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Nations as refrains:Wales and the Festival of Britain 1951
No full textOver the past two decades, cultural geographers have been paying increasing attention to the performative, habitual, affective and atmospheric qualities of nations, nationalist movements and national identities. In this paper I utilise the concept of the refrain (ritournelle) from the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari to trace the very different rhythmic refrains and movements which may or may not gain a certain consistency in the world and affect bodies of different kinds. Refrains may be material, embodied and/or vibrational perturbations which attain a certain rhythm and consistency, and I examine how they are central to the processes of individuation and collective individuation by which nations, national subjects and national identities become crystallised and unfold. In the latter part of the paper I draw upon archival research on the Festival of Britain 1951 to argue that it can usefully be approached through the refrain. In contrast to accounts which present the Festival as a largely London affair which positioned Welsh, Scottish and Irish narratives as reflective of the regional diversity of Britain, I reveal the different responses of Welsh individuals and organisations to the idea of a Festival of Britain. I trace the importance of the Welsh language in setting a different tone or refrain for national events, and I examine how a range of material infrastructures, one-off staged events, and celebrations functioned as refrains of Welshness and/or Britishness. The paper outlines the reactions of Welsh nationalists and republicans for whom British refrains were seen as negative affective forces that would continue to subordinate Wales under a nation-state ruled from England (and specifically London)
Testing stimulus generalisation as a mechanism for impression formation
No full textPeople readily judge trustworthiness based on others' facial appearance, but less is known about how our prior experiences shape who we find trustworthy. Stimulus generalisation is one mechanism which may explain how experience influences impressions of strangers. This fundamental learning principle argues that learning about one stimulus generalises to stimuli that resemble the original stimulus. Here, we asked whether stimulus generalisation, specifically, based on facial resemblance, can influence impressions of trustworthiness. We used a novel face resemblance paradigm to test whether naturally acquired attitudes held towards known individuals (celebrities) predict trustworthiness impressions of strangers' faces that were manipulated to resemble these identities. Across three studies (Total N = 283) and two countries (UK, Australia), we confirmed that pre-existing attitudes towards known individuals significantly predicted trustworthiness impressions of strangers' faces that merely resemble these individuals. Importantly, pre-existing attitudes remained significant after multi-level modelling accounted for variation in both facial appearance and participant differences. We found strong support for stimulus generalisation, demonstrating that social learning in the real world predicts individuals' impressions of trustworthiness. Therefore, impression formation involves integrating visual appearance with prior experiences to help us decide which people we trust. Our work demonstrates an important but neglected theoretical overlap between person perception, attitude formation, and learning principles.</p
Evaluating the Quantitative Accuracy and Application of DNA Metabarcoding for Dietary Reconstruction in Ruminants
No full textDNA metabarcoding offers a powerful, non-invasive tool to identify dietary composition with high taxonomic resolution, yet its quantitative accuracy and bias remain a well-recognised limitation across taxa and sample types. This universal challenge is particularly evident in herbivores, where plant material introduces additional amplification constraints. This study evaluates the accuracy of DNA metabarcoding in reconstructing the diets of sheep under controlled feeding trials involving high and low digestibility forage, using two widely used plant DNA barcodes (ITS2 and trnL). A secondary trial tested the detectability and proportional representation of a target species, Medicago sativa, when added to the diet in varying amounts (1%, 5%, 10%). ITS2 provided greater species-level resolution, while trnL showed broader taxonomic coverage but reduced precision. Both markers distinguished diet treatments effectively; however, faecal DNA showed proportional discrepancies from vegetation input, particularly under low-digestibility conditions. M. sativa was reliably detected even at 1% inclusion but was consistently overrepresented in sequence reads. Our findings highlight the strengths and limitations of DNA metabarcoding for herbivore diet studies and underscore the importance of marker choice and the effects of differential digestion biases. These findings demonstrate the need for multi-marker approaches and calibration controls in dietary studies, especially when quantitative interpretation is required. Despite limitations in quantitative accuracy, faecal DNA metabarcoding provides valuable insights into herbivore diet composition and preferences, with future refinements expected to improve its resolution and reliability for ecological monitoring and grazing management.</p
DINOv3-Driven Semantic Segmentation for Landslide Mapping in Mountainous Regions
No full textLandslide hazard assessment increasingly demands the joint analysis of heterogeneous remote sensing data; however, automating this process remains difficult due to the pronounced resolution and texture discrepancies existing between satellite and aerial sensors. To address these limitations, this study proposes a robust segmentation framework capable of extracting sensor-robust representations. The framework leverages a DINOv3 transformer encoder and exploits representations from multiple transformer layers to capture complementary visual information, ranging from fine-grained surface textures to global semantic contexts, overcoming the receptive field constraints of conventional CNNs. Experiments on the Longxi satellite dataset achieve a Dice coefficient of 0.96 and an IoU of 0.938, and experiments on the Longxi UAV dataset achieve a Dice coefficient of 0.965 and an IoU of 0.941. These results show consistent segmentation performance on both the Longxi satellite and UAV datasets, despite differences in spatial resolution and surface appearance between acquisition platforms
