Thomas Ward Blagg and the Abbey Parish Charities Scandal c.1827-1860

St Albans in the early to mid-nineteenth century suffered from endemic levels of corruption. The borough was well known for the bribery that took place at its borough elections and was the subject of three parliamentary enquiries before it was eventually disfranchised in 1852. However, historians have largely focused on the forms that the bribery took without looking below the surface to identify the underlying causes of the corruption, the networks that allowed it to function or the wider repercussions. By concentrating on the activities of the town clerk Thomas Ward Blagg, I will examine the political and other motivations for corruption and look at how Blagg’s embezzlement of several of the Abbey parish endowment charities helped fund his attempts at controlling the borough. Through this study, it will become clear that key pieces of legislation from the Age of Reform such as the Great Reform Act 1832 and The Municipal Corporations Act 1835 increased levels of corruption in the borough rather than reducing them. What followed was a ‘golden age’ of corruption, which saw competing factions trying to fill the vacuum of power that had been created by the ending of aristocratic patronage. In effect Blagg and his contemporaries were participating in a ‘New Corruption’ that would take the best part of two decades to overcome. It took the combined efforts of leading figures within the Abbey parish and the emergence of legislation from Westminster that gave the authorities unprecedented powers of intervention to bring men like Blagg under control

Willful Subjects by Sara Ahmed, Duke University Press, 2014

Willful Subjects by Sara Ahmed, Duke University Press, 201

Presentism as dynamic existence

This thesis proposes and defends a novel version of presentism called Dynamic Existence Presentism (DEP). DEP is founded on two main principles: there are no (discrete) times and temporal existence is fundamentally dynamic. Rejecting the notion of time as a series of static slices, DEP builds on Merricks' (2007) and Tallant's (2014) arguments that presence equates to existence, thereby dissolving the need for a distinct present moment. DEP further distinguishes between the passage of time and temporal dynamism, accepting the latter as an irreducible aspect of reality. The mechanism of DEP's dynamism is rooted in a Neo-Aristotelian powers ontology, positing that all properties are dynamic and process-like. According to DEP, objects are bundles of powerful properties, intrinsically dynamic and inseparable from their properties

Presentism as dynamic existence

This thesis proposes and defends a novel version of presentism called Dynamic Existence Presentism (DEP). DEP is founded on two main principles: there are no (discrete) times and temporal existence is fundamentally dynamic. Rejecting the notion of time as a series of static slices, DEP builds on Merricks' (2007) and Tallant's (2014) arguments that presence equates to existence, thereby dissolving the need for a distinct present moment. DEP further distinguishes between the passage of time and temporal dynamism, accepting the latter as an irreducible aspect of reality. The mechanism of DEP's dynamism is rooted in a Neo-Aristotelian powers ontology, positing that all properties are dynamic and process-like. According to DEP, objects are bundles of powerful properties, intrinsically dynamic and inseparable from their properties

Water resource planning under future climate and socioeconomic uncertainty in the Cauvery River Basin in Karnataka, India

Decision‐Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU) approaches have been less utilized in developing countries than developed countries for water resources contexts. High climate vulnerability and rapid socioeconomic change often characterize developing country contexts, making DMUU approaches relevant. We develop an iterative multi‐method DMUU approach, including scenario generation, coproduction with stakeholders and water resources modeling. We apply this approach to explore the robustness of adaptation options and pathways against future climate and socioeconomic uncertainties in the Cauvery River Basin in Karnataka, India. A water resources model is calibrated and validated satisfactorily using observed streamflow. Plausible future changes in Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) precipitation and water demand are used to drive simulations of water resources from 2021 to 2055. Two stakeholder‐identified decision‐critical metrics are examined: a basin‐wide metric comprising legal instream flow requirements for the downstream state of Tamil Nadu, and a local metric comprising water supply reliability to Bangalore city. In model simulations, the ability to satisfy these performance metrics without adaptation is reduced under almost all scenarios. Implementing adaptation options can partially offset the negative impacts of change. Sequencing of options according to stakeholder priorities into Adaptation Pathways affects metric satisfaction. Early focus on agricultural demand management improves the robustness of pathways but trade‐offs emerge between intrabasin and basin‐wide water availability. We demonstrate that the fine balance between water availability and demand is vulnerable to future changes and uncertainty. Despite current and long‐term planning challenges, stakeholders in developing countries may engage meaningfully in coproduction approaches for adaptation decision‐making under deep uncertainty

Systems Modeling to Improve the Hydro-Ecological Performance of Diked Wetlands

Water scarcity and invasive vegetation threaten arid-region wetlands and wetland managers seek ways to enhance wetland ecosystem services with limited water, labor, and financial resources. While prior systems modeling efforts have focused on water management to improve flow-based ecosystem and habitat objectives, here we consider water allocation and invasive vegetation management that jointly target the concurrent hydrologic and vegetation habitat needs of priority wetland bird species. We formulate a composite weighted usable area for wetlands (WU) objective function that represents the wetland surface area that provides suitable water level and vegetation cover conditions for priority bird species. Maximizing the WU is subject to constraints such as water balance, hydraulic infrastructure capacity, invasive vegetation growth and control, and a limited financial budget to control vegetation. We apply the model at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge on the Great Salt Lake, Utah, compare model-recommended management actions to past Refuge water and vegetation control activities, and find that managers can almost double the area of suitable habitat by more dynamically managing water levels and managing invasive vegetation in August at the beginning of the window for control operations. Scenario and sensitivity analyses show the importance to jointly consider hydrology and vegetation system components rather than only the hydrological component

A Unified Framework for Trend Uncertainty Assessment in Climate Data Record: Application to the Analysis of the Global Mean Sea Level Measured by Satellite Altimetry

Estimating trends from Climate Data Records (CDRs) of Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) is necessary to detect persistent changes in Earth’s climate and geophysical processes and states. Accurately describing trend uncertainty is also essential to determining the significance of observed changes and attributing drivers. However, despite the importance of uncertainty, no established trend assessment approach properly accounts for all known sources of trend uncertainty. Most approaches either neglect part of known measurement uncertainty, such as measurement system instability, or ignore the influence of natural climate variability on trend estimation. Such neglect can result in over-confidence in trend estimates. With the intent of providing the most realistic uncertainty intervals for climate data record time series data, this study discusses problems and limitations of current approaches. It emphasizes the need to account for the combined influence of measurement uncertainties (i.e., stability of the observational system) and natural climate variability on trend uncertainty. This study proposes a novel trend-uncertainty assessment approach unifying available measurement uncertainty information with empirical modelling of natural climate variability within the same trend-estimation framework. As a proof of concept, the proposed approach is applied to the analysis of trends in a Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL) time-series. This GMSL application demonstrates that combining available measurement uncertainty assessment with variance modelling is expected to lead to more realistic uncertainty evaluations in sea-level trends. This unified approach is potentially applicable to virtually any CDR and could enhance the reliability of climate change analysis through an improved trend uncertainty assessment in climate studies