Spotlight on the traveller: Individual experiences of routine journeys

All travel generates a range of feelings, responses and emotions that can be stimulated by many factors but recovering such responses to everyday travel in the past is difficult. Few conventional sources provide information on the travellers’ experiences of movement and, not surprisingly, most transport histories focus mainly on matters of infrastructure, usage, and technological change. In contrast, contemporary mobilities studies that can talk directly to those who travel do explore the lived experiences of mobility in some detail. This paper shows how, by using a range of life writing drawn from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, it is possible to begin to recover at least some of the feelings and responses that past travellers experienced. I argue that such an approach provides an important additional perspective to research in transport history.

Making the most of world talent for science? The Nobel Prize and Fields Medal experience

Opportunities in science largely affect the accumulation of scientific knowledge and, therefore, technological change. However, there is little evidence of how much of people’s talent is actually wasted. Here we focus on scientists with the highest performance, the recipients of the Nobel Prize and Fields Medal. We found that the average age of scientists at the time of the breakthrough was higher for researchers from less developed countries. Moreover, individual opportunities in the world were extremely unequal by country of birth, gender significantly conditioned any participation in research, and the probability of becoming a top researcher more than doubled for individuals with parents belonging to the most favoured occupational categories. Thus, inequality of opportunity in science at the highest level was higher than in sports excellence (Olympic medals) and educational attainment. These findings would not be so negative if opportunities in science at the highest level had increased over time. Contrary to the expectations, our results show that opportunities in science, in contrast with humanities, have stagnated.

Measuring Technological Change through an Extended Structural Decomposition Analysis: An Application to EU-28 Primary Sectors (2010–2015)

This paper addresses the input–output structural decomposition for an economic analysis. The objective is to determine the causes of changes in production in these sectors with a particular focus on disaggregating the technological change by distribution factors associated with a specific normalization of the Leontief inverse. In calculating the net multipliers, an attempt was made to exclude each sectors’ own consumption in a satisfactory manner. However, the treatment of own consumption when introducing a time factor requires further investigation to avoid questionable measurements. An empirical application is presented regarding agriculture, forestry, and fishing sectors in six EU-28 countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) over the 2010–2015 period. In general, a typical characteristic of primary sectors is the accumulation of a significant amount of their own consumption, facilitated by the design of their own symmetric accounting methods. Therefore, attention is focused on these sectors so as to reveal possible analysis techniques that will provide nuance or validate existing techniques.