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A Slaving Port?: The Captive and Conventional Trades in Newport, Rhode Island, 1768-1775
No full textThis chapter assesses the value of the transatlantic slave trade of late-colonial Newport, Rhode Island, relative to the ‘conventional’ trades, particularly the molasses trade. It is based on customs records from 1768–74, which provide details on vessels, cargoes, owners, and captains. The records reveal that while the transatlantic slave trade accounted for relatively few clearances, the high value of human cargo carried meant that Newport’s slave-trading merchants earned most of their profit from the African trade. In addition, the records reveal that ship captains tended to specialise in slave trading due to the premium placed on experience. The Caribbean molasses trade was important to Newport, both as the source of the raw ingredient for rum, the slavers’ trade good and as a profitable enterprise in itself. However, the coastal North American trade, which accounted for a majority of clearances, was relatively unimportant to Newport’s economy due to its low value and the fact that it was mostly in the hands of non-Rhode Islanders. Late-colonial Newport, therefore, qualifies as a true ‘slaving port,’ where merchants and mariners specialised in and earned significant profits from the commerce of captives
Islamic family mediation and women's access to justice in Türkiye: Assessing the applicability of the England Sharia Council model
Get PDFIn England over the last 30 years, there has been a small but steady proliferation of Sharia Councils, although exact numbers are not known. Established to meet the religious needs of the British Muslim population, these focused primarily on providing a forum for resolving marital disputes by offering arbitration, mediation and conciliation services. In research carried out to date, it is seen that the principal applicants to the Sharia Councils are Muslim women. To understand whether Islamic family mediation should be implemented in Türkiye, one must investigate Islamic law distinguishing between men's and women's forms of divorce. Islamic law has specific guidelines for divorce proceedings, with different rights and obligations for men and women. By examining these differences, it can be determined whether Islamic family mediation would be suitable for implementation in Türkiye. Islamic law establishes different rights and responsibilities for men and women in divorce cases, allowing men to unilaterally divorce without court oversight while women need spousal agreement or religious authority intervention. This inequality prompts concerns about the viability and justice of Islamic family mediation in the Turkish legal system.
This research examines these legal discrepancies to assess the potential for Islamic family mediation to achieve fair results, thus assessing its applicability in Türkiye. Focusing on the growth of Sharia Councils in England, which have sparked debates on their credibility and effects on women's legal access, the research evaluates the potential effects in Türkiye when similar entities provide Islamic family mediation. Sharia Councils aim to integrate religious principles into the nation's legal framework. Through analyzing the cultural importance of these councils, their legal framework, and operational procedures, the paper aims to evaluate their capacity to address the particular requirements of women in Turkish households and advance impartial family justice. This thesis examines the critical question of whether Islamic family mediation can enhance family justice in Türkiye. The study discusses in depth whether resolving marital disputes within the framework of Islamic dispute resolution can achieve family justice in Türkiye. This study contributes to such ongoing debates regarding family law, access to family justice, and Muslim requests for taking easy religious support in family law matters
Ambiguity and ambiguity attitude
Get PDFAmbiguity refers to scenarios where probabilities are not known nor objectively specified as opposed to scenarios of risk where probability are objectively available. Scenarios with ambiguity are widespread in economics. Based on early thought experiments, subsequent literature has found that many individuals choices are different under ambiguity from those implied by the standard subjective expected utility model. This has led to significant extensions and advances in models of decision-making. In turn these models have been useful to accommodate a rich pattern of choices and to help understand a wide range of economic phenomena
“It’s better to be quiet than share”: Perspectives of secondary-aged students of British Pakistani background in seeking support for Social, Emotional & Mental Health
