Why an ESM programme could be a kiss of death: Recovery values and subordination. CEPS Commentary, 27 June 2012

Spain, needing a bailout for its banks, was granted a vague promise by EZ leaders for up to €100 billion. The details remain obscure, yet they matter enormously. This column argues that the so-called ‘subordination effect’ of fresh official lending could put Spain on the slippery road to ruin. It argues that if sovereign bonds must be bought, this should be done in the secondary market which, would be on an equal footing with private investors and thus avoid the subordination trap.

Exploring the spatial relations between soil physical properties and apparent electrical conductivity

Relations between the apparent electrical conductivity of the soil (ECa) and top- and sub-soil physical properties were examined for two arable fields in southern England (Crowmarsh Battle Farms and the Yattendon Estate). The spatial variation of ECa and the soil properties was explored geostatistically. The variogram ranges showed that ECa varied on a similar spatial scale to many of the soil physical properties in both fields. Several features in the map of kriged predictions of ECa were also evident in maps of the soil properties. In addition, the correlation coefficients showed a strong relation between ECa and several soil properties. A moving correlation analysis enabled differences in the relations between ECa and the soil properties to be examined within the fields. The results indicated that relations were inconsistent; they were stronger in some areas than others. A regression of ECa on the principal component scores of the leading components for both fields showed that the first two components accounted for a large proportion of the variance in ECa, whereas the others accounted for little or none. For Crowmarsh topsoil sand and clay, loss on ignition and volumetric water measured in the autumn had large correlations on the first component, and for Yattendon they were large for topsoil sand and clay, and autumn and spring volumetric water. The cross-variograms suggested strong coregionalization between ECa and several soil physical properties; in particular subsoil sand and silt at Crowmarsh, and subsoil sand and clay at Yattendon. The structural correlations from the linear model of coregionalization confirmed the strength of the relations between ECa and the subsoil properties. Nevertheless, no one property was consistently important for both fields. Although a map of ECa can indicate the general patterns of spatial variation in the soil, it is not a substitute for information on soil properties obtained by sampling and analysing the soil. Nevertheless, it could be used to guide further sampling. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Causes of the apparent scale independence of fractal indices associated with forest fragmentation in Bolivia

In a recent investigation, Landsat TM and ETM+ data were used to simulate different resolutions of remotely-sensed images (from 30 to 1100 m) and to analyze the effect of resolution on a range of landscape metrics associated with spatial patterns of forest fragmentation in Chapare, Bolivia since the mid-1980s. Whereas most metrics were found to be highly dependent on pixel size, several fractal metrics (DLFD, MPFD, and AWMPFD) were apparently independent of image resolution, in contradiction with a sizeable body of literature indicating that fractal dimensions of natural objects depend strongly on image characteristics. The present re-analysis of the Chapare images, using two alternative algorithms routinely used for the evaluation of fractal dimensions, shows that the values of the box-counting and information fractal dimensions are systematically larger, sometimes by as much as 85%, than the "fractal" indices DLFD, MPFD, and AWMFD for the same images. In addition, the geometrical fractal features of the forest and non-forest patches in the Chapare region strongly depend on the resolution of images used in the analysis. The largest dependency on resolution occurs for the box-counting fractal dimension in the case of the non-forest patches in 1993, where the difference between the 30 and I 100 m-resolution images corresponds to 24% of the full theoretical range (1.0 to 2.0) of the mass fractal dimension. The observation that the indices DLFD, MPFD, and AWMPFD, unlike the classical fractal dimensions, appear relatively unaffected by resolution in the case of the Chapare images seems due essentially to the fact that these indices are based on a heuristic, "non-geometric" approach to fractals. Because of their lack of a foundation in fractal geometry, nothing guarantees that these indices will be resolution-independent in general. (C) 2006 International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Inc. (ISPRS). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A traitor's death? The identity of a drawn, hanged and quartered man from Hulton Abbey, Staffordshire

Analysis of a set of bones redeposited in a medieval abbey graveyard showed that the individual had been beheaded and chopped up, and this in turn suggested one of England's more gruesome I execution practices. Since quartering was generally reserved for the infamous, the author attempts to track down the victim and proposes him to be Hugh Despenser, the lover of King Edward II.

Modelling seasonally varying data: A case study for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)

Many time series are measured monthly, either as averages or totals, and such data often exhibit seasonal variability-the values of the series are consistently larger for some months of the year than for others. A typical series of this type is the number of deaths each month attributed to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). Seasonality can be modelled in a number of ways. This paper describes and discusses various methods for modelling seasonality in SIDS data, though much of the discussion is relevant to other seasonally varying data. There are two main approaches, either fitting a circular probability distribution to the data, or using regression-based techniques to model the mean seasonal behaviour. Both are discussed in this paper.

Life and death in a civitas capital: metabolic disease and trauma in the children from late Roman Dorchester, Dorset

The impact that “Romanization” and the development of urban centers had on the health of the Romano-British population is little understood. A re-examination of the skeletal remains of 364 nonadults from the civitas capital at Roman Dorchester (Durnovaria) in Dorset was carried out to measure the health of the children living in this small urban area. The cemetery population was divided into two groups; the first buried their dead organized within an east–west alignment with possible Christian-style graves, and the second with more varied “pagan” graves, aligned north–south. A higher prevalence of malnutrition and trauma was evident in the children from Dorchester than in any other published Romano-British group, with levels similar to those seen in postmedieval industrial communities. Cribra orbitalia was present in 38.5% of the children, with rickets and/or scurvy at 11.2%. Twelve children displayed fractures of the ribs, with 50% of cases associated with rickets and/or scurvy, suggesting that rib fractures should be considered during the diagnosis of these conditions. The high prevalence of anemia, rickets, and scurvy in the Poundbury children, and especially the infants, indicates that this community may have adopted child-rearing practices that involved fasting the newborn, a poor quality weaning diet, and swaddling, leading to general malnutrition and inadequate exposure to sunlight. The Pagan group showed no evidence of scurvy or rib fractures, indicating difference in religious and child-rearing practices but that both burial groups were equally susceptible to rickets and anemia suggests a shared poor standard of living in this urban environment.