Awareness of universals

Book synopsis: The work of Mark Sainsbury has made a significant and challenging contribution to several central areas of philosophy, especially philosophy of language and logic. He has made significant contributions to puzzles concerning the nature of thought and language and pioneered research in the philosophical theory known as fictionalism. In this outstanding volume, twenty contributors engage with Sainsbury's work but also go beyond it, exploring fundamental problems in the philosophy of language, mind and logic. Topics covered include propositional thought, intentionality, the mind-body problem, singular thoughts, the individuation of concepts, nominalisation, logical form, non-existent objects and vagueness. Thought: Its Origin and Reach will be of interest to professional philosophers and students working in philosophy of mind, language, epistemology, and metaphysics

A hidden diversity of ornithischian dinosaurs: UK Middle Jurassic microvertebrate faunas shed light on a poorly represented period

Current research suggests that ornithischians originated in the Middle–Late Triassic and achieved a global distribution by the Early Jurassic, but the Middle Jurassic was a pivotal period in which the clade underwent rapid diversification and radiation. However, Middle Jurassic ornithischian fossils are rare, with few named taxa and numerous occurrences of isolated teeth with disputed identifications. Here, we apply detailed morphological comparisons to a suite of isolated ornithischian teeth from Bathonian microvertebrate sites in the U.K., to assess their taxonomic affinities. These reveal a hitherto unknown, highly diverse ornithischian fauna that significantly increases the known diversity of ornithischians from this time period in the U.K. Comparisons indicate the presence of six ornithischian morphotypes: an indeterminate ornithischian, a heterodontosaurid, two indeterminate thyreophorans, a stegosaur, and an ankylosaur. These results confirm the predictions made by phylogenetic studies that Ornithischia rapidly diversified in the Middle Jurassic, fill in temporal gaps within lineages, and also include recognition of one of the oldest global occurrences of stegosaurs. In addition, the mixture of non-eurypodan and eurypodan morphotypes identified suggests that not only did non-eurypodans survive until at least the Middle Jurassic but they also co-existed with early eurypodans

Biodiversity responses to Lateglacial climate change in the subdecadally-resolved record of Lake Hämelsee (Germany)

Anthropogenically-driven climate warming and land use change are the main causes of an ongoing decrease in global biodiversity. It is unclear how ecosystems, particularly freshwater habitats, will respond to such continuous and potentially intensifying disruptions. Here we analyse how different components of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems responded to natural climate change during the Lateglacial. By applying a range of analytical techniques (sedimentology, palaeoecology, geochemistry) to the well-dated sediment archive from Lake Hämelsee (Germany), we show evidence for vegetation development, landscape dynamics and aquatic ecosystem change typical for northwest Europe during the Lateglacial. By particularly focussing on periods of abrupt climate change, we determine the timing and duration of changes in biodiversity in response to external forcing. We show that onsets of changes in biodiversity indicators (e.g. diatom composition, Pediastrum concentrations) lag changes in environmental records (e.g. loss-on-ignition) by a few decades, particularly at the Allerød/ Younger Dryas transition. Most biodiversity indicators showed transition times of 10–50 years, whereas environmental records typically showed a 50–100 year long transition. In some cases, transition times observed for the compositional turnover or productivity records were up to 185 years, which could have been the result of the combined effects of direct (e.g. climate) and indirect (e.g. lake stratification) drivers of ecosystem change. Our results show differences in timing and duration of biodiversity responses to external disturbances, suggesting that a multi-decadal view needs to be taken when designing effective conservation management of freshwater ecosystems under current global warming

'Begin at the beginning, the King said, very gravely': Serious Openings and Subversive Epigraphs in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon

The American author, Thomas Pynchon, the focus of this paper, is famed, it could be argued, mostly for three things. The first is the extreme lengths of his novels and the bewildering numbers of characters and plotlines in said books. Gravity’s Rainbow, his 1973 work that remains unfinished by most who own a copy, contains over 400 characters for example. The second, and the point to which this paper is devoted, is the famous opening to that novel, which most readers do reach, the howl of the V-2 rocket that soars at supersonic speed above the landscape: “a screaming comes across the sky” it reads. The third is that this novel was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize but denied the prize at the last minute on the grounds of being “turgid, overwritten, and obscene”

YOLO-ET: a machine learning model for detecting, localising and classifying anthropogenic contaminants and extraterrestrial microparticles optimised for mobile processing systems

