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Atheists and atheism before the Enlightenment: the English and Scottish experience
No full textAnxiety about the threat of atheism was rampant in the early modern period, yet fully documented examples of openly expressed irreligious opinion are surprisingly rare. England and Scotland saw only a handful of such cases before 1750, and this book offers a detailed analysis of three of them. Thomas Aikenhead was executed for his atheistic opinions at Edinburgh in 1697; Tinkler Ducket was convicted of atheism by the Vice-Chancellor's court at the University of Cambridge in 1739; whereas Archibald Pitcairne's overtly atheist tract, Pitcairneana, though evidently compiled very early in the eighteenth century, was first published only in 2016. Drawing on these, and on the better-known apostacy of Christopher Marlowe and the Earl of Rochester, Michael Hunter argues that such atheists showed real 'assurance' in publicly promoting their views. This contrasts with the private doubts of Christian believers, and this book demonstrates that the two phenomena are quite distinct, even though they have sometimes been wrongly conflated
Points mean prizes
No full textMy very kind colleagues at the Open Library of Humanities, it turns out, had conspired to present me with an award for the ten years I spent building and running OLH
Cuban youth: changing attitudes towards sexual and reproductive health
Get PDFCuba remains one of the few countries still governed by a communist party. Despite its socialist commitments, including to gender equality, these have not been fully achieved and norms concerning gender roles are often at variance with revolutionary values. Focusing on youth and particularly young women, this paper draws on primary data collected in Cuba in 2018-2019 to explore young people’s sexual and reproductive health decisions. The analysis highlights how despite the family planning services and educational opportunities made available to them young women’s reproductive and sexual choices are often determined by men and by values that accord primacy to marriage and motherhood, as conservative values are increasingly gaining a foothold
From dematerialising race to distorting decoloniality: development-as-imperialism and Hindu supremacy
Get PDFThis article explores how race in international development currently operates globally. It is not simply a discursive legacy of colonialism, but is inextricably embedded in contemporary processes of imperialist extraction and accumulation which the
architecture of development both legitimises and extends. The article argues for deeper engagement with Marxist thinkers located in the Global South in contemporary theorisations of race in development.
In the context of multiple anti-racist and decolonial movements globally, many mainstream development actors are claiming to engage with questions of racism within their organisations. This is explored through an analysis of several texts produced by
Bond a large network of organisations working on international development in Britain, in response to the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement since 2020. While contradictions within these texts evidently reflect internal contestations over
understandings of racism and anti-racism, they ultimately propose the adoption of diversity-based ‘solutions’ to racism and coloniality in development. These are analysed in the context of a long line of initiatives to relegitimise colonialism and development in order to sustain racialised structures of global capital accumulation.
The essentialisation inherent in these approaches facilitates the appropriation of notions of decoloniality by forces of Brahmanical Hindu supremacism in India, which are closely tied to racialised and racializing global corporate capital. The second part of
the article explores these processes, highlights the synergies between anti-caste and anti-racist thinking about capital and labour, and argues that Hindu supremacism incorporates, is sustained and strengthened by, and in turn feeds global supremacist ideologies
The response of household debt to COVID-19 using a neural networks VAR in OECD
No full textThis paper investigates responses of household debt to COVID-19-related data like confirmed cases and confirmed deaths within a neural networks panel VAR for OECD countries. Our model also includes a plethora of non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical interventions. We opt for a global neural networks panel VAR (GVAR) methodology that nests all OECD countries in the sample. Because linear factor models are unable to capture the variability in our data set, the use of an artificial neural network (ANN) method permits to capture this variability. The number of factors, as well as the number of intermediate layers, is determined using the marginal likelihood criterion and we estimate the GVAR with MCMC techniques. We also report δ-values that capture the dominance of each individual country in the network. In terms of dominant countries, the UK, the USA, and Japan dominate interconnections within the network, but also countries like Belgium, Netherlands, and Brazil. Results reveal that household debt positively responds to COVID-19 infections and deaths. Lockdown measures such as stay-at-home advice, and closing schools, all have a positive impact on household debt, though they are of transitory nature. However, vaccinations and testing appear to negatively affect household debt
Optimal reinsurance–investment strategy based on stochastic volatility and the Stochastic Interest Rate Model
Get PDFThis paper studies insurance companies’ optimal reinsurance–investment strategy under the stochastic interest rate and stochastic volatility model, taking the HARA utility function as the optimal criterion. It uses arithmetic Brownian motion as a diffusion approximation of the insurer’s surplus process and the variance premium principle to calculate premiums. In this paper, we assume that insurance companies can invest in risk-free assets, risky assets, and zero-coupon bonds, where the Cox–Ingersoll–Ross model describes the dynamic change in stochastic interest rates and the Heston model describes the price process of risky assets. The analytic solution of the optimal reinsurance–investment strategy is deduced by employing related methods from the stochastic optimal control theory, the stochastic analysis theory, and the dynamic programming principle. Finally, the influence of model parameters on the optimal reinsurance–investment strategy is illustrated using numerical examples
The impact of COVID-19 vaccination on human mobility: the London case
