Beyond the Orange and the Green. The Diversification of the Qualitative Social Research Landscape in Northern Ireland.

The Northern Ireland conflict has been described as one of the most over-researched conflicts in the world. However, this is a relatively recent development. For many years, when the conflict was most intense, social scientists in Northern Ireland were silent and not vocal. The sectarian violence that dominated the life in Northern Ireland as well as the fact that the country was a fundamentally unjust society contributed to this silence. However, since the peace process began in the mid 1990s, a growing number of qualitative studies have been published, utilising one-to-one interviews and focus group discussions, in order to "make people's voices heard" and deal with the consequences of the so-called "Troubles". This paper looks into the emergence of a qualitative social research landscape in Northern Ireland beyond the conflict and explores issues so far neglected. It is argued that a number of factors have contributed to this, among them the availability of research funding to voluntary and community sector organisations that use their data to influence policy-making and equality legislation in a country which is still deeply divided along socio-religious lines.

Is perception of upper body orientation based on the inertia tensor? Normogravity versus microgravity conditions

During lateral leg raising, a synergistic inclination of the supporting leg and trunk in the opposite direction to the leg movement is performed in order to preserve equilibrium. As first hypothesized by Pagano and Turvey (J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform, 1995, 21:1070-1087), the perception of limb orientation could be based on the orientation of the limb's inertia tensor. The purpose of this study was thus to explore whether the final upper body orientation (trunk inclination relative to vertical) depends on changes in the trunk inertia tensor. We imposed a loading condition, with total mass of 4 kg added to the subject's trunk in either a symmetrical or asymmetrical configuration. This changed the orientation of the trunk inertia tensor while keeping the total trunk mass constant. In order to separate any effects of the inertia tensor from the effects of gravitational torque, the experiment was carried out in normo- and microgravity. The results indicated that in normogravity the same final upper body orientation was maintained irrespective of the loading condition. In microgravity, regardless of loading conditions the same (but different from the normogravity) orientation of the upper body was achieved through different joint organizations: two joints (the hip and ankle joints of the supporting leg) in the asymmetrical loading condition, and one (hip) in the symmetrical loading condition. In order to determine whether the different orientations of the inertia tensor were perceived during the movement, the interjoint coordination was quantified by performing a principal components analysis (PCA) on the supporting and moving hips and on the supporting ankle joints. It was expected that different loading conditions would modify the principal component of the PCA. In normogravity, asymmetrical loading decreased the coupling between joints, while in microgravity a strong coupling was preserved whatever the loading condition. It was concluded that the trunk inertia tensor did not play a role during the lateral leg raising task because in spite of the absence of gravitational torque the final upper body orientation and the interjoint coupling were not influenced.

Development of Illusory contour perception in infants

We investigated whether infants from 8 ^ 22 weeks of age were sensitive to the illusory contour created by aligned line terminators. Previous reports of illusory-contour detection in infants under 4 months old could be due to infants' preference for the presence of terminators rather than their configuration. We generated preferential-looking stimuli containing sinusoidal lines whose oscillating, abutting terminators give a strong illusory contour in adult perception. Our experiments demonstrated a preference in infants 8 weeks old and above for an oscillating illusory contour compared with a stimulus containing equal terminator density and movement. Control experiments excluded local line density, or attention to alignment in general, as the basis for this result. In the youngest age group (8 ^ 10 weeks) stimulus velocity appears to be critical in determining the visibility of illusory contours, which is consistent with other data on motion processing at this age. We conclude that, by 2 months of age, the infant's visual system contains the nonlinear mechanisms necessary to extract an illusory contour from aligned terminators.

“Islands” in Holocene forests: implications for forest openness, landscape clearance and “culture-steppe” species

Human activity has undoubtedly had a major impact on Holocene forested ecosystems, with the concurrent expansion of plants and animals associated with cleared landscapes and pasture, also known as 'culture-steppe'. However, this anthropogenic perspective may have underestimated the contribution of autogenic disturbance (e.g. wind-throw, fire), or a mixture of autogenic and anthropogenic processes, within early Holocene forests. Entomologists have long argued that the north European primary forest was probably similar in structure to pasture woodland. This idea has received support from the conservation biologist Frans Vera, who has recently strongly argued that the role of large herbivores in maintaining open forests in the primeval landscapes of Europe has been seriously underestimated. This paper reviews this debate from a fossil invertebrate perspective and looks at several early Holocene insect assemblages. Although wood taxa are indeed important during this period, species typical of open areas and grassland and dung beetles, usually associated with the dung of grazing animals, are persistent presences in many early woodland faunas. We also suggest that fire and other natural disturbance agents appear to have played an important ecological role in some of these forests, maintaining open areas and creating open vegetation islands within these systems. More work, however, is required to ascertain the role of grazing animals, but we conclude that fossil insects have a significant contribution to make to this debate. This evidence has fundamental implications in terms of how the palaeoecological record is interpreted, particularly by environmental archaeologists and palaeoecologists who may be more interested in identifying human-environment interactions rather than the ecological processes which may be preserved within palaeoecological records.