Deficits in agency in schizophrenia, and additional deficits in body image, body schema, and internal timing, in passivity symptoms

Individuals with schizophrenia, particularly those with passivity symptoms, may not feel in control of their actions, believing them to be controlled by external agents. Cognitive operations that contribute to these symptoms may include abnormal processing in agency as well as body representations that deal with body schema and body image. However, these operations in schizophrenia are not fully understood, and the questions of general versus specific deficits in individuals with different symptom profiles remain unanswered. Using the projected-hand illusion (a digital video version of the rubber-hand illusion) with synchronous and asynchronous stroking (500 ms delay), and a hand laterality judgment task, we assessed sense of agency, body image, and body schema in 53 people with clinically stable schizophrenia (with a current, past, and no history of passivity symptoms) and 48 healthy controls. The results revealed a stable trait in schizophrenia with no difference between clinical subgroups (sense of agency) and some quantitative (specific) differences depending on the passivity symptom profile (body image and body schema). Specifically, a reduced sense of self-agency was a common feature of all clinical subgroups. However, subgroup comparisons showed that individuals with passivity symptoms (both current and past) had significantly greater deficits on tasks assessing body image and body schema, relative to the other groups. In addition, patients with current passivity symptoms failed to demonstrate the normal reduction in body illusion typically seen with a 500 ms delay in visual feedback (asynchronous condition), suggesting internal timing problems. Altogether, the results underscore self-abnormalities in schizophrenia, provide evidence for both trait abnormalities and state changes specific to passivity symptoms, and point to a role for internal timing deficits as a mechanistic explanation for external cues becoming a possible source of self-body input.

The 'veil' of control: exploring the attitudes and perceptions of UK design controllers

In the UK, architectural design is regulated through a system of design control for the public interest, which aims to secure and promote ‘quality’ in the built environment. Design control is primarily implemented by locally employed planning professionals with political oversight, and independent design review panels, staffed predominantly by design professionals. Design control has a lengthy and complex history, with the concept of ‘design’ offering a range of challenges for a regulatory system of governance. A simultaneously creative and emotive discipline, architectural design is a difficult issue to regulate objectively or consistently, often leading to policy that is regarded highly discretionary and flexible. This makes regulatory outcomes difficult to predict, as approaches undertaken by the ‘agents of control’ can vary according to the individual. The role of the design controller is therefore central, tasked with the responsibility of interpreting design policy and guidance, appraising design quality and passing professional judgment. However, little is really known about what influences the way design controllers approach their task, providing a ‘veil’ over design control, shrouding the basis of their decisions. This research engaged directly with the attitudes and perceptions of design controllers in the UK, lifting this ‘veil’. Using in-depth interviews and Q-Methodology, the thesis explores this hidden element of control, revealing a number of key differences in how controllers approach and implement policy and guidance, conceptualise design quality, and rationalise their evaluations and judgments. The research develops a conceptual framework for agency in design control – this consists of six variables (Regulation; Discretion; Skills; Design Quality; Aesthetics; and Evaluation) and it is suggested that this could act as a ‘heuristic’ instrument for UK controllers, prompting more reflexivity in relation to evaluating their own position, approaches, and attitudes, leading to better practice and increased transparency of control decisions.

Social entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa

Responding to calls for a better understanding of the relationship between social enterprises and their environments, this article focuses on contextual influences on social entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa. We identify four predominantly African contextual dimensions, i.e., acute poverty, informality, colonial history, and ethnic group identity, and explore their influence on the way social ventures perceive themselves and on their choice of activities. Our empirical study of 384 social enterprises from 19 sub-Saharan African countries suggests that ethnic group identity and high poverty levels influence both self-perception and activity choices, while the country’s colonial history only influences self-perception and informality has no significant influence on either. These findings point to the need to consider both self-perception and the choice of activities in defining social entrepreneurship. Our study also highlights the importance of African contextual dimensions for understanding social entrepreneurship, and underlines the added value of incorporating insights from African data into management research more broadly.

Time-varying price discovery in the eighteenth century: empirical evidence from the London and Amsterdam stock markets

This paper examines the time-varying nature of price discovery in eighteenth century cross-listed stocks. Specifically, we investigate how quickly news is reflected in prices for two of the great moneyed com- panies, the Bank of England and the East India Company, over the period 1723 to 1794. These British companies were cross-listed on the London and Amsterdam stock exchange and news between the capitals flowed mainly via the use of boats that transported mail. We examine in detail the historical context sur- rounding the defining events of the period, and use these as a guide to how the data should be analysed. We show that both trading venues contributed to price discovery, and although the London venue was more important for these stocks, its importance varies over time.

