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Political correctness gone woke in polarised society: the emergence of a new keyword in an old ‘culture war’ discourse
Get PDFThis article investigates firstly the current usage of woke through a corpus-assisted discourse analysis and, secondly, the emergence of woke as a discourse keyword in British newspaper discourse. The analysis of the current usage is based on a purpose-built corpus with just over 2,500 articles from five UK broadsheet newspapers across the political spectrum containing the word woke between October 2021 and October 2022. The corpus-based analysis shows that the collocational profile of woke hardly differs between left-liberal and conservative-right newspapers. However, given that the notion of woke is based on a public discourse characterised by increased polarisation in the context of the so-called ‘culture wars’, a closer look at the concordances reveals clear differences in usage: The discourse on the political right derides woke, whereas the discourse on the left features various ways of distancing from the out-group’s derogatory uses of woke. These results demonstrate the extent to which the use of this discourse keyword is determined by its appropriation by the political right who speak negatively about woke. The analysis of collocations and concordances is complemented by using the corpus to elicit all word formation based on woke, which demonstrates the rapidly increased versatility of its deployment and gives further insights into differences in stance towards woke. The analysis of the emergence of woke seeks to add diachronic depth to the analysis of the current usage by looking at the first uses of woke as discourse keyword in the same five British broadsheets, as well as its relation to preceding words from within the ‘culture wars’ discourse
You are unmuted: the impact of virtual arrangements on women and old age legislators’ participation during the COVID-19 pandemic
Get PDFDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, parliaments around the world implemented virtual arrangements to facilitate participation by legislators who were negatively affected. This article explores if the pandemic had a differential impact on MP participation in parliamentary proceedings by age or gender and whether virtual arrangements have mitigated these adverse effects. Using the adoption of hybrid proceedings in the United Kingdom House of Commons as its case study, and exploiting the change in its form and application during the pandemic period as treatment, this article demonstrates that the pandemic has had an especially adverse impact on women MPs’ participation in parliamentary proceedings and that virtual arrangements had a substantive role in mitigating the gendered effect of the pandemic when its application was more extensive. These results suggest that maintaining virtual arrangements for parliamentary proceedings post-pandemic is potentially beneficial for the descriptive representation of women
Vox populi, vox dei? The effect of sociotropic and egocentric incongruence on democratic preferences
Get PDFSystemic congruence between the whole legislature and the whole electorate (‘many-to-many’, or
sociotropic congruence) should be the benchmark to evaluate a democratic system. Yet, most studies link shifts
in democratic preferences to individual-level representation (‘many-to-one’, or egocentric incongruence), since
individual-level representation failures should be more salient and visible for individual citizens. We argue that the
sociotropic incongruence hypothesis has not been appropriately tested to date, because the measure does not vary at
individual level in observational data. Using an experiment conducted in France, we manipulate various sociotropic
(in)congruence scenarios at the individual level. In addition to the incongruence hypotheses, our original experiment
tests whether offering expertise-based justifications to incongruence attenuates the backlash against representatives.
