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Is there rush hour in a third world country?
No full textCall centre agents and migrant workers, soldiers and charity workers, fresh university graduates and street children — they all navigate the myriad of avenues in which their desires are entangled within the Philippines’ harsh and unforgiving conditions of migration and labour in Rogelio Braga’s collection of stories, Is There Rush Hour in A Third World Country? Now translated by Kristine Ong Muslim into English, the collection offers a glimpse of the lives of ordinary Filipinos, told amidst coup d’états, active conflict areas, late-night convenience store rendezvous, and bumper-to-bumper Manila traffic, given a considered dignity and nuance by one of the Philippines’ celebrated playwrights
Ditches
No full textThe Court of Sewers is an essential resource for law and literature scholarship. The foundational text of this minor jurisprudence is Sir Thomas Dugdale's History of Imbanking. Themes from sewer law are dramatically transformed by Shakespeare and Gerrard Winstanley's Digger texts. John Ruskin's Unto This Last, William Morris' News from Nowhere and Peter Kropotkin's Fields, Factories and Workshops are further radical re-workings of themes of ditches and ditch digging. The minor jurisprudence of the sewer terminates in the most recent ruling on the ditch rule in Wibberley Building Ltd v Insley. The ditch is fundamental to notions of property and territory. Bound up with the figure is a utopian/literary imaginary that defines alternative understandings of labour, land and community
Threshold queries in theory and in the wild
Get PDFThreshold queries are an important class of queries that only require computing or counting answers up to a specified threshold value. To the best of our knowledge, threshold queries have been largely disregarded in the research literature, which is surprising considering how common they are in practice. In this paper, we present a deep theoretical analysis of threshold query evaluation and show that thresholds can be used to significantly improve the asymptotic bounds of state-of-the-art query evaluation algorithms. We also empirically show that threshold queries are significant in practice. In surprising contrast to conventional wisdom, we found important scenarios in real-world data sets in which users are interested in computing the results of queries up to a certain threshold, independent of a ranking function that orders the query results
Anxious parents show higher physiological synchrony with their infants
Get PDFBackground. Interpersonal processes influence our physiological states and associated affect. Physiological arousal dysregulation, a core feature of anxiety disorders, has been identified in children of parents with elevated anxiety. However, little is understood about how parent-infant interpersonal regulatory processes differ when the dyad includes a more anxious parent.
Methods. We investigated moment-to-moment fluctuations in arousal within parent-infant dyads using miniaturised microphones and autonomic monitors. We continually recorded arousal and vocalisations in infants and parents in naturalistic home settings across day-long data segments.
Results. Our results indicated that physiological synchrony across the day was stronger in dyads including more rather than less anxious mothers. Across the whole recording epoch, less anxious mothers showed responsivity that was limited to ‘peak’ moments in their child’s arousal. In contrast, more anxious mothers showed greater reactivity to small-scale fluctuations. Less anxious mothers also showed behaviours akin to ‘stress buffering’ – downregulating their arousal when the overall arousal level of the dyad was high. These behaviours were absent in more anxious mothers.
Conclusion. Our findings have implications for understanding the differential processes of physiological co-regulation in partnerships where a partner is anxious, and for the use of this understanding in informing intervention strategies for dyads needing support for elevated levels of anxiety
A deadline distraction: why the death penalty is not the answer to rape in South Asia
Get PDFSince 2010, persons convicted of rape offences were executed in at least 9 countries, including India and Pakistan. Moreover, public protests against the rape epidemic, which led governments to introduce capital rape laws, illustrates the need to shine a spotlight in South Asia.
