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Beaten into the margins: the governance and knowability of BDSM and kink sexualities in England and Wales
No full textThis thesis research examines the mechanisms of socio-legal governance which misunderstand,
misrepresent and marginalise BDSM and Kink sexualities and intimacies in the socio-legal imaginary
in England and Wales. Focusing on BDSM and Kink lived experiences, including cultures,
communities and activities, this thesis will explore how BDSM and Kink identities are constructed,
depicted and regulated as deviant and aberrant on both social and legal axes. Following
interdisciplinary approaches, using a social constructionist paradigm and Foucauldian conceptions of
power and governance, this ethnographic socio-legal research investigates how the construction and
depictions of BDSM and Kink sexualities are based on misconceptions imposed and maintained by
authoritative outsider perspectives, which seek to erase, punish or normalise BDSM and Kink-associated practices. Such processes render BDSM and Kink expressions of intimacy ‘unthinkable’
and ‘unknowable’ (Lamble, 2009) in both social and legal contexts. Using primary data collected
from 24 semi-structured interviews with BDSM and Kink-orientated persons based in England and
Wales, this thesis presents and explores opinions on: the criminalisation, legal governance and
regulation of BDSM and Kink; conflicting views held by the general public about BDSM and Kink; and
social governance mechanisms and processes of othering, which are informed by and contribute to
justifications for further socio-legal marginalisation of BDSM and Kink sexualities. This research
further examines the impact of misconceptions perpetuated about the BDSM and Kink communities
on members of these intimate subcultures, demonstrating the desirability of redressing the current
socio-legal position in England and Wales. Finally, in a bid to determine the feasibility of redressing
the socio-legal conceptions and treatment of BDSM and Kink sexualities in England and Wales, this
research presents novel and evidence-based social and legal strategies through mobilising the lived-experience-informed recommendations of the participants of this study
Life-history traits predict ability of British wild bees to fill their climate envelopes
No full textUnderstanding a species’ ability to fill its climate envelope is crucial to understanding barriers to dispersal, and for predicting capacity to respond to climate change. If a species is not present in its climate envelope, its absence is likely due to non-climatic environmental factors including 1) dispersal limitations; 2) unsuitable habitat and resources and 3) insufficient data. This study investigates the relationship between British wild bees’ life-history traits and their ability to occupy their climate envelopes.
The ability of a species to fill its climate envelope was calculated as the proportion of its climate envelope containing a presence record. The relationship between climate envelope filling ability and four life-history traits - lecty (pollen foraging specialisation), overwintering stage, body size and habitat breadth was assessed.
Across 64 species of wild bee this study reveals large species, with generalist foraging behaviour and wide habitat breadth, filled a greater proportion of their climate envelope than smaller bees, with restricted foraging preferences and narrow habitat requirements. This study also found that while larger, generalist species are relatively more successful at filling their climate envelopes, many species do not fill the entirety of their potential climate envelopes.
In the context of climate change, this study raises the issue that Great Britain may experience a homogenization of future bee communities, dominated by widespread generalist species, better able to overcome the non-climatic barriers to filling their climate envelope
The importance of scale in the definition of uncertainties: how do we best communicate this to data users?
No full textClimate services often require observational climate data to inform decision-making on mitigation and adaptation activities. Understanding the uncertainties in the climate datasets that are used for this purpose, and how these uncertainties relate to the context of the climate service is critical to making well-informed decisions. Recent developments in the production of climate-relevant satellite datasets has focused on characterising uncertainties from a bottom-up perspective with a high degree of mathematical rigour. Using the example of three essential climate variables: sea surface temperature, soil moisture and carbon dioxide we discuss how to translate the highly-detailed uncertainty information provided with high-resolution datasets into something appropriate to the scale of a climate service, where the decision making context might be local, regional or global. Close engagement between climate data producers and climate service providers is essential to ensure we have the best possible platform to make decisions as we adapt to climate change
Navigating the fog: the effectiveness of personalised conversational GenAI models for supporting ancient language learning
No full textHallucinations (misleading, inaccurate predicted text presented as fact) are a critical problem for using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools to support ancient language teaching and learning. For a teacher, significant editing time is required to correct any inaccuracies or misrepresentations prior to making use of AI-generated content to support their teaching practice. For students, these convincing errors may not be recognised, and this may lead to misconceptions in their knowledge formation. OpenAI and Google released public-facing, customizable conversational AI models which allow users to upload their own datasets to create personalised AI chat agents, known as GPTs (2023) and Gems (2024) respectively. This presents an opportunity for teachers to personalize their own models to streamline their students’ experiences. However, can personalised conversational AI tools provide a fine-tuned experience that reduces the major, problematic ancient history and ancient language hallucinations that we see in standard ChatGPT and Gemini outputs?