We find that, even when giving sociotropic incongruence a fair test, egocentric incongruence still consistently shapes
democratic preferences, while the effect of sociotropic incongruence remains negligible. Furthermore, we find
that narratives rooted in expertise claims do not attenuate the effect of representation failure on backlash against
representative democracy: they exacerbate it
Estimating stock market betas via machine learning
Get PDFMachine learning-based stock market beta estimators outperform established benchmark models both statistically and economically. Analyzing the predictability of time-varying market betas of U.S. stocks, we document that machine learning-based estimators produce the lowest forecast and hedging errors. They also help to create better market-neutral anomaly strategies and minimum variance portfolios. Among the various techniques, random forests perform the best overall. Model complexity is highly time-varying. Historical stock market betas, turnover, and size are the most important predictors. Compared to linear regressions, allowing for nonlinearity and interactions significantly improves predictive performance
A comprehensive evaluation of biases in convective storm parameters in CMIP6 models over North America
Get PDFThis study presents an evaluation of the skill of 12 global climate models from phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) archive in capturing convective storm parameters over the United States. For the historical reference period 1979–2014, we compare the model-simulated 6-hourly convective available potential energy (CAPE), convective inhibition (CIN), 0–1-km wind shear (S01), and 0–6-km wind shear (S06) to those from two independent reanalysis datasets: ERA5 and Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, version 2 (MERRA2). To obtain a comprehensive picture, we analyze the parameter distribution, climatological mean, extreme, and thresholded frequency of convective parameters. The analysis reveals significant bias in capturing both magnitude and spatial patterns, which also vary across the seasons. The spatial distribution of means and extremes of the parameters indicates that most models tend to overestimate CAPE, whereas S01 and S06 are underrepresented to varying extents. Additionally, models tend to underestimate extremes in CIN. Comparing the model profiles with rawinsonde profiles indicates that most of the high CAPE models have a warm and moist bias. We also find that the near-surface wind speed is generally underestimated by the models. The intermodel spread is larger for thermodynamic parameters as compared to kinematic parameters. The models generally have a significant positive bias in CAPE over western and eastern regions of the continental United States. More importantly, the bias in the thresholded frequency of all four variables is considerably larger than the bias in the mean, suggesting a nonuniform bias across the distribution. This likely leads to an underrepresentation of favorable severe thunderstorm environments and has the potential to influence dynamical downscaling simulations via initial and boundary conditions
‘We still have a duty of care, but how legitimate is her allergy to fish?’ Practitioner engagement in food practices in women’s prison
Get PDFThis paper aims to explore how staff members in women’s prisons understand their role in relation to the food practices. Given the budgetary restrictions, staff shortages, and overall concerns around the quality of food in prison, there is a critical gap in engaging with these staff perspectives which urgently needs addressing. Drawing on a qualitative study conducted in four women’s prisons in England, this paper will explore the food practices in prison from a range of staff (n=10). The paper focuses on the following themes: i.) understanding the different ways in which staff navigate structural issues in serving food practices; ii.) examining how staff manage the expectations of women in prison around food; iii.) analysing how they link food practices to notion of normality; and lastly, iv.) exploring the ways in which staff navigate the debates on whether food should be seen as a form of punishment or rehabilitation
Sequential monitoring for changes in GARCH(1,1) models without assuming stationarity
Get PDFIn this article, we develop two families of sequential monitoring procedure to (timely) detect changes in the parameters of a GARCH(1,1) model. Our statistics can be applied irrespective of whether the historical sample is stationary or not, and indeed without previous knowledge of the regime of the observations before and after the break. In particular, we construct our detectors as the CUSUM process of the quasi-Fisher scores of the log likelihood function. To ensure timely detection, we then construct our boundary function (exceeding which would indicate a break) by including a weighting sequence which is designed to shorten the detection delay in the presence of a changepoint. We consider two types of weights: a lighter set of weights, which ensures timely detection in the presence of changes occurring “early, but not too early” after the end of the historical sample; and a heavier set of weights, called “Rényi weights” which is designed to ensure timely detection in the presence of changepoints occurring very early in the monitoring horizon. In both cases, we derive the limiting distribution of the detection delays, indicating the expected delay for each set of weights. Our methodologies can be applied for a general analysis of changepoints in GARCH(1,1) sequences; however, they can also be applied to detect changes from stationarity to explosivity or vice versa, thus allowing to check for “volatility bubbles”, upon applying tests for stationarity before and after the identified break. Our theoretical results are validated via a comprehensive set of simulations, and an empirical application to daily returns of individual stocks
