Gender, language and floor apportionment in political debates

Political debates are speech events which foreground issues of power and the `floor', and allow the opportunity of assessing the ways in which the gender of participants affects their construction as more or less powerful participants in debates. Debates in the British House of Commons are adversarial in style, making it appropriate to view the floor as `the site of a contest where there is a winner and a loser'. Previous research into political debates has found that male participants violate the formal rules in debates more than their female counterparts, in order to gain the floor. Although the canonical form and rules of debates exist to `permit the equalization of turns', rule violations are common, and inequalities between participants exist. In this article legal and illegal interventions are evaluated in five debates in order to establish the extent to which the gender of participants is related to the control that an individual has over the debate floor.

Considering the relationship between freight transport and urban form

There has been much discussion since the mid-1980s about the relationship between transport and urban form. However, all of this body of research has concerned itself with passenger transport (i.e. the movement of people). This report is intended as an initial investigation into the relationship between road freight transport and urban form. Important trends in road freight transport and logistics and the land use associated with these activities are discussed. Data about road freight transport activity by heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) in Britain that has been disaggregated from a UK government survey is analysed to investigate the nature of urban freight operations in sixteen selected urban areas. This includes analysis of the efficiency and transport intensity of these operations on journeys to, from and within each urban area. Scenarios concerning urban freight operations based on reductions in length of haul, and improvements in vehicle lading factors, vehicle carrying capacities and empty running are constructed in order to investigate the potential effect of such changes on the vehicle kilometres performed on journeys to, from and within the sixteen urban areas.

Investigating relationships between road freight transport, facility location, logistics management and urban form

This paper examines road freight transport activity and its relationship with facility location, logistics management and urban form through an analysis of 14 selected urban areas in the UK. Improved understanding of this relationship will assist planners when making transport and land use decisions. The findings suggest that several geographical, spatial and land use factors have important influences on freight activity in urban areas. Commercial and industrial land use patterns affect the types and quantities of goods produced, consumed, and hence the total quantity of freight transport handled. This also influences the distances over which goods are moved and by what specific mode. There has been relatively low growth in warehousing in many of the selected areas over the last decade compared to the national average as well suburbanisation of warehousing in some locations. This affects the origin and destination of journeys visiting these facilities and typically increases the distance of such journeys. A greater proportion of road freight has been shown to be lifted on internal journeys in large urban areas than in smaller ones. Journeys within urban areas have been shown to be less efficient than journeys to and from the urban area in the 14 locations studied due to the much smaller average vehicle carrying capacities and lower lading factors for journeys within urban areas. The length of haul on journeys to and from urban areas studied was found to be greatest for those areas with a major seaport and/or which were geographically remote. This affects the road freight transport intensity of goods transport journeys.

Floating on the same plane: metropolis, money and the culture of abstraction

This article argues that the emergence of a trans-disciplinary discourse of ‘visual culture’ must be understood as, above all, a constitutively urban phenomenon. More specifically, it is in the historically new form of the capitalist metropolis, as described most famously by Simmel, that the ‘hyper-stimulus’ of modern visual culture has its social and spatial conditions. Paradoxically, however, it is as a result of this that visual culture studies is also intrinsically ‘haunted’ by a certain spectre of the invisible: one rooted in those forms of ‘real abstraction’ which Marx identifies with the commodity and the money form. Considering, initially, the canonical urban visual forms of the collage and the spectacle, these are each read in a certain relation to Simmel’s account of metropolitan life and of the money form, and, through this, to what the author claims are those forms of social and spatial abstraction that must be understood to animate them. Finally, the article returns to the entanglement of the visible and invisible entailed by this, and concludes by making some tentative suggestions about something like a paradoxical urban ‘aesthetic’ of abstraction on such a basis.

Testing the weak-form market efficiency and the day of the week effects of some African countries

The aims of this work are twofold. On the one hand, it aims to find evidence supporting the presence of the weak form efficiency of several emerging African stock markets by using both parametric as well as non parametric tests. The results indicate that none of the markets are characterised by random walks with the exception of the South African stock market. On the other hand, this study aims to detect the presence of the day of the week effects of these African stock markets. Results show the existence of day of the week effects, that is the typical negative Monday and Friday positive effects in several stock markets.

Modular Form as a Curatorial Practice

This article discusses a curatorial approach to authorship as a model for thinking about what I describe as an iterative modular poem, a poetic text composed of appropriated segments. As a response to contemporary proliferation of literary and artistic works created by iterative means, i.e. through acts of appropriation, remixing and remediation, the article is an attempt at putting forward ‘the curatorial’ as an emerging paradigm of writing for the twenty-first century. The article approaches established paradigms of authorship, creativity and originality as inadequate with respect to contemporary experimental poetic practices to suggest a shift from creating to collecting and curating as a possible alternative model for thinking about instances of iterative creative writing. The argument focuses on Robert Fitterman’s Holocaust Museum (2011) as an example of an iterative modular poem and a text emblematic of such curatorial approach to authorship.