This paper discusses the creation of a personalised Latin Tutor GPT and Gem through the development of a series of exhaustive Latin vocabulary spreadsheets. We tested these personalised tools against their standard GenAI counterpart to determine if personalisation improved their efficacy and efficiency for supporting ancient language learning. The development of the spreadsheets and testing process both closely addressed current GenAI ethical issues, including copyright, environmental impact, and content restrictions. The results of these tests found that personalised GPTs and Gems made small efficacy and efficiency improvements, but the time and energy required greatly outweighed the results
The power of partnership: adapting early language intervention for children with Down Syndrome through family-researcher collaboration
No full textBackground. Parents are uniquely placed to support their child’s development. Interventions which are designed to be delivered by parents therefore hold considerable promise, particularly for children with neurodevelopmental conditions that are associated with particular developmental strengths and challenges.
Aims. This study worked in partnership with families from the Down syndrome community to adapt an evidence based early language intervention for children with Down syndrome.
Methods and Procedures. Six families with a 3-5 year old child with Down syndrome participated in this mixed methods exploratory study. Guided by aspects of Community Based Participatory Research and Design Based Research, iterative cycles of design, implementation, analysis, and re-design were implemented to produce an adapted intervention programme. Data were collected using record forms, surveys, observations, and focus groups.
Outcomes and Results. Findings showed many aspects of the original programme were acceptable and feasible for families but important adaptations were identified including enhancing repetition and consolidation, reducing time pressures, tailoring to individual needs, smaller steps for learning, supporting engagement, and increasing visual support. Adapting the programme in these ways enhanced adherence, enjoyment and the child’s active engagement.
Conclusions and Implications. This study is the first to report the process of adapting an existing language intervention for people with disabilities and highlights the value of working with families to identify the best ways to support their needs. Our approach shows promise for supporting language development in this population and serves as a foundation for future research that aims to develop novel interventions
“I am a fighter” - Managers, lecturers or academics? Hybrid and fragmented identities of female middle managers within the context of the Institution-Wide Language Programme
No full textThe existing literature on middle management in UK higher education recognises that, due to
institutional neglect, workload intensification and role unpredictability, educational identities
have become fragmented and unstable. The leadership experience of middle managers has
been problematised further by recent organisational changes, resulting in the transfer to
Academic Education Pathway (AEP) contracts and the addition of scholarship to management
and teaching responsibilities. Although intended as an opportunity for career progression, it
has also caused identity stress and regulation for middle managers. With gender being the
particular focus of this enquiry, the study gives voice to the lesser-heard female middle
managers of Russian and Arabic origin within the under-researched field of the Institution-Wide Language Programme of UK Universities. The study explores the complexities of
women’s leadership identity construction through the intersection of gender, culture and
ethnicity.
The thesis employs a combined multiple-case and narrative inquiry approach to explore the
leadership journeys and identity constructions of ten women. It is informed by the
theoretical framework, consisting of four interrelated concepts – educational leadership,
leadership experience, institutional/organisational change and dilemmatic identity. It is
foregrounded by feminist poststructuralist theory and draws on educational leadership
theory, gendered leadership experience, social role theory, discourse and identity, critical
race and organisational culture and change theories. To fully explore the nuances and
ambiguities of the women’s stories, a four-stage analysis was employed, comprising
thematic, positioning, and narrative components.
