Hogg's Confessions, S.R. Crockett and the House of Macmillan

This article adds to our knowledge of the publishing history of James Hogg's most famous novel by examining a reader's report in the archives of the publishing house of Macmillan. It discusses the role played by the novelist S.R. Crockett in attempting to republish Hogg's novel in 1895, and examines the reasons behind Macmillan's decision to reject the work.

Dr John Snow and an early investigation of groundwater contamination

John Snow was a physician but his studies of the way in which cholera is spread have long attracted the interest of hydrogeologists. From his investigation into the epidemiology of the cholera outbreak around the well in Broad Street, London, in 1854, Snow gained valuable evidence that cholera is spread by contamination of drinking water. Subsequent research by others showed that the well was contaminated by sewage. The study therefore represents one of the first, if not the first, study of an incident of groundwater contamination in Britain. Although he had no formal geological training, it is clear that Snow had a much better understanding of groundwater than many modern medical practitioners. At the time of the outbreak Snow was continuing his practice as a physician and anaesthetist. His casebooks for 1854 do not even mention cholera. Yet, nearly 150 years later, he is as well known for his work on cholera as for his pioneering work on anaesthesia, and his discoveries are still the subject of controversy.

Semiotic modelling for complex enterprise systems

An enterprise is viewed as a complex system which can be engineered to accomplish organisational objectives. Systems analysis and modelling will enable to the planning and development of the enterprise and IT systems. Many IT systems design methods focus on functional and non-functional requirements of the IT systems. Most methods are normally capable of one but leave out other aspects. Analysing and modelling of both business and IT systems may often have to call on techniques from various suites of methods which may be placed on different philosophic and methodological underpinnings. Coherence and consistency between the analyses are hard to ensure. This paper introduces the Problem Articulation Method (PAM) which facilitates the design of an enterprise system infrastructure on which an IT system is built. Outcomes of this analysis represent requirements which can be further used for planning and designing a technical system. As a case study, a finance system, Agresso, for e-procurement has been used in this paper to illustrate the applicability of PAM in modelling complex systems.

Sarkar Bengali typeface

Fiona Ross, Tim Holloway (co-designers) were commissioned by the renowned newspaper and publishing house Anandabazar Patrika (ABP) to design a new low-contrast typeface in a contemporary style for print and screen use in its publications. Ross and Holloway designed ABP's Bengali house typeface (Linotype Bengali - the first digital Bengali font) that has been in daily use in its newspaper since 1982. The design team was augmented by Neelakash Kshetrimayum; OpenType production undertaken by John Hudson. This Bengali typeface is the first fully functional OpenType design for the script. It demonstrates innovative features that resolve problems which hitherto hindered the successful execution of low-contrast Bengali text fonts: this connecting script of over 450 characters has deep verticals, spiralling strokes, wide characters, and intersecting ascenders. The new design has solutions to overcome the necessity to implement wide interlinear spacing and sets more words to the line than has yet been possible. This project therefore combines the use of aesthetic, technical and linguistic skills and is highly visible in newspapers of the largest newspaper group and publishing house in West Bengal in print and on-line. The design and development of Sarkar has positive implications for other non-Latin script designs, just as the Linotype Bengali typeface formed the blueprint for new non-Latin designs three decades ago. Sarkar was released on 31 August 2012 with the launch of Anandabazar Patirka's new newspaper Ebela.

On the spectra and pseudospectra of a class of non-self-adjoint random matrices and operators

In this paper we develop and apply methods for the spectral analysis of non-selfadjoint tridiagonal infinite and finite random matrices, and for the spectral analysis of analogous deterministic matrices which are pseudo-ergodic in the sense of E. B. Davies (Commun. Math. Phys. 216 (2001), 687–704). As a major application to illustrate our methods we focus on the “hopping sign model” introduced by J. Feinberg and A. Zee (Phys. Rev. E 59 (1999), 6433–6443), in which the main objects of study are random tridiagonal matrices which have zeros on the main diagonal and random ±1’s as the other entries. We explore the relationship between spectral sets in the finite and infinite matrix cases, and between the semi-infinite and bi-infinite matrix cases, for example showing that the numerical range and p-norm ε - pseudospectra (ε > 0, p ∈ [1,∞] ) of the random finite matrices converge almost surely to their infinite matrix counterparts, and that the finite matrix spectra are contained in the infinite matrix spectrum Σ. We also propose a sequence of inclusion sets for Σ which we show is convergent to Σ, with the nth element of the sequence computable by calculating smallest singular values of (large numbers of) n×n matrices. We propose similar convergent approximations for the 2-norm ε -pseudospectra of the infinite random matrices, these approximations sandwiching the infinite matrix pseudospectra from above and below.

Insurgencies and counterinsurgency strategies: patterns and dilemmas

The roots of insurgencies and counterinsurgency go back to Antiquity, and consistent patterns can be traced. These include the state's use of its own armed forces against insurgents who tend to be inferior in terms of armaments, and states' attempts to delegitimize violent aimed to overthrow it, and the need for insurgents to recur to illegal means to challenge the state's power. Very often insurgents have to team up with criminal networks in order to do so, undermining their ability to claim legitimacy.

Accumulation of complex eigenvalues of an indefinite Sturm--Liouville operator with a shifted Coulomb potential

For a particular family of long-range potentials V, we prove that the eigenvalues of the indefinite Sturm–Liouville operator A = sign(x)(−Δ+V(x)) accumulate to zero asymptotically along specific curves in the complex plane. Additionally, we relate the asymptotics of complex eigenvalues to the two-term asymptotics of the eigenvalues of associated self-adjoint operators.

Utopia and education in the seventeenth century: Bacon’s 'Salomon’s House' and its influence

New Worlds Reflected provides a significant contribution both to the history of utopian literature and travel, and to the wider cultural and intellectual history of the time, assembling original essays from scholars interested in representations of the globe and new and ideal worlds in the period from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and in the imaginative reciprocal responsiveness of utopian and travel writing. Chapter 7 looks at the influence of Salomon’s House in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) on later seventeenth-century educational utopias.