49 research outputs found
Does measuring social attention lead to changes in behavior? A preliminary investigation into the implications of attention bias trials on behavior in Rhesus Macaques
No full text© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.A welfare assessment tool in development must satisfy several criteria before it is considered ready for general use. Some tools that meet many of these criteria have been criticized for their negative effect on welfare. We conducted a preliminary assessment of the impact of attention bias (AB) trials using threat-neutral conspecific face pairs followed by presumed neutral-positive filler stimuli on the behavior of 21 rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta; 15 female). Behavioral observations were conducted following AB trials and repeated two weeks later when no AB trials had occurred (no trial: NT). The association between observation period and behavior was assessed using linear mixed-effects models in R. Trials did not impact any observed behavior except for fear, which was displayed by five monkeys over six trials (four NT). For this sample, there was a significant reduction in fear behavior following AB trials. We, therefore, found no evidence suggesting that AB trials negatively affect behaviour. AB protocols may be suitable for continued development for primate welfare assessment and we encourage researchers to include assessing test impact on welfare in their AB protocols.ERI Howarth was supported by an LJMU PhD studentship. CL Witham and the Centre for Macaques are funded by the Medical Research Council
The problem of studying certain accounting features of Negro and foreign language weekly newspapers in the United States, 1938, 1939
No full textIn these days of keen competition, it is particularly necessary to give special attention to the business side of newspaper publishing. The first aim of the analysis underlying this thesis is to examine the financial policies of the Negro and foreign language weeklies in the United States, 1938, through a study of their balance sheets and profit and loss statements. The second aim of the study is to make a comparative analysis of their advertising rates. This is done by seeking the correlation of the advertising rate and the size of special population in the city of publication of the special paper and the correlation of the advertising rate and the circulation of the paper. If the study helps serious students and editors and publisher of the Negro and foreign language papers to a better appreciation of the need and merits of sound business principles as tools of management in the two publishing fields, the author will consider her purpose fulfilled
Physical exercise impacts the performance of explosives detection dogs
No full textDogs (Canis familiaris) are widely used as scent detectors due to their sensitive olfactory capabilities, endurance, and ability to cover large areas quickly. They are in high demand due to a global rise in terrorist threats using specialized explosive contraptions. Detection dogs are often faced with high temperatures and physical exertion, which can increase panting rate as a function of evaporative cooling, inhibiting olfactory ability. This study examined the impact of exercise on the search performance of 11 explosive detection dogs (eight labradors and three springer spaniels). They completed two trial sets: one after exercise with a ball thrower and one without exercise. They were timed while searching for three types of explosives: trinitrotoluene, composition-4, and ammonium nitrate. Data were analyzed in R using mixed effects models, revealing that exercise significantly affected search duration and success for all types of explosives. Searches averaged 29.58 seconds without exercise, while post-exercise searches took 44.91 seconds. Dogs were 1.14 times more likely to locate explosives without prior exercise. Dogs took the longest to find trinitrotoluene and were fastest with ammonium nitrate and composition-4. These findings highlight the importance of allowing detection dogs adequate rest, as even brief exercise can impact their search performance.N/
Authenticity in feminist research: a researcher's account of reflexivity
No full textThe paper discusses how anxieties and insecurities resulting from an assumed imperative of authenticity affect the process of reflexivity in feminist research. Drawing on the feminist poststructuralist inspired nature of her research; the author centres her analysis on her experience as a woman doing research focusing on women within a geospatial context of emotional and cultural familiarity. The paper is organised in six sections; after a general introduction, the first section discusses how reflexivity is used by feminist researchers as an authenticity tool with the aim of 'being truthful' to the commitment of exploring people's lives, particularly women's realities. The second section provides a brief description of the nature and objectives of her research. In sections three, four and five, the author reflects on the authenticity/genuineness concerns generated by her geographical positionality, her theoretical positionality and her locus of d(enunciation) and how these affected her thought and production process. This is followed by a closing reflection in the last section, where the author assesses the how reflexivity helped her accomplish authenticity in her own research
Notes on Contributors
No full textJad Adams is an historian working as an author and an independent television producer. He specializes on radical characters from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the Decadence of the 1890s. His books include biographies of Tony Benn, Gandhi, Emmeline Pankhurst and of the Nehru dynasty. His literary work includes a biography of Kipling, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson (2000) and Hideous Absinthe: History of the Devil in a Bottle (2004). His television work incl..
Notes on Contributors
No full textJad Adams is an historian working as an author and an independent television producer. He specializes on radical characters from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the Decadence of the 1890s. His books include biographies of Tony Benn, Gandhi, Emmeline Pankhurst and of the Nehru dynasty. His literary work includes a biography of Kipling, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson (2000) and Hideous Absinthe: History of the Devil in a Bottle (2004). His television work incl..
