Betwixt spaces: Students’ accounts of turning point experiences in first-year transitions

'Not belonging' is becoming a prevalent theme within accounts of the first-year student experience at university. In this study the notion of not belonging is extended by assuming a more active role for the idea of liminality in a student's transition into the university environments of academic and student life. In doing so, the article suggests that the transition between one place (home) and another (university) can result in an 'in-between-ness' - a betwixt space. Through an interpretative methodology, the study explores how students begin to move from this betwixt space into feeling like fully-fledged members of university life. It is concluded that there is a wide range of turning points associated with the students' betwixt transition, which shapes, alters or indeed accentuates the ways in which they make meaningful connections with university life. Moreover, transitional turning point experiences reveal a cast of characters and symbolic objects; capture contrasting motivations and evolving relationships; display multiple trajectories of interpersonal tensions and conflicts; highlight discontinuities as well as continuities; and together, simultaneously liberate and constrain the students' transition into university life.

Stomatal proxy record of CO2 concentrations from the last termination suggests an important role for CO2 at climate change transitions

A new stomatal proxy-based record of CO₂ concentrations ([CO₂]), based on Betula nana (dwarf birch) leaves from the Hässeldala Port sedimentary sequence in south-eastern Sweden, is presented. The record is of high chronological resolution and spans most of Greenland Interstadial 1 (GI-1a to 1c, Allerød pollen zone), Greenland Stadial 1 (GS-1, Younger Dryas pollen zone) and the very beginning of the Holocene (Preboreal pollen zone). The record clearly demonstrates that i) [CO₂] were significantly higher than usually reported for the Last Termination and ii) the overall pattern of CO₂ evolution through the studied time period is fairly dynamic, with significant abrupt fluctuations in [CO₂] when the climate moved from interstadial to stadial state and vice versa. A new loss-on-ignition chemical record (used here as a proxy for temperature) lends independent support to the Hässeldala Port [CO₂] record. The large-amplitude fluctuations around the climate change transitions may indicate unstable climates and that " tipping-point" situations were involved in Last Termination climate evolution. The scenario presented here is in contrast to [CO₂] records reconstructed from air bubbles trapped in ice, which indicate lower concentrations and a gradual, linear increase of [CO₂] through time. The prevalent explanation for the main climate forcer during the Last Termination being ocean circulation patterns needs to re-examined, and a larger role for atmospheric [CO₂] considered.

Scaling of the entanglement spectrum near quantum phase transitions

The entanglement spectrum describing quantum correlations in many-body systems has been recently recognized as a key tool to characterize different quantum phases, including topological ones. Here we derive its analytically scaling properties in the vicinity of some integrable quantum phase transitions and extend our studies also to nonintegrable quantum phase transitions in one-dimensional spin models numerically. Our analysis shows that, in all studied cases, the scaling of the difference between the two largest nondegenerate Schmidt eigenvalues yields with good accuracy critical points and mass scaling exponents.

Three narratives in search of a city: Researching Belfast's 'post-conflict' transitions

This paper highlights the role of narratives in expressing, shaping and ordering urban life, and as tools for analysing urban conflicts. The paper distinguishes analytically between two prominent epistemological meta-narratives in contemporary urban studies and multiple ontological narratives in a given city-in this case Belfast. The first meta-narrative represents cities as sites of deepening coercion, violence and inequality and the second sees them as engines of new forms of transnational capitalism. Both are marked by the strategy of specifying 'exemplar' or 'paradigm' cities. The core of the paper addresses how these two meta-narratives map onto and interact with, three contemporary ontological narratives of urban regeneration in Belfast. We conceive of narratives-epistemological and ontological-as analytical tools and objects of analysis but also as tools for social action for competing political and economic interests and coalitions. While in the urban studies literature Belfast is typically studied as an exemplar 'conflict city', it is now being promoted as a 'new capitalist city'. In the context of post-Agreement Belfast, we explore not only the 'pull' of exemplar narratives but also resistances to them that are linked to multiple and hybrid senses of place in the city. We conclude that any significant move beyond the exigencies of rampant commodification or recurring inter-communal antagonism must firstly, encourage new forms of grassroots place-making and, secondly, reform of Belfast's (and Northern Ireland's) fragmented governance structures. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

