“It's About Time You Came Out”: Sexualities,Mobility and Home

Abstract: Helping redress the dominance of metropolitan narratives upon which much literature on sexuality is framed, this article interprets the narrative told by a “white” 16‐year‐old man living in regional Australia. Our aim is to investigate the intersections of migration and homemaking in sexual subject formation. Finding a place to call “home” can be a complex process for young men born in regional Australia and not conforming to the social formations of a “normal guy”. This young man's narrative expressively reveals the fluidity and spatiality inherent in processes of negotiating sexual subjectivities. His story provides telling insights into how migration and mobility change his understandings of home and of self by making possible a third‐space configured by neither the gender norms of his hometown nor the “gay scene” in Sydney.     

An ongoing Austronesian expansion in Island Southeast Asia

The Austronesian expansion into Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific was the last and most far-reaching prehistoric human migration. Austronesian languages replaced indigenous languages over nearly half the globe, yet the absolute number of Austronesian colonists was small. Recently, geneticists have identified large geographic disparities in the relative proportions of Asian ancestry across different genetic systems (NRY, mitochondrial DNA, autosomes and X chromosomes) in Austronesian-speaking societies of Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Surprisingly, a substantial genetic discontinuity occurs in the middle of a continuous chain of islands that form the southern arc of the Indonesian archipelago, near the geographic center of the Austronesian world. In the absence of geographic barriers to migration, this genetic boundary and swathe of Austronesian language replacement must have emerged from social behavior. Drawing on decades of comparative ethnological research inspired by F.A.E. van Wouden’s structural model of Austronesian social organization, later codified by Claude Lévi-Strauss as “House societies” (“sociétés à maison”), we propose a two-stage ethnographic model in which the appearance of matrilocal “House societies” during the initial phase of the Austronesian expansion, and the subsequent disappearance of “House societies” in lowland rice-growing regions, accounts for the observed linguistic, genetic and cultural patterns.     

Luminescence dating of young coastal deposits from New Zealand using feldspar

A new measurement protocol has been tested on K-feldspars from Whanganui Inlet and Parengarenga Harbour, New Zealand. A Single Aliquot Regenerative (SAR) dose protocol, using two successive infrared (IR) stimulations (post-IR IR SAR protocol) is setup for these young (<1000 years) coastal sediments. Significant anomalous fading (g _2days =7 %/decade) is observed using the conventional IR signal measured at 50°C. In contrast, the fading rate of the IR signal measured at elevated temperature (150°C) after the IR stimulation at 50°C (a post-IR IR signal) is not significant (g _2days ≤ 1 %/decade). Surprisingly low residual infrared stimulated luminescence (IRSL) signals were observed for a surface sample, suggesting that accurate ages as young as ∼50 years can be obtained for these recent deposits. IRSL ages ranging between 48±6 years and 1050±50 years are obtained from six samples, indicating that sediment accumulation has occurred at the two sites during the last millennia, despite a falling trend in relative sea-level in Whanganui Inlet and a stable relative sea-level at Parengarenga Harbour.     

IRSL and post-IR IRSL residual doses recorded in modern dust samples from the Chinese Loess Plateau

Using a set of modern/young (0 to about 200 years old) dust samples collected from the Chinese Loess Plateau the bleachability of IRSL measured at 50°C (IR₅₀) and post-IR₅₀ elevated temperature IRSL (measured at 225°C and at 290°C) is investigated by measuring the apparent (residual) doses recorded by these signals. Doses recorded by quartz OSL are used as a reference. Allowing for differences in dose rates it seems that both IRSL and post-IR IRSL signals yield residual doses that are significantly larger than the doses measured in quartz. These residual doses can be largely explained by thermal transfer caused by preheating. Nevertheless, we advise against the use of a low temperature preheat (<200°C) with IR₅₀ to date loess samples because, as has been reported before, the signal appears to be thermally unstable. In general, we conclude that it may not be advisable to apply post-IR IRSL dating to Chinese loess samples where residuals of up to ∼20 Gy are a significant fraction of the total dose. However, these residuals quickly become unimportant when dating older samples, and this is the age range in which post-IR IRSL dating is likely to be most useful.     

Cutwaters Before Rams: an experimental investigation into the origins and development of the waterline ram

Students at Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken, NJ, USA) investigated the reasons for an elongated projection at the bow of Mediterranean galleys. Using a 1:20 base model adapted from the Trireme Trust's Olympias fitted with: 1) an elongated projection; and 2) a control bow similar to excavated merchant ships, tow‐tank tests were carried out at various speeds. Hydrodynamic resistance and power were calculated for each bow type. Above speeds corresponding to 6 knots, the cutwater bow significantly attenuated the model's bow waves when compared to the control bow. These results were then compared to those of the ship with a ram‐type bow from experiments conducted in 1985 at the National Technical University of Athens, which showed similar wave‐attenuating characteristics.