Maternal Abusers: Underlying concerns for children

Child sexual abuse is an emotive topic, which raises public fears and political concerns. Commonly the perpetrators of such abuse are male and their victims female, but evidence suggests that there are a significant number of female perpetrators as well. It is the perceived gendered nature of the crime that creates a stumbling block to the recognition of women who sexually abuse and can silence the child victims. Using data from a wider research project, this paper examines the ways in which female perpetrators rationalise their behaviours and in doing so considers what part these justifications play in silencing the child victims

Structural relaxation in the hydrogen-bonding liquids N-methylacetamide and water studied by optical Kerr-effect spectroscopy

Structural relaxation in the peptide model N-methylacetamide (NMA) is studied experimentally by ultrafast optical Kerr-effect spectroscopy over the normal-liquid temperature range and compared to the relaxation measured in water at room temperature. It is seen that in both hydrogen-bonding liquids, beta relaxation is present and in each case it is found that this can be described by the Cole-Cole function. For NMA in this temperature range, the alpha and beta relaxations are each found to have an Arrhenius temperature dependence with indistinguishable activation energies. It is known that the variations on the Debye function, including the Cole-Cole function, are unphysical, and we introduce two general modifications: one allows for the initial rise of the function, determined by the librational frequencies, and the second allows the function to be terminated in the alpha relaxation

Unconventional gas in Australia: towards a legal geography

Recent commentary on future research directions for legal geography highlights the need for studies that are historically grounded and focused on human–environment interactions in rural settings. As a current, controversial land use in Australia, unconventional gas (UG) development provides an ideal lens through which researchers can investigate these themes. Utilising emerging international literature and current Australian examples, this paper surveys major trends in the Australian literature relating to UG, before exploring some of the ways in which Australian legal geographers might contribute constructively to community debates around this resource. Seeking to encourage further analysis, this paper contributes to this developing literature by focusing on two key areas: the various legal actors involved in UG development in Australia (including their regulatory choices, spatial interpretations, expertise, and influence) and the implications for legal geography where attempts are made to establish ‘social licence’ through contractual arrangements between industry and individual landholders. This article also delves into the place of Indigenous Australians in relation to UG extraction and the questions this resource raises about land use conflicts in Australia more generally – offering suggestions for comparative international studies and further critique at the domestic level.This research was funded by an Australian Postgraduate Award and a Supplementary Scholarship from the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University

On black holes in string theory

PhDThis thesis investigates black holes in string theory through string amplitudes and through gauge-gravity duality. The research presented in this thesis supports the claim that string theory is capable of a consistent quantum-mechanical description of black holes and develops techniques which may prove useful in testing this claim in new scenarios. The thesis comprises two parts. Part I describes novel disk amplitudes which derive the supergravity elds sourced by a D-brane with a travelling wave, and Part II describes free particle structures arising in a matrix model which is related through gauge-gravity duality to asymptotically anti-de Sitter black holes. The disk amplitudes calculated in Part I provide a direct connection between the microscopic worldsheet description of a D-brane with a travelling wave and its macroscopic supergravity description. A D-brane carrying a travelling wave can be mapped via string dualities to the two-charge D1-D5 black hole and this research opens up the possibility to use these techniques to study the three-charge D1-D5-P black hole. Part II of the thesis identi es free particle descriptions of non-holomorphic operators in a complex matrix model derived from dimensional reduction of N = 4 Super-Yang-Mills theory. This research generalizes the free particle description in the half-BPS sector of this theory which was realized in supergravity and enabled studies of the microscopics of singular geometries. The free particle descriptions have been derived at zero gauge coupling; if these or similar structures are also present at strong coupling this research could be used to study the microscopics of non-extremal asymptotically anti-de Sitter black holes

Towards the electrochemical conversion of CO2 to formic acid at an applicative scale: technical and economic analysis of most promising routes