The study helps advance feminist poststructuralist theory and narrative methodology by
revealing the transformative power of narrative in women's identity shift from powerless to
agentive. It reveals the nature of the dilemmatic identity resisting or submitting to the
institutional and patriarchal gender discourses, intellectual power hegemony, cultural gender
stereotyping, academic exclusion, financial insecurity and contractual limitations at the time
of organisational change. The findings have implications for policymakers in higher education
management, human resources and mentorship
Latent data assimilation with non-explicit observation operator in hydrology
Get PDFNatural hazards can cause significant damage to human life and property. Among
them, floods are one of the most severe and frequent natural disasters, making flood
prediction crucial. River discharge is an essential factor in causing floods, so accurate
and fast predicting river discharge is crucial for flood mitigation. Data assimilation (DA)
as a method of combining different sources of data (e.g., state field and observations)
has the ability to estimate the possible states of the river discharge. However, DA
on high dimensional data such as river discharge can be computationally expensive.
Furthermore, when the DA process lacks explicit mappings from the state field to the
observations, DA cannot be effectively conducted. In this work, we design a latent neural
mapping (LNM) in the form of a neural network (NN) as the observation operator and
integrate this within a 3D-Variational DA framework. By operating within the latent
space, the resulting approach helps mitigate computational costs and allow us to run
DA within seconds despite the high dimensional data. In addition, several alternative
NNs are employed to build mapping functions, which map data from the state space
to the observation space (and vice versa), and benchmarked against the latent space
based LNM approach. We test the LNM with real river discharge data from the UK and
Ireland. The National River Flow Archive (NRFA) dataset provides the observations,
and the data provided by a surrogate model from the European Flood Awareness System
(EFAS) dataset served as the state field. LNM outperforms the alternative methods in
terms of accuracy and efficiency. The developed LNM can be applied to areas other
than hydrology to efficiently integrate data with models
Universities and the rule against political charities
No full textProfessor Arif Ahmed has made an impassioned – and entertaining – case for political “institutional neutrality” in our universities.1 The suggestion here will be that political neutrality is already effectively a legal requirement for almost all universities. What is needed is a better understanding, and better enforcement, of relevant charity law. It has long been recognised that non-profit universities are charities.2 Indeed, the list of charitable purposes in the Preamble to the Charitable Uses Act 1601 (or “Statute of Elizabeth”), the historical foundation of much of our charity law, included “the maintenance of … scholars in universities…”.3 This article examines the potential application to universities of the rule against political charities. In particular, it draws on the authorities establishing that political propaganda representing itself as education is non-charitable
The global circuit capacitor and two new ways of deriving the time constant of the global atmospheric electric circuit
Get PDFTemporal smoothing of the electrical impulses generated by lightning and shower clouds occurs through the global atmospheric electric circuit (GEC); smoothing is quantified by the time constant of the GEC. Two new methods for calculating this time constant are presented. They are based a) on a novel global circuit capacitor model, rather than the Earth-ionosphere capacitor model, and b) on the concept of dielectric relaxation time of near-surface poorly conducting air. The new GEC model considers the contributions of stratus clouds and their changes to the electrical conductivity of the air. Using model a), the time constants for the various regions of the atmosphere, over land and oceans, are obtained and the GEC time constant is found to be ~ 10 minutes. This compares very favourably with the time constant derived from recent observations of the effects of sudden volcanic lightning on the GEC. The upper “pseudo-electrode” of the capacitor, the actual value of whose constant potential varies according to the conditions present, is found to be at an altitude of 1.8 km. For model b), the upper pseudo-electrode is placed at the boundary between dielectric and conducting atmospheres, i.e. where the displacement current equals the conduction current. Its altitude is ~ 2.0 km, in the vicinity of stratiform clouds; the GEC time constant is 7.6 minutes. The vertical profile of air conductivity which best fits both DC GEC and AC (Schumann resonance) considerations is presented. Smoothing from the GEC’s time constant provides steady background conditions for stratiform cloud edge charging which may affect their properties in the climate system; the steady conditions are also exploited biologically, e.g., by spiders and their webs. Other connections between atmospheric electricity and various living species are briefly explored
