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Playing hide and seek: contextual regularity learning develops between 3 and 5 years of age
Get PDFThe ability to acquire contextual regularities is fundamental in everyday life as it helps us navigate the environment, directing our attention where relevant events are more likely to occur. Sensitivity to spatial regularities has been largely reported from infancy. Nevertheless, it is presently unclear when children can use this rapidly acquired contextual knowledge to guide their behaviour. Evidence of this ability is indeed mixed in school-aged children and, to date, it has never been explored in younger children and toddlers. The present study investigates the development of contextual regularity learning in children between 3 and 5 years of age. To this aim, we designed a new contextual learning paradigm in which young children were presented with recurring configurations of bushes and were asked to guess behind which bush a cartoon monkey was hiding. In a series of two experiments, we manipulated the relevance of colour and visuo-spatial cues for the underlying task goal and we tested how this impacted young children’s behaviour. Our results bridge the gap between the infant and the adult literature, showing that sensitivity to spatial configurations persists from infancy to childhood, but it is only around the 5th year of age that children naturally start to integrate multiple cues to guide their behaviour
Reisen im Mittelalter Unterwegs mit Pilgern, Rittern, Abenteurern
No full textLebendig, spannend und erstaunlich. Hier erleben wir, was es heißt, in fremden Ländern unterwegs zu sein, damals wie heute«, schreibt John Arnold, Professor für Geschichte des Mittelalters in Cambridge, über »Reisen im Mittelalter«. Farbig und anschaulich erzählt der Historiker Anthony Bale, wie es war, im Mittelalter durch die Welt zu reisen.
Ob Pilgerinnen oder Kaufleute, Ritter, Mönche oder Spione – schon damals packte die Menschen die Leidenschaft für das Reisen. Getrieben von Fernweh und Abenteuerlust die einen, auf der Suche nach religiöser Erleuchtung oder Ruhm auf dem Kreuzzug die anderen. Für alle war die Reise lang und gefährlich, gute Vorbereitung und ein Reiseführer mit Tipps für Rast und Übernachtung und Hinweisen auf Gefahren waren unerlässlich.
Vom mittelalterlichen Ulm, damals ein Eldorado der Touristen, über Aachen und Köln führen uns die Reisen verschiedener Menschen bis nach Rom mit seinen wunderbaren Sehenswürdigkeiten. Von dort geht es in das schon damals von Touristen bevölkerte Venedig und nach Rhodos, Hotspot der Kosmopoliten und Adligen. Wir erkunden Konstantinopel und die heilige Stadt Jerusalem und gelangen bis in die sagenhaften Länder der Amazonen, Riesen und Fabelwesen, nach Indien, China und Tibet, nach Persien und Äthiopien, Java und Sumatra.
Ein farbiges Panorama der mittelalterlichen Welt, wie sie von Europa aus erlebt und gesehen wurde – ein Buch wie ein Roman von Umberto Eco und die ideale Lektüre für die Sommerferien. Als hochwertige Geschenkausgabe mit Vorsatzpapier und Goldfolienveredelung
Prison data collection in Commonwealth countries: a guidance note
Get PDFICPR’s latest publication Prison data collection in Commonwealth countries: A Guidance Note makes the case for the systematic collection and regular publication of the most important facts and figures about prison populations. It recommends the routine and regular publication of Core Data on:
• the number and categories of people imprisoned on any one day – for example female prisoners, juveniles and those held in pre-trial/remand detention
• the numbers received into and released from prison over particular periods of time
• the maximum capacity of the prison system and how this is measured to enable the calculation of occupancy levels and address the risk of overcrowding.
Our Guidance Note also proposes that Additional Data should be made available where possible so as to ensure the greatest possible transparency. This includes more detailed information about the status and characteristics of prisoners, their treatment and conditions of detention, and about numbers of prison staff. The process for getting access to this data should be clear to all interested stakeholders, and straightforward to implement.