Imminent robotic and human activities on the Moon and other planetary bodies would benefit from advanced in situ Computer Vision and Machine Learning capabilities to identify and quantify microparticle terrestrial contaminants, lunar regolith disturbances, the flux of interplanetary dust particles, possible interstellar dust, -meteoroids, and secondary impact ejecta. The YOLO-ET (ExtraTerrestrial) algorithm, an innovation in this field, fine-tunes Tiny-YOLO to specifically address these challenges. Designed for coreML model transference to mobile devices, the algorithm facilitates edge computing in space environment conditions. YOLO-ET is deployable as an app on an iPhone with LabCam® optical enhancement, ready for space application ruggedisation. Training on images from the Tanpopo aerogel panels returned from Japan’s Kibo module of the International Space Station, YOLO-ET demonstrates a 90% detection rate for surface contaminant microparticles on the aerogels, and shows promising early results for detection of both microparticle contaminants on the Moon and for evaluating asteroid return samples. YOLO-ET’s application to identifying spacecraft-derived microparticles in lunar regolith simulant samples and SEM images of asteroid Ryugu samples returned by Hayabusa2 and curated by JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences indicate strong model performance and transfer learning capabilities for future extraterrestrial applications

The problem for REF 2029

The real problem for a future REF is that the erosion of tuition fee value has pushed workloads into "total hell" and most staff are struggling to get any research time out of REF funding, which is just being used to plug the tuition gap. Departments that fared extremely well in REF have nonetheless found themselves the targets of "voluntary" redundancy schemes because of the financial crisis in UK HE

Preservation as a Memento Mori and Matter of Ethics

Digital preservation is crucial to ensuring the decadal- and centuries-long accessibility of scholarship. In other words, it asks us to consider how the conversation around a piece of work will continue, beyond the lifespan of its creator. It asks us to consider that point when a work enters the public domain and is no longer under the author’s copyright, it asks us to consider a purpose for scholarship that is greater than self-advancement. Digital preservation is a memento mori in the scholarly world – our own anamorphic skull – that assumes the oblivion of the individual and the continuity of the artefact. Perhaps that is why so few people want to look it in the face

An ‘“Electric Telegraph” of the Heart’: a community of feeling in the Victorian language of flowers

The publishing craze of the language of flowers anthologies spanned the length of the nineteenth century. As a cultural fad and popular form allied to the gift annual and the gift book, the language of flowers anthologies were well-known and prolific. The floriography of the flower 'vocabularies' became diffused and disseminated throughout the cultural imagination, yet, the anthologies were initially marketed at a female, middle-class, 'genteel' readership, with the broad aim of advancing the romantic endeavours of the reader. In this article, I ask whether there was a community of meaning, authorship and readership of the language of flowers. Was a community of feeling established through the ‘gifting’ process inherent within this genre? Might the books have been meaningful to a wider range of relationships beyond the proposed remit of romantic entanglement? Looking to case studies of personalised inscriptions, together with the introductory and prefatory contents of the books, I will consider whether the language of flowers had a broader appeal than might be assumed, investigating just how far floral meanings became embedded in notions of feeling. Finally, I will speculate about how we might consider feeling through flowers now, in light of the many perceived foibles and failings of this nineteenth-century genre

Structure and chronology of a star dune at Erg Chebbi, Morocco, reveals why star dunes are rarely recognised in the rock record

Star dunes are the tallest dunes on Earth and are amongst the larger and more spectacular aeolian landforms. Although they are widespread in modern sandy deserts, star dunes are rarely recognised in the rock record probably due to a lack of suitable sedimentary models. This paper presents a new sedimentary model for the structure of a star dune at Erg Chebbi in Morocco (Sahara Desert) on the basis of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) surveys. Individual sedimentary structures in star dunes are similar to those in linear or barchanoid dunes, likely leading to misidentification in the rock record. However, the suite of features described in this paper will permit identification of star dunes in future studies of the rock record. Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating shows that accumulation of the Erg Chebbi star dune post-dates the end of the African Humid Period (AHP). At the base of the dune, there is an ~8000-year hiatus in the record. Since then, the dune has grown rapidly to create a 100 m high dune within the past 1000 years and is migrating towards the west. Changes in the cross-strata support the idea that star dune construction was accompanied by a change in the wind directions

Delivering impact via the ebb-and-flow of a research team: reflection on a long-term program of research into a global societal challenge*

In this paper, we draw insights from a 15-year qualitative research program exploring catastrophe insurance and gaps in insurance protection as risks escalate within a world impacted by a climate emergency. We suggest that the ebb-and-flow of our research team's composition and activities through time was inextricably linked with our ability to have a sustained impact on such a large-scale societal issue. The essay situates itself within the research impact and team literature, narrates the trajectory of our research program and team development, and develops a framework for effectively managing impact-oriented qualitative research teams over time. Our framework illustrates key aspects of this process including team (re)forming, building team and individual stickability, performing, and managing team flux. We also present 10 practical takeaways for how these aspects can be managed effectively to produce long-term impact work to address grand challenges