Get PDFThis research explores the perspectives of British Pakistani adolescents on seeking support for Social, Emotional, and Mental Health (SEMH) issues. The study aims to understand the cultural and gender-specific barriers and facilitators that influence help-seeking behaviours in this demographic. Utilising a qualitative methodology, data were collected through semi-structured interviews with adolescents aged 16-18 attending post-16 educational settings. The findings highlight significant cultural barriers, such as stigma, the importance of maintaining family honour, and gender-specific expectations, which inhibit open discussions about mental health and seeking professional support. Female participants reported a relatively higher inclination towards seeking help compared to their male counterparts, who often faced cultural pressures to conform to traditional masculine norms. The research underscores the need for culturally sensitive mental health interventions and greater mental health literacy within the British Pakistani community. It also suggests the importance of collaboration between educational institutions, mental health services, and community organisations to effectively address the mental health needs of British Pakistani adolescents
Making a virtue out of necessity: the effect of negative interest rates on bank cost efficiency
Get PDFDo negative interest rates affect banks’ cost efficiency? We exploit the unprecedented intro- duction of negative policy interest rates in the euro area to investigate whether banks make a virtue out of necessity in reacting to negative interest rates by adjusting their cost efficiency. We find that banks most affected by negative interest rates responded by enhancing their cost efficiency. We also show that improvements in cost efficiency are more pronounced for banks that are larger, less profitable, with lower asset quality and that operate in more competitive banking sectors. In addition, we document that enhancements in cost efficiency are statisti- cally significant only when breaching the zero lower bound, indicating that the pass-through of interest rates to cost efficiency is not effective when policy rates are positive. These findings hold important policy implications as they provide evidence on a beneficial second-order effect of negative interest rates on bank efficiency
Caring for a relative with dementia: Navigating racism and cultural expectations. An interpretative phenomenological analysis
Get PDFBackground: Due to the increasingly ageing and rapidly growing population, rates of dementia are predicted to continue to rise over the next 30 years. Evidence suggests that people from Black African and Caribbean (BAC) communities are at increased risk of being diagnosed with a label of dementia. In the UK, dementia policy emphasises providing support to enable people with dementia to live in their own homes with the support of family carers. The current research seeks to explore the meaning BAC familial caregivers attribute to the experience of looking after a relative with dementia. In addition, this study explores how historical experiences of racism can present in dementia and the understanding of this experience from the perspective of familial caregivers. Method: This qualitative study used semi-structured interviews to explore caregiving experiences with eight participants. The transcripts were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Results: Three group experiential themes (GETs) and six subthemes were developed, guided by the exploration into how BAC familial carers make sense of their experience looking after a relative with a label of dementia. Overall, the themes illustrate the complexities of caring for a relative with a label of dementia against a milieu of tension at the intersection of care, culture, ethnicity, and community. Participants shared their experience of witnessing their relative re-experience memories of racist incidents, which was understood to be an enactment of a longing desire for safety and happiness in a country with which they had a complicated relationship. Conclusion: Clinical and broader implications of the research findings are presented, and considerations are made for future research to advance understanding of this subject
STAR-RIS and UAV Combination in MEC Networks: Simultaneous Task Offloading and Communications
Get PDFThis paper explores a simultaneous tasks offloading and communications (STOC) scheme in mobile edge computing (MEC) networks, supported by the combination of simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) and the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Different from the traditional MEC schemes, the proposed scheme concurrently considers the computation and communication capabilities of the MEC networks, which is actually more practical in reality. Specifically, an optimization problem is devised to maximize the weighted sum of the minimum computed task data and communication data, while ensuring the quality of service (QoS) constraints for STOC through joint design of time scheduling, resource allocation, active and passive beamforming, alongside with the UAV trajectory planning. This non-convex problem with strong couplings among variables is challenging to solve directly. Then, a novel alternating optimization method is proposed, leveraging the successive convex approximation (SCA) and semi-definite relaxation (SDR) techniques. We provide sufficient numerical results to validate the effectiveness of the proposed STOC scheme, which demonstrate that the proposed scheme supported by STAR-RIS and UAV outperforms five benchmark schemes in terms of performance gain. It is important to note that the proposed scheme offers a feasible and realistic way for the implementations of STOC in practical MEC networks
