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This chapter explores the role that birdwatching plays in The Archers. It demonstrates some significant similarities between the way that birdwatching is portrayed in present-day Ambridge, and the way it was presented in both fictional and non-fictional literature of the 1940s. These similarities suggest that birdwatching in Ambridge is an activity that tends to perpetuate traditional class and gender divisions. Particularly in terms of gender, this is a surprising discovery, given the many strong female characters in the show, and suggests that cultural assumptions about gender and birdwatching run deep in UK society today. The chapter warns that a failure to recognise these assumptions not only hampers the progress of women who aspire to be taken seriously as ornithologists, but also risks reinforcing dualistic thinking about humans and nature at a time when the environmental crisis makes it more important than ever to recognise the ecological interconnectedness of human and nonhuman worlds. However, the recent development of Kirsty Miller’s storyline, in which she is rediscovering her earlier love of the natural world, not only offers hope of a shift away from this traditional bias but also opens a space for a more nuanced examination of the importance of birds in human–nature relations.

A bi-level programming approach has been used to tackle an area traffic control optimisation problem subject to user equilibrium traffic flows. In the upper level problem, the signal timing plan for coordinated fixed time control has been defined. In the lower level problem, user equilibrium traffic assignment obeying Wardrop's first principle has been formulated as a variational inequality problem. Mathematical expressions for various components of the performance index in the upper level problem and the average delay in the lower level problem have been derived and reported (Chiou 1997a). A mixed search procedure has been proposed as the solution method to the bi-level problem and a range of numerical tests have been carried out (Chiou 1997b, 1998a,b). In this paper, further numerical tests are performed on Allsop and Charlesworth's (1977) road network in which various traffic loads are taken into account. Effectiveness in terms of the robustness and reliability of the mixed search procedure in congested and uncongested road networks is thus investigated further. Comparisons of the performance index resulting from the mixed search procedure and that of mutually consistent TRANSYT-optimal signal settings and traffic flows are made for the congested road network.

This chapter provides an extensive review of literature on the interaction between and interdependence of informal and formal working practices in various workplace settings. The aim of the chapter is to elucidate the organisational, managerial, human relations and social factors that give rise to informal work practices and strategies, on the shop-floor not only at workers and work group levels but also at supervisory and managerial levels. This chapter helps the reader to understand the informal work practice of making a plan (planisa) in a deep-level mining workplace.