concentration disruption for females. Perceived ability predicted less performance worry for females and males. Perceived ability did not moderate the effects of the perceived motivational climate on performance anxiety, and neither did the results meet the criteria for testing mediation. Conclusions: The extant motivational climate has an effect on performance anxiety, and coaches would be well advised to consider this when working with national elite athletes
The New El Dorado
No full textResearch ContextCommon Culture were commissioned to make The New El Dorado as a reflection of their on-going critical engagement with the cultural manifestation of commodity consumption. Research ImperativesThe project explored three related issues; the processes of commodification at work in the consumption of art and popular forms of entertainment, the role of comedy in mediating social conflict, and the exploration of national identity within a global context.Project methodsThe video used an episodic dramatic narrative to critique the assumed efficacy of socially engaged art and the interventionist impulse at the heart of biennials like Manifesta. Foregrounding their own status as cultural tourists, Common Culture, engineered a strategic collision between elitist assumptions attached to art and its consumption, and the perceived vulgar aspects of popular culture
Acoustic waves in compressible planar layered smectic liquid crystals
No full textA dynamic theory for compressible smectic C (SmC) liquid crystals is postulated following previous work by Leslie, Stewart and Nakagawa [1], Nakagawa [2,3] and de Gennes [4]. This theory is then implemented with a constructed bulk elastic energy and asymmetric stress tensor to describe a system of planar layered SmC liquid crystals undergoing various undulation modes. We show that previous work on smectic~A (SmA) liquid crystals [4] can be expanded for SmC and consolidated. Novel and confirming estimates for SmC material parameter values are produced by considering the dependence of the system on these parameters. [1] F. M. Leslie, I. W. Stewart, and M. Nakagawa, A continuum theory for smectic C liquid crystals, Mol. Cryst. Liq. Cryst., 198 (1991), pp. 443-454. [2] M. Nakagawa, A hydrodynamic theory of compressible SmC* liquid crystals, J. Phys. Soc. Japan, 65 (1996), pp. 100-106. [3] M. Nakagawa, A hydrodynamic theory of compressible SmC* liquid crystals, J. Non-Newtonian Fluid Mech., 119 (2004), pp. 123-129. [4] P. G. de Gennes and J. Prost, The Physics of Liquid Crystals, Oxford University Press, Oxford, second ed., 1993
Outcast Europe: Refugees and Relief Workers in an Era of Total War, 1936-48
No full textThe period of the 'long' Second World War (1936-1948) was marked by mass movements of diverse populations: 60 million people either fled or were forced from their homes. This book considers the Spanish Republicans fleeing Franco's Spain in 1939, the French civilians trying to escape the Nazi invasion in 1940, and the millions of people displaced or expelled by the forces of Hitler's Third Reich. Throughout this period state and voluntary organisations were created to take care of the homeless and the displaced. National organisations dominated until the end of the war; afterwards, international organisations - the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency and the International Refugee Organisation - were formed to deal with what was clearly an international problem. Using case studies of displaced people and of relief workers, this book is unique in placing such crises at the centre rather than the margins of wartime experience, making the work nothing less than an alternative history of the Second World War.
William Fox Talbot
No full textAdditional Information:A critical overview on the writings of Elizabeth Edwards. Particular attention is given to her methodological approach to examining cross-cultural visual histories, photographs as material culture and the history of collecting and institutional practices. The essay charts an evolving critical sensibility drawing on analytical methods from historiography, anthropology, cultural geography and museology, to explore photography as a complex material and visual artefact and its place in the historical imagination. This connects with Roberts’ own curatorial research on the archive and past collaboration with Edwards (Roberts, R. “In Visible Light”, 1997)The importance of Fox-Talbot’s writings is reviewed in proximity to his pioneering experiments that laid the foundations of modern photography and constituted the earliest serious cultural reflection on the origins and potential of the new medium. The essay emphasises the various roles and identities Talbot’s writing on photography embodies and his evolving pictorial and phenomenological response to his discovery from his seminal text The Pencil of Nature (1844-46), to lesser-known writings from personal correspondence and journals that connect with his conception and practice of photography. The essay builds on Roberts’ research into histories of photography and the work of Talbot in particular (Roberts, R. et al, “Huellas de Luz . Traces of Light”, Museo Naçional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2001