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Cash for questions : Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s female detectives, journalism, and the case of the missing income
Get PDFThis article explores the work of Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett (1846–1930), a prolific and successful journalist and novelist who nonetheless struggled to earn a living. It argues that her writing is deeply informed by her financial experiences and her political view of the relationship between capital and labour. Burgoyne Corbett’s detective stories, published as a series in many local papers, interrogate capitalism from a feminist and socialist viewpoint. Her female detective, Dora Bell, resembles the female investigative journalists of the 1890s. Dora exposes wealthy men as frequently the originators of crime and women as its direct and indirect victims.Peer reviewe
Spinoza's simplest bodies
Get PDFIn the entirety of his corpus, Spinoza uses the phrase ‘simplest bodies’ [corporibus simplicissimis] exactly twice and never offers an explanation of what it means. That said, it appears to play a fundamental role in his thought. This paper evaluates two twentieth-century readings of Spinoza in order to present a new original theory of simplest bodies. Ultimately, I present a reading of Spinoza which accepts a nuanced amalgamation of these accounts. I argue that the right understanding of Spinozistic simplest bodies is something like the following: simplest bodies are portions of extension featuring motive homogeneity among their necessarily infinite parts. For Spinoza, simplest bodies thus feature no mereological simplicity at all, but rather only motive simplicity, in that they are properly characterized by a single ratio of motion and rest.Peer reviewe
What is provisional possession?
Get PDFFunding: This research was supported by the CSC-St Andrews PhD scholarship.The concept of provisional possession in Kant presents a significant interpretative challenge. Scholars agree that prior empirical possession must be rationalized but have struggled to identify a form of omnilaterality within the state of nature. I propose understanding provisionality through the Pure Concept of Understanding of Possession (PUP) – a unilateral yet normative framework that rationalizes empirical possession based on temporal priority. Possession understood through PUP serves as a precursor to intelligible possession within the state of nature. To support this account, I first demonstrate that intelligible possession starts from empirical possession, thereby requiring an explanation of the transition from the latter to the former. I then argue that provisional possession unfolds in two distinct steps: first, prior empirical possession acquires an empirical title through the postulate of practical reason, which confers normative significance on temporal priority; second, PUP abstracts from empirical conditions, facilitating the progression towards a rational title.Peer reviewe
Distinguishing between the material reality and social reality
Get PDFIn the so-called “post-truth age” that commenced in the mid-2010s, fake news and unsubstantiated claims have gained popularity mostly stemming from the human observer’s confusion between the material reality and social reality. The article proposes a logical grid for testing whether an object or phenomenon under scrutiny belongs to the former or latter type of reality, and whether, from the human observer’s perspective, its existence is objective or subjective within such a given reality’s confines. The discussion is foregrounded with the history of spatialized conceptualizations of the material and social reality, and concludes with a reflection on the prospect of a rising non-human (machine-generated) social reality.Peer reviewe
Blue emission in sterically shielded multiresonant thermally activated delayed fluorescence emitters
Get PDFFunding: This project has been partly funded by the European Union Horizon 2021 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 101073045 (TADF solutions) and the EPSRC grant EP/X026175/1. In the UK, this project has received funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for support (EP/R035164/1; EP/W007517/1; EP/Z535291/1). D. Chen thanks the support from China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant no. 2022TQ0227) and Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, China (Grant no. BK20230508).Multi-resonant TADF materials are a promising class of emitters capable of addressing the BT.2020 industry requirement for blue emission in electroluminescent displays as they simultaneously show narrowband emission and can harvest both singlet and triplet excitons to produce light. However, these emitters are typically planar and prone to aggregation and their moderately large singlet–triplet energy gap (ΔEST) leads to slow upconversion kinetics resulting in severe efficiency roll-off in the device. In this study we present a molecular design that simultaneously results in an emitter having a faster reverse intersystem crossing rate constant (kRISC) and suppressed aggregation in the film state. Mes-tDABNA emits at λPL of 465 nm as 4 wt% doped films in SF3-RZ and has a short delayed lifetime of 45.2 μs. Vacuum-deposited OLEDs with Mes-tDABNA showed blue emission at CIE coordinates of (0.13, 0.15) and a maximum external quantum efficiency, EQEmax, of 18.4%. Unsurprisingly, these devices suffered from rather strong efficiency roll-off (EQE1000 of 5.6%). With the aim of addressing this efficiency roll-off, hyperfluorescent devices containing DMAC-DPS as a TADF sensitizer were fabricated, which showed an improved EQEmax of 23.1% at CIE coordinates of (0.13, 0.17) and milder efficiency roll-off (EQE1000 of 12.7%). These devices showed one of the highest EQE1000 based on DABNA-based emitters to date.Peer reviewe
Studies of disorders and injuries of the forearm and hand
Get PDFThis portfolio contains 46 papers written during my career as a hand surgeon. They are grouped into ten sections by the subject of the papers: Anatomy; Tendons; Congenital disorders; Work‐related disorders; Injuries; Amputations; Tumours and ganglions; Miscellaneous conditions; Aspects of treatment; and Historical. Each section contains a separate discussion of the paper, written for this portfolio submission
Introduction: climate sustainability – evidence and policy
