bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Breaking machines with a pencil
Authors: Batey Mavis
Published: November 2020

Dilly Knox, the renowned First World War codebreaker, was the first to investigate the workings of the Enigma machine after it came on the market in 1925, and he developed hand methods for breaking Enigma. What he called ‘serendipity’ was truly a mixture of careful observation and inspired guesswork. This chapter describes the importance of the pre-war introduction to Enigma that Turing received from Knox. Turing worked with Knox during the pre-war months, and when war was declared he joined Knox’s Enigma Research Section at Bletchley Park. Once a stately home, Bletchley Park had become the war station of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), of which the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) was part. Its head, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, was responsible for both espionage (Humint) and the new signals intelligence (Sigint), but the latter soon became his priority. Winston Churchill was the first minister to realize the intelligence potential of breaking the enemy’s codes, and in November 1914 he had set up ‘Room 40’ right beside his Admiralty premises. By Bletchley Park’s standards, Room 40 was a small-scale codebreaking unit focusing mainly on naval and diplomatic messages. When France and Germany also set up cryptographic bureaux they staffed them with servicemen, but Churchill insisted on recruiting scholars with minds of their own—the so-called ‘professor types’. It was an excellent decision. Under the influence of Sir Alfred Ewing, an expert in wireless telegraphy and professor of engineering at Cambridge University, Ewing’s own college, King’s, became a happy hunting ground for ‘professor types’ during both world wars—including Dillwyn (Dilly) Knox (Fig. 11.1) in the first and Alan Turing in the second. Until the time of Turing’s arrival, mostly classicists and linguists were recruited. Knox himself had an international reputation for unravelling charred fragments of Greek papyri. Shortly after Enigma first came on the market in 1925, offering security to banks and businesses for their telegrams and cables, the GC&CS obtained two of the new machines, and some time later Knox studied one of these closely.
We were the world’s first computer operators
Authors: Ireland Eleanor
Published: November 2020

In 1944 I worked at Bletchley Park and lived at nearby Woburn Abbey. My job was to assist the codebreakers by operating one of the Colossus machines. In this chapter I describe how this came to be and what it was like to live and work at Bletchley Park during the last months of the war. In 1944 I was working in London, in a philatelist’s business. One of my friends joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) as a motor transport driver, and I decided to join too. In great trepidation I went to Queen Anne’s Gate and volunteered. I was interviewed immediately and very soon was called to a medical. Not long after, I received a letter telling me to report on 2 August 1944 to a WRNS establishment at Tullichewan Castle near Glasgow. I found out much later that it would have been more usual to report to Mill Hill in London, but there had been a spate of bombing and the powers that be did not wish to take any chances with the new intake, so they sent us up to Scotland. Strangely enough, in the week before I was due to set off on this adventure I met a school friend who was also joining the WRNS and had been asked to report to Tullichewan on the same day. I was pleased to discover that I had a companion to go with. As it turned out, we were to stay together until we were demobbed at the end of December 1946. We travelled to Glasgow and then out to a small station on the edge of Loch Lomond, where we were picked up and taken to Tullichewan WRNS reception camp, a requisitioned castle standing in a large hillside estate. At the bottom of the hill was the Regulating Office, together with a large number of Nissen huts—the sleeping quarters, a mess, the stores hut, and so forth. Opposite the huts was an enormous parade ground, while at the top of the hill was the castle, used by the officers, and another parade ground with the naval flag. Every day a bell sounded at 5 a.m. to get us up, after which we were required to do various menial tasks, such as cleaning out the huts, potato peeling, and blancoing the steps of the castle.
Baby
Authors: Copeland Jack
Published: November 2020

The modern computer age began on 21 June 1948, when the first electronic universal stored-program computer successfully ran its first program. Built in Manchester, this ancestral computer was the world’s first universal Turing machine in hardware. Fittingly, it was called simply ‘Baby’. The story of Turing’s involvement with Baby and with its successors at Manchester is a tangled one. The world’s first electronic stored-program digital computer ran its first program in the summer of 1948 (Fig. 20.1). ‘A small electronic digital computing machine has been operating successfully for some weeks in the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory’, wrote Baby’s designers, Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn, in the letter to the scientific periodical Nature that announced their success to the world. Williams, a native of the Manchester area, had spent his war years working on radar in rural Worcestershire. Kilburn, his assistant, was a bluntspeaking Yorkshireman. By the end of the fighting there wasn’t much that, between them, they didn’t know about the state of the art in electronics. In December 1945 the two friends returned to the north of England to pioneer the modern computer. Baby was a classic case of a small-scale university pilot project that led to successful commercial development by an external company. The Manchester engineering firm Ferranti built its Ferranti Mark I computer to Williams’s and Kilburn’s design: this was the earliest commercially available electronic digital computer. The first Ferranti rolled out of the factory in February 1951. UNIVAC I, the earliest computer to go on the market in the United States, came a close second: the first one was delivered a few weeks later, in March 1951. Williams and Kilburn developed a high-speed memory for Baby that went on to become a mainstay of computing worldwide. It consisted of cathode-ray tubes resembling small television tubes. Data (zeros and ones) were stored as a scatter of dots on each tube’s screen: a small focused dot represented ‘1’ and a larger blurry dot represented ‘0’. The Williams tube memory, as the invention was soon called, was also used in Baby’s immediate successors, built at Manchester University and by Ferranti Ltd.
Decidability and the Entscheidungsproblem
Authors: Whitty Robin
Published: November 2020

