People, Places and Policy Jones, Martin; Orford, Scott; Macfarlane, Victoria
2016, 20150827, 2015, 2015-08-27, 2015-08-24
eBook
Odprti dostop
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license.
Set within the context ...of UK devolution and constitutional change, People, Places and Policy offers important and interesting insights into 'place-making' and 'locality-making' in contemporary Wales. Combining policy research with policy-maker and stakeholder interviews at various spatial scales (local, regional, national), it examines the historical processes and working practices that have produced the complex political geography of Wales.
This book looks at the economic, social and political geographies of Wales, which in the context of devolution and public service governance are hotly debated. It offers a novel 'new localities' theoretical framework for capturing the dynamics of locality-making, to go beyond the obsession with boundaries and coterminous geographies expressed by policy-makers and politicians. Three localities - Heads of the Valleys (north of Cardiff), central and west coast regions (Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and the former district of Montgomeryshire in Powys) and the A55 corridor (from Wrexham to Holyhead) - are discussed in detail to illustrate this and also reveal the geographical tensions of devolution in contemporary Wales.
This book is an original statement on the making of contemporary Wales from the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD) researchers. It deploys a novel 'new localities' theoretical framework and innovative mapping techniques to represent spatial patterns in data. This allows the timely uncovering of both unbounded and fuzzy relational policy geographies, and the more bounded administrative concerns, which come together to produce and reproduce over time Wales' regional geography.
English Roman Catholic women's congregations are an enigma of
nineteenth-century social history. Over ten thousand nuns and
sisters, establishing and managing significant Catholic
educational, health ...care and social welfare institutions in England
and Wales, have virtually disappeared from history. Despite their
exclusion from historical texts, these women featured prominently
in the public and private sphere. Intertwining the complexities of
class with the notion of ethnicity, Contested identities examines
the relationship between English and Irish-born sisters. This study
is relevant not only to understanding women religious and
Catholicism in nineteenth-century England and Wales, but also to
our understanding of the role of women in the public and private
sphere, dealing with issues still resonant today. Contributing to
the larger story of the agency of nineteenth-century women and the
broader transformation of English society, this book will appeal to
scholars and students of social, cultural, gender and religious
history.
► Uncertainty in observed data can influence the assessment of model performance. ► The assessment of model performance using spatial pattern comparisons should be avoided where possible. ► A ...probabilistic treatment of observed data should be used to gain a more holistic understanding of flood risk.
The performance of flood inundation models is often assessed using satellite observed data; however, these data have inherent uncertainty. In this study we determine the patterns of uncertainty in an ERS-2 SAR image of flooding on the River Dee, UK and, using LISFLOOD-FP, evaluate how this uncertainty can influence the assessment of flood inundation model performance. The flood outline is intersected with high resolution LiDAR topographic data to extract water levels at the flood margin, and to estimate patterns of uncertainty the gauged water levels are used to create a reference water surface slope for comparison with the satellite-derived water levels. We find the residuals between the satellite data points and the reference line to be spatially clustered.
A new method of evaluating model performance is developed to test the impact of this spatial dependency on model calibration. This method uses multiple random subsamples of the water surface elevation points that have no significant spatial dependency; tested for using Moran’s I. LISFLOOD-FP is then calibrated using conventional binary pattern matching and water elevation comparison both with and without spatial dependency. It is shown that model calibration carried out using pattern matching is negatively influenced by spatial dependency in the data. By contrast, calibration using water elevations produces realistic calibrated optimum friction parameters even when spatial dependency is present. Accounting for spatial dependency reduces the estimated modelled error and gives an identical result to calibration using spatially dependent data; it also has the advantage of being a statistically robust assessment of model performance in which we can have more confidence. Further, by using the variations found in the subsamples of the observed data it is possible to assess how the noisiness in these data affects our understanding of flood risk. This has highlighted the requirement for a probabilistic treatment of observed data, and using multiple subsamples is one way of achieving this.
The frictional influence of the seabed on the tidal flow in shelf seas and estuaries is usually modelled via a prescribed, spatially/temporally invariant drag coefficient. In practice, the seabed ...exhibits considerable variability, particularly spatially, that should in principle be included in simulations. Local variations in the seabed roughness (ks) alter the flow strength and, hence, local sediment transport rates. The effect of using a spatially/temporally varying ks is assessed here with reference to a tidal channel (Menai Strait, N. Wales) in which the variability of the bedforms has been monitored using multi-beam surveying. The channel not only exhibits strong tidal flow, but also a residual induced flow that is used here as diagnostic to assess various bed roughness formulations tested in a Telemac model. Tidal simulations have been carried out with both constant and temporally/spatially variable ks, and the predicted residual flow is shown to be sensitive to these representations. For a mean spring-neap (SN) cycle with variable ks, the average residual flow is calculated to be 525m3s−1, consistent with observations. This residual flow can be recovered using imposed, constant values of ks in the range 0.15m to 0.3m. The results suggest that the overall, effective roughness of the seabed is less than half of the maximum local roughness due to the dunes in mid-channel, but more than the spatially-averaged ks value in the channel as a whole by about 50%. Simulations carried out with an M2-alone tide using variable ks produce a somewhat smaller (by 7%) residual flow of 491m3s−1. The use of an ‘equivalent M2’ tide of amplitude enhanced by 7.3% reconciles these estimates. The main contribution to ks is made by dunes which are modelled using Van Rijn's (2007) formulation subject to an additional ‘history effect’. The modelled ks is found to equal approximately the observed height of the dunes along mid-channel transects rather than half the height as expected. This is attributed to the non-equilibrium nature of the bedforms in the reversing tidal flow, which exhibited shorter wavelength and more symmetrical profiles than dunes in steady flow.
•Flow in tidal channel modelled with temporally/spatially varying bed roughness•Comparisons made between Telemac simulations using variable and fixed bed roughness•Residual flow in channel used as diagnostic to assess different roughness formulations•New ‘history effect’ applied in prediction of dune roughness in reversing tidal flow•Predicted bed roughness found to equal approximately dune height on site
Gresford Williamson, Stanley
1998., 19990501, 1999, 1999-05-01
eBook
The worst disaster of the North Wales coalfield – one of the worst in the history of the British mining industry – occurred in 1934, killing 256 men and devastating a small community. Stanley ...Williamson’s account draws on his own interviews with the bereaved and those involved in the rescue, as well as the reports of the subsequent inquiry and the records of the North Wales Miners’ Association. Williamson covers the inquiry, and the important issues it raised, in detail and charts the way in which Sir Stafford Cripps, representing the North Wales miners, launched an attack on the whole social and industrial system of which the industry was a part.
This article proposes to study the rebirth of a nation, Wales, during the Edwardian years, by first considering the deep changes affecting the country, be they economic, social and cultural, giving ...it a new lease of life. Such changes led to a new prominence of the symbols and institutions of Welsh nationhood, and successes, especially in sport. All these areas of dominance owed their essence to politics, notably the Liberal domination, that came to be questioned.
This paper aims to study how the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the weaknesses of the Welsh NHS and more generally public health provision, as its fragmented organisation led to confusing messages ...from the Welsh and British governments being given just to Welsh people, hence revealing the incoherences of the United Kingdom’s constitutional settlement. Since health is a devolved matter, it will first be necessary to study how the Welsh government handled the epidemic.
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