Stable carbon isotopic assessment of prehistoric diets in the south-western Cape, South Africa

Bibliography: pages 190-203.This thesis consists of a stable carbon isotopic assessment of the diets of the Holocene human inhabitants of the southwestern Cape, South Africa. Samples of the foods these people ate were collected from each of the four major physiographic zones in the area, and their ¹³C/¹²C ratios measured. A total of more than 200 such analyses enabled the estimation of the average δ¹³C values of prehistoric human diets in each zone. This information is used to interpret δ¹³C measurements on a series of archaeological human skeletons. The results are consistent with a model of prehistoric subsistence behaviour in which people living at the coast made intensive use of marine food resources throughout the Holocene, consuming such a large proportion of these foods that they must have spent much, if not all of their time at the coast. Inland skeletons reflect an almost entirely terrestrial diet. These results contradict hypotheses about seasonal population movements between the coast and the interior generated from excavated archaeological material. Considerable changes in many of our current views of the Late Stone Age of the south-western Cape will have to be made in order to accommodate these data

Modern behaviour in ancient South Africans: evidence for the heat treatment of stones in the Middle Stone Age

To what extent was fire used as an engineering tool by early modern humans? Kyle Brown and co-authors marshal an impressive array of evidence to show that by 72 000 years ago, and perhaps as far back as 164 000 years ago, prehistoric people prepared the stone from which they planned to make artefacts by intentionally heat-treating it to improve its flaking qualities. This practice is well known from later sites but the increased time depth reported here is remarkable, and contributes to a growing body of evidence that Middle Stone Age people in South Africa were capable of far more sophisticated behaviour than previously realised

Opt-in or opt-out: exploring how women construe their ambition at early career stages

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Emerald via the DOI in this record.Purpose: This qualitative study challenges existing models of career ambition, extending understanding of how women define and experience ambition at early career stages in a professional services organisation. Method: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 women from a professional services organisation, who were aged 24-33 and had not yet reached managerial positions. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and template analysis was conducted. Results: The analysis revealed four main themes in the women’s experiences: subjective, dynamic ambition; frustrated lack of sight; self-efficacy enables ambition; and a need for resilience versus a need to adapt. The findings indicated that women do identify as ambitious, but they vary in the extent to which they view ambition as intrinsic and stable, or affected by external, contextual factors, such as identity-fit, barriers, support and work-life conflict. Implications & limitations: These results indicated insufficiency of current models of ambition and a new model was proposed. The model explains how women’s workplace experiences affect their ambition and therefore how organisations and individuals can better support women to maintain and fulfil their ambitions. Originality/Value: This study extends and contributes to the redefinition of women’s career ambition, proposing a model incorporating women’s affective responses to both internal (psychological) and external (organisational) factors. It provides further evidence against previous individual-level claims that women ‘opt-out’ of their careers due to an inherent lack of ambition, focusing on the interplay of contextual level explanations

Women's leadership ambition in early careers

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Edward Elgar via the DOI in this record.Assumptions are made that women leaving organizations in their late 30’s and 40’s are choosing to become stay-at-home mothers, implying that women have inherently lower career ambition than men. This, despite the fact that young women have been “overachieving” at university level, receiving more and better graded degrees than young men for several years. Extant research has tended to focus either on student perceptions of careers and aspirations or on the older age-group struggling to stay in organizational life. This chapter recounts a qualitative study of young women in sought-after graduate roles and asks: “How do women construe their ambition at early career stages in a professional services organization?” Considering social cognitive career theory and the identity fit model of career motivation, the chapter defines women’s early career identification with ambition and their struggle to maintain it in the current working environment, revealing that the psychological exit causing women to leave later in organizational life may start a decade earlier

Women on Boards: Progress following the 2012 Corporate Governance Code

This report monitors and recounts progress to date against the Financial Reporting Council's 2012 amendment to the Corporate Governance Code, considering inclusion of diversity reporting within annual reports. From this and from measuring the reality of the statistics on women in leadership and board positions across the top FTSE 350 companies, the report comments on the extent to which gender diversity is becoming an integral part of corporate strategy

