Hasil untuk "History of Great Britain"

Geoff Mulgan

Firda Khoirunnisa, Ari Jogaiswara Adipurwawidjana, Sandya Maulana

This study explores the idea of place in Nadeem Aslam’s The Golden Legend (2017) to frame the identity crisis befalling the Christian community in Pakistan as a mirror of the similar experiences of marginalized groups in Britain. As a British novel expected to be read by Western readers, the depiction of the marginalization happening in Pakistan is utilized to allude to the condition outside the country: a paradox. The depicted paradox also recalls the history of Islam’s development in Türkiye and Spain, represented by the Hagia Sofia and the Great Mosque. The loss of ‘home’ causes the marginalized to wander in Pakistan, and, at the same time, they try to establish their identities and be remembered by society, both in the sense of belonging and of inhabiting memory. It is the same with the unsettled immigrant of Muslim Pakistanis, begging for their citizenship and being acknowledged in Britain. This analysis is based on Bhabha’s notion of unhomeliness and Derrida’s host and guest concept, composing an understanding that having no exact ‘home’, the Christian community being a guest to the Muslim community whose territory is obligated to preserve, is treated inappropriately. With these findings, we argue that wandering through places in Pakistan is an action determining whether one’s self is constructed or otherwise, illustrating Muslims in Britain having the same fate by remembering the golden legend told in the novel.

Marion Amblard, Sabrina Juillet-Garzón

Scotland has fascinated and attracted the French for centuries. Located on the periphery of Europe, its geographical location made it difficult to reach for a long time. However, with the development of roads in the Highlands and the reduction in costs that accompanied improved transport, an increasing number of French people began to visit Scotland from the late eighteenth century onwards. It even became one of the most popular destinations with French travellers in the first half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, many writers and painters ventured to the land of Walter Scott and Ossian. How did French travellers from the 1830s to 1850s view Scotland and its people? What factors influenced their perception of the nation? Was the way they perceived Scotland characteristic of the French? What role did these French travellers play in the development and dissemination of a multifaceted Scottish cultural identity in Britain? This article will attempt to answer these questions through a study of Pierre-Étienne Denis Saint-Germain-Leduc’s travelogue (L’Angleterre, l’Écosse et l’Irlande : relation d’un voyage récent dans les trois royaumes) and the publications—collections of lithographs and letters—by Michel Bouquet, who visited Scotland between the late 1830s and the 1840s. This study will show, on the one hand, that these two travellers’ view of Scotland was representative of the way the French perceived Scotland; on the other hand, that the publications of Saint-Germain-Leduc and Bouquet helped to disseminate the new Scottish identity that was developed after the Napoleonic Wars by Walter Scott, Scottish historians and painters.

Larissa Barbosa, Sávio Freire, Rita S. P. Maciel et al.

[Context and Motivation] Several studies have investigated attributes of great software practitioners. However, the investigation of such attributes is still missing in Requirements Engineering (RE). The current knowledge on attributes of great software practitioners might not be easily translated to the context of RE because its activities are, usually, less technical and more human-centered than other software engineering activities. [Question/Problem] This work aims to investigate which are the attributes of great requirements engineers, the relationship between them, and strategies that can be employed to obtain these attributes. We follow a method composed of a survey with 18 practitioners and follow up interviews with 11 of them. [Principal Ideas/Results] Investigative ability in talking to stakeholders, judicious, and understand the business are the most commonly mentioned attributes amongst the set of 22 attributes identified, which were grouped into four categories. We also found 38 strategies to improve RE skills. Examples are training, talking to all stakeholders, and acquiring domain knowledge. [Contribution] The attributes, their categories, and relationships are organized into a map. The relations between attributes and strategies are represented in a Sankey diagram. Software practitioners can use our findings to improve their understanding about the role and responsibilities of requirements engineers.

