482 research outputs found
Unseen landscapes of adult education: creative arts, well-being and well-becoming in later life
Creative arts education is integral to the diverse, extramural, formally taught and non-accredited landscapes of Adult Education. Traditionally popular with adults in later life, it is correlated with improvements in subjective well-being (Hughes and Adriaanse, 2017), health (Humphrey et al., 2011) and social inclusion (Feinstein et al., 2008). However, UK government support for arts curricula is in decline (Hughes et al., 2016), despite the rising demographics for older age groups (Office for National Statistics (ONS), 2018). Funding for remaining programmes is increasingly rationalised through perceived improvements to well-being (Hughes et al., 2016) and the attainment of objective and functional learning outcomes (Schuller, 2017).
This thesis explores the relationships of three women in later life with creative arts education. The interpretive bricolage methodology draws together their experiences and considers the impacts of rationalising education exclusively through objective criteria. The research material is analysed using writing-as-inquiry and emergent interpretations are refined in iterative dialogues between researcher and participants. Thus, meaning is made in a ācontinuing realignment of life events and life possibilitiesā (Rolling, 2010, p.157). The analysis is (re)presented as a series of evocative narratives, interwoven with the reflexive and autoethnographic positioning of the researcher. This process seeks to āfracture the boundaries that normally separate social science from literatureā (Ellis and Bochner, 2000, p.744).
The research highlights the participantsā perceptions of motivational factors, barriers and constraints and explores aspects of personal meaning-making, spirituality and transformation. It also illustrates the importance of āplaceā in fostering collaborative learning and curiosity and questions fixed notions of well-being. The latter is reconceptualised as āwell-becomingā to acknowledge its fluid and transient qualities. The womenās experiences are set against a prevailing culture of accountability and lie beyond the immediate gaze of policymakers. Therefore, the research assists in promoting more sustainable and context-appropriate practice by exploring some of the otherwise āunseenā landscapes of Adult Education in later life
What was a mortarium used for? Organic residues and cultural change in Iron Age and Roman Britain.
The Romans brought the mortarium to Britain in the first century AD, and there has long been speculation on its actual purpose. Using analysis of the residues trapped in the walls of these ākitchen blendersā and comparing them with Iron Age and Roman cooking pots, the authors show that it wasn't the diet that changed ā just the method of preparing certain products: plants were being ground in the mortarium as well as cooked in the pot. As well as plants, the mortars contained animal fats, including dairy products. The question that remains, however, is why these natural products were being mixed together in mortaria. Were they for food, pharmaceuticals or face creams?</jats:p
Interaction between a fast rotating sunspot and ephemeral regions as the origin of the major solar event on 2006 December 13
The major solar event on 2006 December 13 is characterized by the
approximately simultaneous occurrence of a heap of hot ejecta, a great
two-ribbon flare and an extended Earth-directed coronal mass ejection. We
examine the magnetic field and sunspot evolution in active region NOAA AR
10930, the source region of the event, while it transited the solar disk centre
from Dec. 10 to Dec. 13. We find that the obvious changes in the active region
associated with the event are the development of magnetic shear, the appearance
of ephemeral regions and fast rotation of a smaller sunspot. Around the area of
the magnetic neutral line of the active region, interaction between the fast
rotating sunspot and the ephemeral regions triggers continual brightening and
finally the major flare. It is indicative that only after the sunspot rotates
up to 200 does the major event take place. The sunspot rotates at
least 240 about its centre, the largest sunspot rotation angle which
has been reported.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, ApJ Letters inpres
Immediate replacement of fishing with dairying by the earliest farmers of the NE Atlantic archipelagos
The appearance of farming, from its inception in the Near East around 12 000 years ago, finally reached the northwestern extremes of Europe by the fourth millennium BC or shortly thereafter. Various models have been invoked to explain the Neolithization of northern Europe; however, resolving these different scenarios has proved problematic due to poor faunal preservation and the lack of specificity achievable for commonly applied proxies. Here, we present new multi-proxy evidence, which qualitatively and quantitatively maps subsistence change in the northeast Atlantic archipelagos from the Late Mesolithic into the Neolithic and beyond. A model involving significant retention of hunterāgathererāfisher influences was tested against one of the dominant adoptions of farming using a novel suite of lipid biomarkers, including dihydroxy fatty acids, Ļ-(o-alkylphenyl)alkanoic acids and stable carbon isotope signatures of individual fatty acids preserved in cooking vessels. These new findings, together with archaeozoological and human skeletal collagen bulk stable carbon isotope proxies, unequivocally confirm rejection of marine resources by early farmers coinciding with the adoption of intensive dairy farming. This pattern of Neolithization contrasts markedly to that occurring contemporaneously in the Baltic, suggesting that geographically distinct ecological and cultural influences dictated the evolution of subsistence practices at this critical phase of European prehistory
Double Trouble for Logical Pluralists
According to tradition, logic is normative for reasoning. According to many contemporary philosophers of logic, there is more than one correct logic. What is the relationship between these two strands of thought? This paper makes two claims. First, logic is doubly normative for reasoning because, in addition to constraining the combinations of beliefs that we may have, logic also constrains the methods by which we may form them. Second, given that logic is doubly normative for reasoning, a wide array of logical pluralisms are inconsistent with the normativity of logic as they entail contradictory claims about how agents ought to reason. Thus, if logic is normative for reasoning, these pluralisms are untenable
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Roman diet and trade: evidence from organic residues on pottery sherds recovered at the Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester Hants.)
