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Beachy Head Woman: clarifying her origins using a multiproxy anthropological and biomolecular approach
No full textThe skeletal remains of an individual colloquially referred to as Beachy Head Woman (BHW) were re-discovered in the Eastbourne Town Hall collection in 2012, and have remained the subject of significant public interest since. Radiocarbon dating yielded a calibrated date of between 129 and 311 calCE indicating that she lived during the period of the Roman occupation of Britain and, over more than a decade, there have been several attempts to unravel her geographical origins and ancestry. Here, we present results of all bioanthropological and biomolecular analyses performed to date. Initial osteological analyses indicated possible sub-Saharan origin, with BHW thus presented as one of the earliest British-Africans. However, her story was complicated by subsequent (unpublished) biomolecular analyses, which suggested she likely grew up on the south coast of Britain and had recent European ancestry. Subsequently, high quality ancient DNA data indicate that Beachy Head Woman has a strong genetic affinity to individuals from rural Britain during the Roman occupation and modern day Britons. We find no signals of admixture that would suggest recent sub-Saharan ancestry. Phenotypic predictions suggest she had blue eyes, intermediate (between pale and dark) skin pigmentation and light hair. Combined, our multiproxy approach indicates that Beachy Head Woman was of local British ancestry
Pólya's conjecture for Dirichlet eigenvalues of annuli
No full textWe prove Pólya's conjecture for the eigenvalues of the Dirichlet Laplacian on annular domains.
Our approach builds upon and extends the methods we previously developed for disks and balls.
It combines variational bounds, estimates of Bessel phase functions, refined lattice point counting techniques, and a rigorous computer-assisted analysis. As a by-product, we also derive a two-term upper bound for the Dirichlet eigenvalue counting function of the disk, improving upon Pólya's original estimate
The mood brightening effect of leisure activities and social company in young people with depression and anhedonia symptoms: an ecological momentary assessment study
Get PDFBackground: Depressed individuals are less reactive than controls to positive stimuli in the laboratory, yet mood brightening (MB) is when positive stimuli increase positive affect (PA) and/or decreases negative affect (NA) more in those with depression compared to controls, in real life. Leisure activities and social company may drive mood brightening in depression, but their impact on anhedonia remains unclear, clarifying this could inform intervention development.
Methods: Participants (N=71, mean 20yrs) with a range of depression and anhedonia symptoms provided 6 days Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) data about their leisure activities and social company and NA and PA. In 2,177 ecological momentary assessments, we measured affective reactivity as the difference between PA and NA at the time of the activity/social company compared to two baselines: previous assessment (t-1; lag-1 fluctuation) and within-subject mean. Longitudinal multilevel linear regression models examined the interaction between symptoms and affect reactivity to leisure and to social company.
Results: Multilevel models revealed that those with higher depression (p<0.05) and anhedonia symptoms (p<0.025) had greater reductions in NA during leisure activity and that those with higher depression symptoms (p<0.05) had greater reductions in NA during social company. These findings indicate MB effects of leisure activity and social company.
Conclusions: Although MB has been documented in depression this is the first study to examine a MB effect in anhedonia symptoms. We provide real-time mechanistic evidence that encouraging individuals with depression and anhedonia symptoms to engage in leisure activities and seek out enjoyable social company could elevate their mood via a reduction in NA
Language and migration
No full textThis chapter deals with the relationship between language and migration. From early human migrations, through centuries of colonialism and up to contemporary phases of globalization, the discussion draws on anthropology as well as applied linguistics, geography and sociology to understand the complex interactions between language practices and human mobility. Literacy and multilingualism are explored within their social, cultural and political contexts as a means of illustrating the diversity of language practices migrants draw on at various stages of their migrations
Pizza ice cream with salami sprinkles: an analysis of the creativity of nominal compounding in multilinguals
No full textAims
This study aims to provide new insights into the creativity of nominal compounds in multilinguals. We ask whether mixed and unmixed compounds in Malay-English language contact follow Malay or English rules for the headedness of compounds and how pluralization rules are applied to compounds across both languages. We also ask whether any innovative forms qualify as examples of rule-governed or rule-changing creativity.