Peter Dorey

Although the relationship between the Conservative Party and the trade unions has often been characterised by mutual distrust and hostility, there was a unique period, from 1945 until the early 1960s, when senior Conservatives pursued a conciliatory and constructive approach to the trade unions, and insisted that harmonious industrial relations could not be secured by punitive legislation or political diktats. Instead, the paternalistic One Nation Conservatives who dominated the Party during this time, such as Rab Butler, Joseph Godber, Ian Macleod, Harold Macmillan, and Walter Monckton, emphasised that peace in industry could only be secured by developing trust via closer co-operation, dialogue and industrial partnership. This reflected the One Nation view that industrial conflict was often a consequence of workers feeling alienated, insecure and under-valued in large-scale, and impersonal, industries, where a growing gulf between workers and managers developed, and minor grievances smouldered. It was envisaged that this consensual and conciliatory strategy would result in reduced trade union militancy, and thus fewer strikes in pursuit of inflationary wage increases. This, in turn, would reduce the pressure from right-wing Conservatives for repressive legislation against the trade unions. From the 1970s onwards, though, this cohort of conciliatory One Nation Conservatives was superseded by a new generation of Conservative MPs and Ministers who heralded an ideological transformation in the Party. Often emanating from lower middle class or petit bourgeois backgrounds, many of these newer, younger, Conservatives were self-made men and women, and saw themselves as representatives or symbols of small businesses, individual entrepreneurs, and the self-employed especially. They were openly hostile towards trade unions, believing that they and their industrial militancy were responsible for many of Britain’s economic problems, such as excessive wage increases, high inflation, low productivity, and management’s inability to take tough commercial decisions, including the introduction of new working practices and technologies, due to the likelihood that these would prompt strikes by trade unions concerned with defending jobs. The decline of the One Nation Conservatives was therefore accompanied by a much more combative and confrontational approach by the Conservative Party towards workers and trade unions since the 1970s.       

Géraldine Vaughan

M. D. Allen

Patrick M. Duerr, William J. Wolf

The paper re-examines the principal methodological questions, arising in the debate over the cosmological standard model's postulate of Dark Matter vs. rivalling proposals that modify standard (Newtonian and general-relativistic) gravitational theory, the so-called Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) and its subsequent extensions. What to make of such seemingly radical challenges of cosmological orthodoxy? In the first part of our paper, we assess MONDian theories through the lens of key ideas of major 20th century philosophers of science (Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Laudan), thereby rectifying widespread misconceptions and misapplications of these ideas common in the pertinent MOND-related literature. None of these classical methodological frameworks, which render precise and systematise the more intuitive judgements prevalent in the scientific community, yields a favourable verdict on MOND and its successors -- contrary to claims in the MOND-related literature by some of these theories' advocates; the respective theory appraisals are largely damning. Drawing on these insights, the paper's second part zooms in on the most common complaint about MONDian theories, their ad-hocness. We demonstrate how the recent coherentist model of ad-hocness captures, and fleshes out, the underlying -- but too often insufficiently articulated -- hunches underlying this critique. MONDian theories indeed come out as severely ad hoc: they do not cohere well with either theoretical or empirical-factual background knowledge. In fact, as our complementary comparison with the cosmological standard model's Dark Matter postulate shows, with respect to ad-hocness, MONDian theories fare worse than the cosmological standard model.

Ciara Chambers

S. B. F. Dorch, J. O. Petersen

About fifty years after the work that astronomer Tycho Brahe carried out while living on the island of Hven had made him world famous, King Christian IV of Denmark built the Trinity Buildings in Copenhagen. The Tower observatory was opened in 1642, and it housed the astronomers from the University of Copenhagen until 1861 when a new, modern observatory was built at Østervold in the eastern part of the city. In 1996, all the University astronomers from the observatories at Østervold and the small town of Brorfelde were relocated to the Rockefeller Buildings at Østerbro, and the two observatories were closed. In this paper we focus on the library at the observatory in Østervold, and its subsequent fate following the close-down of that observatory.

Giovanna Tallone

In 1993 Clare Boylan edited a collection of essays by diverse writers on the act of writing entitled The Agony and the Ego. The Art and Strategy of Fiction Writing Explored. Here, Boylan takes the double stance of an outsider, as a critic, and of an insider, as a writer, and her concern with other writers’ work highlights her own preoccupation with writing and creativity, thus providing an interesting insight into her own fiction too. Besides writing seven novels and three collections of short stories, Clare Boylan also produced personal, autobiographical and critical pieces in a variety of essays and newspaper articles. She also showed a rigorous stance as editor in the thorough and engaging Literary Companion to Cats (1994). In particular, Boylan’s non-fiction work includes essays on Kate O’Brien and Molly Keane, as well as an introduction to Maeve Brennan’s posthumous novella The Visitor. Her critical work shows rigorous attention to texts and imagery, but also patterns of affinities with the writers she takes into account. The purpose of this essay is to analyse samples of Clare Boylan’s critical work vis-à-vis her own fiction. Significant cross-references can be identified which cast new perspectives on her literary work.