In 1936 Turing invented a mathematical model of computation, known today as the Turing machine. He intended it as a representation of human computation and in particular as a vehicle for refuting a central part of David Hilbert’s early 20th-century programme to mechanize mathematics. By a nice irony it came to define what is achievable by non-human computers and has become deeply embedded in modern computer science. A simple example is enough to convey the essentials of a Turing machine. We then describe the background to Hilbert’s programme and Turing’s challenge—and explain how Turing’s response to Hilbert resolves a host of related problems in mathematics and logic. If I had to portray, in less than 30 seconds, what Alan Turing achieved in 1936 it seems to me that drawing the picture shown in Fig. 37.1 would be a reasonable thing to do. That this might be so is a testament to the quite extraordinary merging of the concrete and the abstract in Turing’s 1936 paper on computability. It is regarded by, I suppose, a large majority of mathematical scientists as his greatest work. The details of our picture are not especially important. As it happens, it is a machine for deciding which whole numbers, written in binary form, are multiples of 3. It works thus: suppose the number is 105, whose binary representation is 1101001, because (1 × 26) + (1 × 25) + (0 × 24) + (1 × 23) + (0 × 22) + (0 × 21) + (1 × 20) = 64 + 32 + 8 + 1 = 105. We start at the node labelled A and use the binary digits to drive us from node to node. The first couple of 1s take us to node B and back to A again. The third digit, 0, loops us around at A. Now a 1 and a 0 take us across to node C; and the final 0 and 1 take us back via B to A once more.
The Donkey in Human History
Authors: Mitchell Peter
Published: November 2020

Donkeys carried Christ into Jerusalem while in Greek myth they transported Hephaistos up to Mount Olympos and Dionysos into battle against the Giants. They were probably the first animals that people ever rode, as well as the first used on a large-scale as beasts of burden. Associated with kingship and the gods in the ancient Near East, they have been (and in many places still are) a core technology for moving people and goods over both short and long distances, as well as a supplier of muscle power for threshing and grinding grain, pressing olives, raising water, ploughing fields, and pulling carts, to name just a few of the uses to which they have been put. Yet despite this, they remain one of the least studied, and most widely ignored, of all domestic animals, consigned to the margins of history like so many of those who still depend upon them. Spanning the globe and extending from the donkey's initial domestication up to the present, this book seeks to remedy this situation by using archaeological evidence, in combination with insights from history and anthropology, to resituate the donkey (and its hybrid offspring such as the mule) in the unfolding of human history, looking not just at what donkeys and mules did, but also at how people have thought about and understood them. Intended in part for university researchers and students working in the broad fields of world history, archaeology, animal history, and anthropology, but it should also interest anyone keen to learn more about one of the most widespread and important of the animals that people have domesticated.
Why Donkeys?
Authors: Mitchell Peter
Published: November 2020

Donkeys carried Christ into Jerusalem, transported the Greek god Dionysus to his childhood home on Mount Nysa and into battle against the Giants, and provided a mount for Muhammad, who supposedly used it to summon his companions. Long before the arrival of the horse, they were ridden by kings in the Near East, buried near Egypt’s first pharaohs, and sacrificed to ancient gods across the Fertile Crescent and as far beyond it as Baluchistan and Badajoz. Along with their hybrid offspring, the mule, donkeys formed—and in places still form—a core technology for moving goods at both local and international levels, especially in areas of rugged or mountainous terrain: agricultural produce throughout the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East, and beyond; tin and wool for Bronze Age merchants between Assyria and Anatolia; supplies for the Roman army; New World silver to Caribbean ports for shipment to Spain; salt in contemporary and medieval Ethiopia; household necessities and even the dead in the modern Moroccan city of Fez. Their muscles ground flour in the Classical Mediterranean, powered water wheels in Islamic Andalucía, and helped deliver stone columns from Egypt’s deserts to build the Pantheon in Rome. Today, they remain a critical resource for many of the world’s poor, their use promoted by numerous development projects. At the same time, conservation authorities in places as distant from each other as Australia and the United States seek to control the numbers of feral donkeys using means that pose impossible-to-resolve ethical questions. And yet, for most twenty-first-century individuals in the Western world, donkeys are among the least considered of the animals that people have domesticated. Tellingly, for example, a recent overview of the archaeology of animals completely omits them, while nevertheless including the Muscovy duck (Cairina moschata), a tree-nesting bird kept by Pre-Columbian Native Americans, in its table of ‘major domestic animals’. Rarely seen and even more rarely eaten, donkeys are perhaps met with on foreign holidays or encountered as unusual companion animals, participants in school Christmas celebrations, or seaside attractions for small children.
Growth
Authors: Hanson Robin
Published: November 2020

