Urban Land Reform Briefing Paper No 4: Explaining Public Interest Led Development

This is one of six briefing papers prepared by Professor David Adams of the University of Glasgow to help explain key proposals for urban land reform made in 2014 by the Scottish Government’s Land Reform Review Group (LRRG) to whom he acted as an independent adviser. This paper focuses on the LRRG’s recommendation “that the Scottish Government should encourage and support a greater emphasis on public interest led development” (see pages 128-129 of the LRRG report)

Urban Land Reform Briefing Paper No 1: Explaining Compulsory Sale Orders

This is one of six briefing papers prepared by Professor David Adams of the University of Glasgow to help explain key proposals for urban land reform made in 2014 by the Scottish Government’s Land Reform Review Group (LRRG) to whom he acted as an independent adviser. This paper focuses on the LRRG’s recommendations “that further mechanisms are required to address the persistent challenge of vacant and derelict land in urban areas” and “that Local Authorities should have the right to exercise a Compulsory Sale Order over an area of vacant or derelict land, and also that Community Councils, or appropriate community bodies, should have the right to request that a local authority exercises a Compulsory Sale Order” (see pages 103 and 122-124 of the LRRG report)

Urban Land Reform Briefing Paper No 2: Explaining the Housing Land Corporation

This is one of six briefing papers prepared by Professor David Adams of the University of Glasgow to help explain key proposals for urban land reform made in 2014 by the Scottish Government’s Land Reform Review Group (LRRG) to whom he acted as an independent adviser. This paper focuses on the LRRG’s recommendations that to achieve the Scottish Government’s national housebuilding targets and place-making aspirations requires “the establishment of a Housing Land Corporation, a new national body charged with the acquisition and development of sufficient land” and that the Corporation “should have explicit performance targets that recognise the specific needs of small rural communities and an extended operational role to enable these to be addressed” (see pages 132-141 of the LRRG report)

Index and overlap construction for staggered fermions

Recent developments regarding index and overlap construction for staggered fermions are reviewed, highlighting the surprising and unexpected aspects.Comment: proceedings contribution for 28th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, Lattice2010, June 14-19, 2010, Villasimius, Italy (slightly extended version, 8 pages

Dirac operator index and topology of lattice gauge fields

The fermionic topological charge of lattice gauge fields, given in terms of a spectral flow of the Hermitian Wilson--Dirac operator, or equivalently, as the index of Neuberger's lattice Dirac operator, is shown to have analogous properties to L\"uscher's geometrical lattice topological charge. The main new result is that it reduces to the continuum topological charge in the classical continuum limit. (This is sketched here; the full proof will be given in a sequel to this paper.) A potential application of the ideas behind fermionic lattice topological charge to deriving a combinatorial construction of the signature invariant of a 4-manifold is also discussed.Comment: 16 pages, based on talk at Chiral'99 (Sept. 13-18, 1999, Taipei), to be published in the Proceeding

Infant Day Care and the Working Mother: A Proposal for Reducing Maternal Anxiety

My interest in the day care of children of working mothers was stimulated by my recent involvement in a study of the need for day care facilities in Kitchener-Waterloo. During this study it became apparent that most of the facilities and the interest in day care programs was related specifically to the care and education of children ages three to five. In reviewing the findings of a questionnaire used in the study however, it was readily determined that another problem existed. A total of 75 of 170 working mothers from industry stated that they placed a total of 84 infants with relatives and babysitters while they were at work. One-half of these infants were cared for outside of their homes. Approximately one-half of the mothers indicated that they had been forced to make two or more arrangements during the year and the majority stated that arrangements were hard to make. This paper deals with three main areas. Initially, it attempts to address the general issues surrounding the provision of infant day care services. Secondly, it presents a point of view regarding the type of facility needed in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. Thirdly, it proposes the undertaking of an initial study devoted to examining the effects of a specific type of infant day care program in reducing anxiety in the low-income working mother from industry

The semiclassical approximation for the Chern-Simons partition function

The semiclassical approximation for the partition function in Chern-Simons gauge theory is derived using the invariant integration method. Volume and scale factors which were undetermined and had to be fixed by hand in previous derivations are automatically taken account of in this framework. Agreement with Witten's exact expressions for the partition function in the weak coupling (large k) limit is verified for gauge group SU(2) and spacetimes S^3, S^2 x S^1, S^1 x S^1 x S^1 and L(p,q).Comment: 14 p., latex (a typo corrected), to appear in Phys.Lett.

Urban Land Reform Briefing Paper No 6: Explaining Urban Partnership Zones

This is one of six briefing papers prepared by Professor David Adams of the University of Glasgow to help explain key proposals for urban land reform made in 2014 by the Scottish Government’s Land Reform Review Group (LRRG) to whom he acted as an independent adviser. This paper focuses on the LRRG’s recommendations “that the well-established international practice of property land readjustment or land-pooling provides another effective means of addressing fragmented or multiple ownership of land. The Group recommends that the Scottish Government investigates the potential of introducing an Urban Partnership Zone mechanism in Scotland” (see pages 126-128 of the LRRG report)