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Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) strategically manipulate their environment to deny conspecifics access to food
Get PDFHumans modify their environment to grant or prevent others’ access to valuable resources, for example by using locks. We tested whether sanctuary-living chimpanzees (N = 10) would flexibly modify their environment to either allow or deny a dominant conspecific access to a shared food source by giving them the option to change a food reward’s pathway prior to releasing it. The food could end up in one of two locations: one was accessible to both the subject and a dominant conspecific, the other one was only accessible to the subject. We further manipulated the extent of inhibitory control needed for modifying the pathway by varying the subjects’ starting position. Our subjects reoriented the pathway competitively to monopolize food but changed the pathway less often in trials with high inhibitory demands. We further show how inhibitory task demands in a social context influence chimpanzees’ future planning. Our results show that chimpanzees will strategically manipulate their environment to maximize their own and deny a dominant conspecific access to food
Evaluating the importance of footloose-type failure in ice island deterioration modeling
Get PDFThe drift and deterioration of large and tabular icebergs, also known as “ice islands” in the Arctic, are modeled for both operational (e.g., offshore risk mitigation) and research (e.g., oceanographic impact of melt water input) purposes. In this paper, we build a theoretical argument to show that the lateral deterioration of ice islands is controlled by the rate of sidewall notch growth at the waterline, with this growth leading to the development of underwater rams and buoyancy-induced calving via the ‘footloose’ mechanism. This dominance of footloose-type lateral deterioration allows for the majority of ice island deterioration to be simulated with only three oceanic variables: wave height, wave period, and sea-surface temperature. Information regarding the size and lineage of ice islands tracked in the Canadian Ice Island Drift, Deterioration and Detection (CI2D3) Database provides opportunity to assess our theoretical work, as the database serves as a validation dataset for simulations of ice island length and area change. When simulating the length reduction over time of ice islands tracked in the CI2D3 Database, the footloose model reduced the mean error over 80 d to +277 m, compared to −1545 and −1403 m with no-melt and thermal-melt models, respectively. We also demonstrate a new approach to simulating the areal deterioration of ice islands resulting from discrete footloose calving events. The approach utilizes two parameters: the length-to-width ratio of the ice island (r) and the width of a footloose calving event relative to the ice island's length (K). With r = 1.6 and K= 0.8, the mean error in modeled area was close to zero after 20 d of simulation. A comparison of stresses associated with footloose events from a 1D-beam model and those simulated with 3D finite-element modeling showed that the 1D and 3D simulations produce broadly similar results. This supports our approaches and parameter assignments for simulating ice island length and area reduction from footloose calving. These approaches can now be incorporated into ice island deterioration models. The benefit of this incorporation will be greatest for those interested in research of longer-term impacts of ice island deterioration on ocean properties given the greater improvements to model error over periods of time that are longer than those that usually concern offshore ice management operations
"A jubilee of rot": Degradations of the dead and mourning in twentieth-century United States American gothic literature
No full textThis thesis investigates representations of the dead and dying body in American gothic literature from 1917 to 1999, specifically the violence enacted upon it and its often-ignored physicality. It demonstrates how modern U.S. society uses such bodies to mediate social anxieties about death, including the treatment of the dead/dying body, the experience of death, and society's ability to 'manage' death and negotiate the acceptable level of closeness to or distance from the dead which is expected to be maintained by the living. Bringing together gothic literature and thanatology, it produces close readings of novels and short stories with reference to scholarship in gothic and death studies as well as etiquette manuals, medical and funerary developments, and death-centric incidents in contemporaneous U.S. culture. It interrogates how death is positioned as fundamentally 'un-American' and how this induces anxiety. The gothic figure of the necrophile provides an excellent lens for interrogating the position of the corpse as subject or object and determining what constitutes 'inappropriate' death, grief, mourning, and treatment of the corpse; a broader understanding of what constitutes necrophilia, beyond its generally accepted but restrictive conception as a sexual behavior, will also be established throughout this study. This thesis aims to establish the dead/dying body as a source of special anxiety in modern American culture and gothic texts due to a social investment in 'triumphing over' rather than 'sharing in' the suffering of others. The gothic texts investigated include: H.P. Lovecraft's "Herbert West—Reanimator" (1922), C. M. Eddy Jr.'s "The Loved Dead" (1924), William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" (1930), Ray Bradbury's "There Was an Old Woman" (1944) and "The Coffin" (1947), Robert Bloch's Psycho (1959), Michael Avallone's The Coffin Things (1968), Harlan Ellison's "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" (1973), Stephen King's Pet Sematary (1983), and Poppy Z. Brite's Exquisite Corpse (1996)
A SWOT Analysis of the Use of Marine, Grain, Terrestrial-Animal and Novel Protein Ingredients in Aquaculture Feeds
Get PDFA variety of new feed ingredients are emerging in the aquaculture feed sector. While the technology readiness of these options varies across and within the new ingredient classes, it remains important to consider them in terms of the overall feed ingredient spectrum. In this review, the use of marine, grain, terrestrial animal by-product and a range of novel (e.g., bacterial and yeast) resources being considered as potential protein feedstuffs for use in aquafeeds is explored. In comparing the nutritional attributes of each of the ingredient classes, an assessment framework is applied based on understanding the critical knowledge required to be able to accommodate any ingredient in a formulation process. To further examine each of the different ingredient classes a Strength-Weakness-Opportunity-and-Threats (SWOT) analysis is applied, to enable some consideration of what future potential may exist across the spectrum and what risks and opportunities they may bring. It is noted that all ingredients have strengths and weaknesses, and that there is no such thing as the perfect ingredient. By better appreciating the positives and negatives of each ingredient, it becomes possible to increase adaptability in responding to the various opportunities for their use in feeds
