Language Evolution, Acquisition, Adaptation and Change

In the twenty‐first century, there are between 6000 and 8000 different languages spoken in the world, all of which are in a continuous state of evolving, by inter‐mixing or stagnating, growing or contracting. This occurs through changes in the population size of the people who use them, the frequency and form of their use in different media, through migration and through inter‐mixing with other languages. As Stadler et al. argue, human languages are a ‘culturally evolving trait’ and when it occurs language change is both sporadic and robust (faithfully replicated) and the main established variants are replaced by new variants. Only about 200 of these disparate languages are in written as well as spoken form, and most, except the popular ones like Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, and Russian, are in decline of use. But how did language itself evolve and come to be the most important innate tool possessed by people? The complex issue of language evolution continues to perplex because of its associations with culture, social behaviour and the development of the human mind

Natural Disaster and International Development

Recovery from natural disaster has for many years been seen in objective terms as simply the time taken to replace damaged infrastructure. Increasingly, however, social scientists are describing the large part that human capital plays in the recovery from natural disaster in the form of ‘resilience’. The purpose of the chapter is to delineate, from a social scientific perspective, the main factors involved in disaster rehabilitation from a necessarily superficial but nevertheless accurate and useful viewpoint. The main areas to be considered are infrastructural impacts, psychological impacts and communication factors. The chapter concludes by defining various perspectives that contribute to the quality of resilience that underscores the investment in human capital in post‐disaster zones

Time-capsule: Explorations of Concepts of Time and Law in Colonial New Zealand

Postcolonial legal culture in New Zealand (Aotearoa) has sought to revise the past by reinterpreting Victorian legal contexts in the light of contemporary understandings of inter-cultural differences. This article develops an argument that demonstrates the relationship between cultural and legal notions of time during nineteenth century New Zealand. It examines the way in which Victorian attitudes were expressed in the expansion of colonial empire and the discursive ideologies which may have informed them. It explores the notion of time as expressed in lawmaking in colonial New Zealand through an examination of legal and philosophical commentary derived from contemporary jurisprudence and para-legal literature. The article is concerned with presenting an argument for the way in which colonial law and lawmakers manipulated the symbolic notion of time to the possible occlusion of indigenous interests in colonial New Zealand

Incidence, Prevalence, and Survival of Patients with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis in the UK.

INTRODUCTION: Recent developments in the care of patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis have the potential to improve survival rates. Population-based estimates of the current disease burden are needed to evaluate the future impact of newly approved therapies. The objective of this study is to describe incidence, prevalence, and survival of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis patients in the UK. METHODS: Between 2000 and 2012, a patient cohort (N = 9,748,108), identified from Clinical Practice Research Datalink primary care data, was used to identify incident and prevalent cases of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis-clinical syndrome. Incident cases were followed up to identify deaths. Poisson and Cox regressions were used to calculate incidence rate ratios (IRR) and hazard ratios for mortality, respectively. Adjustments were made for age, gender, and strategic health authority. Survival from diagnosis was estimated using Kaplan-Meier analysis. RESULTS: In total 1491 and 4527 incident cases were identified using narrow and broad idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis-clinical syndrome definitions, respectively. Incidence and prevalence increased during the study. Compared with 2000, a near 80% increase in incidence was observed by 2012 [IRR 1.78 (95% CI 1.50-2.11; broad definition)], despite an observed decrease using the narrow definition [0.50 (0.38-0.65)]. Median survival was 3.0 years (95% CI 2.8-3.1) and 2.7 years (95% CI 2.5-3.0) in broad (n = 2168) and narrow case sets (n = 996), respectively. No significant changes in survival were observed. CONCLUSIONS: Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis incidence rates have increased since 2000 and survival remains poor. These results provide a benchmark against which the effects of future treatment changes can be measured. FUNDING: InterMune UK and Ireland (now part of F. Hoffman La Roche)

The Sisterhood: Black Women, Black Feminism, And The Women\u27s Liberation Movement

