Taking environmental engineering out of the laboratory

Environmental engineering is a core component of most construction and surveying undergraduate courses. It is generally accepted that students on these courses should have an understanding of thermal comfort, heat transfer, condensation, lighting, noise transmission and acoustics. Experiments are essential in developing students’ awareness and understanding of the underlying physical concepts which drive environmental engineering solutions. Traditionally these experiments have been conducted by students working in small groups in laboratories. However, increasing student numbers and, in particular, the growth in part time study, have placed significant additional demands on limited laboratory resources. The availability of reasonably priced, simple, hand-held equipment has made it possible for students to conduct experiments outside the confines of the laboratory. Furthermore, various professional software packages (some of which are freely available online) enable the resultant data to be further developed and analysed in conjunction with the conventional textbook approach. This paper examines these alternative approaches to the traditional laboratory experiment. An assessment is provided of the types of experiment which are both possible and appropriate, and the efficacy of these approaches is considered.

Empathic and non-empathic routes to visuospatial perspective-taking

The present study examined whether strategy moderated the relationship between visuospatial perspective-taking and empathy. Participants (N=96) undertook both a perspective-taking task requiring speeded spatial judgements made from the perspective of an observed figure and the Empathy Quotient questionnaire, a measure of trait empathy. Perspective-taking performance was found to be related to empathy in that more empathic individuals showed facilitated performance particularly for figures sharing their own spatial orientation. This relationship was restricted to participants that reported perspective-taking by mentally transforming their spatial orientation to align with that of the figure; it was absent in those adopting an alternative strategy of transposing left and right whenever confronted with a front-view figure. Our finding that strategy moderates the relationship between empathy and visuospatial perspective-taking enables a reconciliation of the apparently inconclusive findings of previous studies and provides evidence for functionally dissociable empathic and non-empathic routes to visuospatial perspective-taking.

Parties in democratic national assemblies: comparative assessment of parliaments note

This paper argues that the analysis of democratic national assemblies is not only impossible without discussing political parties, but also incomprehensible without recognizing parties as the most significant organizations within them. Parties have structured political groupings and demands on government even before assemblies were democratically elected. And although parties may be in decline as institutions mediating between society and government in the current era, they remain significant as organizing forces within government. The paper first explains the origins of party organizations within parliaments by exploring why individual members and the assemblies taken as a whole need parties: what are their costs and benefits? It then describes the manner in which party organizations operate in different national assembly chambers. The third section analyses types and sources of party influence, including the role played by party leaders in manipulating legislative agendas, structuring Members’ policy choices and shaping policy outcomes. The final section reviews how politi- cal scientists have sought to explain intra-party cohesion and discipline across different national assemblies.

Handling the transfer of power: a note on the 1964 origins of the Douglas‐Home rules

Opposition is rarely a good preparation for government. The only post‐war government to enter office confident, well‐acquainted with the Civil Service and with a fund of administrative experience to draw on was the Attlee administration formed in 1945. The longer a party spends in opposition the more these assets disappear. Labour, by the end of the long period of Conservative rule in 1951–64, was largely unfamiliar with the burdens of office. This formed the background to the formulation of the Douglas‐Home rules, whereby informal contact is permitted between the Civil Service and the Opposition in advance of a general election. Since 1964 this arrangement has gradually become more extensive (especially after Neil Kinnock complained that the period for contact was too brief during the run‐up to the 1992 election) and more formalised. In late 1993 John Major agreed that contacts could be made from early 1996 in advance of the next election, rather than only during the last six months of a parliament, as had by then become the convention.’ The object of this short paper is, however, to explain how these rules originated.

Embodied perspective-taking indicated by selective disruption from aberrant self motion

Spatial perspective-taking that involves imagined changes in one’s spatial orientation is facilitated by vestibular stimulation inducing a congruent sensation of self-motion. We examined further the role of vestibular resources in perspective-taking by evaluating whether aberrant and conflicting vestibular stimulation impaired perspective-taking performance. Participants (N = 39) undertook either an “own body transformation” (OBT)task, requiring speeded spatial judgments made from the perspective of a schematic figure, or a control task requiring reconfiguration of spatial mappings from one’s own visuo-spatial perspective. These tasks were performed both without and with vestibular stimulation by whole-body Coriolis motion, according to a repeated measures design, balanced for order. Vestibular stimulation was found to impair performance during the first minute post stimulus relative to the stationary condition. This disruption was task-specific, affecting only the OBT task and not the control task, and dissipated by the second minute post-stimulus. Our experiment thus demonstrates selective temporary impairment of perspective-taking from aberrant vestibular stimulation, implying that uncompromised vestibular resources are necessary for efficient perspective-taking. This finding provides evidence for an embodied mechanism for perspective-taking whereby vestibular input contributes to multisensory processing underlying bodily and social cognition. Ultimately, this knowledge may contribute to the design of interventions that help patients suffering sudden vertigo adapt to the cognitive difficulties caused by aberrant vestibular stimulation.