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This economic, social and cultural analysis of the nature and variety of production and consumption activities in households in Kent and Cornwall yields important new insights on the transition to capitalism in England.

Clark's claims about the scale of English agricultural output from the 1200s to the 1860s flout historical and geographical reality. His income-based estimates start with the daily real wages of adult males and assume that days worked per year were constant. Those advanced in British economic growth make no such assumption and instead are built up from the output side. They correlate better with population trends and are consistent with an economy slowly growing and becoming richer. Clark's denial that such growth occurred, his assertion that substantially more land must have been under arable cultivation, his belief that conditions of full employment invariably prevailed in the countryside at harvest time, his concern that the wage bill would have exceeded the value of output in British economic growth, his refusal to consider the possibility that the working year was of variable length, and his assertion that output per acre must have been equalized across arable and pasture are all shown to be figments of his 'Malthus delusion'.

The levels of physical activity and knowledge about postures and practices in carpentry students have not been extensively investigated. This study will inform occupational health practitioners about carpentry students’ physical activity levels and workplace practices, so that back care and injury prevention education can be included in the curriculum. Data were collected from 51 participants using a questionnaire that asked about levels of physical activity and knowledge and practice for injury prevention. On average 6.4 hours of physical activity was performed weekly outside of work and/or study hours by 86% of participants. Most participants identified components of a safe lifting technique (‘bend knees’ 76%; ‘back straight’ 45%). They reported that heavy loads were frequently lifted (51% often/always lifted weights of 20–30kg independently and 69% rarely using the assistance of a co-worker or lifting device). Although participants had a basic knowledge of common lifting strategies for back care and injury prevention, weights lifted independently were frequently over the deemed safe lifting level. The findings indicate that carpentry students have a basic knowledge of injury prevention and lifting techniques but do not necessarily implement their knowledge into practice.

This paper makes a case for re-establishing the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a crucial period of agricultural advance in England worthy of the description 'agricultural revolution'. It therefore counters the stream of claims made since the 1960s that developments in earlier centuries were of more significance. The two key indicators of progress are taken to be, first, an unprecedented increase in agricultural output brought about by an equally unprecedented increase in land productivity, and, second, an unprecedented increase in labour productivity which was a necessary corollary to industrialization. New evidence is presented to demonstrate that these changes were mainly a feature of the period from 1750, and, although the seventeenth century was not devoid of developments in agricultural technology, it was not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth that these and other developments came to fruition in an 'agricultural revolution'.

We introduce the Romu family of pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs) which combines the nonlinear operation of rotation with the linear operations of multiplication and (optionally) addition. Compared to conventional linear-only PRNGs, this mixture of linear and nonlinear operations achieves a greater degree of randomness using the same number of arithmetic operations. Or equivalently, it achieves the same randomness with fewer operations, resulting in higher speed. The statistical properties of these generators are strong, as they pass BigCrush and PractRand -- the most stringent test suites available. In addition, Romu generators take maximum advantage of instruction-level parallelism in modern superscalar processors, giving them an output latency of zero clock-cycles when inlined, thus adding no delay to an application. Scaled-down versions of these generators can be created and tested, enabling one to estimate the maximum number of values the full-size generators can supply before their randomness declines, ensuring the success of large jobs. Such capacity-estimates are rare for conventional PRNGs. A linear PRNG has a single cycle of states of known length comprising almost all possible states. However, a Romu generator computes pseudo-random permutations of those states, creating multiple cycles with pseudo-random lengths which cannot be determined by theory. But the ease of creating state-sizes of 128 or more bits allows (1) short cycles to be constrained to vanishingly low probabilities, and (2) thousands of parallel streams to be created having infinitesimal probabilities of overlap.

Annual estimates of GDP constructed from the output side are used to analyse British business cycles between 1270 and 1870. After c.1670 the scale of recessions tended to diminish as the economy grew, diversified and became more resilient. Until c.1730, business cycles were driven largely by agricultural fluctuations, but shocks to industry and commerce became more important over time as the structure of the economy changed. A number of severe recessions can be identified, associated with harvest failures, disease outbreaks, wars and disruptions to commerce. Monetary and financial factors also played a role in some of these severe recessions.