The analysis of organic residues from pottery sherds using Gas-Chromatography with mass-spectroscopy (GC-MS) has revealed information about the variety of foods eaten and domestic routine at Silchester between the second and fourthāsixth centuries A.D. Two results are discussed in detail: those of a second-century Gauloise-type amphora and a fourth-century SE Dorset black-burnished ware (BB1) cooking pot, which reveal the use of pine pitch on the inner surface of the amphora and the use of animal fats (ruminant adipose fats) and leafy vegetables in cooking at the Roman town of Silchester, Hants
Biomolecular Analysis of Ceramic Containers, Skeletal Remains, Anthropogenic Sediments and Organic Artefacts from the Royal Tomb at Qatna
Gorilla in our midst: An online behavioral experiment builder
Behavioral researchers are increasingly conducting their studies online, to gain access to large and diverse samples that would be
difficult to get in a laboratory environment. However, there are technical access barriers to building experiments online, and web
browsers can present problems for consistent timingāan important issue with reaction-time-sensitive measures. For example, to ensure
accuracy and testāretest reliability in presentation and response recording, experimenters need a working knowledge of programming
languages such as JavaScript. We review some of the previous and current tools for online behavioral research, as well as how well they
address the issues of usability and timing. We then present the Gorilla Experiment Builder (gorilla.sc), a fully tooled experiment
authoring and deployment platform, designed to resolve many timing issues and make reliable online experimentation open and
accessible to a wider range of technical abilities. To demonstrate the platformās aptitude for accessible, reliable, and scalable research,
we administered a task with a range of participant groups (primary school children and adults), settings (without supervision, at home,
and under supervision, in both schools and public engagement events), equipment (participantās own computer, computer supplied by
the researcher), and connection types (personal internet connection, mobile phone 3G/4G). We used a simplified flanker task taken
from the attentional network task (Rueda, Posner, & Rothbart, 2004). We replicated the Bconflict network^ effect in all these
populations, demonstrating the platformās capability to run reaction-time-sensitive experiments. Unresolved limitations of running
experiments online are then discussed, along with potential solutions and some future features of the platform
Compound-specific amino acid <sup>15</sup>N stable isotope probing of nitrogen assimilation by the soil microbial biomass using gas chromatography/combustion/isotope ratio mass spectrometry
RATIONALE: Organic nitrogen (N) greatly exceeds inorganic N in soils, but the complexity and heterogeneity of this important soil N pool make investigations into the fate of Nācontaining additions and soil organic N cycling challenging. This paper details a novel approach to investigate the fate of applied N in soils, generating quantitative measures of microbial assimilation and of newly synthesized soil protein. METHODS: Laboratory incubation experiments applying (15)Nāammonium, (15)Nānitrate and (15)Nāglutamate were carried out and the high sensitivity and selectivity of gas chromatography/combustion/isotope ratio mass spectrometry (GC/C/IRMS) exploited for compoundāspecific (15)N stable isotope probing ((15)NāSIP) of extracted incubation soil amino acids (AAs; as Nāacetyl, Oāisopropyl derivatives). We then describe the interpretation of these data to obtain a measure of the assimilation of the applied (15)Nālabelled substrate by the soil microbial biomass and an estimate of newly synthesised soil protein. RESULTS: The cycling of agriculturally relevant N additions is undetectable via bulk soil N content and Ī“ (15)N values and AA concentrations. The assimilation pathways of the three substrates were revealed via patterns in AA Ī“ (15)N values with time, reflecting known biosynthetic pathways (e.g. ammonium uptake occurs first via glutamate) and these data were used to expose differences in the rates and fluxes of the applied N substrates into the soil protein pool (glutamate > ammonium > nitrate). CONCLUSIONS: Our compoundāspecific (15)NāSIP approach using GC/C/IRMS offers a number of insights, inaccessible via existing techniques, into the fate of applied (15)N in soils and is potentially widely applicable to the study of N cycling in any soil, or indeed, in any complex ecosystem. Ā© 2016 The Authors. Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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