- Design/Methodology/Approach: We analyse data from the existing literature on compounding in Malay and English as well as data from a corpus of over a thousand utterances with intrasentential code-switching, collected by Majid (2019) among teachers of English in Malaysia.
- Data and Analysis: A qualitative analysis is made of the headedness of different nominal compounds and of the way in which these are pluralized.
-Findings/Conclusions: We found that Malay compounds in the data were generally left-headed and English compounds right-headed, but the directionality of mixed compounds depended largely on the language of the clause in which they appear: in Malaysian English short stories and newspapers, mixed compounds were right-headed, while they were left-headed in the speech of teachers.
- Originality:
The study brings together insights from the literature on creativity and insights from studies on nominal compounding. As in most studies of compounds, the constructions are studied in isolation, the current study is novel in that the language of the clause in which the compounds appear is analysed too. Finally, we bring together insights from the study of compounding in children as well as young adults, showing that the data from young adults are more likely to lead to rule-changing creativity
The decline of neoliberal hegemony: the US Fentanyl epidemic as a case study
No full textThis chapter offers an intervention and refinement to the criminological discussion about neoliberal political practices, using the case study of American political responses to the fentanyl epidemic
Dystopian international law
No full textIn 2025, we international lawyers – and the legal system in which we operate – are standing at the precipice. That things are beyond bad should not be in doubt. This is not some run-of-the-mill crisis of the kind that international lawyers revel in, as Hilary Charlesworth warned us not to do. This is collapse, or something collapse-adjacent. And we are not alone, here at the precipice. Everyone else is here too. Some don’t think things are as catastrophic as they first seem. Some are delighted with how things are going (though there are few international lawyers among them). Some are despairing (and here the international lawyers are legion). Everyone’s anxious.
I, too, am anxious, standing here at the precipice. I see the looming catastrophe, for our world and for our field. The catastrophe is already here. It is in Gaza, in Sudan, in Ukraine. It is in the global decline of democracy and rising authoritarianism, including in the United States, the linchpin of the current international order. The question is how big this catastrophe is going to get, and what will come after it. And that we just don’t know. We can’t know, standing, as we are, here at the precipice.
In this essay, I would like to imagine, as an international lawyer, where the international legal system could go as we leave this precipice behind. The world we will live in in ten or twenty years’ time will in many ways be worse than when I write this. The international legal system will be worse with it.
But dystopias are not inevitable. Where we go from this precipice, and just how bad things really end up being, is contingent. It depends on what we choose to do, or not do. Anyone who has lived through a dictatorship – and I have lived through three (kind of) – will know that the good guys don’t always win, but the bad guys don’t either. There are forks in the road, decisions and choices that people make. The decisions and choices of international lawyers are far from the most consequential, but they are ours.
I have chosen to engage with two books – both written by non-lawyers, for a general, mass market audience – as a starting point for discussing the precipice on which we stand. The first is a classic: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, the first edition of which was published in 1951. The second is of more recent vintage: Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc., published in 2024.
Arendt’s work has provoked decades of scholarly commentary. She has also, for good reasons, experienced a surge in popularity in recent years, in response to the unravelling of democracy in a substantial number of states. Applebaum’s work is, of course, not canonical in the same way. But, despite their differences, and the seven decades’ gap between them, there are some important commonalities between these two books. Both resulted from an effort by scholars, who are not traditional academics but essayists writing books with a popular appeal, to make sense of the radical transformation of the world around them. Both books were written on a precipice. Both are intensely personal. And both have lessons to impart – for international lawyers and for all citizens – lessons that need to be absorbed
The psychological contracts of self-initiated expatriate women: contract type, expatriate status and intention to stay
No full textPurpose
Self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) are relevant resources for multinational enterprises, but the topic of gender is often overlooked. This study examines how psychological contract (PC) types differ between women and men SIEs and how the intersection of gender and occupational status shapes these contracts and associated intentions to stay. Specifically, we investigate how relational and transactional PCs mediate the relationship between supervisor–subordinate relationship quality and intention to remain with the same employer and in the host region, with a particular analytical focus on women SIEs.
