Challenges encountered during acid resin transfer preparation of fossil fish from Monte Bolca, Italy

Copyright: Palaeontological Association May 2015. This is an open access article, available to all readers online, published under a creative commons licensing (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The file attached is the published version of the article

Improving archaeomagnetic dating through new data acquisition and method development

The Earth’s magnetic field (or geomagnetic field) has been measured for hundreds of years, starting with maritime observations from logbooks for navigation purposes to present day real-time recording by satellites. From these records, the geomagnetic field variation throughout recent time is well-understood. In order to study longer term field variations (on the scale of hundreds to thousands of years), it is necessary to use indirect methods of observation of the geomagnetic field, recovered from lavas and burnt archaeological clays. Reconstructions of the geomagnetic field based on such archaeo-/ palaeomagnetic data can be used both to date certain archaeological and geological materials and to study deep Earth processes where the field is generated. However, the currently available archaeo-/ palaeomagnetic data are not geographically nor chronologically well-distributed. The first aim of this thesis is therefore to provide new archaeomagnetic field determinations from locations that are currently under-represented (either spatially or temporally) in the geomagnetic field records, including southern Africa, New Zealand and the Orkney Isles, UK. New geomagnetic field intensities have been collected from each targeted location and in addition, new geomagnetic field directions from New Zealand have also been produced. Archaeomagnetic dating is challenging in data sparse areas such as these, due to large and often unknown uncertainties of either the data (due to non-ideal formation/ preservation conditions) or the geomagnetic reference curves or both. The second aim of this thesis is to address such problems by introducing alternative methodologies for archaeomagnetic dating, (i) accounting for unknown uncertainties and (ii) using alternative constraints, such as the rate of change of the geomagnetic field to be able to provide chronological information

Peter Fröberg Idling. Song for an approaching storm: a fantasy. Translated from the Swedish by Peter Graves

Review of Peter Fröberg Idling. Song for an approaching storm: a fantasy. Translated from the Swedish by Peter Grave

Using Visual Highlighting to Teach Discriminations and Patterns

Every day in classrooms throughout the country one can find children experiencing visual discrimination problems. One can also find a massive amount of teaching effort directed towards correcting those same problems, too often with limited success. Recent research has raised many questions about the usefulness of the most popular commercially available training materials (i.e. Frostig, Kephart, Michigan Tracking). However, research has also identified useful techniques that classroom teachers might employ

Discourse and the reception of literature : problematising 'reader response'

In my earlier work, ‘First steps towards a rhetorical hermeneutics of literary interpretation’ (2006), I argued that academic reading takes the form of an argument between readers. Four serious weaknesses in that account are its elision of the distinction between reading and discourse on reading, its inattention to non-academic reading, its exclusive focus on ‘interpretation’ as if this constituted the whole of reading or of discourse on reading, and its failure to theorise the object of literary reading, ie. the work of literature. The current work aims to address all of these problems, together with those created by certain other approaches to literary reading, with the overall objective of clearing the ground for more empirical studies. It exemplifies its points with examples drawn primarily from non-academic public discourse on literature (newspapers, magazines, and the internet), though also from other sources (such as reading groups and undergraduate literature seminars). It takes a particular (though not an exclusive) interest in two specific instances of non-academic reception: the widespread reception of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses as an attack on Islam, and the minority reception of Peter Jackson’s film trilogy The Lord of the Rings as a narrative of homosexual desire. The first chapter of this dissertation critically surveys the fields of reception study and discourse analysis, and in particular the crossover between them. It finds more productive engagement with the textuality of response in media reception study than in literary reception study. It argues that the application of discourse analysis to reception data serves to problematise, rather than to facilitate, reception study, but it also emphasises the problematic nature of discourse analysis itself. Each of the three subsequent chapters considers a different complex of problems. The first is the literary work, and its relation to its producers and its consumers: Chapter 2 takes the form of a discourse upon the notions of ‘speech act’ and ‘authorial intention’ in relation to literature, carries out an analysis of early public responses to The Satanic Verses, and puts in a word for non-readers by way of a conclusion. The second is the private experience of reading, and its paradoxical status as an object of public representation: Chapter 3 analyses representations of private responses to The Lord of The Rings film trilogy, and concludes with the argument that, though these representations cannot be identical with private responses, they are cannot be extricated from them, either. The third is the impossibility of distinguishing rhetoric from cognition in the telling of stories about reading: Chapter 4 argues that, though anecdotal or autobiographical accounts of reading cannot be taken at face value, they can be taken both as attempts to persuade and as attempts to understand; it concludes with an analysis of a magazine article that tells a number of stories about reading The Satanic Verses – amongst other things. Each of these chapters focuses on non-academic reading as represented in written text, but broadens this focus through consideration of examples drawn from spoken discourse on reading (including in the liminal academic space of the undergraduate classroom). The last chapter mulls over the relationship between reading and discourse of reading, and hesitates over whether to wrap or tear this dissertation’s arguments up