492 research outputs found

    The making of a quinologist: Cinchona, collections, and science in the work of John Eliot Howard (1807-1883)

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    The subject of this thesis is the career of the quinologist and industrialist, John Eliot Howard (1807-1883), his cinchona bark collections and scientific work. The approach is collections-based, combining archival and object-based research, to understand Howard’s collections assemblages, scientific practices, networks of specimen and knowledge exchange. Howard’s primary collections and archives are in the Economic Botany Collection and Library and Archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.Working in his family’s pharmaceutical factory at Stratford, Howard had the financial, technological and cultural resources to develop specialist expertise relating to cinchona and its constituent quinoline alkaloid, helping to develop the discipline of quinology. His career reflects wider historical developments including scientific specialisation, evolution of species and mass pharmaceutical manufacture. Howard’s extensive research led to expert consultation work for the Government’s British-Indian cinchona project, and the family firm becoming Britain’s leading quinine suppliers. Much historical research has been done on cinchona collection in South America and its transplantation in South Asia, less is known about the ways in which these collections and the knowledge they generated were mobilised within Britain. This thesis asks how the work of Howard, located far from the fields of origin or cultivation of cinchona, influenced its use and that of its alkaloids.Chapter 1 of the thesis introduces a historical context for cinchona research. Chapter 2 presents the methods, the archival and collections sources and the results of a meta-analysis for the Kew specimens. Chapter 3 introduces Howard and the development of his family business. Chapter 4 explores his professional development as a cinchona expert and his influence within quinology. Chapter 5 examines Howard ‘in the lab’: his collections and scientific practices. Chapter 6 analyses how Howard developed his scientific interests as he moved ‘out of the lab’ into the garden. Chapter 7 then explores Howard’s circulated works through his books, illustrations, distribution and reception. The final chapter presents conclusions and a view of future research beyond the thesis.<br/

    Discretion and the Rule of Law: The Significance and Endurance of Vagrancy and Vagrancy-Type Laws in England, the British Empire, and the British Colonial World

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    This article explores the history of vagrancy laws in England, the British Empire, and the British colonial world, the significance of those laws, the various challenges that were made to vagrancy laws in the twentieth century, and the limits of those challenges to date. While vagrancy laws preceded the nineteenth century, the 1824 Vagrancy Act in England set a new model, which proved extremely influential around the world over the following centuries. Between the early nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, vagrancy laws were adopted or reformulated almost everywhere the British left a footprint. The laws that were adopted covered a broad range of (what the authorities considered) offenses and offensive ways of being, including impoverishment, idleness, begging, hawking, public gambling, sex work, public indecency, fortune-telling, traditional religious practices, drunkenness, homosexuality, cross-dressing, socializing across racial groups, being suspicious, and many other activities as well. They were adopted for a range of purposes: to control labor and limit workers\u27 bargaining positions, including after the abolition of slavery; to define the boundaries of civilized, industrious, and moral society; and to clean up the streets and reinforce urban boundaries. Most overarchingly, vagrancy laws served as a practical and rhetorical means through which the discretionary power of the authorities, as enforced through the police and magistracy, was expanded. Far from constituting an object of challenge for \u27rule of law\u27 advocates, expansion in such discretionary authority was closely bound up with the expansion of the rule of law in theory and practice. While vagrancy laws began to be challenged in the mid-twentieth century, including through a decades-long anti-vagrancy law campaign in the United States that had significant success, they remain part of the law of numerous states around the world. In addition, even where explicit vagrancy laws have been abolished, vagrancy-type laws—laws that have granted the police discretionary authority to commit arbitrary detention, of the poor in particular—remain deeply embedded in the criminal law regimes of all former British jurisdictions. Overcoming the vagrancy law legacy will require recognizing and taking measures to reform the arbitrary, class-discriminatory police power vagrancy laws have helped entrench in common law legal orders

    Iterative musical collaboration as palimpsest: Suite Inversée and The Headroom Project

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    Suite inversée is a musical work, co-composed by the two authors asynchronously online by means of file transfer alone and digitally presented using a self-made web app called The Headroom Project. The Headroom Project mediates the compositional project during creation as well as allowing the listener to browse a historical thread that weaves through the developmental process: through this app, each audio file that was shared between the two composers can be heard and considered both in and out of the context of its creation. The framework of the project provided the opportunity for the authors to reflect on issues of remote digital collaboration and the palimpsest nature of a work revealed in varying stages of evolution through a novel mode of presentation. This paper discusses the mode of creation by situating it within narratives of composition and technology