Why wages don't fall in jobs with incomplete contracts
Get PDFWe investigate how the incompleteness of an employment contract -discretionary and non-contractible effort - can affect an employer's decision about cutting nominal wages. Using matched employer-employee payroll data from Great Britain, linked to a survey of managers, we find support for the main predictions of a stylised theoretical framework of wage determination: nominal cuts are at most half as likely when managers believe their employees have significant discretion over how they do their work, though the involvement of employees, via information sharing, reduces this correlation. We also describe how contract incompleteness and wage cuts vary across different jobs. These findings provide the first observational quantitative evidence that managerial beliefs about contractual incompleteness can account for their hesitancy over nominal wage cuts. This has long been conjectured by economists based on anecdotes, qualitative surveys, and laboratory and field experiments.Output Status: Forthcomin
Awareness of enterprise finance support programmes: the role of networks, gender and ethnicity
Get PDFOutput Status: Forthcoming/Available Onlin
Future ordinaries: assembling place-based knowledges and literacies in real and imagined harmscapes
Get PDFThis paper explores the role of the everyday in real and imagined responses to climate-changed landscapes emerging from South African and UK-based activities in a project exploring local knowledges and resilience. We explore photographs and captions created by co-researcher residents in three climate-stressed settlements in South Africa. We then use participant-generated stories created in the UK to explore imagined future landscapes. We demonstrate important commonalities between the real and the imagined, and between Global South and Global North, including three key dynamics to involved in responses to harmscapes of the present that also animate imagined futures: intra-community relations, the development of place and landscape literacies and adaptations. Our process reveals the centrality of the ordinary to both present realities and future imaginaries
Reducing alcohol harms whilst minimising impact on hospitality businesses: ‘Sweetspot’ policy options
Get PDFBackground During COVID-19, hospitality businesses (e.g. bars, restaurants) were closed/restricted whilst off-sales of alcohol increased, with health consequences. Post-covid, governments face lobbying to support such businesses, but many health services remain under pressure. We appraised ‘sweetspot’ policy options: those with potential to benefit public services and health, whilst avoiding or minimising negative impact on the hospitality sector. Methods We conducted rapid non-systematic evidence reviews using index papers, citation searches and team knowledge to summarise the literature relating to four possible ‘sweetspot’ policy areas: pricing interventions (9 systematic reviews (SR); 14 papers/reports); regulation of online sales (1 SR; 1 paper); place-shaping (2 SRs; 18 papers/reports); and violence reduction initiatives (9 SRs; 24 papers/reports); and led two expert workshops (n = 11). Results Interventions that raise the price of cheaper shop-bought alcohol appear promising as ‘sweetspot’ policies; any impact on hospitality is likely small and potentially positive. Restrictions on online sales such as speed or timing of delivery may reduce harm and diversion of consumption from on-trade to home settings. Place-shaping is not well-supported by evidence and experts were sceptical. Reduced late-night trading hours likely reduce violence; evidence of impact on hospitality is scant. Other violence reduction initiatives may modestly reduce harms whilst supporting hospitality, but require resources to deliver multiple measures simultaneously in partnership. Conclusions Available evidence and expert views point to regulation of pricing and online sales as having greatest potential as ‘sweetspot’ alcohol policies, reducing alcohol harm whilst minimising negative impact on hospitality businesses
Power at Play in Paranormal History: The Contested Object Biography of the Cottingley Fairy Artefacts.
Get PDFThis article presents a collective object biography and discussion of the Cottingley fairy artefacts—cameras, photographs, watercolours sketches, and print materials—held at the National Science and Media Museum. I demonstrate how the controversial paranormal claims made about the Cottingley cameras by Arthur Conan Doyle and Edward Gardner relied on the manipulation and obfuscation of key episodes in their history of use, a strategy that worked to distance the objects from each other and from their young female working-class operators Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright. My article seeks to both interlink and restore the lost episodes in the histories of these objects as a way of redressing the power imbalance between the plebeian producers and elite cosmopolitan popularisers of the world-famous fairy photographs. I suggest how a new curatorial approach to the materials might reject the familiar—and largely inaccurate—narrative of deliberate hoax and deception still widely attached to the case, and instead use them to tell a new story about the technological experimentation, artistic aspirations, and social restrictions experienced by working-class girls in early twentieth-century Britain
Everyday records or living archives? An analysis of record-keeping in residential children’s homes in Scotland
Get PDFThis article presents research and experience gathered during a practice-based study to look at how group experience is captured and preserved in care records of children and young people. It discusses the work of the Archiving Residential Children’s Homes project (ARCH), a joint Scottish-German research project with teams at the Universities of Stirling and Osnabruck. The article focuses on the Scottish side of the project, examining the steps recently taken in Scotland towards recognizing the value and importance of care records and challenging current recording practices in the care sector. It reflects on the interdisciplinary nature of the project, examining the differing positions taken by key professionals and their approach to record keeping. The article looks beyond the individual case file examining how everyday, group life was historically captured and recorded, drawing out the parallels and differences with contemporary practice and proposing a new reframing of record keeping responsibilities to include the wider responsibility of memory keeping
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