Reticent autobiography: Henry Green and Christopher Isherwood at the Hogarth Press

Christopher Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows (1938) and Henry Green’s Pack My Bag (1940) are accounts of the authors’ educations in the 1920s. Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, these works use reticent narrators to test the limits of autobiography. In each case, authorial self-presentation complicates the work’s classification in the literary marketplace: Green paradoxically extends his use of a pseudonym to autobiography and Isherwood assigns his own name to his purportedly fictional protagonist, and yet Hogarth published both as novels. The two texts and their publication histories exemplify modernist autobiography’s blurring of the lines between fiction and personal history.

Vegetation and environmental changes in Northern Anatolia between 134 and 119ka recorded in Black Sea sediments

This multiproxy study on SE Black Sea sediments provides the first detailed reconstruction of vegetation and environmental history of Northern Anatolia between 134 and 119 ka. Here, the glacial–interglacial transition is characterized by several short-lived alternating cold and warm events preceding a meltwater pulse (~ 130.4–131.7 ka). The latter is reconstructed as a cold arid period correlated to Heinrich event 11. The initial warming is evidenced at ~ 130.4 ka by increased primary productivity in the Black Sea, disappearance of ice-rafted detritus, and spreading of oaks in Anatolia. A Younger Dryas-type event is not identifiable. The Eemian vegetation succession corresponds to the main climatic phases in Europe: i) the Quercus–Juniperus phase (128.7–126.4 ka) indicates a dry continental climate; ii) the Ostrya–Corylus–Quercus–Carpinus phase (126.4–122.9 ka) suggests warm summers, mild winters, and high year-round precipitation; iii) the Fagus–Carpinus phase (122.9–119.5 ka) indicates cooling and high precipitation; and iv) increasing Pinus at ~ 121 ka marks the onset of cooler/drier conditions. Generally, pollen reconstructions suggest altitudinal/latitudinal migrations of vegetation belts in Northern Anatolia during the Eemian caused by increased transport of moisture. The evidence for the wide distribution of Fagus around the Black Sea contrasts with the European records and is likely related to climatic and genetic factors

Introduction: entire hands and main fingers

The ten-volume edition of The Collected Works of Thomas Heywood, forthcoming from Oxford University Press from 2015 to 2022, will attempt to place Heywood’s plays, poetry, and prose back where they belong: at the centre of the study of early modern English literature, drama, and theatre history. Especially as an actor, playwright, reviser, editor, and historical chronicler, Heywood had the longest and widest-ranging career of his contemporaries and thus can reveal how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors and theatrical and literary audiences came to see the practice and production of drama.

Paddy Hartley: of faces and facades

Paddy Hartley's work is primarily concerned with the ways in which the human face can be repaired, manipulated and recontextualised, and the questions these processes raise about our concepts of beauty and disfigurement. Incorporating surgical and pharmaceutical equipment as well as steel, scrap metal, digital embroidery and textiles, Hartley sets out a critique of how we think about the face today. Taking as a starting point records of facially injured servicemen of the First World War and the pioneering surgery they underwent, Project Facade examines the impact of disfigurement on the human psyche, as well as tracing the development of early facial reconstructive surgery. His Face Corsets, meanwhile, examines attitudes towards cosmetic surgery and the beauty industry, providing a non-surgical means to brutally mimic the results of cosmetic procedures and beyond. The series gained notoriety and success in a wide variety of popular publications both nationally and internationally, and continue to feature in contemporary textiles and fashion publications. Paddy Hartley: Of Faces and Facades brings together these works in book form for the first time, presenting previously unpublished texts from David Houston Jones and Marjorie Gehrhardt, as well as drawings and photographs which document a remarkable creative process and a history that is still insufficiently explored.

Diversity lessons from Wales: how marketing bilingualism contributes to language shift and language maintenance

Wales is one of the constituent nations of the United Kingdom. While sharing much of its political and social history with England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, it has retained a distinct cultural identity.In particular, over 560,000 people, a significant minority of the population of 2.2 million, speak Welsh, a member of the Celtic family of languages, and the country is officially bilingual. In this paper, we will look at attempts to maintain and grow the number of speakers of the language and at the relevance of this development for speakers of minority languages in other settings.

