This work offers a unique contribution to gender and Scottish history breaking new ground on several fronts: there is no history of inter-war women in Scotland, very little labour or popular political history and virtually nothing published on women, the home and family. This book is a history of women in the period which integrates class and gender history as well as linking the public and private spheres. Using a gendered approach to history it transforms and shifts our knowledge of the Scottish past, unearthing the previously unexplored role which women played in inter-war socialist politics, the General Strike and popular political protest. It re-evaluates these areas and demonstrates the ways in which gender shaped the experience of class and class struggle. Importantly, the book also explores the links between the public and private spheres and addresses the concept of masculinity as well as femininity and pays particular reference to domestic violence. The strength of the book is the ways in which it illuminates the complex interconnections of culture and economic and social structure. Although the research is based on Scottish evidence, it also uses material to address key debates in gender history and labour history which have wider relevance and will appeal to gender historians, labour historians and social and cultural historians as well as social scientists.

Iterative learning control (ILC) has its origins in the control of processes that perform a task repetitively with a view to improving accuracy from trial to trial by using information from previous executions of the task. This brief shows how a classic application of this technique - trajectory following in robots - can be extended to neurological rehabilitation after stroke. Regaining upper limb movement is an important step in a return to independence after stroke, but the prognosis for such recovery has remained poor. Rehabilitation robotics provides the opportunity for repetitive task-oriented movement practice reflecting the importance of such intense practice demonstrated by conventional therapeutic research and motor learning theory. Until now this technique has not allowed feedback from one practice repetition to influence the next, also implicated as an important factor in therapy. The authors demonstrate how ILC can be used to adjust external functional electrical stimulation of patients' muscles while they are repeatedly performing a task in response to the known effects of stimulation in previous repetitions. As the motor nerves and muscles of the arm reaquire the ability to convert an intention to move into a motion of accurate trajectory, force and rapidity, initially intense external stimulation can now be scaled back progressively until the fullest possible independence of movement is achieved.