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Unpacking the richness of language experience as a predictor of bilingual children’s language proficiency
Get PDFThe richness of bilingual children’s language experience is typically expressed as a composite score using parental questionnaire data. This study unpacks the concept of input richness by examining one such composite score (Q-BEx) to determine whether it reliably predicts children’s language abilities, is no more complex than required, and as user-friendly as possible. Data were collected from 173 bilingual children aged 5 to 8 across three countries (France, Netherlands, UK) with various heritage languages in each. Parents completed the Q-BEx questionnaire and children proficiency tasks in their societal language. We analysed the predictive power of the original score compared to several alternative scoring approaches. Results showed (i) these alternatives were not more informative, (ii) scores including qualitative aspects of richness fared better than those with only quantitative variables, (iii) the latent variables underlying richness were comparable across languages, and (iv) whether parental education was included made little difference
Reaaliaikainen kasvojentunnistus ja teknologiset kuvitelmat Ison-Britannian kriminaalipolitiikassa [Live facial recognition and technological imaginaries in the politics of criminal justice in the UK]
Get PDFIn recent years, police forces across the United Kingdom have tested live facial recognition in pub-lic spaces. Although civil society groups and members of parliament have criticized the inaccuracy of these surveillance tools and a lack of regulation, their use has steadily expanded. This article examines the impact of future visions of live facial recognition on criminal justice policy debates in the UK.
The theoretical framework of this article is based on the sociology of expectations. According to this field, technological imaginaries structure political discussion by presenting speculative future visions as inevitable and desirable, while excluding alternative futures. Utilizing this framework, I analyze the development of parliamentary debates related to live facial recognition in the United Kingdom from 2009 to 2025. The empirical material was collected from the Hansard parliamentary archive and analyzed using qualitative thematic content analysis.
Technological imaginaries influenced digital surveillance policy in addition to external events and research data. Fueled by the AI boom, optimistic visions have recently become more prominent than earlier cautionary imaginaries regarding an Orwellian surveillance society, and the use of faci-al recognition has expanded. However, these prevailing views have also promoted critical debates about criminal justice by highlighting the political dimensions of technological development
Federated-Learning-Assisted RIS Active and Passive Beamforming with ADMM for IoT Devices
Get PDFFederated learning (FL) and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) are pivotal technologies for future Internet of Things (IoT) networks, enhancing user privacy and system efficiency. However, realizing their full potential necessitates a cohesive and synergistic integration, challenging the traditional view of them as disparate components. This paper tackles the complex problem of maximizing energy efficiency (EE)—a critical yet under-explored metric insuch tightly coupled FL-RIS systems. We address this gap by formulating ajoint optimization problem that intrinsically links the FL process with physical layer resource allocation. Our framework maximizes the system’s global EE by concurrently designing the base station’s active beamforming and the RIS’s passive phase shifts,with an FL aggregation mechanism that is explicitly channel-aware and adaptive to the RIS-optimized wireless environment. This co-design ensures RIS actively facilitates FL by establishing robust communication, while FL intelligently leverages these improved channels for efficient and accelerated learning, all under practical FL performance constraints. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly enhances system energy efficiency compared to several benchmark schemes and exhibits robust convergence properties
Design of a High-Gain Antenna System for MM-Wave Full-Duplex Communication
Get PDFAdvanced antenna designs are crucial for millimeter-wave (mmWave) 5&6G communication to support higher data rates, lower latency, and reduced power consumption. These demands can be partially met through wideband antenna arrays, while full-duplex radios further enhance spectral efficiency by enabling simultaneous transmission and reception in the same band. This paper proposes a patch antenna array architecture for full-duplex mmWave applications, which can significantly mitigate self-interference at the antenna stage. The array achieves broadside symmetrical radiation patterns and exhibits exceptional isolation characteristics, making it well-suited for mmWave full-duplex operation. Simulation results demonstrate a gain of circa 17.5 dB, self-interference (SI) isolation less than −55 dB reaching to −85 dB between the transmit (Tx) and receive (Rx) ports, and mutual coupling (MC) level below −10 dB reaching to −16.5 dB within the Tx and the sampling (Rs) port, across the 26-27 GHz band. Additionally, the proposed design achieves a radiation efficiency of approximately 90%
Heart failure patients’ and care givers’ experiences and expectations of end-of-life conversations and palliative care provision, and community heart failure nurses’ perspectives on implementation into clinical practice.