Claire L. Davies

The great conjunction of 21 December 2020 saw Jupiter and Saturn appear together in the sky, separated by just a tenth of a degree (equivalent to a distance five times smaller than the diameter of the full Moon). This provided a potential once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view the solar system's two biggest planets - and up to five of their moons - through a telescope eyepiece at the same time. Moreover, this was the first such opportunity, ever; previous observable conjunctions at similarly close separations took place before the development of the telescope in the early 1600s. Our team of scientists from the University of Exeter's Astrophysics Group and Exeter Science Centre worked with local social enterprises to develop a series of promotional and concurrent events to tie in with our live telescope broadcast of Jupiter and Saturn, to celebrate this spectacular celestial event. We hoped not only to inform and educate the public about great conjunctions, and the solar system more generally, but also to bring some light relief in what had been a rather difficult year.

Daniel Ruff

The BBC has been subjected to legitimate public scrutiny throughout its history. Governments have regularly commissioned committees of enquiry to study its role, its values, its programmes, its funding, its future. Far from destabilising the Corporation, these enquiries have tended—sometimes against expectations—to confirm the importance of the BBC in the life of the nation. Although programmes and technologies have evolved beyond recognition since his time, Reith’s founding principles of public service broadcasting have been endorsed time and again. The BBC and its funding model are never completely out of the woods; but a longer view of the constant cycle of public enquiries shows that it is in every sense hard to beat.

Michael Coffey

Gilles Teulié

During the 19th century as and when Europeans developed a keen interest in what was described as the ‘Orient’—ranging from architecture in Moorish Spain to the faces and places in Northern Africa and the Middle East–—images of an exotic fantasised Orient bounced back to Europe, in particular through the works of artists who painted what they had seen, or thought they had seen. The Orientalist movement was buttressed by Napoleonic expeditions in Egypt or the travel boom (Eugène Delacroix in Morocco). And yet suffice it to say that only the elite had access to these visual representations, either by becoming owners of paintings or by admiring them in art galleries, the prerogative of the educated and the wealthy. It is against this context that the article will consider how ‘high culture’ and ‘popular culture’ (and particularly postcards) permeated Victorian and Edwardian society, and through the transformative power of the Arts, contributed eminently to the consolidation of the imperial project.

C. Wetterich

The great emptiness is a possible beginning of the Universe in the infinite past of physical time. For the epoch of great emptiness particles are extremely rare and effectively massless. Only expectation values of fields and average fluctuations characterize the lightlike vacuum of this empty Universe. The physical content of the early stages of standard inflationary cosmological models is the lightlike vacuum. Towards the beginning, the Universe is almost scale invariant. This is best seen by an appropriate choice of the metric field -- the primordial flat frame -- for which the beginning of a homogeneous metric is flat Minkowski space. We suggest that our observed inhomogeneous Universe can evolve from the lightlike vacuum in the infinite past, and therefore can have lasted eternally. Then no physical big bang singularity is present.

J. -M. Huré, A. Trova, V. Karas et al.

We have investigated the toroidal analog of ellipsoidal shells of matter, which are of great significance in Astrophysics. The exact formula for the gravitational potential $Ψ(R,Z)$ of a shell with a circular section at the pole of toroidal coordinates is first established. It depends on the mass of the shell, its main radius and axis-ratio $e$ (i.e. core-to-main radius ratio), and involves the product of the complete elliptic integrals of the first and second kinds. Next, we show that successive partial derivatives $\partial^{n +m} Ψ/\partial_{R^n} \partial_{Z^m}$ are also accessible by analytical means at that singular point, thereby enabling the expansion of the interior potential as a bivariate series. Then, we have generated approximations at orders $0$, $1$, $2$ and $3$, corresponding to increasing accuracy. Numerical experiments confirm the great reliability of the approach, in particular for small-to-moderate axis ratios ($e^2 \lesssim 0.1$ typically). In contrast with the ellipsoidal case (Newton's theorem), the potential is not uniform inside the shell cavity as a consequence of the curvature. We explain how to construct the interior potential of toroidal shells with a thick edge (i.e. tubes), and how a core stratification can be accounted for. This is a new step towards the full description of the gravitating potential and forces of tori and rings. Applications also concern electrically-charged systems, and thus go beyond the context of gravitation.

T. O'Donoghue, J. Harford, Teresa O’Doherty

Dominique Boullier, Niranjan Sivakumar, Maxime Crepel et al.

Payments architectures are on the verge of a great bifurcation that must be documented in order to be debated. Google is moving towards a quasi bank while Apple and Google disseminate payment systems over smartphones. At the same time, block chain might become a distributed ledger introducing a radical new model of trusted third-party. The detailed history of credit card systems helps understand why the game of security has always been trigged by a delegation process of the risk to third parties and by the cat-and-mouse game of security and fraud. Technologies were designed to solve these issues but have always been closely related to innovations in institutional assemblages. These payments systems shape our social life and the stakes of trust that we put in these architectures require a truly political examination.