Migrants’ Belongings: preliminary considerations of Greek and Italian migrants’ travel trunks in the post-Second World War period of settlement to South Australia

The Migrants’ Belongings project, while considering both the scholarly work of the past and more contemporary trends, aims to take migration studies one step further by investigating the significance of belongings brought in the travel trunks of Greek and Italian migrants when they settled in Australia after the Second World War. The project seeks to understand, in the context of displacement, movement and loss, what objects were of particular relevance in reshaping the lives and the identities of these migrants, with particular reference to those objects carried by trunk, rather than by suitcase. This article, the first in a series relating to the Migrants’ Belongings project, aims to situate the project within the wider literature of post-Second World War Italian and Greek migration to Australia. It will consider the use and representation of migrants’ belongings, drawing on methodologies and findings from museology, material culture and identity studies. The project will reflect on the reasons why the “objects of migration”, and more specifically the contents of “migrant trunks”, have so far been largely neglected by scholars of history and migration studies. Finally, this article will highlight the project’s proposed methodology

The efficacy of community policing: a community relations case study of Gloucester County, New Jersey patrol officers and residents

Community Policing has become a driving management strategy in many police departments throughout the United States. Police officers are being asked to form long-lasting relationships with community members so both publics can more easily work together to solve community and crime issues This study\u27s purpose was to determine the efficacy of community policing as it relates to both patrol officers and residents to determine what public relations skills may assist future community policing initiatives. A patrol officer survey was designed and distributed to 24 municipal police departments. 394 surveys were delivered with 199 usable respondents. Officers were asked to give their responses on community policing from questions based on the Likert scale. Surveys were also collected from 199 residents throughout Gloucester County, NJ. The major findings include: Officers in Gloucester County, New Jersey agree with community policing. Half of the community members surveyed thought police were effective communicators and almost no officers had any public relations or community policing training

The industrialisation of building: building systems and social housing in postwar Britain 1942 to 1975

This study describes the development of system building in postwar social housing. System building required major transformations in the nature of the building producer and client. The transformation in the producer consisted of a change from the conventional pattern of selling the capacity to build individual buildings to selling a specific product, the building system, a general feature of which was its use of new building technologies and requirement for considerable capital investment. The transformation in the client consisted of a departure from the historical pattern of conceiving each building as an individual project to presenting large programmes of standardised buildings. These transformations took place within a specific historical epoch - the Welfare State. While the Welfare State provided conditions favourable to system building, it is argued that the policies persued by central government, the building industry, local authorities, the architectural profession and building trades unions played a crucial role in its development. These are examined in turn. The concept of mass production was continually associated with postwar developments in building technology, and the attraction of this idea to Welfare policy makers is also discussed. Chapters Six and Seven look in detail at the types of system promoted, both by government research and development architects and by commercial sponsors. The last chapter examines the architectural character of the housing produced by system building and the. relationship between technology and design theory in social housing

Strong baselines for complex word identification across multiple languages

© 2019 Association for Computational Linguistics Complex Word Identification (CWI) is the task of identifying which words or phrases in a sentence are difficult to understand by a target audience. The latest CWI Shared Task released data for two settings: monolingual (i.e. train and test in the same language) and cross-lingual (i.e. test in a language not seen during training). The best monolingual models relied on language-dependent features, which do not generalise in the cross-lingual setting, while the best cross-lingual model used neural networks with multi-task learning. In this paper, we present monolingual and cross-lingual CWI models that perform as well as (or better than) most models submitted to the latest CWI Shared Task. We show that carefully selected features and simple learning models can achieve state-of-the-art performance, and result in strong baselines for future development in this area. Finally, we discuss how inconsistencies in the annotation of the data can explain some of the results obtained

Two Swedish modernisms on English housing estates: cultural transfer and visions of urban living 1945-1969

This article examines the transfer of Swedish concepts of urban modernity to British cities after 1945. It shows how an affinity between design and architecture elites facilitated the transfer of key concepts that were mediated in cities. Moreover, it argues that the often contested transfer of Swedish modern architecture and design to northern English cities initially meshed with municipal ambitions to improve working-class housing and culture. Thereafter the influence of Swedish modern was continued in altered form by the preponderance of Swedish prefabrication techniques In the construction of new poured concrete and high-rise estates during the 1960s. These aspirations to improve the urban environment with Scandinavian examples of good living often magnified the difficulties of modernising the industrial conurbations of the north

‘Stop-go’ policy and the restriction of post-war British house-building

From the mid-1950s to the early 1980s the Treasury and Bank of England successfully advocated a policy of restricting both private and public sector house-building, as a key but covert instrument of their wider ‘stop-go’ macroeconomic policy framework. While the intensity of restrictions varied over the economic cycle, private house-building was restricted (through limiting mortgage availability) for almost all this period. This was achieved by keeping building society interest rates low relative to other interest rates and thus starving the building society movement of mortgage funds. Mortgage restriction was never publicly discussed and sometimes operated alongside ambitious housing targets and well-publicised policy initiatives to boost housing demand. This paper outlines the evolution of house-building restriction, together with its impacts on the housing sector and the wider economy. We review the evolution of the policy framework and its consequences, compare the level and stability of British house-building during this period - historically and relative to other countries, and undertake time-series econometric analysis of its impacts on both house-building and house prices. Finally, implications for debates regarding stop-go policy, Britain’s housing problem, and the distributional consequences of government macroeconomic policy are discussed