John Birks: Pioneer in quantitative palaeoecology

We describe the career of John Birks as a pioneering scientist who has, over a career spanning five decades, transformed palaeoecology from a largely descriptive to a rigorous quantitative science relevant to contemporary questions in ecology and environmental change. We review his influence on students and colleagues not only at Cambridge and Bergen Universities, his places of primary employment, but also on individuals and research groups in Europe and North America. We also introduce the collection of papers that we have assembled in his honour. The papers are written by his former students and close colleagues and span many of the areas of palaeoecology to which John himself has made major contributions. These include the relationship between ecology and palaeoecology, late-glacial and Holocene palaeoecology, ecological succession, climate change and vegetation history, the role of palaeoecological techniques in reconstructing and understanding the impact of human activity on terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems and numerical analysis of multivariate palaeoecological data.

The Ultraviolet-Bright, Slowly Declining Transient PS1-11af as a Partial Tidal Disruption Event

We present the Pan-STARRS1 discovery of the long-lived and blue transient PS1-11af, which was also detected by Galaxy Evolution Explorer with coordinated observations in the near-ultraviolet (NUV) band. PS1-11af is associated with the nucleus of an early type galaxy at redshift z = 0.4046 that exhibits no evidence for star formation or active galactic nucleus activity. Four epochs of spectroscopy reveal a pair of transient broad absorption features in the UV on otherwise featureless spectra. Despite the superficial similarity of these features to P-Cygni absorptions of supernovae (SNe), we conclude that PS1-11af is not consistent with the properties of known types of SNe. Blackbody fits to the spectral energy distribution are inconsistent with the cooling, expanding ejecta of a SN, and the velocities of the absorption features are too high to represent material in homologous expansion near a SN photosphere. However, the constant blue colors and slow evolution of the luminosity are similar to previous optically selected tidal disruption events (TDEs). The shape of the optical light curve is consistent with models for TDEs, but the minimum accreted mass necessary to power the observed luminosity is only 0.002 M, which points to a partial disruption model. A full disruption model predicts higher bolometric luminosities, which would require most of the radiation to be emitted in a separate component at high energies where we lack observations. In addition, the observed temperature is lower than that predicted by pure accretion disk models for TDEs and requires reprocessing to a constant, lower temperature. Three deep non-detections in the radio with the Very Large Array over the first two years after the event set strict limits on the production of any relativistic outflow comparable to Swift J1644+57, even if off-axis.

John Punch, Scotist Holy War, and the Irish Catholic Revolutionary Tradition in the Seventeenth Century

During the 1640s, the Irish Franciscan theologian John Punch taught his theology students in Rome that war against Protestants was made just by their religion alone. Jesuits like Luis de Molina identified the holy war tradition in which Punch stood as a Scotist one, and insisted that the Scotists had confused the natural and supernatural spheres. Among Irishmen, Punch was unusual. The main Irish Catholic revolutionary tradition employed Jesuit and Thomist theory. They argued that the Stuarts had lost the right to rule Ireland for natural reasons, not supernatural ones; because the Stuarts were tyrants, not because they were Protestants.

John Maxwell

Biography of General Sir John Maxwell

John Thompson: Seeing through China

In 1848, Karl Marx predicted that a flow of cheap commodities would be the heavy artillery which would batter down all Chinese walls and open up the country to the west (Marx, 1978, p. 477). The Scottish photographer John Thomson (1837-1921) was both chronicler of and participant in the early moments of this process. Thomson was a commercial photographer who first arrived in the Far East in 1862. He earned the moniker of 'China' in a decade-long stay during which he photographed what he considered to be the key aspects of its culture and landscape. In this body of work, Illustrations of China and its People (first published in 1874) is perhaps the most comprehensive. It explores, through two hundred photographs and accompanying texts, a series of phenomena from the macro-scale of landscape, infrastructure and industry to the smaller scales of streetscapes, domestic spaces, individual portraits, and other details of everyday life. Despite his own description of the volumes as encyclopedic, Illustrations is geographically quite limited. Thomson's explorations into the hinterland proceed up the country’s principal rivers from those coastal ports which had already been wrested into western hands during the Opium Wars (of the 1840s) and subsequently opened up to trade. This is perhaps one of the reasons why Illustrations has been described as an explicitly colonial text, a guide-book for the prospective settler whose content offered the strategic knowledge of land, culture and natural resources necessary if the territorial advantages of the coastal periphery were to extended to the interior (Jeffrey, 1981, p. 64). It can also be argued, however, that Thomson’s volume offered justification for a potential colonial presence. Faced with a civilization whose history was as sophisticated as the west, it depicts a culture that is static and moribund, its addiction to traditional values an impediment to progress. While this is perhaps most explicit in the texts of Illustrations of China, it can also be seen in the images whose uniform chemical rendering also serves to make an essentially diverse culture seem homogenous. Yet it is these images that distinguish Illustrations from previous attempts to collate China’s culture and landscape. Here, the mechanical precision of his camera captures a reality that often subverts the colonial narrative, confounding stereotypes as Thomson’s mass-produced images allow another China to emerge.

Do Children still need to Escape Childhood? A Reassessment of John Holt and his Vision for Children's Rights

The work of children’s liberationists have been long been critiqued for pushing the parameters of rights discourse too far; specifically, by suggesting that there are no significant differences between children and adults, including their ability for self-determination. John Holt’s 1974 text Escape from Childhood is one such work which was deemed highly controversial for its time. This article uses Holt’s Escape from Childhood as an overarching framework against which to examine the current state of play on children’s rights as explicated through the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It suggests that whilst Holt has often been critiqued for being too radical, in the context of current children’s rights discourse Holt’s visioning is not as radical as it might first appear.

Bright Molecules for Sensing, Computing and Imaging: A Tale of Two Once-troubled Cities

The circumstances in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which led to a) the generalization of luminescent PET (photoinduced electron transfer) sensing/switching as a design tool, b) the construction of a market-leading blood electrolyte analyzer and c) the invention of molecular logic-based computation as an experimental field, are delineated. Efforts to extend the philosophy of these approaches into issues of small object identification, nanometric mapping, animal visual perception and visual art are also outlined.