How fast might an em economy grow? We have many reasons to expect an em economy to grow much faster than does our economy today. As mentioned in Chapter 13 , Competition section, the em economy should be more competitive in the sense of more aggressively and more easily replacing low-efficiency items and arrangements with higher-efficiency versions. Reduced product variety and spatial segmentation of markets help innovations to spread more quickly across the economy. Stronger urban concentration should also help promote innovation ( Carlino and Kerr 2014 ). The fact that more productive em work teams can be copied as a whole should make it much easier for more productive em firms and establishments to rapidly displace less productive firms and establishments. These factors allow the em economy to innovate more quickly. For a long time, most innovation, and most of the total value of innovation, has been associated with a great many small and context-dependent changes ( Sahal 1981 ). Most innovation has also long come from application and practice, rather than from “researchers” or “inventors” narrowly conceived. Most of the research that aids innovation is “applied” as opposed to “basic” research. Thus we expect most of this better and faster em innovation to consist of many small innovations that arise in the context of application and practice. Another reason to expect faster growth in an em economy is that ems depend more on computer technology. One might guess that a future very computer-centered economy improves at something closer to the recent rate at which computer technologies have improved. This suggests that the global em economy might double as fast as every year and a half, which is 10 times faster than today’s economic doubling time of about 15 years. Actually, there are plausible reasons to expect an em economy to grow even faster. The productive capacity of an economy comes from its capacity of inputs, such as land, labor, and capital of various sorts, and also from its level of “technology,” that is, the ways it has to convert inputs into useful outputs. Although there have been times and places where growth has been driven mainly by increases in inputs, most growth over the long run has come from better technology, broadly conceived.
Collaboration
Authors: Hanson Robin
Published: November 2020

How do rituals differ in an em world? Today, we use rituals such as graduations, marriages, retirement parties, and funerals to jointly and overtly affirm community values at key social transitions. However, if we use a broader sense of the term “ritual,” most social interactions and many apparently non-social processes are also rituals, wherein emotional energy becomes amplified as participants achieve a common focus of attention and act in ways that are finely synchronized and coordinated with each other ( Collins 2004 ). during rituals, synchronized feelings and body movements of people who are adjacent to one other become especially potent. Such group synchronization shows participants that they feel similarly to others in the group, and know each other well. people, things, and beliefs that are the mutual focus of attention in such rituals acquire added importance and emotional energy, and become able to increase the passion of subsequent rituals. The emotional energy that comes from a common focus of attention on synchronized actions has long influenced the frequency and structure of many forms of synchronized human activities, in dances, plays, movies, concerts, lectures, protests, freeways, business meetings, group recitations in schools, consumption of advertised products, and group songs that coordinate work in hunting, farming, sailing, armies, and factories. We expect ems to continue to show this tendency to prefer social situations where vivid awareness of finely synchronized actions can assure them of shared capacities and values. For example, similar to people today we expect ems to say hello and goodbye as they join and leave meetings, and to find reasons for frequent face-to-face meetings at work. Some examples of common overt rituals today are when the police stop a driver, when a waiter takes an order, when two sports teams battle in front of a crowd, and when an audience watches a movie together. In the industrial era, we have a substantially lower rate of such rituals than did our forager and farmer ancestors. For our ancestors, in contrast, it was more like having Christmas or Thanksgiving happen several times a month, with many smaller ceremonies happening several times a day (Collins 2004).
Introduction: The evolution of territorial identities in the English landscape
Authors: Rippon Stephen
Published: November 2020

