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No full textAbstract redacted"This work was supported by an EPSRC iCASE studentship EP/W522259/1 and AWE Plc."--Fundin
The mists of ancient history : representations of fog in Latin literature
No full textThis thesis explores the representations of fog in Latin literature. It consists of three chapters. Chapter One focuses on natural philosophy, looking at fog’s representation in Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones as well as Pliny’s Naturalis Historia. Chapter Two focuses on historiography and uses Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita as a case study. Chapter Three focuses on epic, beginning with a brief survey of Greek epic before looking a range of Latin texts. In consideration of their novel developments of fog’s usage, the chapter predominantly examines Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lucan’s Bellum Civile, and Statius’ Thebaid, prefaced by briefer analyses of Virgil’s Aeneid and Manilius’ Astronomica.
From the analysis of these texts, this thesis suggests that fog holds manifold meanings as indicative of its significance to Roman thought. Fog’s ability to destabilise its surroundings, transform the landscape, and overwhelm the senses lends itself to numerous interpretations and uses. Because of its disruptive effects, fog commonly appears as a form of chaos. Such a presentation manifests in the ‘fog of war’, in Latin literature a literal meteorological phenomenon which blurs the landscape and indicates the sensory and emotional chaos of battle. Often, fog is also a liminal space, situated on the threshold between real and mythical space, or blurring divine beings from mortal sight. Fog can also appear metaphorically to represent confusion or forgetfulness in a similar way to our ‘mind fog,’ and metaphysically, to represent the muddled state of being in which humans flounder. In this way, the Romans used fog to conceptualise numerous aspects of existence
Historical notes : nineteen days hath September
Get PDFThis article examines the way in which compilers of British almanacks handled the change to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, and what this tells us about the public's interest in calendar change
Aquinas, perception, and the question of realism
Get PDFRecent years have seen increased interest in Aquinas’s account of perception, its connection to other aspects of his thought and its relation to other theories, such as Kantian and empiricist ones. The present essay begins by discussing contributions to the understanding of Thomas’s position advanced by David Hamlyn and Anthony Lisska and later engages with Aquinas’s writings directly. It poses the question, ‘What sort of a theory does Aquinas offer?’ and suggests it is akin in type if not in substance to Quine’s ‘naturalised epistemology’. Aquinas holds that all human knowledge derives from experience, but I argue that this does not imply (as it would with a strict empiricism) that it is reducible, directly or indirectly, to the contents of immediate sense experience. This is because of the role of two capacities: the cogitative power and the active intellect in constructing contents that transcend immediate experience but which are expressed in perception. Also, some concepts are non-empirical. This leads to a consideration of the sense in which Aquinas is or is not a metaphysical and epistemological realist.Peer reviewe
The "woman's seed" : immediate abolitionism's intellectual mothers
Get PDFThe rise of the movement propagating the abolition of the slave trade in Britain was accompanied by the increasing engagement of women in the antislavery cause. These women claimed a voice on the public stage by pointing to the fact that slavery was a domestic institution. By the early nineteenth century, family separation had become one of the most popular abolitionist tropes and it gave women an important role in the later immediatist movement that emerged in opposition to gradualism. This article deals with the evolution of the abolitionist cognitive tool “mental metempsychosis,” which was made use of to argue against family separations, by looking at religiously inspired ideas notably tied to Christian Kabbalism that challenged the concept of the heritability of slavery. These ideas were initially developed by female Nonconformist ministers to repudiate the biblical story of Eve’s transgression as justification for original sin and for women’s subjugation to men.Peer reviewe
Translating M et Mme/Mr and Mrs : the case of male scientific translators in the forging of nineteenth-century natural science by women
No full textIf the feminist turn in the late 1980s alerted scholars to the ‘uneasy careers’ (Abir-Am & Outram, 1989) of women in the long nineteenth century busily translating and illustrating their way into science undertaken mainly by their fathers, husbands, and brothers, this chapter develops subsequent scholarship that uncovers women clearly making primary scientific contributions. In scientific translation it further identifies the many secondary men forging careers in science as its intra- and interlingual translator-disseminators (vulgarisateurs and popularisers) of science authored by ‘Mme’ and ‘Mrs’, and by ‘M’ and ‘Mr’. Three indicative cases provide proof of concept. W. H. Davenport Adams (1828–91) translated the work of Madame (Athénaïs) Michelet into English as well as the works of M. (Jules) Michelet. Théodore Lacordaire (1801–70) translated Sarah Bowdich Lee's biography of Georges Cuvier into French in 1833. Gerson Hesse (n.d.) translated the work of Mrs Mary Trimmer into French in 1828. In consequence, (nineteenth-century) scientific translations are no secondary scientific endeavours when they differently promote (or further efface) works by overlooked primary women. Translations of their science by men also identifies key innovations in the sciences of other (rival) language cultures. Scientific progress is therefore not a revolution, but rather a ‘translation’ of knowledge
Exponential mixing and almost sure limit theorems in dynamical systems
Get PDFA goal of ergodic theory is to understand the stochastic behaviours of deterministic systems. Given a measure preserving system (, , μ), decay of correlations ensures that for reasonable ω : → ℝ,(ω(ⁿ)), ∈N asymptotically behaves like an i.i.d. process and results analogous to classical probabilistic theorems for i.i.d. sequences can be proved.