Authentic Artifice; Cultures of the Real
No full textThe object of this book is to query some of the premises in our perceptual distinctions between the real and the artificial. It opens up discussion through a medley of scenarios which present us with simulated realities and acknowledged fakes which nonetheless betray signs of genuine substance. Inseparable from the differentiation between the genuine and the fake are claims of authenticity: assertions of who and what is real; where reality is; when things were real in the past, are real in the present, or will be real in the future; why some things are real and others are not, or why some are more real than others; and how it is that those things which are real are real in the first place. This book explores these issues through three distinct themes: • The author as a codifier of the meanings of the real within the constructive framework of a sign-system • The self-reflexive construction of the authentic subject: a person knowingly adopting a manner, mode or performance which is accepted to be, or contributes to defining what is considered to be, real • The discursive representation of objects which are constructed as being real Drawing on a range of cultures - histories, artefacts and ways of life from ceramic wall plaques to self-help manuals, from tourism in Spain to hip-hop in the US - this book examines the establishment and re-appropriation of authenticity and the celebration and refusal of the inauthentic
Can Celts teach us how to live with Kanaks? The Case of Robert Louis Stevenson.
No full textInternational audienceIf Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson is famous for being the writer of boys’ adventure stories featuring tales of piracy, hidden treasures and islands (if not known as the author of key Victorian texts like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (to quote only one)), one too many readers seem to have forgotten that R.L. Stevenson is also the author of South Pacific Tales, which he started to write during the final years of his life that he spent in the Pacific (1888-1894). When setting out for the Pacific in 1888, Stevenson’s objective was to search for a healthier climate, not to become a chronicler of the South Seas. And yet, his travelogue of what he encountered on the various islands in the South Pacific, published posthumously as In The South Seas in 1896, became recognized as one of Stevenson’s finest books and invaluable source for historians studying the archipelagos of Oceania - the Marquesas, Tuamotus and Gilberts Islands. Writing to one of his friends Sidney Colvin, Stevenson himself considered that, with his South Pacific novella “The Beach of Falesa” (1892), readers “will know more about the South Seas after [they] have read my little tale that if [they] had read a library” (Selected Letters 467-468). In his own words, Stevenson believed that he had acquired “the smell and the look of the thing” and could write with conviction about the people, places and cultures of the South Seas (Selected Letters 467-468). After a life of traveling, Stevenson eventually settled in Samoa and ended his life there, becoming a ardent defender of the Samoan desire for home rule and a defender of their rights and condemning European colonial exploitation. To do so, Stevenson often draws a parallel between the South Sea Islanders and the “barbaric” Highlanders, noticing “points of similarity between a South Sea people and some of my own folk at home” (In The South Seas 23). If Michael Shaw reads this as a proto-Celticist tendency in Stevenson’s works (typical of some Scottish romance revivalists) –making the Samoan situation a new efficient paradigm for Stevenson to look back upon and reassess the situation of imperial domination imposed upon Highlanders—(what Stevenson himself acknowledged in The South Seas), studying some of Stevenson’s South Pacific Tales, and in particular “The Beach of Falesa,” also proves a formidable lesson into intercultural encounter, one that may well be needed in times like the ones we are currently facing in New Caledonia as we speak. Not only does Stevenson avoid some of transcultural pitfalls that often threaten the writing of milieux that are considered too exotic by the average European or American reader, but he also resists the colonial narrative polarized into domestic versus exotic. By portraying white missionaries as ‘partly Kanakaized’ (34) and by organizing the plot around the marriage between the English trader Wiltshire and the Polynesian Uma, this novella, as I shall argue, reads as an exercise into cultural crossing and maybe more than anything else, an exercise into domesticating the unknown and creating contact zones. To get to the sense of the other, as this communication will show, Stevenson encourages the reader to discard generalities, revise traditional oppositions, and embrace ways of seeing and knowing the “stranger” that refuse normative, absolutist and universal (European) truths
Authentic Artifice; Cultures of the Real
No full textThe object of this book is to query some of the premises in our perceptual distinctions between the real and the artificial. It opens up discussion through a medley of scenarios which present us with simulated realities and acknowledged fakes which nonetheless betray signs of genuine substance. Inseparable from the differentiation between the genuine and the fake are claims of authenticity: assertions of who and what is real; where reality is; when things were real in the past, are real in the present, or will be real in the future; why some things are real and others are not, or why some are more real than others; and how it is that those things which are real are real in the first place. This book explores these issues through three distinct themes: • The author as a codifier of the meanings of the real within the constructive framework of a sign-system • The self-reflexive construction of the authentic subject: a person knowingly adopting a manner, mode or performance which is accepted to be, or contributes to defining what is considered to be, real • The discursive representation of objects which are constructed as being real Drawing on a range of cultures - histories, artefacts and ways of life from ceramic wall plaques to self-help manuals, from tourism in Spain to hip-hop in the US - this book examines the establishment and re-appropriation of authenticity and the celebration and refusal of the inauthentic
