A Contrastive Pragmatics Study of Invitations in British English and Japanese

This study offers a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective on invitations. It explores invitation sequences in a symmetrical invitation-refusal situation, performed by 20 female native speakers of British English and 20 female native speakers of Japanese, from a discursive approach using role plays. The qualitative analysis of the data obtained from the adapted version of conversation analysis revealed some similarities and differences in turn designs of the English and the Japanese invitations. Although pre-sequences were highly frequent in the English data, they were more so in the Japanese data. The analysis of the linguistic formats of the invitations in the two sets of data revealed that an approach to handle uncertainty seen in the cases where the invitation was initiated with a preface differed - the English speakers used a syntactic solution whereas the Japanese speakers used a sequential solution. These findings highlight the importance of analysing speech acts in situated interactions

Production of mortar with calcined alum sludge as partial cement replacement

Alum sludge is a largely generated and disposed waste from water treatment plants. This study aimed to produce mortar using alum sludge calcined at different temperatures (600 – 900 ºC). After the optimal calcination temperature was selected, the calcined alum sludge was used to replace 5, 10, and 15 % of cement by mass in mortar. The performance of the mortars was evaluated based on the workability, compressive strength, flexural strength, porosity, and percentage of water absorption. Mortars with alum sludge calcined at 800 ºC had the highest strength as compared to the other temperatures. The mechanical strength of mortars reduced while the porosity and percentage of water absorbed increased with increasing calcined alum sludge content. Although replacing 5 % of cement with calcined alum sludge would reduce the mechanical strengths by 13 – 15 %, it was still acceptable as it had negligible influence on the porosity and water absorption value of the mortar. In short, the partial substitution of cement with calcined alum sludge should be limited within 5 % to maintain the performance of the mortar

Integrating DNA and Chemical Profiling to Trace Illicit Drug Manufacture and Distribution

Illicit drug materials represent a valuable but underutilized source of forensic intelligence. While chemical profiling is routinely used to trace drug composition and origin, the recovery of trace DNA offers the potential to link these substances directly to individuals involved in their manufacture and distribution. This study evaluates the forensic utility of integrating DNA profiling with chemical analysis to improve source attribution across different drug formulations. Pharmaceutical-grade simulants in the form of capsules, tablets, and powders were handled by volunteers under controlled deposition scenarios. DNA was recovered using moistened cotton swabs, extracted via automated silica-based workflows, and analyzed using STR profiling. In parallel, chemical fingerprints were generated through GC-MS and LC-MS, with sample classification based on retention time and mass spectral data. Capsules yielded the highest DNA recovery (median: 310 pg), followed by tablets (230 pg) and powders (18 pg), with single-source STR profiles obtained in over 85% of capsule and tablet cases. Chemical profiling achieved 85% accuracy for capsules, 78% for tablets, and 65% for powders. When integrated, the combined approach significantly outperformed individual methods, achieving classification accuracies of 97% for capsules, 85% for tablets, and 72% for powders (p < 0.01). These findings demonstrate the enhanced evidentiary value of dual profiling, particularly in cases involving degraded or limited DNA. The proposed framework supports a more comprehensive forensic strategy, enabling biological and chemical linkage of drug materials to persons of interest and manufacturing sources. This integrative approach offers critical advantages for law enforcement and prosecution in disrupting drug trafficking networks

Fighting Jim Crow in Lancashire: Remembering the Battle of Bamber Bridge 1943-2023

In June 1943, African American troops based in the UK village of Bamber Bridge mutinied against the Jim Crow segregation conditions imposed in the European theatre of World War II and found support from local residents. Following international news coverage of the events held in Lancashire to mark the 80th anniversary of the battle in June 2023, this commemorative booklet honours their joint fight against racism. It features historical reflections on the conflict, a map of key locations and pictures of memorabilia from the battle, extracts from the 1943 and 1944 court martial records, photos from the commemorations and ceremonies, insights from writers and directors of dramatic recreations of the mutiny, and a DVD and transcript of the documentary Community Memories of the Battle of Bamber Bridge. Scholars at the Institute for Black Atlantic Research at the University of Central Lancashire have produced this booklet in collaboration with Preston Black History Group, South Ribble Borough Council, StudioCanal, the US Embassy in London, the UK Ministry of Defence, and the US Defense Department

Swiss young people’s experience of living with parental intimate partner violence and other adversities

In Switzerland, approximately one in five children experience intimate partner violence (IPV) in their parents’ relationship. The aim of this article is to discover what it means to grow up in a home with IPV, so that professionals understand this experience from children’s perspectives. In 2022, we conducted 20 individual semi-structured interviews with adolescents and young adults who had lived with parental IPV while minors and whose parent had attended a Swiss clinical forensic service as a consequence of IPV. Semi-structured interviews, supported by the use of life history calendars, covered all major areas of their life since birth. A thematic analysis was carried out on the interview transcripts. As well as physical violence, participants identified psychological, sexual and economic IPV. Their experience was usually measured in years. They described being very involved during and around acute IPV events, physically and emotionally and took an active role in protecting their victimized parents, siblings, and themselves. Multiple victimizations occurred for most of them, in and out of the home and included direct violence from the IPV perpetrator and school bullying. Other adverse childhood events (e.g., alcohol abuse, parental mental illness) were frequently reported. Children are not mere witnesses but victims who demonstrate agency in the context of IPV. Their situation is made more complex by other victimizations and adversities. Recommendations are made in terms of detection, screening and intervention

