Britain and Globalization

Many perspectives on globalization see it as differentiated in its effects and reception, culturally driven, either pre-modern or postmodern, best captured by globalist or sceptical perspectives, and an equalizing phenomenon. This article discusses the British experience of globalization in the light of such approaches and argues that looking at this case gives an alternative view. Six themes on globalization are explored across four areas of the British experience of globalization. It is argued that in Britain globalization is, in contrast to the approaches outlined above, differentiated but also generalizing, economically driven, modern, best understood with a mix of globalist and sceptical perspectives and structured by power, inequality, and conflict. It is also argued that the British experience of globalization is a specific one and that Britain is a very globalized and globalizing country, economically, culturally, and politically.     

After the Slavers: Law,Liberation and Captive-taking in the New Mexican Borderlands

This article explores how Congress decided that captive-taking customs, such as Indian-Mestizo servitude were on balance, more like Black slavery than not and should be abolished as a result. I contrast the scholarly literature against first-hand accounts of the slave trade as it appeared to several witnesses at the time. I argue that captive-taking customs were complicated and unstable institutions. If kinship practices did resonate expansively within the trade, they did not necessarily transcend custodial relationships that were ultimately based on dominance and subordination. In this sense, captive-taking customs paralleled black servitude institutions. Congress, too, reached these same conclusions after reviewing the evidence. Collectively, legislators decided that Indian-Mestizo servitude was inconsistent with newly passed anti-slavery legislation and should be abrogated permanently.     

Living in Sin? Religion and Cohabitation in Britain 1985–2005

Frequency of cohabitation among 13,703 adults from the British Social Attitudes data set for 1985–2005 peaked at around 26–30 years of age and increased significantly over the period of study. Cohabitation frequency was compared between those of no religious affiliation and Christian affiliates who (a) attended church at least once a month, (b) attended church but less than once a month, and (c) never attended church. Active Christians were 3.2 times less likely to cohabit than nonaffiliates, and rates of cohabitation have remained stable over time in this group. Christian affiliates who never attended church were 1.2 times less likely to cohabit than nonaffiliates, suggesting that even affiliation without attendance may indicate greater affinity to Christian moral attitudes compared with nonaffiliates.     

Arab students of social work in Israel: adjustment difficulties and coping strategies

Israel is a multi-cultural society, and this can no longer be ignored. However, there is a serious lack of theoretical and empirical literature dealing with the implications of Israel's multi-cultural social context for social work education in Israel, as well as its impact on social work practice with different ethnic and national populations in that country. The dearth of material is even more pronounced in the case of Arab students attending Israeli universities.

This paper documents the first stage of a project focusing on Arab students at the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A triangulation method was applied for collection of data from students enrolled in the 3-year programme, graduate students, faculty members and field work supervisors, as well as reports from previous years.

Personal, academic and socio-cultural difficulties are documented as well as coping mechanisms and recommendations for schools of social work in Israel. The results are used to demonstrate cultural misunderstanding, educational dilemmas and differences in professional ideologies.     

Anti-Alienism in New Zealand during the Great War: The von Zedlitz Affair, 1915

This article examines the role played by the New Zealand popular press in fostering anti-German sentiment during the Great War. In particular, it focuses on the case of George von Zedlitz, a Wellington academic, who for 12 months after the war's declaration, evaded government legislation intended to dismiss all enemy aliens from their posts, and intern those regarded as a danger to home security. Weekly journals led the campaign against the professor and fed the public's growing interest in the case. The affair sparked considerable public and private debate to the extent that by August 1915 the New Zealand Government was pressured into introducing the Alien Enemy Teachers' Act, which led to von Zedlitz being dismissed from his position.     

Information exchange with collision detection on multiple channels

Information exchange is a fundamental communication primitive in radio networks. We study this problem in multi-channel single-hop networks. In particular, given \(k\) pieces of information, initially stored in \(k\) nodes respectively, the task is to broadcast these information pieces to the entire network via a set of \(\mathcal {F}\) channels. We develop efficient distributed algorithms for this task for the scenario where both the identities and the number \(k\) of the initial information holders are unknown to the participating nodes. Assuming nodes with collision detection, we present an efficient randomized algorithm for unrestricted information exchange, where multiple information items can be combined into a single message. The algorithm disseminates all the information items within \(O(\frac{k}{\mathcal {F}}+\mathcal {F}\log ^2n)\) timeslots with high probability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that breaks the \(\varOmega (k)\) lower bound for unrestricted information exchange if only a single channel is available. This result establishes the superiority of multiple channels for the task of unrestricted information exchange. Moreover, for restricted information exchange, where each message can carry only one information item, we devise a randomized algorithm that completes the task in \(O(k+\frac{\log ^2n}{\mathcal {F}}+\log n)\) timeslots. When \(k\) is large, both algorithms are asymptotically optimal, as they can reach the trivial lower bounds of \(\varOmega (\frac{k}{\mathcal {F}})\) and \(\varOmega (k)\) for unrestricted and restricted information exchange, respectively.     

Constrained pairwise and center-star sequences alignment problems

This paper considers the minimax regret vertex 2-sink location problem in a dynamic path network with positive edge lengths and uniform edge capacity. Let \(P\) be an undirected path graph of \(n\) vertices, and the weight (initial supply) of every vertex is known as an interval. The problem is to find two vertices \(x\) and \(y\) as two sinks on the path such that all the weights can evacuate to \(x\) and \(y\) with minimum regret of evacuation time in case of an emergency for any possible weight distribution. We present an \(O(n^3\log n)\) time algorithm.     

Distributed wireless link scheduling in the SINR model

We present an approximation algorithm for wireless link scheduling under the physical SINR interference model. In the link scheduling problem, it is given a set of \(n\) links in a metric space, each of which is a sender–receiver pair, and the objective is to schedule the links using the minimum amount of time. We focus on a variant of this fundamental problem where the power is fixed, i.e., the power assignment of links is given as part of the input. Specifically, we consider an important category of power assignments called length-monotone sublinear power assignment, which includes the widely studied uniform, mean and linear power assignments. We present a distributed algorithm that can schedule all links in \(O(\log \varDelta (I_{max}+\log ^3n))\) rounds with high probability, where \(\varDelta \) is the ratio between the longest link and the shortest link and \(I_{max}\) is the maximum nearly-equilength class affectance of the link set. It is shown that the proposed algorithm is \(O(\log \varDelta )\) approximate to the optimal schedule in dense networks with \(I_{max}\in \varOmega (\log ^3n)\). To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first distributed one whose approximation ratio is independent of the network size \(n\). Our result also shows that the \(\varOmega (\log n)\) lower bound (Halldórsson and Mitra in: ICALP, 2011) on the approximation ratio does not hold for link sets with \(\log \varDelta \in o(\log n)\).