Multidimensional poverty measurement in Europe:An application of the adjusted headcount approach

As awareness of the limitations of relying solely on income to measure poverty has become more widespread, attention has been increasingly focused on multi-dimensional approaches, to the point where the EU has adopted a multidimensional poverty and social exclusion target for 2020. The rationale advanced is that the computation of a multidimensional poverty index is an effective way of communicating in a political environment, and a necessary tool in order to monitor 27 different national situations. By contrast with the rather ad hoc way in which the EU 2020 poverty target has been framed and rationalised, the adjusted head count ratio applied here has a number of desirable axiomatic properties. It constitutes a significant improvement on union and intersection approaches and allows for the decomposition of multidimensional poverty in terms of dimensions of deprivation and socio-economic attributes. Since understanding poverty as multidimensional does not necessarily require constructing a multidimensional poverty index, on the basis of our analysis we provide a more general consideration of the value of developing a multidimensional index of poverty for the European Union.

Log gf values for astrophysically important transitions Fe II

Aims. In a recent measurement, Meléndez & Barbuy (2009, A&A, 497, 611) report accurate log gf values for 142 important astrophysical lines with wavelengths in the range 4000 Å to 8000 Å. Their results include both solar and laboratory measurements. In this paper, we describe a theoretical study of these lines. Methods. The CIV3 structure codes, combined with our "fine-tuning" extrapolation process, are used to undertake a large-scale CI calculation involving the lowest 262 fine-structure levels belonging to the 3d4s, 3d, 3d4s, 3d4p, and 3d4s4p configurations. Results. We find that many of the 142 transitions are very weak intercombination lines. Other transitions are weak because the dominant configurations in the two levels differ by two orbitals. Conclusions. The comparison between our log gf values and the experimental values generally shows good agreement for most of these transitions, with our theoretical values agreeing slightly more closely with the solar than with the laboratory measurements. A detailed analysis of the small number of transitions for which the agreement between theory and experiment is not as good shows that such disagreements largely arise from severe cancellation due to CI mixing.

Electron-Impact Excitation Collision Strengths and Theoretical Line Intensities for Fine-Structure Transitions in S III

We present Maxwellian-averaged effective collision strengths for the electron-impact excitation of S III over a wide range of electron temperatures of astrophysical importance, log Te (K) = 3.0-6.0. The calculation incorporates 53 fine-structure levels arising from the six configurations—3s 23p 2, 3s3p 3, 3s 23p3d, 3s 23p4s, 3s 23p4p, and 3s 23p4d—giving rise to 1378 individual lines and is undertaken using the recently developed RMATRX II plus FINE95 suite of codes. A detailed comparison is made with a previous R-matrix calculation and significant differences are found for some transitions. The atomic data are subsequently incorporated into the modeling code CLOUDY to generate line intensities for a range of plasma parameters, with emphasis on allowed ultraviolet extreme-ultraviolet emission lines detected from the Io plasma torus. Electron density-sensitive line ratios are calculated with the present atomic data and compared with those from CHIANTI v7.1, as well as with Io plasma torus spectra obtained by Far-Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer and Extreme-Ultraviolet Explorer. The present line intensities are found to agree well with the observational results and provide a noticeable improvement on the values predicted by CHIANTI.

Do fertility transitions influence infant mortality declines? Evidence from early modern Germany

The timing and sequencing of fertility transitions and early-life mortality declines in historical Western societies indicate that reductions in sibship (number of siblings) may have contributed to improvements in infant health. Surprisingly, however, this demographic relationship has received little attention in empirical research. We outline the difficulties associated with establishing the effect of sibship on infant mortality and discuss the inherent bias associated with conventional empirical approaches. We offer a solution that permits an empirical test of this relationship while accounting for reverse causality and potential omitted variable bias. Our approach is illustrated by evaluating the causal impact of family size on infant mortality using genealogical data from 13 German parishes spanning the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Overall, our findings do not support the hypothesis that declining fertility led to increased infant survival probabilities in historical populations.