This is a study of the territorial structures within which past communities managed their landscapes. Today, we live our lives within a complex hierarchy of administrative units that includes parishes, districts, counties, and nations, and while some of these are recent in origin, others are deeply rooted in the past: most parts of England, for example, still have counties that are direct successors to the shires recorded in Domesday and which still form the basis for our local government. These territorial entities are an important part of our history, giving communities a sense of place and identity, and this book will explore where this aspect of our landscape has come from: might county names such as Essex— meaning the ‘East Saxons’—suggest that they originated as early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and if so, what was the relationship between these kingdoms and the Romano-British civitates and Iron Age kingdoms that preceded them? The idea that the landscape all around us has a long and complex history is a familiar one. For a long time, however, continuity stretching back to the Roman period and beyond was thought to be rare. Archaeologists and historians have argued that once Britain ceased to be part of the Roman Empire, its economy collapsed, and it was not long before hordes of Angles and Saxons sailed across the North Sea and dispossessed the Britons of their land. This was thought to have marked the onset of the ‘dark ages’ before the flowering of a new era of civilization—the ‘Middle Ages’—a few centuries later. Although this was the view when Hoskins (1955) wrote his Making of the English Landscape, it is noteworthy that in the same year Finberg (1955) published a short paper speculating that there may have been considerable continuitywithin the landscape at Withington in Gloucestershire. Overall, however, while some Romanists saw a degree of overlap and continuity during the Anglo-Saxon colonization, most saw the fifth century as one of dramatic change reflected in the apparent desertion of most towns and villas, the collapse of market-based trade and manufacturing, and the introduction of entirely new forms of architecture, burial practice and material culture (see Esmonde Cleary 2014, 3 for a historiography).
The Romano-British urban and religious landscape
Authors: Rippon Stephen
Published: November 2020

There has been a long-standing tendency to divide Roman Britain into just two regions. This simplistic view goes back toHaverfield’s (1912) ‘civil’ and ‘military’ districts, and Fox’s (1932) ‘lowland’ and ‘upland’ zones, and the persistence of these binary characterizations contributes to the impression of homogeneity in Romano-British landscape character (Collingwood 1930; Frere 1967; Salway 1981, 4–5). Dark and Dark’s (1997) substitution of the term ‘villa landscape’ for ‘civil zone’, and ‘native landscape’ for ‘military zone’, simply reinforces this over-simplification. While there have been many discussions of local distinctiveness within the Romano-British landscape, this has all too often been within the context of modern counties (e.g. papers in Thomas 1966a), and Taylor’s (2007a) use of twenty-first century units of regional government was no better (his ‘South East’ region, for example, stretches from Kent to the foot of the Cotswold Hills and embraced regions of very different character in the Roman period). In An Imperial Possession Mattingly (2006) moves the debate on a long way, in discussing how three ‘communities’—military, civil (urban), and rural—interacted with each other in different regions, although his 621-page book, which is so rich in ideas, contains just fifteen very small-scale maps, reflecting how our understanding of regional variation in landscape character is not as well advanced as it is for the medieval period. The need to improve our understanding of regionality within Romano-British society across eastern England has recently been highlighted as a priority in the Research Framework for this region (Medlycott 2011b, 47); the following three chapters will hopefully go some way towards achieving that. The Roman Conquest brought about a transformation of lowland Britain as it was progressively drawn into the Roman world. One effect of this is an archaeological record that appears, at first sight, remarkably homogeneous, with the landscape apparently characterized by towns and villas, the economy seemingly dominated by market-based trade, and material culture increasingly using a relatively uniform repertoire of forms.
The native British
Authors: Rippon Stephen
Published: November 2020

By the fourth century AD, the landscape of Roman Britain was densely settled and archaeological surveys and excavations have consistently shown that most lowland areas supported farming communities, including on the heavier claylands (Smith et al. 2016). Thereafter the character of the archaeological record changes dramatically with the appearance of settlements, cemeteries, and material culture whose ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cultural affinities lay in northern Germany and southern Scandinavia (Chapters 8–9). All too often, however, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England is discussed in a way that implies that settlements characterized by Grubenhäuser and cemeteries furnished with Germanic grave goods were characteristic of the whole of eastern England (e.g. Welch 1992; Lucy 2000; Tipper 2004; Hamerow 2012), whereas detailed local studies have suggested that this was not the case. In areas such as Sussex (Welch 1983) and Lincolnshire (Green 2012) evidence for Anglo-Saxon colonization has only been found in certain parts of the landscape, and the potential reasons for ‘blank’ spots in the distribution of Anglo-Saxon settlement are complex: they may in part simply reflect areas where there has been less archaeological investigation, or that these areas were unattractive for settlement. There is, however, another possibility: that these distributions are not a record of where people were and were not living, but a reflection of how the cultural identity of early medieval communities varied from area to area, and that some of these identities are archaeologically less visible than others. There has long been speculation that at least some of the ‘blank areas’ in the distributions of Anglo-Saxon settlements and cemeteries reflect the places where native British populations remained in control of the landscape. West (1985, 168), for example, noted the lack of early Anglo-Saxon settlement on the East Anglian claylands, and speculated that this is where a substantial Romano- British population remained: ‘did they survive somehow, perhaps in a basically aceramic condition, or were they, in the main, drawn to the new settlements on the lighter soils to become slaves or some subordinate stratum of society, as indicated by later documentary evidence, or was the population drastically reduced by pestilence or genocide?’ (West 1985, 168).
How to Pay for it
Authors: Willetts David
Published: November 2020