    Real-world listening effort in adult cochlear implant users

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    Cochlear implants (CI) are a treatment to provide a sense of hearing to individuals with severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss. Even when optimal levels of intelligibility are achieved after cochlear implantation, many CI users complain about the effort required to understand speech in everyday life contexts. This sustained mental exertion, commonly known as “listening effort”, could negatively affect their lives, especially regarding communication, participation, and long-term cognitive health. This thesis aimed to evaluate the listening effort experienced by CI recipients in real-world sound scenarios. The research focused on social listening situations that are particularly common in everyday life such as having conversations in a busy cafĂ© or communicating through video call. Additionally, some situations that prevailed during the COVID-19 pandemic were also examined (e.g., listening to someone who is wearing a facemask). Multimodal measures of listening effort were employed throughout the research project to obtain a comprehensive assessment. Nonetheless, the primary focus was on measures that quantify objectively the cognitive demands of listening through a CI. To that end, we used a combination of physiological measures, functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) brain imaging and simultaneous pupillometry, both of which are compatible with CIs and capable of providing insights into the neural underpinnings of effortful listening. We also proposed a novel approach to quantify “listening efficiency”, an integrated behavioural measure that reflects both intelligibility and listening effort. We successfully applied these assessments to 168 CI users and 75 age-matched normally hearing (NH) controls who were recruited throughout the project. We found that CI users experienced high levels of listening effort, even when their intelligibility was optimal under highly favourable listening conditions. Objective measures revealed that CI listeners exhibited significantly inferior listening efficiency than NH controls when listening to speech under moderate levels of cafeteria background noise and when attending online video calls. Physiologically, they showed elevated levels of arousal as revealed by larger and prolonged pupil dilations to baseline compared with NH controls, suggesting high cognitive load and increased need for recovery. The importance of visual cues was evident; the presence of video and captions benefited CI recipients by improving considerably their listening efficiency during online communication. These results were consistent with their subjective ratings of effort, both in the experiments and in daily life. These findings provide objective evidence of the cognitive burden endured by CI listeners in everyday life. In addition, the objective assessments proposed were proved feasible to quantify the performance and cognitive demands of listening through a CI. In particular, listening efficiency showed sensitivity to differences in task demands and between groups, even when intelligibility remained near perfect. We argue that listening efficiency holds potential to become a CI outcome measure

    HM 30: Reflections on Naval History: Collected Essays

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    Reflections on Naval History: Collected Essays, by John B. Hattendorf, Ernest J. King Professor Emeritus of Maritime History, Naval War College, is the third in a series of volumes that bring together scholarly writings originally published in a variety of specialized journals and other publications, many of which are obscure and difficult to access. It includes papers originally appearing in the years 2010–20. The earlier volumes are Naval History and Maritime Strategy: Collected Essays (2000), and Talking about Naval History: A Collection of Essays (2011). The latter volume also appeared under the imprimatur of the Naval War College Press.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/usnwc-historical-monographs/1029/thumbnail.jp

    Geographic information extraction from texts

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    A large volume of unstructured texts, containing valuable geographic information, is available online. This information – provided implicitly or explicitly – is useful not only for scientific studies (e.g., spatial humanities) but also for many practical applications (e.g., geographic information retrieval). Although large progress has been achieved in geographic information extraction from texts, there are still unsolved challenges and issues, ranging from methods, systems, and data, to applications and privacy. Therefore, this workshop will provide a timely opportunity to discuss the recent advances, new ideas, and concepts but also identify research gaps in geographic information extraction

    Going to university? A qualitative case study into the factors influencing A-level subject choices in a comprehensive sixth form centre.

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    This thesis explores the assumption that university selection is a purely rational, economically-driven, and utilitarian decision. At the same time, it explores the importance of emotional, familial, and social factors in candidates’ choices. The choice of A-levels can be very stressful for candidates because such choices have the potential to have an impact on future employability and career outcomes. This research into the influences of university selection explored the responses, experiences, and challenges of a small sample of students and staff at a single sixth-form centre. The expansion of tertiary education through widening participation policies has been accompanied by a plethora of resources, such as websites, platforms and dedicated services offering information, statistics and data that can help prospective students make their choices. Yet evidence produced in this thesis indicates these resources do not have a significant role to play when students make their choices. Rather it highlights the important role played by parents who, directly or indirectly, exert an influence on their children, even when their own social and economic capital and experiences of the process is limited. In consequence, such choices may appear to be idiosyncratic, but are nonetheless, equally rational, and valid responses for dealing with the stressful process of making UCAS applications during A-level preparation time. The findings highlight the importance of parents as trusted and significant influences on students’ university selection. The findings also illuminate three main areas of policy concern and further study. First, they cast doubt on the suitability of A-levels as the best means for university selection. Second, they question the appropriateness of predicted grades as the most reliable indicator of academic potential. Third, they point to a need to reconsider the current UCAS timings and the attendant negative impact on student welfare

    Praxis of urban morphology : conference proceedings. Part 1

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    In its jubilee year of 215 years, the University of Belgrade and the Faculty of Architecture as its constituent member had an opportunity to host the 30th International Seminar on Urban Form Conference (ISUF2023). This year’s conference titled Praxis of Urban Morphology presented a great opportunity to discuss the process by which this discipline is enacted, embodied, and realized. The ISUF 2023 organization committee’s endeavor was to build on the previous experience and ideas, and to direct activities toward systematization and synthesis at an international level, aiming to embody these ideas into operational knowledge. The conference was developed in a manner to provide a framework for reflecting on ISUF community intellectual knowledge coming both from the practical and scientific arenas. The very conference included total of 227 presentations with 580 authors (220 present on site), with representation of participants from 43 countries. The conference was developed in 4 tracks: A. Good in Planning, Landscapes and Townscapes, B. Culture Space, Common Space and Personalities, C. History of Ideas and Challenges and D. Programming and Rethinking Concepts. Conference proceedings were developed in two parts
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