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A team-taught interdisciplinary undergraduate unit in Sustainable Development has been developed and run over the past two years at the University of Bristol. This has been a unique initiative for this university to take. As in most other research-intensive higher education institutions, teaching generally follows rather traditional disciplinary conventions, operating within departmental bounds. The initiative was unusual - and indeed ambitious - enough to gain the Higher Education Environmental Performance Improvement (HEEPI) Green Gown Award in teaching for 2007 (HEEPI is a project supported by the Higher Education Founding Council for England; http://www.heepi.org.uk/green_gown_awards.htm). There are both challenges and pleasures in designing and delivering a team-taught unit in a traditional university setting. This experience is outlined and evaluated here, giving consideration to both the practical and the more fundamentally philosophical issues encountered in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1909 Parker Smith showed that the ratio of seats won by the two major parties in Britain was close to the cube of the ratio of their votes. Taagepera and Shugart argue, wrongly, that a fractal electoral map implies this. In fact, their premises imply that the seats' ratio will be the votes' ratio to the power of √3, not 3. However, in the six countries we examine, the figure is between 2 and 3. This implies that the electoral map is nonfractal, political allegiances becoming less 'clustered' as you move from a macro to a micro scale. Taking the United Kingdom, we ask if this is a result of the geographical pattern of income distribution, and find that this is even further away from fractality than is voting. This fits the well-known 'neighbourhood effect' whereby poor (rich) people in rich (poor) constituencies vote as if richer (poorer) than they really are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to enrich our understanding of the history and substance of cybernetics. It reviews the work of three British cyberneticians — W. Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask — paying attention particularly to the materiality of their practice — the strange and fascinating devices and systems that were at the heart of their work — and to the worldly projects they pursued — scientific, technological, artistic, organizational, political and spiritual. Connections are drawn between cybernetics and recent theoretical work in science and technology studies, in the hope of illuminating key features of both. The paper concludes by suggesting that the antidisciplinary impulse of contemporary science studies might find inspiration in the work of cyberneticians — that theory does not have to remain confined to the realm of theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study that explained the cumulative exploration in the Continental Shelf of Great Britain. Contention that prices and taxes determine exploration effort; Information from a model of oil extraction and exploitation developed in 1990; Lists of firms included in the study; Year when data from the firms were collected; Economic variables that made an impact in exploration decision.