Paying for university education has been one of the most acute and politically fraught challenges in public policy. Both the Blair government and the Coalition had some of their smallest Parliamentary majorities for votes on this issue, such are the emotions it arouses. It sparked violent protests in November 2010 and was seen as one of the issues boosting support for Jeremy Corbyn in the General Election of June 2017. It touches such a raw nerve because people worry that we are imposing costs on the younger generation which previous generations of young people did not have to bear. Having written a book myself about the importance of fairness between the generations I well understand why this matters so much. One can only tackle this anxiety if the new way of funding higher education is better for the younger generation than any likely alternative. When I was Opposition spokesman before 2010 I said that the test of any changes we brought in would be if they were in the interests of students and that is the test I tried to apply throughout my time as minister. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s higher education faced persistent financial crises. Higher education was one of the public services facing particularly rapid growth of demand. For the amount of public spending per student to be maintained there would have to be very large increases in total public spending on higher education. Expecting such big increases in spending for any programme was difficult enough. But at the same time higher education was not a political priority. Indeed this view was reinforced by universities. I would encounter protesters on university campuses demanding free higher education whilst inside the university’s own social scientists repeated the conventional wisdom that it was the early years that really mattered and the Vice Chancellor told me he could not do any better on access for disadvantaged students unless schools improved and that should be the priority. Moreover, as it is usually the quality of its research that makes a university’s reputation, pressures to maintain research funding were greater than for teaching.
Social landscapes
Authors: Brück Joanna
Published: November 2020

In 1960 a rock climber found a small Middle Bronze Age pot wedged in a cleft in the rock halfway down the eastern face of Crow’s Buttress, a granite outcrop on the southern edge of Dartmoor in Devon (Pettit 1974, 92). The Middle Bronze Age was a period during which extensive field systems were constructed on Dartmoor (Fleming 1988). As we shall see later in this chapter, these have often been thought to indicate the intensification of agriculture and an increasing concern to define land ownership in response to population pressure (e.g. Barrett 1980a; 1994, 148–9; Bradley 1984, 9; Yates 2007, 120–1; English 2013, 139–40). Such models imply the commodification of the natural world: the landscape is viewed primarily as a resource for economic exploitation. Yet this small pot calls such assumptions into question, for it can surely be best interpreted as an offering to spirit guardians or ancestors associated with a striking natural rock formation. This hints at a quite different way of engaging with and understanding the landscape. In this chapter we will explore the links between people and landscape, beginning with the monumental landscapes of the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age, moving then to consider what the appearance of field systems during the Middle and Late Bronze Age tells us about human–environment relationships during the later part of the period, and finally considering some of the ways in which animals were incorporated into the social worlds of Bronze Age communities. Funerary and ceremonial monuments of various sorts are the most eye-catching feature of the Early Bronze Age landscape and have dominated our interpretations of the period. By contrast, as we have seen in Chapter 4, settlement evidence of this date is relatively sparse. This, and recent isotope analyses of Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age inhumation burials (Jay et al. 2012; Parker Pearson et al. 2016), suggest a significant degree of residential mobility.
Behaviour/Experience
Authors: Swift Ellen
Published: November 2020

This chapter explores in depth the way in which the affordances of artefacts constrain or enable specific uses and/or experiences. In the first half of the chapter, we will consider a range of objects and materials from this perspective. We have seen from the previous chapter that evaluating use and behaviour from artefact affordances is not always a straightforward process. Affordances may suit a range of functions. Apparently functional features of artefacts may become redundant as the use of the artefact changes. Use of functional features can change even though the features themselves remain the same—for instance if they afford a range of functions. Aspects of artefact form may relate to task efficiency, rather than whether or not a task can be performed, and so may be ignored when quality of performance is less important. Any attempt to study behaviour through artefact design must engage with these issues, and I have chosen to do this mainly through careful selection of objects. Firstly, we can choose artefacts that performonly a very narrow range of functions in normative use, and in which system function uses may be identifiable through wear marks or changes to the artefact. Secondly, artefact forms can be selected that constrain or enforce particular behaviour, or affect experience in a predictable way. Evidence of affordances will also be studied alongside other types of evidence such as visual sources or contextual information. The objects chosen for investigation in this chapter are cone cups, drinking horns, spoons, strigils, styli, locks and keys (including key finger-rings), and dice. Most of these are artefacts that also exist in modern or more recent historical material culture, and while the benefits of this are obvious in terms of comparisons and an understanding of artefact features through direct experience of similar modern items, we will also need to be aware of any assumptions about the performance of artefacts that may be conditioned by modern perceptions of what an artefact is for, and how it can or should be used.
Understanding Minoan In-House Relationships on Late Bronze Age Crete
Authors: Driessen Jan
Published: November 2020

