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.

Past mobilities: archaeological approaches to movement and mobility

The new mobilities paradigm has yet to have the same impact on archaeology as it has in other disciplines in the social sciences – on geography, sociology and anthropology in particular – yet mobility is fundamental to archaeology: all people move. Moving away from archaeology’s traditional focus upon place or location, this volume treats mobility as a central theme in archaeology. The chapters are wide-ranging and methodological as well as theoretical, focusing on the flows of people, ideas, objects and information in the past; it also focuses on archaeology’s distinctiveness. Drawing on a wealth of archaeological evidence for movement, from paths, monuments, rock art and boats, to skeletal and DNA evidence, Past Mobilities presents research from a range of examples from around the world to explore the relationship between archaeology and movement, thus adding an archaeological voice to the broader mobilities discussion. As such, they will be of interest not only to archaeologists and historians, but also to sociologists, geographers and anthropologists.

A common framework for approaches to extreme event attribution

The extent to which a given extreme weather or climate event is attributable to anthropogenic climate change is a question of considerable public interest. From a scientific perspective, the question can be framed in various ways, and the answer depends very much on the framing. One such framing is a risk-based approach, which answers the question probabilistically, in terms of a change in likelihood of a class of event similar to the one in question, and natural variability is treated as noise. A rather different framing is a storyline approach, which examines the role of the various factors contributing to the event as it unfolded, including the anomalous aspects of natural variability, and answers the question deterministically. It is argued that these two apparently irreconcilable approaches can be viewed within a common framework, where the most useful level of conditioning will depend on the question being asked and the uncertainties involved.

Towards Qualitative Approaches to Bayesian Evidential Reasoning

A crucial aspect of evidential reasoning in crime investigation involves comparing the support that evidence provides for alternative hypotheses. Recent work in forensic statistics has shown how Bayesian Networks (BNs) can be employed for this purpose. However, the specification of BNs requires conditional probability tables describing the uncertain processes under evaluation. When these processes are poorly understood, it is necessary to rely on subjective probabilities provided by experts. Accurate probabilities of this type are normally hard to acquire from experts. Recent work in qualitative reasoning has developed methods to perform probabilistic reasoning using coarser representations. However, the latter types of approaches are too imprecise to compare the likelihood of alternative hypotheses. This paper examines this shortcoming of the qualitative approaches when applied to the aforementioned problem, and identifies and integrates techniques to refine them.