This dissertation, “The Sisterhood: Black Women, Black Feminism, and the Women’s Liberation Movement” traces the development of second-wave Black feminism as an intellectual and activist tradition in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on published and unpublished literary and academic works and extensive archival materials including personal correspondence, I argue that a cohort of Black women novelists, poets, critics, and academics used their work and social networks to build a distinct Black feminist movement while simultaneously imagining and producing new possibilities for political and personal relationships with individual white women and the larger feminist movement. This dissertation contributes to ongoing discussions in the fields of Black women’s intellectual history, Black feminism, and women’s studies in three ways: This dissertation contributes to these ongoing conversations in three ways: (1) by enlarging what has become a limited genealogy of second-wave Black feminist to include lesser-known and under-studied groups and women; (2) by illuminating the connections between the creative and political work Black feminists do including how Black feminists’ creative work (e.g. poetry and fiction) is a crucial form of theorizing the development of a Black feminist tradition; and (3) by explaining how Black feminists were consistently in dialogue with white feminists pressuring them to expand the mainstream feminist political platform to be more inclusive and attentive to women of color’s concerns. This dissertation is a recuperative project but also an effort to examine the robust, multi-layered contributions of Black women outside of mainstream second-wave feminist and Black Nationalist organizations. Tracing the circuits Black feminists navigated in their activist and intellectual work helps us to better understand the contemporary moment and to critically appraise contemporary, popular invocations of Black feminism as descendants of a historically specific movement and moment of Black feminist creativity and activism

‘The White Rose of Yorkshire’: Public Relations, Condolences and Grief Expression

In public relations, there is always unpredictability. It is part of a public relations strategists’ role to assess potential areas of crisis, to monitor the corporate mediascape for unpredictable events and to mitigate uncertainty for their clients be they organisations or individuals. But such public relations exercises are made more complex and unpredictable by the emotions experienced in public grieving. No recent commemoration has been so shocking and grief inspiring as that for British Labour Politician Member of Parliament for Batley and Spen in Yorkshire, Ms. Jo Cox who was shot and stabbed to death outside of her ‘constituency surgery’ in Birstall, West Yorkshire on June 16th, 2016. On her sudden and untimely death a nation and a Commonwealth ‘erupted’ into an expression of mourning, with some commentaries describing Ms. Cox as the ‘white rose of Yorkshire’ in a transient image, ephemeral pure and emblematic of their personal and public grief. As an MP who supported liberal causes, Ms Cox’s untimely death was also a political event. It occurred exactly at that moment of juncture when the ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ factions of the BREXIT campaign were focusing their vitriolic fervor, all the more poignant as she died espousing the liberal cause that was defeated in the first Referendum held on June 23rd, 2016. In discussing the relationship between personal and private grief, this article will focus on the eulogies for Ms Cox and the condolence message phenomenon, primarily as a mediated organisational ‘operation’

The Booker Prize and the legacy of empire

This thesis is about the Booker Prize—the London-based literary award given annually to "the best novel written in English" chosen from writers from countries which are part of or have been part of the British Commonwealth. The approach to the Prize is thematically but not chronologically historical, spanning twenty-six years of award-winning novels from the Prize's inauguration in 1969 to a cut-off point of 1995. The twenty-nine novels which have won or shared the Prize in this period are examined within a theoretical framework intended to map out the literary terrain which the novels inhabit. More specifically, the thesis is arranged in chapters which explore individually themes that occur within the larger narrative that is formed by this body of novels. The chapters, which are prefaced with thematic introductions and framed by theoretical commentary, explore aspects of the cultures, social trends, and movements that the novels invoke collectively, spanning the stages of British Empire perceived by their authors over the last three decades. Individually and collectively the novels provide a reflection, often in terms of more than a single static image, of British imperial culture after empire, contesting, and reinterpreting perceptions of the historical moment of the British Empire and its legacy in contemporary culture. It is my thesis that the body of Booker Prize winning novels from 1969 to 1995 narrates the ending of British Empire and the emergence of different cultural formations in its aftermath. This idea is pursued in the seven chapters of the thesis which discretely explore groups of novels which deal with aspects of the transition from empire to a post-imperial culture-the stages from early imperial expansion, to colonisation, to retrenchment, decolonisation and post-colonial pessimism, to the emergence of tribal nationalisms and post-imperial nation-states in the aftermath of empire. Throughout this thesis the focus is primarily literary and contingently cultural