Houses, space, and architecture are ways through which identities and social relations are enacted and performed; they produce and support practices that themselves are needed to reproduce or generate identities and interpersonal associations. As archaeologists, we are especially interested in the ways static structures can be used to identify ever-changing social relations; and this chapter is an attempt to approach the architectural configurations and spatial organization of larger residential complexes of Minoan Crete more socially and to see what structured these (Ensor 2013). My aim is to advance our knowledge on the micro-scale of proximate interactions, in other words what the evidence is for in-house relationships. As such it may help in an eventual peopling of the past. For a house to become a home, more than an architectural form is needed. Hence the linkage of house and household and the need for a house to become a social unit, the place of reproduction, socialization, and the setting of primary social and economic dealings. In this sense, the house as a home is also a nexus of social and economic activities and hence achieves a political importance since its roles in production and consumption are pivotal to the amalgamated whole which is the community. He who rules the home, rules the community. The house is the society. Throughout the different periods of Minoan civilixation, houses are given great prominence and many of them are striking architectural creations, surprising because of their size, design, elaboration, and decoration, clear signs of the significance of houses in interpersonal relationships. They are unmistakably more than physical residences; they are also transcendent categories with a life of their own (Bloch 2010: 156–7). Houses stand for social groups and are symbolic foci, something also underlined by J. D. Schloen (2007) in his monograph The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East.
Psychiatry
Authors: McMullen Isabel
Published: November 2020

Mental health problems are estimated to affect one in four people each year in the UK, making mental illness one of the commonest presentations to GP surgeries, outpatient clinics, and Emergency Departments. Yet many doctors and medical students feel uncertain about how to approach patients with a psychiatric disorder. The key to becoming a good psychiatrist lies in the clinical interview. There are few physical signs or investigations that allow doctors to diagnose psychiatric illness, so a detailed history and mental state examination are important. As a psychiatrist, you are in the privileged position of having patients tell you their personal stories, and the skill is in listening attentively and asking relevant questions to help to clarify parts of the story. The best way to practise these techniques is to watch experienced clinicians at work and to interview patients yourself. Obviously diagnosis is important, so you need to be aware of the types of symptoms that fit with each type of disorder, as well as the medical conditions that may mimic psychiatric illness. Investigations may be necessary to rule out other diseases, and you need to be able to request these appropriately. Psychiatrists have access to a range of treatments—medical (e.g. antidepressants), psychological (e.g. cognitive behavioural therapy), and physical (e.g. electroconvulsive therapy)—and you need to know which ones to recommend. Most of these treatments are delivered in conjunction with the multidisciplinary team, so you should be clear about the roles of each team member. Finally, there is overlap between psychiatry and the law, which can raise interesting ethical issues. It is sometimes necessary to treat a person against their will, for the safety of that person or others, so you need to know about mental health law. Psychiatrists are also often requested to provide a second opinion in difficult capacity assessments.
Day surgery, preoperative assessment, gynaecology, urology, and plastics
Authors: Whymark Caroline , Junkin Ross , Ramsey Judith
Published: November 2020

To pass the written part of the FRCA, candidates must achieve the pass mark for the SAQs and the MCQ/ SBA papers combined. Therefore, doing particularly well in one paper, or one area, can compensate for another in which you have scored poorly. The 30 SBA questions is an area that candidates commonly find difficult. There is a feeling these questions are unjust and that it is impossible to second guess the examiners and choose the correct option. They feel further punished that four marks are awarded for each correct answer or lost for an incorrect choice. While this reflects the fact that four answers have been eliminated in the course of choosing the best answer, candidates often state it is an unfair ‘all or nothing’ way to mark these questions. They can commonly narrow the choice down to a final two options but report finding it difficult to then choose between them. They receive no credit having successfully eliminated three of the options and cite the SBA element as being the reason they failed the examination. These comments however are not supported by examination success data published by the RCoA. The pass rate for this paper was consistent at around 70% before and after the introduction of the SBA component in September 2011. We believe the concepts behind the SBAs are misunderstood by many. When asked to write a SBA question, candidates inevitably produce a five- part A to E multiple choice question but with only one correct answer. The finer points of SBA questions are lost among quickly written revision aids containing what the authors believe to be examination standard questions, when often they are not. Further, because SBAs are a relatively new element to the FRCA there is a limited bank of questions, and a highly restricted number in the public domain. Both these factors make practice of these questions difficult. Part of exam success is practice of the technique and question type in advance. We believe the practice of SBAs is an area to which candidates do not give enough attention.
Intensive care
Authors: Whymark Caroline , Junkin Ross , Ramsey Judith
Published: November 2020

