‘Blue Squares’, ‘Proper’ Muslims and Transnational Networks

Despite the volume of research about identities of various shapes and forms, few studies have explored young people’s narratives of nation and religion. Drawing on research with young Muslim men in Scotland, this article employs Floya Anthias’s ideas about narratives of location, dislocation and positionality in order to seek a deeper understanding and appreciation of the young men’s national and religious identities and affiliations. Although the majority of the young men identify as Scottish Muslims, the meanings and associations of these identity markers vary in strength, nature and meaning, and the young men are also connected with a global network of identifications linking them with family heritages in Asia and Africa

A model for best practice safety regulation in the mining industry

The authors were engaged by the West Australian government in early 2005 to provide advice on best practice safety regulation for the mining industry in that state. The advice was provided in the first place to a Mine Safety Improvement Group and formed the basis of its report to government, delivered in April 2005. The full report is available at http://www.ministers.wa.gov.au/carpenter/docs/features/interim%20report%20stage%201%20w%20text.pdf The present paper aims to extricate the advice outlined in that report from the particular Western Australian context and present it in a way that is of potential relevance to other Australian jurisdictions. The aim, then, is to present a model for best practice safety regulation in the mining industry generally. Many discussions of regulatory models focus on the kinds of regulatory requirements that are to be imposed on the regulated industry. The discussion here goes beyond that to consider the regulator itself and how it might best be organized. In short, the paper deals both with the regulatory requirements and with the structure of the regulator. The latter is a pressing practical issue for any government seeking to set up a best practice regulatory regime and for this reason we devote considerable attention to it. In addition we discuss strategies for establishing such a regulator. The principles outlined are based on research carried out by the first named author (Hopkins), and on many years of practical experience as a regulator in the UK and in Australia by the second named author (Wilkinson). Wilkinson was head of the team which established the National Offshore Petroleum Safety Authority

Familial geopolitics and ontological security : intergenerational relations, migration and minority youth (in)securities in Scotland

This paper discusses the family as a site of geopolitics. Bridging scholarship in feminist geopolitics, political psychology and sociology, we explore the psycho-social dynamics of family life and theorise the family as a multi-scalar, relational site of security. Original data collected with ethnic and religious minority youth in Scotland are presented alongside an analysis of how family relations, at interconnected scales, mitigate against and/or re-inscribe broad geopolitical narratives of security. We employ the concept of ontological security (OS) to analyse the role of the family, and the relationships within it, on shaping youth securities. We discuss (1) how family histories and intergenerational experience shape young people’s sense of security; (2) how young people negotiate and resist family norms and values that reproduce securitizing geopolitical narratives; and (3) how young people find security when family is absent or indeterminate. In each case, we analyse how geopolitics operates through family life. The paper makes two key contributions: first, we use original empirical data to theorise ethnic and religious minority youth securities; second, we show the value of OS as a conceptual tool for understanding psycho-social dimensions of familial geopolitics.PostprintPeer reviewe

Carrying a Good Joke Too Far

Contract is predicated on agreement, or so the story goes. Of course, the reality of the modern bank-customer transaction is not so straightforward. In those transactions, the contract law is confronted with an ostensible dilemma: Should the law find its goal in the efficiency to be gained by binding customers to terms which they neither read nor understand? Or should the law instead focus on classical conceptions of bargain and agreement, and refuse to enforce contract terms that do not exhibit these characteristics? Article 4 of the Uniform Commercial Code, which regulates bank-customer transactions, attempts to strike a balance between fairness and efficiency, but the success of its task is undermined by one provision, section 4-103, which permits banks and customers to circumvent the effect of the Article by agreement. The majority of the form terms that invade bank-customer agreements are not the subject of agreement in any meaningful sense; they are unilateral impositions of the stronger contracting party: the bank. Provisions such as waivers of a customer\u27s right to a jury trial and terms granting the bank the authority to alter the terms of the account agreement abound, and nobody—including the courts asked to enforce these provisions—seriously contends that these terms are the result of agreement in the sense of a bargained-for exchange. Instead, as the economic literature shows, these terms result from banks\u27 exploitation of their naïve customers. In the typical bank-customer transaction, banks, like all businesses, exploit the naïveté of their less-sophisticated customers by imposing on those customers terms to which the customers have not manifested real agreement. This exploitation, which occurs even at market equilibrium, is achieved by the use of shrouded terms, or terms whose meaning and effect are hidden from the customer. But the impact of this shrouding is more harmful than a simple exploitation of naive customers: Sophisticated consumers are complicit in the bank\u27s efforts to exploit naive customers, Indeed, because that exploitation redounds to their benefit, sophisticated customers seek out banks that exploit naive customers. A pernicious cross-subsidy results. The extant justifications of unilaterally-imposed form terms such as those in bank-customer agreements miss the mark because they fail to account for that cross-subsidy. Commentators have argued that courts are capable of weeding out those shrouded terms that result in an aggregate inefficiency, or that naive customers suffer no real detriment because they are shielded by a protective umbrella erected by the more sophisticated customers. One commentator has argued that shrouded terms are merely a prelude to later bargaining and negotiation that occurs when a customer disadvantaged by a term calls to complain about its effects. These varied attempts to craft a trust-the-market solution to the impact of shrouded terms fail because the very market that created these terms cannot be trusted to alleviate their pernicious effects. If we cannot trust the market to police the effects of shrouded terms, then we must find some other mechanism to accomplish that task. Article 4 attempted to provide such a mechanism in the form of a laundry list of acceptable terms that would prevent banks from gaining too much power over their customers. But for those transactors that would find it advantageous to circumvent Article 4\u27s effects, section 4-103 provided an escape clause. Now, the escape clause has become the rule rather than the exception, and a reexamination is due. The conclusion of this paper is that advertisement about the nature and impact of the terms contained in account agreements, and thus education of bank customers, can undo the harmful effects of shrouded terms. With the shroud lifted, bank-customer agreements, like any other contract, can be evaluated by reference to classical notions of bargain and agreement