Get PDFHeart failure is a long-term condition, and is often terminal. The researcher’s clinical experience has highlighted a reluctance from clinicians to have discussions about dying with these patients. To obtain heart failure patients’ and carer givers’ experiences and expectations of end-of-life conversations and palliative care provision. It further aimed to explore from the perspective of community heart failure nurses how these preferences can be implemented into clinical practice to improve patient care. This co-produced study used qualitative interviews and focus groups from a nationally sourced sample. The study recruited 19 cases consisting of 8 heart failure patients, 2 carer givers and 9 community heart failure nurses all of whom had taken part in end-of-life conversations relating specifically to heart failure. Patients and carer givers described a need to be informed regarding their disease and prognosis. A lack of such information impacted on their abilities to rationalise the illness, or prepare for the deterioration in their condition. Those participants that were provided with ongoing conversations described the formation of a patient-healthcare professional relationship, which gave them confidence to take control of their illness and care. These themes were presented to community heart failure nurses, to establish how these findings can be implemented into clinical practice to improve patients experiences of heart failure communication. They identified barriers preventing end-of-life conversations, including active avoidance, lack of role definition, and apprehension to initiate these discussions. They supported the need for a working partnership with their patients and carers to provide reassurance and confidence in providing this care. There is a pressing need to formulate specific end-of-life and palliative care guidance and policy specific to the unstable heart failure disease trajectory to reduce the variation in practice and confidence to talk about terminal illness
The Danish ‘Coil Campaign’ in Greenland: Indigenous Genocide Through Forced Birth Control?
Get PDFThis article analyses whether Denmark may have committed genocide against the indigenous population of Greenland by inserting intra-uterine devices into thousands of Greenlandic women and girls as part of a birth control programme in the 1960s and 1970s – the so-called ‘coil campaign’. This question is important for understanding of how genocide can be committed against indigenous peoples as part of colonial abuses. The article provides an in-depth analysis of genocide, focusing in particular on the prohibited act of imposing measures to prevent births, specific intent, and state responsibility. It then offers a critique of the so-called ‘Holocaust standard’, which perceives genocide as a time-intense mass murders committed by undemocratic, violent regimes and which often excludes indigenous experiences of genocide. Lastly, the article analyses Denmark’s obligations for truth, justice, and reparation. It concludes that, while more investigation is needed, it is possible that the coil campaign in Greenland may constitute genocid
Hybrid NOMA Assisted Heterogeneous Semantic and Bit Users Communication
Get PDFIn this paper, we utilize a downlink hybrid Non- Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) framework to support multiple semantic and bit users within the communication network. The hybrid NOMA setup exploits both NOMA and Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA) which has the benefit of enhancing Spectral Efficiency (SE) by allowing users to dynamically access the resources in multiple heterogeneous slots. This enables integrating semantic and bit users based on their channel gains, while adopting bit-to-semantic decoding order in slots including heterogeneous users. This allows bit user to first decode its signal by treating the semantic signal as interference and subsequently semantic signal is decoded without interference. Semantic users are modeled using a deep learning-based system equipped with pre-trained neural networks. An optimization problem for the power allocation is formulated with the aim of maximizing the equivalent ergodic semantic SE with a constraint on the total available power of the Access Point (AP). The proposed algorithm uses NOMA in shared slots and OMA in bit-user-only slots. Simulation results validate the benefits of heterogeneous users hybrid NOMA setup in comparison to OMA-only for heterogeneous users
The interplay between the 'here' and the 'hereafter': life after death in the psychotherapy of C. G. Jung