To pass the written part of the FRCA, candidates must achieve the pass mark for the SAQs and the MCQ/ SBA papers combined. Therefore, doing particularly well in one paper, or one area, can compensate for another in which you have scored poorly. The 30 SBA questions is an area that candidates commonly find difficult. There is a feeling these questions are unjust and that it is impossible to second guess the examiners and choose the correct option. They feel further punished that four marks are awarded for each correct answer or lost for an incorrect choice. While this reflects the fact that four answers have been eliminated in the course of choosing the best answer, candidates often state it is an unfair ‘all or nothing’ way to mark these questions. They can commonly narrow the choice down to a final two options but report finding it difficult to then choose between them. They receive no credit having successfully eliminated three of the options and cite the SBA element as being the reason they failed the examination. These comments however are not supported by examination success data published by the RCoA. The pass rate for this paper was consistent at around 70% before and after the introduction of the SBA component in September 2011. We believe the concepts behind the SBAs are misunderstood by many. When asked to write a SBA question, candidates inevitably produce a five- part A to E multiple choice question but with only one correct answer. The finer points of SBA questions are lost among quickly written revision aids containing what the authors believe to be examination standard questions, when often they are not. Further, because SBAs are a relatively new element to the FRCA there is a limited bank of questions, and a highly restricted number in the public domain. Both these factors make practice of these questions difficult. Part of exam success is practice of the technique and question type in advance. We believe the practice of SBAs is an area to which candidates do not give enough attention.
Encountering Home: A Contemporary Archaeology of Homelessness
Authors: Singleton Courtney
Published: November 2020

On 17 September 2011 people flooded Zuccotti Park inManhattan’s Downtown Financial District to protest multinational corporations and major banking institutions. Protestors left their houses and established encampments in public parks in over a hundred cities across America to live in solidarity as the ‘99%’. The 99% were ready for conflict between citizen and state, public and private institutions, but they did not expect the conflict that erupted within the encampments between protestors and local homeless populations. Despite the fact that protestors were living ‘homeless’ for symbolic and political purposes, they had not anticipated how to handle the homeless communities who they actively displaced and engaged in the service of their politics. As they pitched their tents, strung up tarpaulins, established communal kitchens, and inflated blow-up mattresses the 99% encountered the already-present local homeless population: people who were both known and unfamiliar, but who were meant to remain hidden and invisible. Cities where the Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS) had a strong and quick start had more problems regarding homelessness than cities where the movement started later, but all Occupy protesters realized homelessness was an issue that had to be confronted (Ehrenreich 2011). Austin and Tampa, for example, used homelessness as the central organizing issue, one that could be easily grasped as a human circumstance with universal appeal. This was primarily because these cities were able to anticipate incidents that had arisen in New York, Denver, and Portland (see AP 2011; Nagourney 2011). Conflicts that first occurred in these cities allowed for later responses to be more proactive, and they subsequently positioned homelessness as a universalizing issue that everyone could rally behind (Ehrenreich 2011). In Denver, Portland, Boston, and New York City protestors expressed fear and apprehension towards the homeless, calling them ‘protest imposters’, ‘freeloaders’, and ‘rapists and gropers of females’ (Algar 2011; Huffington Post 2011a, 2011b; Occupy Wall Street 2011). One New York protestor stated that the homeless were ‘mentally ill and out-of-control’ (Algar 2011). The responses of the Occupy protesters at Zuccotti Park were rooted in a belief that there was a fundamental distinction between themselves and the homeless with whom they lived side-by-side and shared the same materials and spaces.
Conclusion: A Future for Urban Contemporary Archaeology
Authors: Ryzewski Krysta , McAtackney Laura
Published: November 2020

