Making space for past futures: rural landscape temporalities in Roman Britain

In this paper, we seek to explore the ways in which landscapes become venues not only for manipulations of the past in a present, but also for shaping possible futures. Considerations of temporality and being in the landscape have been more strongly focussed on the past and social memory than the future, anticipation, and projectivity, but these are vital considerations if we are to preserve the possibility that past people imagined alternative futures. A fruitful archaeological context for an exploration of past futures can be found in the choices people made during the late Iron Age and Roman period in Britain, which has an increasingly rich and high-resolution material record for complex changes and continuities during a period of cultural interactions and imperial power dynamics. More specifically, recent research into the architectural and material practices evident on rural settlement sites and across landscapes forces us to challenge pre-conceptions about the reactive/reactionary culture of rural societies. Case-studies from Kent and the West Country will be deployed to develop the argument that in the materialising of time, the future has a very significant part to play

Yours, Mine, or Ours? Exploring the Role of Cultural Values in Sharing Economy Services

The sharing economy offers consumers an alternative to ownership by exchanging value through technology-based services. As the growth of sharing economy practices continue to emerge, business scholars have only recently begun to study how cultural differences impact the sharing economy. Specifically, few studies have examined individual cultural values. Therefore, this study explores whether differences in cultural values, using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, account for consumers’ attitudes and participation in sharing economy services (SES). Two studies employing a mix-method approach will be conducted to gain a thorough understanding of the sharing economy from both the consumers’ and the peer providers’ perspective. This research is one of the first papers to investigate the influence of cultural values in the sharing economy at the individual level as most research has only focused at the national level. These results may further our understanding of the sharing economy and its interaction across cultures

Archaeological Investigations at Bourne Park, Bishopsbourne, 2011-2014

Report on the geophysical survey

High Sensitivity DNA Detection Using Gold Nanoparticle Functionalised Polyaniline Nanofibres

Polyaniline (PANI) nanofibres (PANI-NF) have been modified with chemically grown gold nanoparticles to give a nanocomposite material (PANI-NF–AuNP) and deposited on gold electrodes. Single stranded capture DNA was then bound to the gold nanoparticles and the underlying gold electrode and allowed to hybridise with a complementary target strand that is uniquely associated with the pathogen, Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), that causes mastitis. Significantly, cyclic voltammetry demonstrates that deposition of the gold nanoparticles increases the area available for DNA immobilisation by a factor of approximately 4. EPR reveals that the addition of the Au nanoparticles efficiently decreases the interactions between adjacent PANI chains and/or motional broadening. Finally, a second horseradish peroxidase (HRP) labelled DNA strand hybridises with the target allowing the concentration of the target DNA to be detected by monitoring the reduction of a hydroquinone mediator in solution. The sensors have a wide dynamic range, excellent ability to discriminate DNA mismatches and a high sensitivity. Semi-log plots of the pathogen DNA concentration vs. faradaic current were linear from 150 × 10−12 to 1 × 10−6 mol L−1 and pM concentrations could be detected without the need for molecular, e.g., PCR or NASBA, amplification

Sophisticated vs. Rugged: Examining Gendered Brand Communication Styles and Social Media Engagement

Advertising and marketing managers understand that not all brands need to be on social media, but what is not clearly understood is consumers’ engagement expectations for brands that are on social media. Therefore, this study investigates the impact of brand personality, specifically sophisticated and rugged brands, and gendered communication styles on consumers’ expectations of social media engagement. A scenario-based experiment is performed to test the hypotheses using a mock brand. The main study consisted of a Qualtrics consumer panel, and a MANOVA was utilized to examine three components of social media engagement (consumption, contribution, and creation) on the two brand personality dimensions. Results suggest that not all brands are expected to be as engaging on social media. Specifically, consumers expect higher levels of engagement with sophisticated brands (feminine traits) compared to rugged brands (masculine traits)

The Canterbury Hinterland Project: understanding dynamic rural landscapes through the semi-automated interpretation of geophysical survey results

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Alienation and Redemption: the praxis of (Roman) archaeology in Britain

The TRAC session that led to this series of combined mini-papers was consciously designed as a forum for discussion, the aim being to consider how to tackle perceived systemic problems in the archaeology of Roman Britain (as much as the archaeology of other periods) that lead to destructive methods, interpretive fallacies and poor job satisfaction. The shared feeling of those present seemed to be that the systems prevalent in both developer-funded (or ‘commercial’) archaeology, university archaeology departments and even in the museum context are overly driven by ideas of competition, division and acquisition for its own sake, the apparently dominant neoliberal values of our time. Such values are not akin to the valuing of the historic environment per se, but rather promote constraining hierarchies within and between organisations, and a basic lack of communication and team working

Genetic rescue of absence seizures

Crossbreeding GABAAR δ subunit knockout mice with stargazer mice removes the absence seizure phenotype Thalamic tonic GABAA current is similarly abolished Rescue also occurs with acute siRNA knockdown of δ subunit Ataxic phenotype of stargazer is partially ameliorate