Anti-leishmanial study of discrete tetrahedral zinc(ii) β-oxodithioester complexes
No full textWe have synthesized four new oxygen/sulfur(O^S) chelate complexes, [Zn(L)2], where L represents different ligands: methyl-3-hydroxy-3-(furyl)-2-propenedithioate (L1, 1), methyl-3-hydroxy-3-(p-fluorophenyl)-2-propenedithioate (L2, 2), methyl-3-hydroxy-3-(p-chlorophenyl)-2-propenedithioate (L3, 3), and methyl-3-hydroxy-3-(p-bromophenyl)-2-propenedithioate (L4, 4). These complexes have been characterized by using IR, multinuclear NMR (1H, 13C{1H}, and 19F{1H}), and UV-vis spectroscopy. The structural characterization of complexes 1, 2, and 4 was further achieved by single crystal X-ray diffraction (SCXRD). The supramolecular structures of these complexes are stabilized by non-covalent C–H⋯π (ZnOSC3, chelate), C–S⋯π (ZnOSC3, chelate), π⋯π (ZnOSC3,), C–H⋯O, C–H⋯F–C and C–H⋯H–C interactions. The luminescence properties of Zn(II) complexes 1–4 were studied at room temperature in the solid phase. The antileishmanial activity was evaluated for all complexes. Complexes 1 and 4 exhibited significant anti-promastigote and anti-amastigote activities, with IC50 values of 2.0 and 1.33 μg mL−1, and 2.79 and 2.02 μg mL−1, respectively. Additionally, cytotoxicity assays demonstrated that these Zn(II) β-oxodithioester complexes were toxic to promastigotes, but showed reduced toxicity towards RAW 264.7 cell lines at varying concentrations. Furthermore, the optical band gap energies of complexes 1–4 were measured and found to exhibit semiconducting behavior
EuPPollNet: a European database of plant‐pollinator networks
Get PDFMotivation: Pollinators play a crucial role in maintaining Earth's terrestrial biodiversity. However, rapid human‐induced environmental changes are compromising the long‐term persistence of plant‐pollinator interactions. Unfortunately, we lack robust, generalisable data capturing how plant‐pollinator communities are structured across space and time. Here, we present the EuPPollNet (European Plant‐Pollinator Networks) database, a fully open European‐level database containing harmonised taxonomic data on plant‐pollinator interactions referenced in both space and time, along with other ecological variables of interest. In addition, we evaluate the taxonomic and sampling coverage of EuPPollNet, and summarise key structural properties in plant‐pollinator networks. We believe EuPPollNet will stimulate research to address data gaps in plant‐pollinator interactions and guide future efforts in conservation planning. Main Types of Variables Included: EuPPollNet contains 1,162,109 interactions between plants and pollinators from 1864 distinct networks, which belong to 52 different studies distributed across 23 European countries. Information about sampling methodology, habitat type, biogeographic region and additional taxonomic rank information (i.e. order, family, genus and species) is also provided. Spatial Location and Grain: The database contains 1214 different sampling locations from 13 different natural and anthropogenic habitats that fall in 7 different biogeographic regions. All records are geo‐referenced and presented in the World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS84). Time Period and Grain: Species interaction data was collected between 2004 and 2021. Major Taxa and Level of Measurement: The database contains interaction data at the species level for 94% of the records, including a total of 1411 plant and 2223 pollinator species. The database includes data on 6% of the European species of flowering plants, 34% of bees, 26% of butterflies and 33% of syrphid species at the European level. Software Format: The database was built with R and is stored in ‘.rds’ and ‘.csv’ formats. Its construction is fully reproducible and can be accessed at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14747448
Response of extreme North Atlantic midlatitude cyclones to a warmer climate in the GFDL X‐SHiELD kilometer‐scale global storm‐resolving model
Get PDFUsing the novel kilometer‐scale global storm‐resolving model Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory eXperimental System for High‐resolution prediction on Earth‐to‐Local Domains (X‐SHiELD), we investigate the impact of a 4 K increase in sea surface temperatures on Northern Hemisphere midlatitude cyclones, during the January 2020–January 2022 period. X‐SHiELD simulations reveal a poleward shift in cyclone tracks under warming, consistent with CMIP projections. However, X‐SHiELD's high resolution and explicit deep convection allowed for a detailed analysis of the warm and cold sectors, which are instead typically underrepresented in traditional CMIP models. Instead, compositing the 100 most intense midlatitude cyclones in the North Atlantic, we find that the warm sector exhibits statistically significant increases in wind speed and precipitation of up to 15% locally per degree of warming, while changes in the cold sector are less pronounced. This study demonstrates X‐SHiELD's potential to provide a realistic‐looking perspective into the evolving risks posed by midlatitude cyclones in a warming climate