Get PDFThis paper has the status of "research article" in the journal: it was also the introduction to a special issue guest co-edited with Bhattacharjee and Adrian Pabst (Deputy Director, National Institute of Economic and Social Research) based on a COP26 fringe event, Evidence-Based Approaches Towards Economic and Environmental Sustainability: A Discussion of Some COP26 Themes, run at Panmure House, 4 November 2021. I jointly organized the programme with Arnab Bhattacharjee, Heriot-Watt University and the NIESR. Contributors there included: Michael Cohen, Chief U.S. economist at BP; Sir David F. Hendry, then Deputy Director, Climate Econometrics, Nuffield College, Oxford; Daniel Kammen, IPPC lead contributor; Bettina Laville, former advisor on Climate to President Mitterrand; John Ludden, former executive director of the British Geological Study; Susana Campos Martins, former research assistant to Robert Engle (2003 Nobel laureate); and Stephen Pollock, Viscount Hanworth, then member of the House of Lords Science Committee. This event led to the special issue. I am also involved in organizing the programme for a follow-up conference at NIESR in London in 2025 and an associated (second) special issue is planned for 2026.Last year saw yet another year of weather extremes. The Copernicus Climate Change Service run by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Commission (Copernicus, 2024) measured 2023 as being globally the warmest year since records began in 1850. This was by a large margin (0.17 per cent) over the previous record in 2016, with global surface air temperature at nearly 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. While last year’s observations embodied an El Niño effect, which every few years sees temperatures affected by warmer waters coming to the surface of the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean, changes and anomalies consistently observed over the last few years across the globe are becoming more pronounced. What is commonly labelled “climate change” is turning into a global climate emergency. No economy or society are immune to its effects. Today, we see the global average temperature at over 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels, a rise that has been extraordinarily rapid on a planetary timescale, and one that has been primarily caused through our (humans) burning fossil fuels. Nearly a decade has passed since the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference in 2015, COP21, where 196 nations adopted The Paris Agreement – a legally binding international treaty on climate change. Its goal was to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and to pursue efforts “to limit the increase to 1.5°C”.Peer reviewe
Hoops, loops and eyewitness reliability : a history of biologically impossible aquatic monsters
Get PDFHere we outline the history of serpentiform aquatic monster reports and images that contain a zoological impossibility: the presence of loops or arches of the body above the water in a vertically flexing animal body. Images of such serpentiform animals have been common ever since the sixteenth century yet the actual proportion of such eyewitness reports, especially at Loch Ness, has until recently been extremely low, far lower than the proportion of hooped imagery in art portraying the Loch Ness Monster. As the biological impossibility of such arched animals is not widely known, yet the images of such monsters both historically and contemporaneously are extremely common, this allows a test of contemporary eyewitness testimony. Few reports mention vertical arches in freshwater or marine contexts. This low proportion suggests cultural background has not influenced the content of aquatic monster reports, in contrast to previous work in the field. This insight supports the contention that the majority of eyewitness reports are actually based on some underlying physical reality, even if not representing an actual encounter with an unknown species.Peer reviewe
Evaluating the galaxy formation histories predicted by a neural network in pure dark matter simulations
Get PDFFunding: The UKRI Science and Technology Facilities Council supported this study under grant ID ST/T506448/1.We investigate a series of galaxy properties computed using the merger trees and environmental histories from dark-matter–only cosmological simulations, using a semirecurrent neural network producing self-consistent predictions of galaxy evolution, and using stochastic improvements to this model based on similarly predicted Fourier transforms. We apply these methods to the dark-matter–only runs of the IllustrisTNG simulations to understand the effects of baryon removal, and to the gigaparsec-volume pure dark matter simulation Uchuu, to understand the effects of the lower resolution or alternative metrics for halo properties. We find that the machine learning model recovers accurate summary statistics derived from the predicted star formation and stellar metallicity histories, and correspondent spectroscopy and photometry. However, the inaccuracies of the model’s application to dark simulations are substantial for low-mass and slowly growing haloes. For these objects, the halo mass accretion rate is exaggerated due to the lack of stellar feedback, yet the formation of the halo can be severely limited by the absence of low-mass progenitors in a low-resolution simulation. Furthermore, differences in the structure and environment of higher mass haloes results in an overabundance of red, quenched galaxies. These results signify progress towards a machine learning model which builds high fidelity mocks based on a physical interpretation of the galaxy–halo connection, yet they illustrate the need to account for differences in halo properties and the resolution of the simulation.Peer reviewe
Exploring productivity hotspots in the Precambrian biosphere
Get PDFFunding: Financial support was provided by a NERC Frontiers grant (NE/V010824/1), the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2022313) and the Royal Society (RGS\R1\211184).Earth’s earliest biosphere was likely limited by metabolic energy. Nutrient limitation, which imparts a strong control on productivity today, only began with the origin of oxygenic photosynthesis ca 3 billion years ago (Ga). This contribution builds upon these concepts to explore how the spatial distribution of primary producers evolved across this transition from energy- to nutrient-limited. While on the modern Earth hotspots of primary productivity are centred around deep-marine upwelling zones and estuaries, preliminary calculations suggest that the early chemotrophic biosphere may have been fuelled by hydrothermal injections of H2 and Fe2+, making volcanically active basins at least 2–8 times more productive relative to background. The rise of oxygenic photosynthesis in the Neoarchean likely enabled the expansion of primary producers into freshwater habitats, which provided nutrients by weathering and perhaps boosted biological diversification. In the Proterozoic, when the deep ocean was nutrient-depleted, primary productivity was probably clustered around estuarine settings, where it may have been enhanced by a factor of 3–25. In conclusion, the spatial distribution of primary producers has likely evolved over the past 4 billion years. Accounting for this trend may help identify biogeochemical limits and opportunities in future studies of the early Earth and other habitable words. This article is part of the discussion meeting issue ‘Chance and purpose in the evolution of biospheres’.Peer reviewe
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