In the last decade, the electrochemical conversion of CO 2 to formic acid, FA, using Sn\u2010based cathodes, was widely investigated. In this work, the technical feasibility and economic viability of this process were evaluated considering the most promising electrochemical routes reported in the literature. Five case studies, based on the utilisation of GDE technologies or high CO 2 pressures, were analysed. The cost for producing FA by the electrochemical route was compared with that of the conventional chemical route. Several scenarios were envisioned finding the target figures of merit, the potential bottlenecks (including low FA concentration, GDE cost and high energy consumption) of each technology and the challenges that need to be faced. It was shown that the performances of these processes are not still adequate from an economic point of view and the improvements that should be achieved were identified. To be suitable for the commercialisation, the process should reach simultaneously high current density, faradaic efficiency and actual FA concentration as well as good stability with time and a limited cost of electrodes. In addition, it was shown that the utilisation of the excess electric energy generated from renewable sources could significantly reduce the costs of the process

The relationship between recalled self-esteem as a child and current levels of professional burnout among Anglican clergy in England

This study links and tests three strands of theory concerned with explaining individual differences in levels of professional burnout in general and among religious professionals in particular. These three strands concern the significance of current self-esteem, recalled self-esteem as a child, and personality. Data were provided by a sample of 1,278 male stipendiary parochial clergy working in the Church of England who completed the modified Maslach Burnout Inventory (specially designed for use among clergy), and the short-form Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (designed to measure the personality dimensions of extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism), together with a semantic differential index of recalled self-esteem as a child. The bivariate correlation coefficients demonstrated significant associations between more positive self-esteem as a child and lower levels of professional burnout (higher personal accomplishment, lower emotional exhaustion and lower depersonalisation). The bivariate correlation coefficients also demonstrated significant associations between personality and professional burnout. Multiple regression analyses, however, demonstrated that the association between recalled self-esteem as a child and professional burnout largely disappeared after controlling for the personality variables. The conclusion is drawn that knowledge about the personality profile of clergy functions as a more secure predictor of susceptibility to professional burnout than knowledge about recalled self-esteem as a child

Dielectric relaxation of the ionic liquid 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium ethyl sulfate: microwave and far-IR properties

Dielectric relaxation of the ionic liquid, 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium ethyl sulfate (EMI+ETS–), is studied using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The collective dynamics of polarization arising from cations and anions are examined. Characteristics of the rovibrational and translational components of polarization dynamics are analyzed to understand their respective roles in the microwave and terahertz regions of dielectric relaxation. The MD results are compared with the experimental low-frequency spectrum of EMI+ETS–, obtained via ultrafast optical Kerr effect (OKE) measurements

Deriving Contextualised Semantic Features from BERT (and Other Transformer Model) Embeddings

Models based on the transformer architecture, such as BERT, have marked a crucial step for- ward in the field of Natural Language Pro- cessing. Importantly, they allow the creation of word embeddings that capture important semantic information about words in context. However, as single entities, these embeddings are difficult to interpret and the models used to create them have been described as opaque. Binder and colleagues proposed an intuitive embedding space where each dimension is based on one of 65 core semantic features. Un- fortunately, the space only exists for a small data-set of 535 words, limiting its uses. Pre- vious work (Utsumi, 2018, 2020; Turton et al., 2020) has shown that Binder features can be derived from static embeddings and success- fully extrapolated to a large new vocabulary. Taking the next step, this paper demonstrates that Binder features can be derived from the BERT embedding space. This provides two things; (1) semantic feature values derived from contextualised word embeddings and (2) insights into how semantic features are repre- sented across the different layers of the BERT model

On the BPS sector in AdS_3/CFT_2 Holography

The BPS sector in AdS_3/CFT_2 duality has been fertile ground for the exploration of gauge/gravity duality, from the match between black hole entropy and the CFT elliptic genus to the construction of large families of geometrical microstates and the identification of the corresponding states in the CFT. Worldsheet methods provide a tool to further explore the relation between string theory in the bulk and corresponding CFT quantities. We show how to match individual BPS strings to their counterparts in the symmetric product orbifold CFT. In the process, we find an exact match between known constructions of microstate geometries and condensates of BPS supergraviton strings, and discuss their role in the broader collection of BPS states. In particular, we explore how microstate geometries develop singularities; and how string theory resolves these singularities through the appearance of ``tensionless'' string dynamics, which is the continuation of structures found in the weak-coupling CFT into the strongly coupled regime described by string theory in the bulk. We argue that such ``tensionless'' strings are responsible for black hole microstructure in the bulk description.Comment: 47 pages, 5 figure