Whitehall and the control of prices and profits in a major war, 1919-1939

For much of the interwar period there was discussion in Whitehall of the policy to control prices and profits in any future major war. Opinion was divided between those who believed that the control of prices and profits would be necessary in return for controlling labour in the light of the experience of the First World War, and those who focused on the financial aspects of the issue, in which the control of prices and profits was seen to play little positive role. This second strand of thinking, rooted in the treasury, predominated, particularly once rearmament began: the co-operation of business and labour, it was argued, was best achieved by maintaining the status quo. As a result, once war did break out, legislation had to be enacted very rapidly to meet popular demands. More generally, this study throws light on the nature of interwar government in Britain and its attitude towards intervention

Using evolutionary algorithms to resolve 3-dimensional geometries encoded in indeterminate data-sets

This thesis concerns the development of optimisation algorithms to determine the relative co-location, (localisation), of a number of freely-flying 'Smart Dust mote' sensor platform elements using a non-deterministic data-set derived from the duplex wireless transmissions between elements. Smart dust motes are miniaturised, microprocessor based, electronic sensor platforms, frequently used for a wide range of remote environmental monitoring applications; including specific climate synoptic observation research and more general meteorology. For the application proposed in this thesis a cluster of the notional smart dust motes are configured to imitate discrete 'Radio Drop Sonde' elements of the wireless enabled monitoring system in use by meteorological research organisations worldwide. This cluster is modelled in software in order to establish the relative positions during the 'flight' ; the normal mode of deployment for the Drop Sonde is by ejection from an aeroplane into an upper-air zone of interest, such as a storm cloud. Therefore the underlying research question is, how to track a number of these independent, duplex wireless linked, free-flying monitoring devices in 3-dimensions and time (to give the monitored data complete spatio-temporal validity). This represents a significant practical challenge, the solution applied in this thesis was to generate 3-dimensional geometries using the only 'real-time' data available; the Radio Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) data is generated through the 'normal' duplex wireless communications between motes. Individual RSSI values can be considered as a 'representation of the distance magnitude' between wireless devices; when collated into a spatio-temporal data-set it 'encodes' the relative, co-locational, 3-dimensional geometry of all devices in the cluster. The reconstruction, (or decoding), of the 3-dimensional geometries encoded in the spatio-temporal data-set is a complex problem that is addressed through the application of various algorithms. These include, Random Search, and optimisation algorithms, such as the Stochastic Hill-climber, and various forms of Evolutionary Algorithm. It was found that the performance of the geometric reconstruction could be improved through identification of salient aspects of the modelled environment, the result was heuristic operators. In general these led to a decrease in the time taken to reach a convergent solution or a reduction in the number of candidate search space solutions that must be considered. The software model written for this thesis has been implemented to generalise the fundamental characteristics of an optimisation algorithm and to incorporate them into a generic software framework; this then provides the common code to all model algorithms used.EPSRC sourced bursary via The University of Exete

The twilight world of British business politics: the Spring Sunningdale conferences since the 1960s

This article explores a previously unknown form of interaction, known as Spring Sunningdale, between the British business elite and its civil servant equivalent in Whitehall. These began in 1963 and were still continuing only a few years ago. The continuity and stability of these meetings stands in contrast to wider changes in the nature of business–government relations in Britain during this period, particularly since the election of the Thatcher government in 1979. The article analyses why there was such continuity and what the senior civil servants and the captains of industry who attended these annual meetings gained from them

Sustained attention to objects' motion sharpens position representations: attention to changing position and attention to motion are distinct

In tasks where people monitor moving objects, such the multiple object tracking task (MOT), observers attempt to keep track of targets as they move amongst distracters. The literature is mixed as to whether observers make use of motion information to facilitate performance. We sought to address this by two means: first by superimposing arrows on objects which varied in their informativeness about motion direction and second by asking observers to attend to motion direction. Using a position monitoring task, we calculated mean error magnitudes as a measure of the precision with which target positions are represented. We also calculated perceptual lags versus extrapolated reports, which are the times at which positions of targets best match position reports. We find that the presence of motion information in the form of superimposed arrows made no difference to position report precision nor perceptual lag. However, when we explicitly instructed observers to attend to motion, we saw facilitatory effects on position reports and in some cases reports that best matched extrapolated rather than lagging positions for small set sizes. The results indicate that attention to changing positions does not automatically recruit attention to motion, showing a dissociation between sustained attention to changing positions and attention to motion