Subjects or Citizens? India,Pakistan and the 1948 British Nationality Act

Independence in the case of British India occurred at relatively short notice in August 1947, but tying up the loose ends of empire stretched over years. Under these circumstances, the realignment of subjecthood and citizenship necessitated by decolonisation was protracted, and raised complex questions about identity in both the new states of India and Pakistan and the former imperial power itself. This article thus takes as its focus the drawn-out process of disengagement that followed formal independence in relation to one case study: the various ways in which Britain sought to square the working of its 1948 Nationality Act with Indian and Pakistani citizenship legislation that took shape in the 1950s. India and Pakistan faced the common challenge of establishing who now belonged within their new borders. Britain likewise was forced to recalibrate its ideas about nationality and think afresh about the rights of its subjects in view of the new sets of relationships that now linked colonies, old dominions and the ‘mother country’ within the Commonwealth. In practice, applying the 1948 Act's provisions in relation to India and Pakistan became infused with anxieties about ‘race’, which surfaced repeatedly as British officials in London, Delhi, Karachi and consulates around the world sought to manage its operation to suit British interests.     

Estimation of Vertical Floor Displacement Using a Wavelet De-Noising Method

The horizontal response of structural and nonstructural systems during seismic events has been studied for a long time. However, the effect of the vertical response of floors on building contents and nonstructural systems has still remained a topic of concern. A wavelet de-noising method along with the experimental data obtained from a full-scale test at E-Defense is used to estimate the vertical floor displacement of a five-story steel moment frame building in base-isolated and fixed-base configurations. Vertical displacements of slabs and beams are calculated from the experimental data and formulated based on their out-of-plane dominant frequencies. A curve fitting approach is then carried out to estimate vertical displacements at floors and stories. In these tests, partition wall damage such as buckling of studs occurred at slab displacements of about 1 in.     

The Max-Min-Min Principle of Product Differentiation

We analyze two and three-dimensional variants of Hotelling's model of differentiated products. In our setup, consumers can place different importances on each product attribute; these are measured by weights on the disutility of distance in each dimension. Two firms play a two-stage game; they choose locations in stage 1 and prices in stage 2. We seek subgame-perfect equilibria. We find that all such equilibria have maximal differentiation in one dimension only; in all other dimensions they have minimum differentiation. An equilibrium with maximal differentiation in a certain dimension occurs when consumers place sufficient importance (weight) on that attribute. Thus, depending on the importance consumers place on each attribute, in two dimensions there is a max-min equilibrium, a min-max equilibrium, or both. In three dimensions, depending on the weights, there can be a max-min-min equilibrium, a min-max-min equilibrium, a min-min-max equilibrium, any two of these, or all three.