Get PDFThis thesis explores the claims and experiences of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) regarding death, including his encounters with figures he referred to as “the dead” and his near-death experience following a heart attack in 1944. Through a close reading of Jung’s texts, it examines how these experiences influenced Jung’s psychotherapeutic methods, particularly his views on psychological development in relation to death and the notion of an afterlife. Organized chronologically, the thesis divides Jung’s life into three key periods—university years, midlife, and later years—focusing on his most significant works related to death and the dead. The key findings are as follows: First, Jung’s psychotherapeutic approach can be seen as a response to the reductive materialism of science prevalent both in his time and in modern science. Second, the individuation process, a central theme in his therapeutic approach, came to be understood by Jung as a preparation for death. Third, Jung regarded some figures of the dead as actual souls without bodies, and their presence profoundly shaped his therapeutic approach. His framework, particularly after his 1944 near-death experience, expanded to allow for the ontological possibility of these figures and the existence of life after death. Finally, Jung believed that psychological development continued beyond physical life, with the potential to achieve psychological wholeness after death, a central aim of his therapeutic practice. In conclusion, this thesis argues that Jung’s psychotherapeutic work represents an effort to address the mystery of what happens after death
The role of caregiver mental health and interoception in dyadic interactions and interoceptive processing development
Get PDFInteroception, the processing of internal bodily signals, is associated with mental health in adulthood. However, very little is known about the early development of interoceptive processing. In the UK, prevalence of childhood anxiety disorders has been increasing steadily, both pre- and post- the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the relationship between interoception and anxiety in adulthood, understanding the early development of interoceptive processing is both important and urgent. This thesis seeks to explore the factors influencing the early development of interoceptive processing and its relationship with anxiety risk. In recent years, several theories on the development of interoceptive processing have emerged. These theories consistently suggest that an infant’s early social experience, specifically interactions with their primary caregiver, facilitate the development of interoceptive processing. If so, caregivers’ skills in these early interactions could be influencing the development of interoceptive processing in their infants. For example, which of the caregivers’ specific behaviours are important? What factors influence caregivers’ ability in these behaviours? Do these early influences endure throughout childhood and are they associated with susceptibility to anxiety? Despite the importance of this topic, studies providing empirical evidence of interoceptive processing in infants remain sparse, with mixed findings. To add to what is known about the early development of interoceptive processing, I conducted five studies of caregivers and their infant or child, revealing several relationships between caregiver interoception, caregiver mental health and caregiver and infant behaviour. In addition, I demonstrated a strong association between caregiver and child interoception and an association between caregiver interoception and child threat sensitivity, a risk factor for anxiety. Together, these findings provide empirical support for theories on the development of interoceptive processing, adding to what little is known of its early development. In addition, these findings potentially shed some light on the underlying mechanisms behind familial relationships in anxiety disorders
Getting 'Real' about ISDS Reform: A Critical Realist View of International Investment Law's Status Quo
Get PDFInvestor–State dispute settlement (ISDS) is the topic of a concerted reform effort by actors in International Investment Law (IIL). The proposals proffered by United Nations Commission on International Trade Law’s Working Group III have centred around rectifying procedural complaints like the inconsistency in arbitral case law. Little attention has been given to more paradigmatic ideas such as abandoning international arbitration altogether. This article argues that the absence of any meaningful consideration for a radical departure from the current status quo is largely the effect of epistemological privilege. I adopt the philosophical framework of Critical Realism to argue that much of the work towards reforming the regime is grounded in empirical epistemologies that do not consider the deeper, more complex issues that affect IIL’s operation. I make this argument through an examination of behavioural economics’ integration into scholarship and the positivist basis of the reform proposal for an advisory centre for international investment law