Bridging top down and bottom up: Modelling community preferences for a dispersed rural settlement pattern

This paper explores the scope to bridge top-down and bottom-up perspectives on spatial planning by drawing on EU-funded action research in relation to rural settlement planning in Northern Ireland. The empirical work is located within a review of planning theory that exposes a long running tension between the technocratic stances of government planners and the aspirations of engaged citizens. It demonstrates the operation of a large group planning methodology that delivers community preference with environmental responsibility as a participatory input into planning policy formulation. Transferable insights into the dynamics of spatial planning are identified.

Preaching to Princes: John Burgess and George Hakewill in the Royal Pulpit

This article examines a previously unnoticed link between the Puritan John Burgess and the Calvinist conformist George Hakewill. In 1604 Burgess preached a court sermon so outspoken and critical of James I’s religious policy that he was imprisoned. Nearly twenty years later, however, Hakewill chose to incorporate extended passages from Burgess’s sermon into the series of sermons, King David’s vow (1621), preached to Prince Charles’s household. This article considers why Burgess’s sermon became so resonant for Hakewill in the early 1620s and also demonstrates how Hakewill deliberately sought to moderate Burgess’s strident polemic. In so doing the article provides important new evidence for the politically attuned sermon culture at Prince Charles’s court in the early 1620s and also suggests how, as the parameters for clerical conformity shifted in the latter years of James’s reign, Calvinist conformists found a new appeal in the works of moderate Puritans. I

"Producers and Consumers in EU E-Commerce Law by John Dickie, Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2005 (ISBN 1-841-13454-6)"

Book Review

A Comparison of the Flow Structures and Losses Within Vaned and Vaneless Stators for Radial Turbines

This paper details the numerical analysis of different vaned and vaneless radial inflow turbine stators. Selected results are presented from a test program carried out to determine performance differences between the radial turbines with vaned stators and vaneless volutes under the same operating conditions. A commercial computational fluid dynamics code was used to develop numerical models of each of the turbine configurations, which were validated using the experimental results. From the numerical models, areas of loss generation in the different stators were identified and compared, and the stator losses were quantified. Predictions showed the vaneless turbine stators to incur lower losses than the corresponding vaned stator at matching operating conditions, in line with the trends in measured performance.. Flow conditions at rotor inlet were studied and validated with internal static pressure measurements so as to judge the levels of circumferential nonuniformity for each stator design. In each case, the vaneless volutes were found to deliver a higher level of uniformity in the rotor inlet pressure field. [DOI: 10.1115/1.2988493]