Tales of the Old Church of Longmeanygate

In 1973, the Taylor family of 222 Longmeanygate on the outskirts of Leyland joined the Saint Pius V Association under the Superiorship of Father Peter Morgan and funded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Mr Derrick Taylor and Mrs Irene Mary Taylor defied their bishop by hosting priests of the Saint Pius V Association at their home called the Leyland Mass Centre from 1974 to 1978 due to their belief that the Tridentine Rite of the Mass was the true Mass and must be celebrated in Latin despite changes implemented following the Second Vatican Council that allowed for the Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular and with the Mass streamlined under Pope Paul VI. However, their actions in the 1970s were preceded by a long series of events that steam from Mr and Mrs Taylor's childhoods which this book details and in many ways celebrates. This short book provides a timeline of the lives of Mr and Mrs Taylor, using illustrations wherever possible to explain and visualise the significant events (some of which were supernatural) that shaped their beliefs. Each of the illustrations included in this work were commissioned by Mr and Mrs Taylor's grandson Cometan and created by British artist David Young who has been explaining the Taylor's story in the form of illustrations over the last five years. This work is a testament to Mr and Mrs Taylor's dedication to the Latin Mass despite the ridicule they faced and using intimate details about their lives helps to explain why they made their decisions and took controversial action at different stages of their lives

Computationally Motivated Discovery of Biogenic Compounds with Potent CDK9 Inhibition and In Vitro Effects against Glioblastoma

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common malignant brain tumor in adults but with limited and poorly effective treatment protocols. Kinase inhibitors either as a mono- or as a combination therapy have considerable potential as novel treatments for GBM, with cyclin-dependent kinase 9 (CDK9) a promising target. Here, we present a multistep computationally motivated and structure-based approach to the discovery of CDK9 inhibitors. Active/decoy benchmarking calculations considered structural data from available CDK9–ligand crystal structures, including the potential of multiple protein structure docking. Using an optimized virtual screening approach that included 3D pharmacophore prefiltering of compounds and Glide docking calculations, six novel low micromolar inhibitors from the ZINC15 biogenic database were identified, validated as hits using in vitro CDK9/cyclin T1 binding assays. Of these compounds, 1 (3,5-disubstituted barbiturate-type core scaffold) demonstrated potent low micromolar effects (IC50s ∼8–13 μM at 72 h) on the cell viability of three GBM cell-lines (U87-MG, T98G, and U251-MG) in a time- and concentration-dependent manner, with compound 7 (a pyrano[2,3-f]chromene-4,8-dione) more effective against patient-derived PD301 cells. The compounds had good predicted oral bioavailability and four of the six inhibitors potential for blood–brain barrier permeability. Given their structural novelty, the identified CDK9 inhibitor scaffolds can be further explored for their potential against CNS conditions, including 1 and 7 against GBM

SABA: Scale-adaptive Attention and Boundary Aware Network for real-time semantic segmentation

Balancing accuracy and speed is crucial for semantic segmentation in autonomous driving. While various mechanisms have been explored to enhance segmentation accuracy in lightweight deep learning networks, adding more mechanisms does not always lead to better performance and often significantly increases processing time. This paper investigates a more effective and efficient integration of three key mechanisms—context, attention, and boundary—to improve real-time semantic segmentation of road scene images. Based on an analysis of recent fully convolutional encoder–decoder networks, we propose a novel Scale-adaptive Attention and Boundary Aware (SABA) segmentation network. SABA enhances context through a new pyramid structure with multi-scale residual learning, refines attention via scale-adaptive spatial relationships, and improves boundary delineation using progressive refinement with a dedicated loss function and learnable weights. Evaluations on the Cityscapes benchmark show that SABA outperforms current real-time semantic segmentation networks, achieving a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of up to 76.7% and improving accuracy for 17 out of 19 object classes. Moreover, it achieves this accuracy at an inference speed of up to 83.4 frames per second, significantly exceeding real-time video frame rates. The code is available at https://github.com/liuchunyan66/SABA

News and intraday retail investor order flow in foreign exchange markets

This paper examines the trading behavior of individual investors using a proprietary intraday dataset of a large pool of retail investor aggregate (minute by minute) long and short positions in EUR/USD. Standard event study analysis shows no significant adjustment in trading ahead of scheduled macro news announcements and trading contrary to the announcement surprise after the event. A panel regression analysis shows that such contrarian trading behavior is mainly driven by lagged returns rather than fundamental macro news. Further, intraday time series analysis shows that the lagged overall news sentiment also significantly affects retail investor trading. Finally, to verify the uninformed nature of retail trading, we show that simple cross-over trading strategies that exploit retail investors’ order flow could be profitable. Overall, our results suggest that retail investors in currency markets are influenced by news sentiment and past returns, but do not appear able to extract fundamental information from public news. Our findings support the differential abilities of market participants to interpret public information as reflected through the intraday trading activity of retail currency traders