Historical, contemporary, and future-oriented urban identities are presently being challenged worldwide at an unprecedented pace and scale by the continuous influx of people into cities and the accompanying effects of deindustrialization, conflict, and social differentiation. Archaeology is unique in its capacity to contribute a materialist perspective that views recent and present-day struggles of cities as part of longer term cycles of urban life that include processes of decay, revitalization, and reclamation. The aim of this volume is to position contemporary archaeology in general, and studies of cities in particular, as central to the discipline of archaeology and as an inspiration for further interdisciplinary, materially engaged urban studies. In doing so the contributing authors collectively challenge prevailing approaches to cities. Whereas scholars have routinely conceptualized contemporary cities within the bounds of particular analytical categories, including cities as gendered, deindustrialized, global, or urban ecological units of study (see Low 1996 for an overview), the cities discussed in this volume do not fit neatly into these individual analytical units, nor do they exist outside the influence of capitalist policies or institutions (Harvey 2012: xvii). They are instead recognized by the authors as operating within increasingly globalized systems, but also, following Jane Jacobs’ concept of open cities (2011), as places that are full of alternative possibilities. Rather than adhering to particular classifications of cities, the volume’s contributions are intentionally broad and attentive to the dynamics of the local and everyday in specific urban places—the politics, people, interventions, and materialities of specific urban places and the ways in which these dynamics operate across conceptual categories, temporal boundaries, and spatial terrain. Contemporary Archaeology and the City consciously employs a critical, materially engaged perspective that considers urban centres as both discrete and networked entities that are interrelated with places beyond geopolitical city limits. While many cities have characters formed from their vibrancy and centrality, their successful functioning often also relies upon the exploitation and even ruination of peripheral and rural hinterlands. The preceding chapters are original contributions inspired by the fieldwork of archaeologists who work in Europe, North America, Africa, Australia, and Western Asia. They incorporate a diversity of perspectives from across contemporary archaeology and beyond in responding to very different national, social, institutional, and cultural contexts.
How are SJT Questions Created?
Authors: Metcalfe David , Dev Harveer
Published: November 2020

The SJT questions were created following the professional attributes identified from the FY1 job analysis. Questions were written by volunteers at a series of dedicated workshops. The volunteers were not all doctors but should have been familiar with the FY1 role and have worked with junior doctors within the previous two years. The ISFP Project Group employed 89 people to write SJT questions, of whom 69 (77.5%) were senior doctors, two (2.2%) were lay representatives, and the remainder were undeclared. In terms of background, 59 (66.3%) were from a range of acute specialties and 12 (13.5%) from community specialties. This team created a bank of 453 possible questions. These were scrutinized by a team of psychologists who accepted 360 questions as passing this initial stage. A select few writers were asked to moderate all questions to ensure that scenarios were realistic and the terminology was in use across the UK. This group eliminated additional questions, leaving a total of 306. A series of focus groups was then held with foundation doctors who scrutinized the test instructions and up to 20 questions each. They proposed a number of amendments and whittled down the total question bank to 275 items. Once a question bank was established, it was trialled using a panel of subject ‘experts’, i.e. people with similar qualifications to the question writers. Questions survived this process if they achieved a satisfactory level of concordance, i.e. enough experts independently arrived at the same answer under test conditions. A total of 200 questions went forward to be used in the SJT pilots. The SJT model underwent two pilots. The second and larger of these took place in 13 UK medical schools, involving 639 final- year students. Students reported that the content seemed relevant to the Foundation Programme (85% agreed) and that the questions were fair (73.3%). The reasons for understanding how questions are created are to appreciate the following: ● A lot of thought has gone into every question. There should be no ambiguities (unless intended) or ‘tricks’. ● They are written (largely) by senior doctors who are presumably interested in medical training and development.
Coping with Pressure
Authors: Metcalfe David , Dev Harveer
Published: November 2020

The Foundation Programme is tough. New doctors have to cope with taking responsibility for patients for the first time and managing the logistical difficulties that inevitably face those working in a complex environment. They often have to balance multiple competing priorities. Perhaps computed tomography (CT) scans need to be requested by 9.30 a.m. if they are to be scheduled for the same day, Mrs A has chest pain, Mr B is an outlier on a distant ward and has become acutely short of breath, and Mr C’s relatives are angry because they have been waiting to speak to a doctor for an hour. You are part- way through taking blood and have three bleeps to answer (all potentially important but conferring new tasks), and your consultant needs to complete the ward round before her clinic starts . . . This would not be a remarkable day by any means. It can be difficult to balance these responsibilities and do so without cutting corners. Criticism is inevitable as it is rarely possible to keep everyone happy all of the time. Questions within this section will explore your resilience and ability to work under pressure. Through your responses, you will need to demonstrate a willingness to remain flexible, manage ambiguity, and adapt to changing circumstances. The ability to remain calm while handling stressful situations arising with patients, relatives, and colleagues is of the utmost importance. Problems must be resolved directly but may require a diplomatic approach to avoid conflict. It is therefore important to speak to others respectfully, seek help early on, and remain aware of your own limitations. There is growing recognition that such pressures can have long- term health implications for junior doctors. You must be aware of threats to your own health, and the British Medical Association (BMA) has reiterated that you have a duty to ensure that your ‘health problems do not affect patient care’. Informal (so- called ‘corridor’) consultations are discouraged, and Good Medical Practice (2013) is clear that ‘you must, wherever possible avoid providing medical care to yourself ’.