This report examines the use of the death penalty for rape in four South Asian countries: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The report provides an overview of capital rape laws in these jurisdictions, discusses the everyday ramifications of such laws, and explores existing and potential avenues by which advocates may campaign for reform
Remembering nothing: encoding and memory processes involved in representing empty locations
Get PDFPrevious research has provided rich evidence that a set of visual objects can be encoded in isolation along with their exact coordinate positions as well as a global configuration that provides a network of interrelated spatial information. However, much less data is available on how unoccupied locations are encoded and maintained in memory. We tested this ability in adults using a novel paradigm that involved both empty and filled locations and required participants to monitor the addition or deletion of an item, which occurred 50% of the time. Crucially, a number of locations remained hidden to the participant, thus information on the absence of an item at a location could not be inferred from the presence of items elsewhere. We used eye-tracking to measure the proportion of target looking during encoding and the amount of pupil dilation during memory retention. Participants looked significantly longer at filled compared to empty targets and target looking during encoding only predicted accuracy in case of filled targets. Increased pupil dilation was observed in response to an increasing number of items while pupil diameter was unaffected by the number of empty locations. In addition, participants made significantly more errors in the conditions that involved the representation of an empty location. Our findings support the view that human adults encode exact coordinates of items in memory. In contrast, we suggest that empty locations are represented as a property of the global configuration of items and empty space, and not as independent units of information
The long sixth finger illusion: the representation of the supernumerary finger is not a copy and can be felt with varying lengths
Get PDFWe can have a distorted perception of our body, instantly induced with multisensory illusions, anaesthesia or Virtual Reality, and recent studies show we can also feel extra body parts. Newport and colleagues (Newport et al., 2016) created an illusion that induces the feeling of having a sixth finger on one's hand, for a brief moment. By changing the paradigm with a double back and forth stroking, we were able to extend the duration of this illusion (Cadete & Longo, 2020), which can reflect an endured representation of a supernumerary finger. This innovation allowed us to test one specific distortion in the supernumerary finger: length. Patients with supernumerary phantom limb syndrome feel like they have an extra limb, as if one of their limbs was duplicated (Staub et al., 2006), resembling the same size and shape of the existing one. It is unclear from existing studies whether a supernumerary limb is represented as a copy of the existing limb, or if it is represented independently, with its own features. We therefore aimed to investigate whether the properties of the supernumerary sixth finger could be altered, independently of the actual little finger. Hence, we tested whether we can embody a sixth finger with double the size of the average little finger, and half its size. Participants reported feeling a long and a short sixth finger, and gave visual judgements on the felt length of the supernumerary finger, that matched the condition length. Overall, the results show that the supernumerary sixth finger is not a mere copy of the little finger but is represented independently, with distinct features from the existing finger. Moreover, the representation of the supernumerary finger is flexible, allowing the embodiment of a long or a short sixth finger
‘The English language enables me to visit my pain’. Exploring experiences of using a later-learned language in the healing journey of survivors of sexuality persecution
Get PDF-Aims and Objectives: This qualitative study explores the experience of using a later-learned language, English (ELX), in the therapeutic journey of refugee survivors of sexuality persecution, to enhance understanding of the role of language in their rehabilitation.
-Design/Methodology/Approach: This is a multiple case study of three refugees, persecuted in their home country because of their sexual orientation, who are regular attendees of a therapeutic community, Room to Heal, based in London. A qualitatively driven mixed-method research design using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) (Smith, 1996) and ethnography was employed.
-Data and Analysis: Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with the first author. They consisted of questions about the relationship between the participants’ languages, emotions and sense of self.
- Findings/Conclusions: Participants shared common positive experiences characterised by feelings of the ELX being a liberating tool that empowered them and enabled them to bear witness to their trauma; express their same-sex love more easily; be more self-accepting and contributed to the [re]invention and performance of a ‘new’ self.
- Originality: The originality resides, firstly, in the unique profile of the participants –victims of persecution because of their sexual orientation; secondly, in the unique context- a therapeutic community supporting refugees; and thirdly, in the methodology which adopts a qualitatively driven mixed-method design combining IPA and ethnography.
- Significance/Implications: The findings support an embodied perspective of languages and highlight the need for therapists to be aware of multilingualism and its effects. The reduced emotional resonance of a later-learned language (LX) may offer its users a way to access trauma and build a new self within the therapeutic process
The privilege of choice: how prospective college students’ financial concerns influence their choice of higher education institution and subject of study in England
Get PDFA hallmark of English higher education (HE) over the last twenty years has been policies seeking to increase provider competition and student choice. Central to this has been student funding policy changes, leading to rising college costs. This article asks if prospective HE students’ concerns about college costs and the financial strategies they anticipate using because of them, widen or limit their choice of HE institution and subject of study. It calls on the findings from a nationally representative survey of 1,374 English college applicants and uses latent class analysis to develop a typology of students’ planned financial coping mechanisms: Minimizing costs; Managing costs and maximizing returns; and No financial concerns; which prove to be socially stratified. Minimizing costs students are the most disadvantaged and adopt mechanisms which constrain their choices of where and what to study, unlike students in the other groups. Thus, government policies aimed at improving student choice potentially have the opposite effect for the most disadvantaged, perpetuating existing inequalities in access to, and the experience of, HE
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