Design and methodology
We use survey data from 234 women SIEs (and a comparator group of 386 men). The cross-sectional data was collected in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and analysed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), structural equation modelling (SEM) and analysis of variance (ANOVA) to examine gender- and status-based differences.
Findings
Our findings demonstrated positive direct effects between the relationship with the supervisor and holding both relational and transactional PCs. Relational PCs were positively related to intention to stay with the employer, but not in the host region, while transactional PCs were negatively related to both outcome variables. Furthermore, we found that medium-status women SIEs tend to hold PCs with fewer relational features compared with their higher qualified counterparts.
Originality
This study advances psychological contract research by incorporating gender, occupational status, and mobility context into a single analytical framework. For practice, the findings highlight the importance of high-quality supervisory relationships and career development opportunities in supporting the retention of women SIEs at both organisational and regional levels
Board structure, R&D intensity and firm value relationship: evidence from the Anglo-Saxon technology sector
No full textDrawing on resource dependence theory, we examined the role of board structure in shaping firms’ research and development (R&D) intensity and market value within the technology sector in Anglo-Saxon countries. From 2655 firm observations across Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US for the 2002–2021 period, we found that R&D intensity increased firm market value. Additionally, larger and more gender-diverse boards can create synergy in generating value from R&D investments. Counterintuitively, despite its growing importance after the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002, board independence failed to yield a synergy between R&D intensity and firm value. Given the research context, we can infer that excessive board independence may limit managers’ ability to think freely and take risks, which are essential for innovation
Speech-in-noise processing in Autism Spectrum Disorder: electrophysiological and behavioural evidence
No full textRecognising speech in the presence of competing sounds requires listeners to effectively
process both acoustic and semantic information. Autistic individuals often experience greater
difficulties with speech-in-noise (SiN) processing, but the underlying mechanisms remain
unclear. Existing electrophysiological (EEG) research has primarily focused on auditory-level
processing in autism and frequently relies on short, discrete stimuli, such as tones or single
words. As a result, higher-level semantic processing and its interaction with auditory
mechanisms during continuous speech remains largely unexplored. This thesis addresses these
gaps through three studies combining EEG and behavioural measures to investigate SiN
processing in autistic and non-autistic adults. Study 1 evaluated listeners’ use of acoustic cues
(i.e., difference in speaker gender and spatial location) to attend to a speaker amid competing
voices. While both groups benefited from these cues, autistic participants showed lower
accuracy and smaller improvements over time. Study 2 examined the impact of background
music on semantic processing using a sentence acceptability task. Autistic participants showed
lower accuracy and attenuated N400 responses to semantic incongruities, reflecting difficulties
with semantic integration. Unlike non-autistic participants, whose behavioural and neural
responses varied with lyric intelligibility, autistic participants showed minimal variation across
conditions. Study 3 explored auditory and semantic processing in the presence of intelligible
or unintelligible background speech using the same task. Autistic participants showed reduced
auditory encoding, as captured by EEG-derived temporal response functions, and delayed
semantic processing reflected by N400 latency. While non-autistic participants adjusted their
auditory and semantic processing according to the intelligibility of the background speech,
autistic participants showed no such modulation. Overall, these findings offer new insight into
SiN processing in autism, highlighting inefficient auditory and semantic processing, and a
consistent lack of modulation in response to different noise types. This reduced flexibility in
adapting to complex listening conditions indicates broader differences in processing strategies