Decay rates for uniformly hyperbolic maps are often exponential whereas non-uniformly hyperbolic systems can have troublesome rates, e.g. subexponential or polynomial. A common approach to study decay of correlations is via the corresponding symbolic space, which admits the same rate of mixing. Since non-uniformly hyperbolic systems are often modelled by countable Markov shifts which are non-compact, it requires a more exhausting machinery to prove analogous statements for finite shifts.
This thesis will first review some thermodynamic results for subshifts of finite types (SFT) and countable Markov shifts (CMS) then focus on CMS withstrong positive recurrence (SPR), a property shown to be equivalent to the spectral gap property, which guarantees exponential mixing rates and other desirable features. For CMS satisfying certain topological boundary conditions, we will show that SPR is characterised by the ergodic averages over periodic orbits. Examples are provided to demonstrate that our condition is rather weak.
In Chapters 3 and 4, we prove two sets of almost sure results using the Borel-Cantelli lemmas for fast mixing systems. Firstly, we show that the asymptotics of the cover times are almost surely quantified by the Minkowski dimensions, which dictate the growth of hitting times to geometrically small sets.
The second set of theorems shows that for a point in a topological Markov shift, the length of the longest matching substrings grows exponentially depending on the Rényi entropy of the Gibbs measure. Such quantitative results extend analogously to the shortest distance problem for interval maps
Association of vision impairment and hearing impairment with encounters in the criminal justice system among children and young people : a systematic review and meta-analysis
Get PDFFunding: Co-first author Prabhath Piyasena was funded by Wellcome Trust United Kingdom (Grant No: 222490/Z/21/Z) from year May/2022 to April/2024. Thomas Hampton is supported by the Wellcome Trust United Kingdom (Grant No: 203919/Z/16/Z). Co-author Dr Rolvix Patterson is supported by the NIH NIDCD training grant R25DC020172, NIH Fogarty International Center Grant D43TW009340, and the Duke Hubert Yeargan Center for Global Health.Background More than 250,000 children <18 years were incarcerated globally in 2020, and 1.5 million cycle through custody annually. We reviewed studies reporting associations of vision/hearing impairment with the criminal justice encounters among young people aged 10–24 years. Methods We searched PubMed, EMBASE, PsycINFO, Web of Science, Scopus, Cochrane, legal and social science data bases to identify studies that describe vision impairment/eye disease and hearing impairment/ear disease among incarcerated youth from inception to 1 June 2025. We included studies of any design assessing criminal justice system contacts among young people with such impairments. Study selection, data extraction and evaluation of bias and quality were done by two reviewers. We performed narrative summaries of prevalence due to high heterogeneity and provided a meta-analysis for odds of vision/hearing impairment among incarcerated youth compared to controls. This study is registered with PROSPERO, CRD42022319876. Findings We identified 94 eligible full-texts for screening among 10070 assessed. Twenty-three studies (median year of publication 1989) including 34,993 participants (mean age 15.8 years, range 10.2–20.9) were included in analyses. The reported prevalence of vision impairment among incarcerated youth ranged from 1.35% to 66.0% (16 studies),hearing impairment from 1.36% to 50.4% (11 studies). In meta-analysis of four studies providing control samples, odds of hearing impairment were increased among incarcerated youth compared to controls (Odds Ratio [OR] 4.20,95% CI 1.79–9.86; p < 0.001, I2 = 48.4%). Six studies on vision impairment reported a pooled OR of 1.60 (95% CI0.95–2⋅70; p = 0.08, I2 = 69.9%); leave-one-out meta-analysis found removal of a single outlying study left a highly significant OR (OR 1.90, 95% CI 1.65–2.19; p < 0.001). Interpretation The prevalence of vision and hearing impairment are higher among incarcerated youth than the general population, although highly variable. These results highlight the need for screening and treatment of visionand hearing conditions at reception into prisons and follow up on release.Peer reviewe