Impact of Freshman Academy Experiences on Student Academic Intrinsic Motivation

This dissertation was designed to explore the transition of a group of ninth-grade students into a large rural upstate South Carolina high school. The primary focus was to ascertain the students\u27 levels of academic intrinsic motivation toward English, math, science, history, and their general orientation toward school learning, and to explore those freshman academy experiences that the students felt most directly impacted these attributes. The freshman academy at this school was implemented in 2006 as a district initiative to strengthen the transition to high school and ultimately increase the graduation rate. This was a mixed methods case study in which the researcher sought to gain insight into the students\u27 academic intrinsic motivation toward subject areas as well as their general motivational orientation. Data were measured quantitatively by administering the Children\u27s Academic Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (CAIMI) to a group of current ninth graders enrolled in the freshman academy at a South Carolina high school. The students\u27 scale scores on the CAIMI measured their levels of motivation across five subscales--English, math, science, history, and general orientation toward school learning. Qualitatively, the researcher conducted three student focus groups, four teacher interviews (one teacher from each of the four subject areas), and an administrator interview with the assistant principal in charge of the freshman academy. Additionally, the researcher conducted a review of the written descriptions of the freshman academy. The results from this study led the researcher to conclude that the students, teachers, and administrator perceived the overall impacts of the freshman academy on ninth-grade transition as positive and supportive, thus easing the transitional challenges of its students from middle school to high school. All participant categories perceived the academy\u27s structure and program design to have diminished the possible deleterious effects of the academic, procedural, and social challenges experienced by the students as they transitioned to high school. All participant categories perceived the teachers to be primary motivational sources for their students. Students indicated that, although this impact had been mostly positive for them as learners, in some cases, the teachers\u27 impact had been to decrease their desire to learn. CAIMI subscale scores were low in all four subject areas, as well as toward school learning in general. This indicated a possible disconnect between what the teachers did to motivate their students to learn, and what the students perceived as motivating. The researcher\u27s recommendations were for the school to assess the motivation levels of their incoming freshmen and to use this data to guide them in design and implementation of their instructional programs and schedules. In addition, the school should develop and implement professional development on intrinsic motivation theory and practical implications for the classroom teachers

The Female FTSE Board Report 2015

This year we have seen significant progress on FTSE 100 boards. All-male boards have totally disappeared with Glencore, the last, appointing a woman to its board. The percentage of women on FTSE 100 boards is 23.5%, almost exactly where we predicted in last year's report. This puts us on track to hit the 25% target by the end of 2015. The percentage of women in executive directorships on FTSE 100 boards is at an all time high of 8.6% with 24 women holding such roles

Our Administrative System of Criminal Justice

To commemorate our founding in 1914, the Board of Editors has selected six influential pieces published by the Law Review over the past 100 years and will republish one piece in each issue. The fourth piece selected by the Board is Our Administrative System of Criminal Justice, an article written by Gerard E. Lynch that is among the most cited works in the Law Review’s history. This article illustrates how the practice of plea bargaining blurs the boundaries between adversarial and inquisitorial criminal justice systems. Judge Lynch now sits on the Second Circuit having eventually succeeded the late Judge Joseph M. McLaughlin, who also is honored in the pages of this book for the permanent mark he left on Fordham Law School and the Law Review. We think it is fitting that the Law Review feature two of the many contributions that judges of the Second Circuit have made to legal education and scholarship in this issue

Pulsed Laser Cutting of Magnesium-Calcium for Biodegradable Stents

There is growing interests in the use of biodegradable magnesium implants for cardiovascular and pulmonary applications such as stents. Magnesium is a metal that has the ability to gradually dissolve and absorb into the human body after implantation. There is very little work discussing the relationship between process parameters and cut quality of magnesium stents by laser cutting. The objective of this research is to determine the effect of laser cutting conditions including peak laser power and cutting speed of a millisecond range pulsed laser on kerf geometry, surface topography, surface roughness, and microstructure. An assessment on the experimental work discussing laser cutting of magnesium alloys is also presented