Britain’s House of Commons and House of Lords Libraries have a lengthy history beginning with small collections of books and papers in the eighteenth century and evolving into today’s large organizations offering a sophisticated range of services. The central theme of this article is the conservatism of these institutions over most of their history, with the creation of modern library facilitie...

We present a novel method for estimating 3-D positions of near light sources by using highlights on the outside and inside of a single clear hollow sphere. Conventionally, the positions of near light sources have been estimated by using observed highlights on multiple reference objects, e.g. mirror balls.

We describe a classifier which determines the rhetorical status of sentences in texts from a corpus of judgments of the UK House of Lords. Our summarisation system is based on the work of Teufel and Moens where sentences are classified for rhetorical status to aid sentence selection. We experiment with a variety of linguistic features with results comparable to Teufel and Moens, thereby demonst...

This document is a joint submission by the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences to the current House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee enquiry into the science behind the arguments over the use of cannabis and its derivatives for medical and recreational purposes. It has been endorsed by the Council of the Royal Society and by the Council of the Academy of Medical Sc...

Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield's Mind Change grew out of controversial statements she made as a member of the UK House of Lords. In a 2009 debate about websites, Greenfield recounts, “I decided to offer a perspective through the prism of neuroscience... the human brain adapts to the environment and the environment is changing in an unprecedented way, so the brain may also be changing in an unp...

The paper develops the idea of configuration of ownership to distinguish three primary political ideologies: (classical) liberalism, conservatism, and leftism. The liberal configuration is atomistic in its recognition of owners and ownership claims; it conforms closely to Adam Smith’s “commutative justice,” which Smith represented as a sort of social grammar. The conservative configuration also...