Collecting and publishing statistics about the use and practice of imprisonment is a crucial tool for governments to assess the effectiveness of criminal justice policies. Accurate and updated statistics also help to ensure there is sufficient capacity in the prison estate; and enable civil society to monitor overcrowding and associated human rights violations and public health risks in prisons and to generate evidenced proposals for reform
Confronting complex alliances: Situating Britain’s gender-critical politics within the wider transnational anti-gender movement
Get PDFBritain has recently gained notoriety as a global hotspot for anti-trans politics and ‘gender critical’ feminism. But what is the relationship between British ‘gender critical’ politics and the transnational ‘anti-gender’ movement? Does Britain’s gender critical feminism directly align with the global trends of anti-gender mobilisations, including the latter’s authoritarian and neofascist tendencies? This commentary argues for a context-specific analysis of the British gender-critical movement which is attentive to its divergent political orientations. While some strands of gender-critical politics are openly allied with far-right politics and are explicitly anti-feminist, others include prominent figures from left-wing positions, including left feminists and lesbians. Challenging gender-critical politics in Britain requires a reckoning with its cross-political nature and an analysis of the factors that unite these different strands across left and right
The impact of interaction between religion and legal environment on expense misclassification and real activities: international evidence
Get PDFWe examine the interaction between variations in religious social norms and legal environments on real activities manipulations and expense misclassification using a global sample of 63 countries. Our inquiry is motivated by a paucity of research on the interaction between legal environment and religion on earnings management practices in an international setting. We report that variations in religious social norms and legal environments interactions around the world subdue the positive association between religion, expense misclassification and real activities noted in prior studies. We find variability in the interaction between religion and legal environment on expense misclassification and real activities in developed, emerging and developing countries sub-samples. We conduct several robustness tests and our results provide more empirical evidence and indicate that strengthening the legal environment will complement religion, IFRS and other monitoring mechanisms put in place to mitigate unethical expense misclassification and real activities earnings manipulation
In our time: adult education and Birkbeck: Extra-Mural — an experiment 1988–2009
Get PDFIn this article I suggest that three strands of adult education in the nineteenth century contributed to the experiment of the affiliation of Extra-Mural Studies and Birkbeck between 1988 and 2009: those of the mechanics’ institutions, the University of London, and Extra-Mural (‘Extension’). Although these strands had distinct origins, they were all respondents to the popular demand of the day for access to education by adults excluded from further and higher education in Oxbridge, which was full-time, residential, expensive, and confined to Anglicans and young men. The alternatives that adult education offered were secular and non-residential. They included part-time, evening teaching of subjects that reflected student demand. Adult education from the 1820s provided classes in practical science, mathematics, modern languages, English literature, and vocational training in mechanics, and in London University, medicine and law. In their parallel development, during which they all changed radically, these types of adult education were unmistakably hybrid, imitating each other in course selection and delivery, and sometimes competing for students. Extra-Mural joined the university in 1904 as its External Department, while Birkbeck joined the University of London in 1924 as a separate college, giving up, however, its daytime teaching, its intake of students of all ages, and the teaching of economics, to fit into the university without friction. The second part of the article explores one example of a productive partnership in the college between Extra-Mural and a Birkbeck department: English in Extra-Mural and the Department of English over the two decades that Extra-Mural was part of Birkbeck. Lastly, the article considers how the college privileged the other strands of adult education and shed Extra-Mural by integrating its full-time staff and on-site courses, and silently obliterating its vast provision of classes across the capital. A colour-coded Timeline follows this article to help trace the development of adult education that impacted on Birkbeck, and its lurches and adjustments to survive, from 1823 onwards
Geology, the imagination, and speculative writing: Gideon Mantell’s fossil poetry in Anna Birkbeck’s album
Get PDFThis article considers the literary and scientific significance of a poem written by the geologist Gideon Mantell in Anna Birkbeck’s album in 1825. ‘On a Group of Organic Remains of a Former World’ considers a cluster of fossils and asks them to give up information about the prehistoric world in which they had lived. Mantell’s speaker is particularly keen to discover whether a race of angelic beings might have inhabited earth before the biblical creation, as this would help to explain why no fossilized human remains had been found by geologists who had discovered innumerable other creatures buried in the rocks. This article considers why Mantell was interested in these questions, why he chose poetry as the best form in which to explore them, and what his contribution to Anna Birkbeck’s album tells us about the imbrication of scientific and literary writing in the Romantic era
Analysis of the impact of social network financing based on deep learning and long short-term memory
Get PDFThe risk of P2P (peer to peer lending) platform is predicted based on text data on the Internet to avoid the risk of social network financing and improve the security of social network financing. Firstly, the transaction information and review text information of a third-party P2P platform are obtained to be classified for the time series of emotional changes. Secondly, the Granger Causal Relation Test is used to verify the correlation between the time series of emotional changes and trading volume. Finally, a LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) forecasting model is correspondingly proposed based on investors’ emotional changes to predict the trading volume of P2P platforms by emotional changes as a reference for financing social networks to avoid risks. The results show that the value of Pearson correlation coefficient between the trading volume of P2P platforms and negative emotions is -0.2088 with the P value less than 1 %, indicating a correlation between emotional changes and trading volume. The Pearson correlation coefficient between the predicted value and the actual value is 0.7995, while the mean square error is 0.2190 with the fitting degree of 0.6532. This shows that the LSTM forecasting model can well predict the trading volume of P2P platforms with a good performance in the comparison with other forecasting models. In social network financing activities, the LSTM forecasting model can play a good role in risk prediction, as a reference for related research
Host–guest interaction and sustainable consumption behaviour on sharing-accommodation platforms: using a big data analytic approach
Get PDFThe rapid expansion of the sharing economy has ignited diverse perspectives regarding its sus-tainability implications. Nevertheless, a comprehensive study examining the influence of host–guest interactions on sustainable consumption behaviour is yet to be conducted. To fill the above-mentioned gap, this research crawls online data and corresponding consumer reviews of 46,360 properties listed on Muniao Short Rent. Employing latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to model sustainable consumption reviews and conducting subsequent regression analysis using SPSS, this research empirically demonstrates that the host–guest interaction frequencies and positive emo-tions during interaction positively influence guests’ sustainable consumption behaviours within the sharing-accommodation context. This research proposes the significance of the host–guest re-lationship for green consumers and argues that factors such as price and house type negatively moderate the host–guest interactions and guests’ sustainable consumption initiatives
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