Quaker accountability regimes: The case of the Richardson family networks, 1840 - 1914

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the development of the accountability ideals and practices of Quaker industrialists during the period 1840 – 1914. Design/methodology/approach – The research employs a case study approach and draws on the extensive archives of Quaker industrialists in the Richardson family networks, British Parliamentary Papers and the Religious Society of Friends together with relevant contemporary and current literature. Findings – Friends shed their position as Enemies of the State and obtained status and accountabilities undifferentiated from those of non-Quakers. The reciprocal influences of an increasingly complex business environment and radical changes in religious beliefs and practices combined to shift accountabilities from the Quaker Meeting House to newly established legal accountability mechanisms. Static Quaker organization structures and accountability processes were ineffective in a rapidly changing world. Decision-making was susceptible to the domination of the large Richardson family networks in the Newcastle Meeting House. This research found no evidence of Quaker corporate social accountability through action in the Richardson family networks and it questions the validity of this concept. The motivations underlying Quakers’ personal philanthropy and social activism were multiple and complex, extending far beyond accountabilities driven by religious belief. Originality/value –This research has originality and value as a study of continuity and change in Quaker accountability regimes during a period that encompassed fundamental changes in Quakerism and its orthopraxy, and their business, social and political environments

Temporal discrimination: Mechanisms and relevance to adult-onset dystonia

Temporal discrimination is the ability to determine that two sequential sensory stimuli are separated in time. For any individual, the temporal discrimination threshold (TDT) is the minimum interval at which paired sequential stimuli are perceived as being asynchronous; this can be assessed, with high test-retest and inter-rater reliability, using a simple psychophysical test. Temporal discrimination is disordered in a number of basal ganglia diseases including adult-onset dystonia, of which the two most common phenotypes are cervical dystonia and blepharospasm. The causes of adult-onset focal dystonia are unknown; genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors are relevant. Abnormal TDTs in adult-onset dystonia are associated with structural and neurophysiological changes considered to reflect defective inhibitory interneuronal processing within a network which includes the superior colliculus, basal ganglia, and primary somatosensory cortex. It is hypothesized that abnormal temporal discrimination is a mediational endophenotype and, when present in unaffected relatives of patients with adult-onset dystonia, indicates non-manifesting gene carriage. Using the mediational endophenotype concept, etiological factors in adult-onset dystonia may be examined including (i) the role of environmental exposures in disease penetrance and expression; (ii) sexual dimorphism in sex ratios at age of onset; (iii) the pathogenesis of non-motor symptoms of adult-onset dystonia; and (iv) subcortical mechanisms in disease pathogenesis

The taphonomy of big-game hunting in prehistoric New Zealand

This thesis examines patterns of bone remains from big-game hunting in New Zealand archaeological sites, and the origins of these patterns from a taphonomic viewpoint. Taphonomy, as a subdiscipline within archaeology, focuses on the events that impact upon bone remains, in the time between an animal's death and the point of analysis, and the effect of these events on the retrieval of information about the past. In spite of the importance of taphonomy to a fuller understanding of bone deposition, there has been relatively little work undertaken in this field in New Zealand, to date. I examine the effects of two taphonomic agents, weathering (in particular subsurface, as opposed to subaerial weathering) and burning, on moa and seal remains from 17 big-game hunting sites throughout New Zealand. To establish a baseline for understanding the effects of weathering in the temperate climate zone, I conducted a three-year experiment whereby bones were exposed to a range of different weathering situations. The results suggest that subsurface weathering processes begin almost immediately with microorganisms within the soil quickly breaking down the soft tissue. An objective scale was developed for measuring the degree of weathering a bone has undergone, based on the prevalence of markers such as cracking of the diaphysis, the exposure of the underlying cancellous bone and, in the long-term, the large-scale flaking of cortical bone. The analysis of thesb New Zealand wide archaeological collections provides evidence that, in the sites which I examined, taphonomic agents probably played an insignificant role in determining the fate of bones of big-game species. The taphonomic re-analysis did not alter the interpretation of the prehistory of those sites, and has not altered the interpretation of big-game hunting. The weathering of bone cannot be correlated with soil type, geographic region or with chronological age. There are two two environmental zones which are exceptions to this. Firstly, areas of the North Island Volcanic Plateau and the West Coast of the South Island, where the high rainfall levels coupled with high soil acidity (pH <4.5) act to breakdown bone at such a rate that it does not survive to be recovered by archaeologists. Secondly, the inland basins of the South Island where pronounced freeze-thaw patterns work to destroy bone remains, which have been deposited in a landscape where soil deposition is negligible and the only protection provided to bones comes from the deposition of silt during the periodic flooding of streams or rivers, within a few decades

