The Coverings of an Empire: An Examination of Ottoman Headgear from 1500 to 1829

This paper investigates the socio-economic and religious implications of hats worn in the Ottoman Empire from the mid-sixteenth century to 1829, when they were all replaced with the legendary fez. It acts as an initial compendium, drawing heavily from primary sources to explain who wore which style of headgear and why

Building Cross Cultural Competencies.

The Building Cross Cultural Competencies project was developed with the aim of equipping undergraduate students at the University of York with skills to work in the globalised world, while at the same time assisting with the induction and orientation of international students, new to the institution and to study in the UK. The inspiration for the programme dates back to 2006, when one of the authors visited three Universities in New Zealand and Australia. These Universities were perceived to be further down the route to internationalisation (as defined by Knight 2003) than was the norm in the UK at the time. Innovations observed at Massey and Waikato Universities in New Zealand and the University of Sydney, Australia, were redesigned and redeveloped for use at the University of York, with the agreement of the staff involved at those institutions. In particular, a cross cultural communication module and two distinctive peer mentor schemes provided the nucleus of the idea for a new initiative at York that would span the employability and internationalisation agendas This paper identifies how the project redesigned and developed ideas taken from Australian and New Zealand Universities for use in a UK context. It makes links to the literature on student adjustment and institutional adaptation; peer teaching and cross cultural communication skills. It will also consider the problems and difficulties experienced as the project progressed

The Focal Account: Indirect Lie Detection Need Not Access Unconscious, Implicit Knowledge

People are poor lie detectors, but accuracy can be improved by making the judgment indirectly. In a typical demonstration, participants are not told that the experiment is about deception at all. Instead, they judge whether the speaker appears, say, tense or not. Surprisingly, these indirect judgments better reflect the speaker’s veracity. A common explanation is that participants have an implicit awareness of deceptive behavior, even when they cannot explicitly identify it. We propose an alternative explanation. Attending to a range of behaviors, as explicit raters do, can lead to conflict: A speaker may be thinking hard (indicating deception) but not tense (indicating honesty). In 2 experiments, we show that the judgment (and in turn the correct classification rate) is the result of attending to a single behavior, as indirect raters are instructed to do. Indirect lie detection does not access implicit knowledge, but simply focuses the perceiver on more useful cues

Are you hiding something from me? Uncertainty and judgments about the intentions of others

We are skilled at reading other’s intentions – until they try to hide them. We are biased towards taking at face value what others say, but it is not clear why. One possibility is that we are uncertain, and make the decision by relying on heuristics. Half of our participants judged whether speakers were lying or telling the truth. The other half did not have to commit to a judgment: they were allowed to say they were unsure. We expected these participants would no longer need to rely on simplified heuristics and so show a reduced bias compared to the forced choice condition. Surprisingly, those who could say they were unsure were more biased towards believing people. We consider two possible accounts, both highlighting the importance of examining raters’ uncertainty, which have so far been undocumented. Allowing raters to abstain from judgment gives new insights into the judgment-forming process

The disappearing women: North West ICT project final report

Project Context The Disappearing Women: Northwest ICT project was embarked upon to further understand why more women leave the sector than are being recruited, 36% of new ICT recruits in the UK (in the first quarter of 2002) were women, yet in the same period, women accounted for 46% of all leavers or ‘disappearing’ women (The DTI Women in IT Champions report 2003, Grey and Healy 2004). This continuing trend shows a decline from 27% of women making up the ICT workforce in 1997 with a drop to 21% in 2004 (The DTI Women in IT Industry report 2005b). The number of women in the ICT sector remains disappointingly small considering that women make up around 50% of the total UK workforce and significantly this figure has gradually continued to fall despite numerous initiatives to attract more women into the sector (see Griffiths and Moore 2006 for a list of high profile ‘women in ICT’ initiatives). The research team’s first gender research project - Women in IT (WINIT) - ran for two years from January 2004 until March 2006 at the Information Systems Institute at The University of Salford and dealt solely with women who worked in the ICT sector in England. The WINIT Project via an online questionnaire and in-depth interviews gathered the stories and experiences of up to 500 participants and 19 interviewees respectively. The project enabled these women’s voices to be heard but the research team were constantly aware that a certain part of the female ICT workforce - the ‘disappearing’ women who had left ICT vowing never to return - had been overlooked and effectively silenced. It was these women who once found, may be able to facilitate a more in-depth understanding of why women were leaving the ICT sector. Having amassed skills and expertise, qualifications in ICT and crossed ICT recruitment barriers (DTI 2005a) the ‘disappearing’ women for whatever reasons decided to change their career trajectories and leave the sector. What ‘chilly’ (Falkner 2004) workplaces, disinterested organisational cultures and indifferent working conditions had these women encountered that became determining factors in leaving the ICT sector? There has been little (if any) research conducted involving this specific cohort of women and The Disappearing Women: North West ICT (DW: NW ICT) project seeks to make a research contribution to what is a continuing statistical and symbolic under-representation of women in the ICT labour market. The DW: NW ICT project was partly funded by the European Social Fund (ESF) from April 2006 until December 2006 under ESF Objective 3, Policy Field 5.1: Improving the Participation of Women. The DW: NW ICT project contributes research to priority 5 and its strategic objective to reduce the level of disadvantage faced by women in the labour market. The project was run in the Information Systems Group, Salford Business School of The University of Salford, Greater Manchester, UK. The report is structured as follows. The first section presents the backdrop for the research, looking in general at women in the ICT labour market in England and then women leaving the ICT sector focussing on the North West of England and more explicitly women leaving ICT employment in the North West of England. The research aims of the project form the following section; they have been loosely classified in to two groupings, the push and pull factors that are contributing to the high attrition rate of women leaving ICT. The methodology follows with the route taken in how this ‘hard to reach’ target sample were finally located, once contacted the life history interview process and procedures adopted is explained in full. The vignettes of the ‘disappearing’ women are included to allow the reader an opportunity to ‘get to know’ these women a little more closely. Key themes that have naturally emerged throughout the interview data analysis process are presented, including hostilities in the ICT workplace, significant events and the process of leaving ICT workplaces and finally stories of the ‘appearing’ women and their current situations are heard. A discussion regarding the findings of the DW: NW ICT project concludes this report

Estimating the effect of joint interventions from observational data in sparse high-dimensional settings

We consider the estimation of joint causal effects from observational data. In particular, we propose new methods to estimate the effect of multiple simultaneous interventions (e.g., multiple gene knockouts), under the assumption that the observational data come from an unknown linear structural equation model with independent errors. We derive asymptotic variances of our estimators when the underlying causal structure is partly known, as well as high-dimensional consistency when the causal structure is fully unknown and the joint distribution is multivariate Gaussian. We also propose a generalization of our methodology to the class of nonparanormal distributions. We evaluate the estimators in simulation studies and also illustrate them on data from the DREAM4 challenge.Comment: 30 pages, 3 figures, 45 pages supplemen