Predicting how many animals will be where: how to build, calibrate and evaluate individual-based models

Individual-based models (IBMs) can simulate the actions of individual animals as they interact with one another and the landscape in which they live. When used in spatially-explicit landscapes IBMs can show how populations change over time in response to management actions. For instance, IBMs are being used to design strategies of conservation and of the exploitation of fisheries, and for assessing the effects on populations of major construction projects and of novel agricultural chemicals. In such real world contexts, it becomes especially important to build IBMs in a principled fashion, and to approach calibration and evaluation systematically. We argue that insights from physiological and behavioural ecology offer a recipe for building realistic models, and that Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a promising technique for the calibration and evaluation of IBMs. IBMs are constructed primarily from knowledge about individuals. In ecological applications the relevant knowledge is found in physiological and behavioural ecology, and we approach these from an evolutionary perspective by taking into account how physiological and behavioural processes contribute to life histories, and how those life histories evolve. Evolutionary life history theory shows that, other things being equal, organisms should grow to sexual maturity as fast as possible, and then reproduce as fast as possible, while minimising per capita death rate. Physiological and behavioural ecology are largely built on these principles together with the laws of conservation of matter and energy. To complete construction of an IBM information is also needed on the effects of competitors, conspecifics and food scarcity; the maximum rates of ingestion, growth and reproduction, and life-history parameters. Using this knowledge about physiological and behavioural processes provides a principled way to build IBMs, but model parameters vary between species and are often difficult to measure. A common solution is to manually compare model outputs with observations from real landscapes and so to obtain parameters which produce acceptable fits of model to data. However, this procedure can be convoluted and lead to over-calibrated and thus inflexible models. Many formal statistical techniques are unsuitable for use with IBMs, but we argue that ABC offers a potential way forward. It can be used to calibrate and compare complex stochastic models and to assess the uncertainty in their predictions. We describe methods used to implement ABC in an accessible way and illustrate them with examples and discussion of recent studies. Although much progress has been made, theoretical issues remain, and some of these are outlined and discussed.

'The African Presence in Caribbean Literature' revisited: recovering the politics of imagined co-belonging 1930–2005

Working outward from Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s landmark 1974 essay, “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature,” this article explores the fuller history of the idea of Africa in anglophone Caribbean critical and literary works from the 1930s to the 2000s. It demonstrates that earlier, now forgotten Caribbean critics drew on imperfect and incomplete Caribbean literary imaginings of Africa to frame a counter-colonial politics of identity. The essay also brings back into view writings by Una Marson, Victor Stafford Reid, and Derek Walcott that expressed a different politics of solidarity based on the shared experience of colonial violence. Readings of recent literary works by Charlotte Williams and Nalo Hopkinson reveal the contemporary crafting of this relation around a heightened awareness of both presence and loss, history and imagination. Importantly, this gathering of sources and perspectives allows for an appreciation of the role that a reach toward Africa has played in articulations of Caribbeanness and its complex patterning of cultural co-belonging.

Entrepreneurial failure and economic crisis: an historical perspective

This chapter analyses the major UK economic crises that have occurred since the speculative bubbles of the seventeenth century. It integrates insights from economic history and business history to analyse both the general economic conditions and the specific business and financial practices that led to these crises. The analysis suggests a significant reinterpretation of the evidence – one that questions economists’ conventional views.

Plastic and evolutionary responses to heat stress in a temperate dung fly: negative correlation between basal and induced heat tolerance?

Extreme weather events such as heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense. Populations can cope with elevated heat stress by evolving higher basal heat tolerance (evolutionary response) and/or stronger induced heat tolerance (plastic response). However, there is ongoing debate about whether basal and induced heat tolerance are negatively correlated and whether adaptive potential in heat tolerance is sufficient under ongoing climate warming. To evaluate the evolutionary potential of basal and induced heat tolerance, we performed experimental evolution on a temperate source 4 population of the dung fly Sepsis punctum. Offspring of flies adapted to three thermal selection regimes (Hot, Cold and Reference) were subjected to acute heat stress after having been exposed to either a hot-acclimation or non-acclimation pretreatment. As different traits may respond differently to temperature stress, several physiological and life history traits were assessed. Condition dependence of the response was evaluated by exposing juveniles to different levels of developmental (food restriction/rearing density) stress. Heat knockdown times were highest, whereas acclimation effects were lowest in the Hot selection regime, indicating a negative association between basal and induced heat tolerance. However, survival, adult longevity, fecundity and fertility did not show such a pattern. Acclimation had positive effects in heat-shocked flies, but in the absence of heat stress hot-acclimated flies had reduced life spans relative to nonacclimated ones, thereby revealing a potential cost of acclimation. Moreover, body size positively affected heat tolerance and unstressed individuals were less prone to heat stress than stressed flies, offering support for energetic costs associated with heat tolerance. Overall, our results indicate that heat tolerance of temperate insects can evolve under rising temperatures, but this response could be limited by a negative relationship between basal and induced thermotolerance, and may involve some but not other fitness-related traits.