Revealing hidden sources of uncertainty in biodiversity trend assessments
Get PDFIdiosyncratic decisions during the biodiversity trend assessment process may limit reproducibility, whilst ‘hidden' uncertainty due to collection bias, taxonomic incompleteness, and variable taxonomic resolution may limit the reliability of reported trends. We model alternative decisions made during assessment of taxon-level abundance and distribution trends using an 18-year time series covering freshwater fish, invertebrates, and primary producers in England. Through three case studies, we test for collection bias and quantify uncertainty stemming from data preparation and model specification decisions, assess the risk of conflating trends for individual species when aggregating data to higher taxonomic ranks, and evaluate the potential uncertainty stemming from taxonomic incompleteness. Choice of optimizer algorithm and data filtering to obtain more complete time series explained 52.5% of the variation in trend estimates, obscuring the signal from taxon-specific trends. The use of penalized iteratively reweighted least squares, a simplified approach to model optimization, was the most important source of uncertainty. Application of increasingly harsh data filters exacerbated collection bias in the modelled dataset. Aggregation to higher taxonomic ranks was a significant source of uncertainty, leading to conflation of trends among protected and invasive species. We also found potential for substantial positive bias in trend estimation across six fish populations which were not consistently recorded in all operational areas. We complement analyses of observational data with in silico experiments in which monitoring and trend assessment processes were simulated to enable comparison of trend estimates with known underlying trends, confirming that collection bias, data filtering and taxonomic incompleteness have significant negative impacts on the accuracy of trend estimates. Identifying and managing uncertainty in biodiversity trend assessment is crucial for informing effective conservation policy and practice. We highlight several serious sources of uncertainty affecting biodiversity trend analyses and present tools to improve the transparency of decisions made during the trend assessment process
Mechanism Design with Predictions for Facility Location Games with Candidate Locations
No full textWe study mechanism design with predictions in the single (obnoxious) facility location games with candidate locations on the real line, which complements the existing literature on mechanism design with predictions. We first consider the single facility location games with candidate locations, where each agent prefers the facility (e.g., a school) to be located as close to her as possible. We study two social objectives: minimizing the maximum cost and the social cost, and provide deterministic, anonymous, and group strategy-proof mechanisms with predictions that achieve the best possible trade-offs between consistency and robustness, respectively. Additionally, we represent the approximation ratio as a function of the prediction error, indicating that mechanisms can achieve better performance even when predictions are not fully accurate. We also consider the single obnoxious facility location games with candidate locations, where each agent prefers the facility (e.g., a garbage transfer station) to be located as far away from her as possible. For the objective of maximizing the minimum utility, we prove that any strategy-proof mechanism with predictions is unbounded robust. For the objective of maximizing the social utility, we provide a deterministic, anonymous, and group strategy-proof mechanism with prediction that achieves the best possible trade-off between consistency and robustness
On Motion Blur and Deblurring in Visual Place Recognition
Get PDFVisual Place Recognition (VPR) in mobile robotics enables robots to localize themselves by recognizing previously visited locations using visual data. While the reliability of VPR methods has been extensively studied under conditions such as changes in illumination, season, weather and viewpoint, the impact of motion blur is relatively unexplored despite its relevance not only in rapid motion scenarios but also in low-light conditions where longer exposure times are necessary. Similarly, the role of image deblurring in enhancing VPR performance under motion blur has received limited attention so far. This letter bridges these gaps by introducing a new benchmark designed to evaluate VPR performance under the influence of motion blur and image deblurring. The benchmark includes three datasets that encompass a wide range of motion blur intensities, providing a comprehensive platform for analysis. Experimental results with several well-established VPR and image deblurring methods provide new insights into the effects of motion blur and the potential improvements achieved through deblurring. Building on these findings, the letter proposes adaptive deblurring strategies for VPR, designed to effectively manage motion blur in dynamic, real-world scenarios