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic has become a global public health crisis, causing significant morbidity
and mortality worldwide. As an early response, different lockdowns were imposed in the UK
(and the world) to limit the spread of the disease. Although effective, these measures profoundly
impacted mobility patterns across cities, significantly reducing the number of people commuting
to work or travelling for leisure. As different governments introduced massive vaccination
programs to tackle the pandemic, cities have significantly but slowly increased human mobility,
enabling the resumption of travel, work, and social activities. Nevertheless, how much can this
return to normal mobility patterns be attributed to vaccines? In this study, we answer this
question using a statistical approach, analysing two different open urban mobility datasets to
quantify the effect vaccination rollouts have had on increased human activities
The use of an object: exploring physician burnout through object relations theory
Get PDFThe crisis of physician burnout has been widely and repeatedly reported across the mainstream press and medical journals around the world, in the closing years of the second decade of the 21st century. Despite multiple systematic reviews and commentary on the scale of this ‘global epidemic’, understandings of both the phenomenon and the most effective interventions remain limited. Practice-based medical humanities represents the collaborative sharing of conceptual tools for understanding illness and clinical practice and the shouldering of responsibility for mapping the shape of care, in all its local, national and global contexts, thinking-with rather than critique on the profession and its practices. In keeping with this approach, this article offers a new perspective on the contemporary crisis of physician burnout by exploring the objectification of the clinician’s body within the systems and practice of healthcare. Within the context of medical humanities’ scholarship, discussions of objectification usually navigate towards a discussion about patient identity and its potentially reductive objectification within the frameworks of biomedical science. However, this article crosses the cultural divide between clinician and patient, and comes to focus on the objectification of the clinician herself, using object relations theory from the field of psychoanalysis to excavate the psychodynamics of care and their impact on clinicians, and the systems of healthcare in which care is delivered
Psychometric properties of the Persian Gaming Disorder Test and relationships with psychological distress and insomnia in adolescents
Get PDFBackground: Gaming Disorder (GD) was recently included by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a psychiatric condition in the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) and is a concern worldwide, including in Iran. Thus, based on the ICD-11 criteria, a Persian version of the Gaming Disorder Test (GDT) was developed to facilitate assessment of GD. Methods: The present study used classical test theory and Rasch analysis to examine the psychometric properties of the Persian GDT. Iranian adolescents (n = 3837; 2171 [56.6%] males; mean [SD] age = 16.02 [1.4] years) completed the GDT and other instruments assessing disordered gaming, psychological distress, and insomnia.
Results: Overall, the psychometric properties of the Persian GDT were satisfactory based on classical test theory (i.e., confirmatory factor analysis corroborated the unidimensional structure of GDT) and Rasch analysis (i.e., fit statistics suggested that all items were embedded in the concept of GD). Moreover, the Persian GDT was found to be sex-invariant, displaying no items with substantial differential item functioning across sexes. Additionally, it was found that GD mediated associations between time spent gaming and measures of psychological distress and insomnia. Conclusion: The Persian GDT is a convenient and short instrument for assessing GD among Iranian adolescents. The mediating roles of GD in the associations between time spent gaming and psychological distress and between time spent gaming and insomnia suggest that targeting features of GD may reduce psychological distress and improve sleep for Iranian adolescents
Quaternary uplift of palaeoshorelines in southwestern Crete: the combined effect of extensional and compressional faulting
Get PDFWe undertake spatio-temporal analysis on sequences of Pleistocene palaeoshorelines in southwestern Crete where deformed Holocene marine notches have predominantly been suggested to be linked to coseismic uplift from the 365 CE Mw > 8 earthquake. Previous investigations into the Holocene notches have been used to infer that the dominant mechanism of uplift may be slip either on a reverse crustal fault or on the subduction interface. However, seismic reflection studies attest to the presence of numerous active offshore extensional faults whose role in the long-term deformation is unclear. The relative contributions of upper-plate extensional and compressional faults to the overall deformation can be assessed through the study of uplifted and deformed Late Quaternary palaeoshorelines. New 36Cl exposure dating on wave-cut platforms and palaeoshoreline mapping are combined with existing age controls to facilitate investigation into the deformed Late Quaternary palaeoshorelines. We observe that the Late Quaternary uplift rates increase from west (0.61 mm/yr) to east (0.83 mm/yr) over ∼20 km, a spatial uplift pattern that is inconsistent with published vertical deformation models of slip solely on the subduction interface or on a reverse crustal fault. Elastic half-space modelling suggests that an offshore extensional fault may also contribute to the uplift. We conclude that a combination of active extensional and compressional faults may be responsible for Late Quaternary uplift across southwestern Crete.
combined with existing age controls to facilitate investigation into the deformed Late Quaternary palaeoshorelines. We observe that the Late Quaternary uplift rates increase from west (0.61 mm/yr) to east (0.83 mm/yr) over ~20 km, a spatial uplift pattern that is inconsistent with published vertical deformation models of slip solely on the subduction interface or on a reverse crustal fault. Elastic half-space modelling suggests that an offshore extensional fault may also contribute to the uplift. We conclude that a combination of active extensional and compressional faults may be responsible for Late Quaternary uplift across southwestern Crete
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