On Picard Groups of Perfectoid Covers of Toric Varieties

Let $X$ be a proper smooth toric variety over a perfectoid field of prime residue characteristic $p$. We study the perfectoid space $\mathcal{X}^{perf}$ which covers $X$ constructed by Scholze, showing that $\text{Pic}(\mathcal{X}^{perf})$ is canonically isomorphic to $\text{Pic}(X)[p^{-1}]$. We also compute the cohomology of line bundles on $\mathcal{X}^{perf}$ and establish analogs of Demazure and Batyrev-Borisov vanishing. This generalizes the first author's analogous results for "projectivoid space".Comment: 24 pages, comments are welcom

The evolution of Black Hole scaling relations in galaxy mergers

We study the evolution of black holes (BHs) on the M_BH-sigma and M_BH-M_bulge planes as a function of time in disk galaxies undergoing mergers. We begin the simulations with the progenitor black hole masses being initially below (Delta log M_BH=-2), on (Delta log M_BH=0) and above (Delta log M_BH=0.5) the observed local relations. The final relations are rapidly established after the final coalescense of the galaxies and their BHs. Progenitors with low initial gas fractions (f_gas=0.2) starting below the relations evolve onto the relations (Delta log M_BH=-0.18), progenitors on the relations stay there (Delta log M_BH=0) and finally progenitors above the relations evolve towards the relations, but still remaining above them (Delta log M_BH=0.35). Mergers in which the progenitors have high initial gas fractions (f_gas=0.8) evolve above the relations in all cases (Delta log M_BH=0.5). We find that the initial gas fraction is the prime source of scatter in the observed relations, dominating over the scatter arising from the evolutionary stage of the merger remnants. The fact that BHs starting above the relations do not evolve onto the relations, indicates that our simulations rule out the scenario in which overmassive BHs evolve onto the relations through gas-rich mergers. By implication our simulations thus disfavor the picture in which supermassive BHs develop significantly before their parent bulges.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted to ApJL (minor revisions to match accepted version

Relation Between Stellar Mass and Star Formation Activity in Galaxies

For a mass-selected sample of 66544 galaxies with photometric redshifts from the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), we examine the evolution of star formation activity as a function of stellar mass in galaxies. We estimate the cosmic star formation rates (SFR) over the range 0.2 < z < 1.2, using the rest-frame 2800 A flux (corrected for extinction). We find the mean SFR to be a strong function of the galactic stellar mass at any given redshift, with massive systems (log (M/M(Sun)) > 10.5) contributing less (by a factor of ~ 5) to the total star formation rate density (SFRD). Combining data from the COSMOS and Gemini Deep Deep Survey (GDDS), we extend the SFRD-z relation as a function of stellar mass to z~2. For massive galaxies, we find a steep increase in the SFRD-z relation to z~2; for the less massive systems, the SFRD which also increases from z=0 to 1, levels off at z~1. This implies that the massive systems have had their major star formation activity at earlier epochs (z > 2) than the lower mass galaxies. We study changes in the SFRDs as a function of both redshift and stellar mass for galaxies of different spectral types. We find that the slope of the SFRD-z relation for different spectral type of galaxies is a strong function of their stellar mass. For low and intermediate mass systems, the main contribution to the cosmic SFRD comes from the star-forming galaxies while, for more massive systems, the evolved galaxies are the most dominant population.Comment: 34 pages; 8 figures; Accepted for publication in Ap

Permian trilobites and the applicability of the “living fossil” concept to extinct clades

Some taxa occupy our imaginations as “living fossils” because they were known from the fossil record before being discovered alive today. Other taxa are considered “living fossils” because modern relatives bear a strong morphological resemblance to fossil relatives, or because they occupy a contracted geographic range or have less diversity now than in the past, or because they represent phylogenetic diversity that requires conservation. A characterizing feature of living fossils–and thus an implicit assumption of all criteria–is that the “living fossil” of interest is extant. However, the general research questions that “living fossils” inspire–Why do rates of evolution vary across organisms, across traits, and across time? Why do some clades decline in diversity over extended periods?–may be applied to any clade, including completely extinct clades. We propose that there is nothing special about “now” when it comes to pursuing these questions and that it is unnecessarily limiting to restrict research programs to clades for which an extant member meets some conception of the “living fossil” moniker. To this end, we investigate the extent to which Permian trilobites might resemble “living fossils,” albeit from the perspective of 253 million years ago, when the last trilobites were still alive. We do so by comparing the taxonomic diversity, geographic range, and morphological disparity of trilobites living in the Permian to earlier time periods. We find that Permian trilobites meet most definitions of living fossils, although our assessment of morphological change and character retention depend on taxonomic scale

The effects of heat stress on the development of the foetal lamb

Environmental heat stress in tropical sheep suppressed lamb birth weight, but the animals which did not experience hyperthermia under natural environmental conditions gave birth to significantly heavicr (P<0.01) lambs than their less adapted counterparts. Climate chamber studies designed to simulate the rectal temperature patterns of tropical sheep demonstrated that, without nutritional intervention, heat stress during the last month of pregnancy significantly retarded foetal growth (birth weight 2.3 kg v. 3.4 kg; P< 0.01) and maturation of wool follicles (P< 0.01). By comparison, severe nutritional restrictions during the last 3 months of pregnancy also caused a significant reduction in lamb birth weight (3.2 kg v. 3.9 kg; P<O.01), but this difference was not so marked