SHOPPING AND LEISURE: IMPLICATIONS OF WEST EDMONTON MALL FOR LEISURE AND FOR LEISURE RESEARCH

In the context of three alternative approaches to the meaning of leisure (activity, time, and experience), this article uses West Edmonton Mall (with its vast array of shops and unique complex of recreational facilities) as a starting point to explore four relationships between shopping and leisure. These are: independence (shopping as purchasing); shopping for leisure (the purchase of goods for use in subsequent leisure time); shopping and leisure (when shops and leisure facilities are juxtaposed in a single facility like West Edmonton Mall); and shopping as leisure (when shopping begins to take on the attributes of leisure as an experience). It is concluded that the last category offers the most interesting questions for future research.     

Narratives and expert information in agenda-setting: Experimental evidence on state legislator engagement with artificial intelligence policy

Are narratives as influential in gaining the attention of policymakers as expert information, including for complex, technical policy domains such as artificial intelligence (AI) policy? This pre-registered study uses a field experiment to evaluate legislator responsiveness to policy entrepreneur outreach. In partnership with a leading AI think tank, we send more than 7300 U.S. state legislative offices emails about AI policy containing an influence strategy (providing a narrative, expert information, or the organization's background), along with a prominent issue frame about AI (emphasizing technological competition or ethical implications). To assess engagement, we measure link clicks to further resources and webinar registration and attendance. Although AI policy is a highly technical domain, we find that narratives are just as effective as expert information in engaging legislators. Compared to control, expert information and narratives led to 28 and 34 percent increases in policymaker engagement, respectively. Furthermore, higher legislature professionalism and lower state-level prior AI experience are associated with greater engagement with both narratives and expert information. Finally, we find that policymakers are equally engaged by an ethical framing of AI policy as they are with an economic one. The findings advance efforts to bridge scholarship on policy narratives, policy entrepreneurship, and agenda-setting.     

Direct evidence of the use of beehive products in pre-Roman Sardinia

Written sources and iconographic evidence suggest that honey and beehive products, used in culinary, medicinal, and technological functions since pre-Neolithic times, were likely known and used in Phoenician and Punic Sardinia. The role of these resources is nonetheless poorly understood because no direct evidence survives on a macroscopic level. Significant advances in the knowledge about beeswax and beehive products processing in the past have been offered in recent decades by organic residue analyses (ORA), an approach that enables the characterisation of surviving chemical compounds or suites of compounds that provide information relating to human activity in the past. The relatively recalcitrant nature of lipid compounds comprising beeswax means that this commodity is among the products that can be unambiguously identified through ORA. Here we present and discuss the results of analyses undertaken on 368 pottery sherds from Phoenician and Punic Sardinia (eighth to third century BCE). These analyses offer direct evidence for the presence of beehive products on the island, suggesting the use of honey for culinary purposes in pots, and possibly connecting one specific vessel category with beeswax decanting during beekeeping and honey production processes. Our results also now clearly illustrate the widespread use of beehive products in pre-Roman Sardinia.     

Traitana und Θraēta(o)na

An attempt is made to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-Iranian legend, mainly on the basis of a passage in the Avestan Ardvsr-Yast (Yt. 5,61 f.) and a so far misinterpreted RVedic verse (1,115,5). The legend seems to involve a hero named *Traitana/*Tritana who rescues a devout mortal from water by killing a hostile creature (*dsa-). By comparing this legend with a set of closely related RVedic legends, in which mortals are rescued at sea or from imprisonment by Indra or the Avin, it is assumed that the story of *Traitana/*Tritana belonged to a genre once forming a part of an otherwise lost heroic poetry of Indo-Iranian age.     

Variable Selection in Artefact Compositional Studies

In artefact compositional studies, the selection of variables to use in analysis is unavoidable. Given this ubiquity, surprisingly little attention has been paid to ways in which variables might be selected. After arguing the case for the importance of variable selection, two systematic approaches to making a choice, which have had little or no application in archaeometry, are discussed and illustrated. One, based on the use of principal components, is appropriate if structure in the data is not known. The other, based on the use of classification trees, is applicable when there are known or assumed groups in the data.     

The Crisis of the “Disadvantaged Child”: Poverty Research,IQ, and Muppet Diplomacy in the 1960s

In the early 1960s, the US federal government deemed poverty to be a national crisis, and actively intervened to solve this problem. My question for this article is how did preschool education become a key site to remedy this crisis? Government interventions were a combination of poverty research, racialized politics, and child development. I show how the discipline of early childhood education cohered around the term “disadvantaged child”, in turn influencing the War on Poverty policies, including the basis of Head Start preschool education. During this same decade proponents of Sesame Street—with private funding, along with extensive testing mechanisms by consultants—argued that the television could reach more children, therefore be more cost effective. This paper investigates how surplus populations became determined and demarcated, as early as three years old. I question how televised preschool taught “affective skills” and proper social relations during times of political crisis.     

Latitudinarianism,secular theology and Sir Thomas Browne’s influence in George Mackenzie’s Religio Stoici (1663)

This article revisits George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh’s Religio Stoici (1663) which is often acclaimed as the first in a venerable series of imitations of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1642) as well as a possible influence for John Dryden’s Religio Laici (1682). By contrast, this articles returns to the charged contemporary atmosphere that prevailed in Scotland in 1663, following the controversial re-establishment of Episcopalianism the previous year. Combining an instinctive epistemological scepticism with an audacious and polemical anticlericalism, Mackenzie’s tract attacked dogmatic intolerance and denominational exclusivity and instead advanced a courageous, solitary and very public plea for peaceful religious practice.