Relationship Between Knowledge About Aging and Expectations for Late Adulthood

Department of Physic

CLIMB: Curriculum Learning for Infant-inspired Model Building

We describe our team's contribution to the STRICT-SMALL track of the BabyLM Challenge. The challenge requires training a language model from scratch using only a relatively small training dataset of ten million words. We experiment with three variants of cognitively-motivated curriculum learning and analyze their effect on the performance of the model on linguistic evaluation tasks. In the vocabulary curriculum, we analyze methods for constraining the vocabulary in the early stages of training to simulate cognitively more plausible learning curves. In the data curriculum experiments, we vary the order of the training instances based on i) infant-inspired expectations and ii) the learning behavior of the model. In the objective curriculum, we explore different variations of combining the conventional masked language modeling task with a more coarse-grained word class prediction task to reinforce linguistic generalization capabilities. Our results did not yield consistent improvements over our own non-curriculum learning baseline across a range of linguistic benchmarks; however, we do find marginal gains on select tasks. Our analysis highlights key takeaways for specific combinations of tasks and settings which benefit from our proposed curricula. We moreover determine that careful selection of model architecture, and training hyper-parameters yield substantial improvements over the default baselines provided by the BabyLM challenge

CLIMB: Curriculum Learning for Infant-inspired Model Building

We describe our team's contribution to the STRICT-SMALL track of the BabyLM Challenge. The challenge requires training a language model from scratch using only a relatively small training dataset of ten million words. We experiment with three variants of cognitively-motivated curriculum learning and analyze their effect on the performance of the model on linguistic evaluation tasks. In the vocabulary curriculum, we analyze methods for constraining the vocabulary in the early stages of training to simulate cognitively more plausible learning curves. In the data curriculum experiments, we vary the order of the training instances based on i) infant-inspired expectations and ii) the learning behavior of the model. In the objective curriculum, we explore different variations of combining the conventional masked language modeling task with a more coarse-grained word class prediction task to reinforce linguistic generalization capabilities. Our results did not yield consistent improvements over our own non-curriculum learning baseline across a range of linguistic benchmarks; however, we do find marginal gains on select tasks. Our analysis highlights key takeaways for specific combinations of tasks and settings which benefit from our proposed curricula. We moreover determine that careful selection of model architecture, and training hyper-parameters yield substantial improvements over the default baselines provided by the BabyLM challenge

Identification of people with autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease using routine data: a cross sectional study.

BACKGROUND: Autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) causes progressive renal damage and is a leading cause of end-stage renal failure. With emerging therapies it is important to devise a method for early detection. We aimed to identify factors from routine clinical data which can be used to distinguish people with a high likelihood of having ADPKD in a primary health care setting. METHOD: A cross-sectional study was undertaken using data from the Quality Intervention in Chronic Kidney Disease trial extracted from 127 primary care practices in England. The health records of 255 people with ADPKD were compared to the general population. Logistic regression was used to identify clinical features which distinguish ADPKD. These clinical features were used to stratify individual risk using a risk score tool. RESULTS: Renal impairment, proteinuria, haematuria, a diastolic blood pressure over 90 mmHg and multiple antihypertensive medications were more common in ADPKD than the general population and were used to build a regression model (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve; 0.79). Age, gender, haemoglobin and urinary tract infections were not associated with ADPKD. A risk score (range -3 to +10) of ≥0 gave a sensitivity of 70.2% and specificity 74.9% of for detection. CONCLUSIONS: Stratification of ADPKD likelihood from routine data may be possible. This approach could be a valuable component of future screening programs although further longitudinal analyses are needed

Illness-related suffering and need for palliative care in Rohingya refugees and caregivers in Bangladesh: A cross-sectional study.

BACKGROUND:Despite recognition that palliative care is an essential component of any humanitarian response, serious illness-related suffering continues to be pervasive in these settings. There is very limited evidence about the need for palliative care and symptom relief to guide the implementation of programs to alleviate the burden of serious illness-related suffering in these settings. A basic package of essential medications and supplies can provide pain relief and palliative care; however, the practical availability of these items has not been assessed. This study aimed to describe the illness-related suffering and need for palliative care in Rohingya refugees and caregivers in Bangladesh. METHODS AND FINDINGS:Between November 20 and 24, 2017, we conducted a cross-sectional study of individuals with serious health problems (n = 156, 53% male) and caregivers (n = 155, 69% female) living in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, using convenience sampling to recruit participants at the community level (i.e., going house to house to identify eligible individuals). The serious health problems, recent healthcare experiences, need for medications and medical supplies, and basic needs of participants were explored through interviews with trained Rohingya community members, using an interview guide that had been piloted with Rohingya individuals to ensure it reflected the specificities of their refugee experience and culture. The most common diagnoses were significant physical disabilities (n = 100, 64.1%), treatment-resistant tuberculosis (TB) (n = 32, 20.5%), cancer (n = 15, 9.6%), and HIV infection (n = 3, 1.9%). Many individuals with serious health problems were experiencing significant pain (62%, n = 96), and pain treatments were largely ineffective (70%, n = 58). The average age was 44.8 years (range 2-100 years) for those with serious health problems and 34.9 years (range 8-75 years) for caregivers. Caregivers reported providing an average of 13.8 hours of care per day. Sleep difficulties (87.1%, n = 108), lack of appetite (58.1%, n = 72), and lack of pleasure in life (53.2%, n = 66) were the most commonly reported problems related to the caregiving role. The main limitations of this study were the use of convenience sampling and closed-ended interview questioning. CONCLUSIONS:In this study we found that many individuals with serious health problems experienced significant physical, emotional, and social suffering due to a lack of access to pain and symptom relief and other essential components of palliative care. Humanitarian responses should develop and incorporate palliative care and symptom relief strategies that address the needs of all people with serious illness-related suffering and their caregivers