Population Ageing:The Timebomb that Isn't?

Jeroen Spijker and John MacInnes argue that current measures of population ageing are misleading and that the numbers of dependent older people in the UK and other countries have actually been falling in recent year

Scottish circumvention of the English Navigation Acts in the American colonies 1660-1707

From its insular location, its limited indigenous resources and its subordinate political standing as one of three kingdoms ruled by the Stuart dynasty, Scotland was dependent on overseas trade, commercial networks and an entrepreneurial willingness to set aside international regulations for its very survival as a distinctive European nation in the later 17th century. Scotland was manifestly not a major European power, nor a significant imperial presence in the Americas. By the later 17th century, however, colonial endeavours were offering Scots the opportunity not just to break out from the mercantilist dominance of the great European powers, but also to sustain regal union under a common monarchy without recourse to political incorporation with England. By the 1690s, the clannish cohesion of their landed and commercial elite, their diligence in securing positions of influence and their collusive disregard for the Navigation Acts were perceived by English merchants, colonial officials, diplomats and ruling ministries as highly threatening. The Scots challenged the English state through their Darien Scheme to create an international entrepôt for the Pacific as well as the Atlantic on the Panama Isthmus, as through their expansion into Ireland and the Delaware Basin. If the Scots made a success of Darien, there seemed a real prospect to vested English interests that their domestic market would grow to include Ireland and that their entrepreneurial endeavours in the Delaware would lead to the secession of three counties to form a Scottish colony on the American mainland. Only political incorporation, through the Treaty of Union in 1707, seemingly put an end to Scottish flouting of English state power

Spirituality imprisoned

Spirituality Imprisoned. It is not easy to come up with a working definition of spirituality. From everything I’ve read on the subject as preparation, I am assured that just about everybody has his or her own definition for spirituality. We would, in all probability, agree that there are many kinds of spirituality, some of which fit under a larger umbrella. For instance, there is a wellknown Franciscan spirituality, which comes not only from the personality of the man who spoke to birds and flowers, but also from Christian spirituality as well. And in the contemporary world there also seems to be a kind of New Age spirituality, which I have met since coming to England, in which one is presumed to be a Buddhist at heart, a vegetarian, a practitioner of alternative therapies and an animal rights protector. To me, spirituality is something much more intimate. The other aspect to be considered is imprisonment. I must admit I couldn’t see any easy checkmate in that area either. The more I sink into the work of the Prison Phoenix Trust, the more insidious ‘imprisonment’ becomes. The past five years with the Trust have been a great eye-opener in the various forms which unfreedom sometimes takes. We will look at some of them. I have spent the last 35 years of my life trying to discover what a lived spirituality really is. Today, I would like to re-live part of that journey with you, as we consider together the way of spirituality imprisoned which we are all travelling

Queering the grammar school boy: class, sexuality and authenticity in the works of Colin MacInnes and Ray Gosling

In 1959 Colin MacInnes published the fourth in his series of social issue novels, Absolute Beginners. In it the unnamed protagonist is constructed as the iconic teenager, slick, cool, creative, with his ex-lover Crépe Suzette as the object of his art and as his Achilles heel. The novel is framed over one summer, against a backdrop of racial tension, which ultimately led the Boy towards adulthood. MacInnes’s protagonist has been dismissed as an emblem rather than a character, and MacInnes himself derided by George Melly as a perpetual teenager. However in this chapter, we will suggest that taken as a whole MacInnes’ work constructs a complex understanding of The Boy’s political possibilities intersecting with sexuality, gender, race and class. By integrating his novelistic work with his journalistic and activist writing, we will demonstrate the complexity of MacInnes’ Boy as an autonomous, queer political agent, embodied in the ultimate Boy; Ray Gosling. Gosling’s own writing becomes a lens through which to root historical understanding of teenagers and teenage cultures as sexual and racial constructs

Mastiffs and spaniels: Gender and nation in the English dog

In her book The Animal Estate, Harriet Ritvo reminds us that “animal-related discourse has often functioned as an extended, if unacknowledged metonymy, offering participants a concealed forum for the expression of opinions and worries imported from the human cultural arena.” This paper examines one such metonymy in the early modern period; the animal in question is the English dog. Early modern England was often perceived by other nations to be unique in the variety and number of its dogs, and of these the mastiff and spaniel were most celebrated as products of “English soil.” They accompanied many English ambassadors throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they are mentioned in the annals of the Virginia colony, they were even the only two dogs aboard the Mayflower. The mastiff’s courage, strength and ferocity in bull and bear baiting were appealing to those who wanted to advertise English masculine valor, both to themselves and to foreigners, but mastiffs were also criticized for their roughness, stupidity, and laziness. Spaniels, the quintessential dogs of the English gentry, were antithetical to the mastiff in almost every respect. Often celebrated for their loyalty and devotion, qualities that made them a model of civility and common interest, devoted spaniels could all too often be described as fawning, showing a false sycophantic loyalty or self-destructive attachment. As a gendered pair, the mastiff and spaniel record a significant uneasiness about the English national character, caught between barbarism and excessive civility. It is an uneasiness that combines regional climate, including things such as “air” and “ground,” and more abstract notions of race or breed as they were demonstrated in the animal world as a whole, and it demonstrates that the emerging discourse of nationality in the early modern period was as much concerned with the natural world as it was with human institutions

An Explanation of Scientific nomenclature

Volume: XXI

Mesh refinement in a two-dimensional large eddy simulation of a forced shear layer

A series of large eddy simulations are made of a forced shear layer and compared with experimental data. Several mesh densities were examined to separate the effect of numerical inaccuracy from modeling deficiencies. The turbulence model that was used to represent small scale, 3-D motions correctly predicted some gross features of the flow field, but appears to be structurally incorrect. The main effect of mesh refinement was to act as a filter on the scale of vortices that developed from the inflow boundary conditions

Time-accurate simulations of a shear layer forced at a single frequency

Calculations are presented for the forced shear layer studied experimentally by Oster and Wygnanski, and Weisbrot. Two different computational approaches are examined: Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) and Large Eddy Simulation (LES). The DNS approach solves the full three dimensional Navier-Stokes equations for a temporally evolving mixing layer, while the LES approach solves the two dimensional Navier-Stokes equations with a subgrid scale turbulence model. While the comparison between these calculations and experimental data was hampered by a lack of information on the inflow boundary conditions, the calculations are shown to qualitatively agree with several aspects of the experiment. The sensitivity of these calculations to factors such as mesh refinement and Reynolds number is illustrated