Conjugacy for certain automorphisms of the one-sided shift via transducers
Get PDFFunding: The authors are grateful for partial support from EPSRC research grants EP/R032866/1. The second author is additionally grateful for support from Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant RPG-2017-159, LMS ECF grant ECF-1920-105 and EPSRC research grant EP/X02606X/1.We address the following open problem, implicit in the 1990 article Automorphisms of one-sided subshifts of finite type of Boyle, Franks and Kitchens (BFK): Does there exist an element ψ in the group of automorphisms of the one-sided shift Aut({0, 1, . . . , n − 1}ℕ, σn) so that all points of {0, 1, . . . , n − 1}ℕ have orbits of length n under ψ and ψ is not conjugate to a permutation? Here, by a permutation we mean an automorphism of the one-sided shift dynamical system induced by a permutation of the symbol set {0, 1, . . . , n − 1}. We resolve this question by showing constructively that any ψ with properties as above must be conjugate to a permutation. Our techniques naturally extend those of BFK using the strongly synchronizing automata technology developed here and in several articles of the authors and collaborators (although this article has been written to be largely self-contained).Peer reviewe
Prevalence, incidence, risk factors and economic burden in multimorbidity among adult Indians : the MILAN cohort study protocol
No full textFunding: This work was supported by a funding award made to PG by DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance Early career fellowship with grant number IA/CPHE/20/1/505259.Introduction Multimorbidity or multiple long-term conditions (MLTCs) are defined as the coexistence of two or more chronic conditions in an individual. With increased longevity and the rising burden of chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs), multimorbidity is becoming the norm. Although more prevalent in older populations and people with low socio-economic status, multimorbidity is rapidly rising in the younger age groups. Accurate data on its incidence and health and economic impacts, ie, disability-adjusted life years (DALY) lost and quality-adjusted life year (QALY) are not available for the Indian population. The objective of this study is to determine the incidence and predictors of multimorbidity, the longitudinal trends, the common clusters of conditions and the health and economic impact of multimorbidity among adult Indians aged ≥40 years. Methods and analysis 12 229 participants (≥40 years) from the population-based cohort, titled the Centre for cArdiometabolic Risk Reduction in South-Asia (CARRS) cohort, from Delhi and Chennai will be recruited. CARRS is an existing adult urban cohort which is well characterised, deeply phenotyped and geocoded with bio-banked samples. They will be followed up longitudinally twice during 2023-2025. Information will be collected on common NCD risk factors (physical inactivity, tobacco and alcohol use), disability, frailty and treatment costs. We will also perform anthropometric and blood pressure measurements on all participants as well as biomarker assessments on a sub-sample of 2300. Ethics and dissemination Ethics approval has been obtained from the ethics committees of the Centre for Chronic Disease Control (CCDC) (Institutional Review Board (IRB) 00006330) and the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation (IRB no. IRB00002640). Key findings from the study will be published in national and international peer-reviewed journals. Results will also be presented at various academic conferences to engage with the broader research community. A final report will be submitted to the funding agency upon completion of the fellowship. De-identified data will be securely stored at the CCDC. Access to the data will be available upon request to the principal investigator.Peer reviewe
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