The life-course demography of convict transportation to Van Diemen’s Land

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on a sample of 16,953 male and 7,783 female convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land between 1818 and 1853 whose life courses have been reconstructed as much as possible from cradle to grave to explore the effects of critical life stages and the impact of a shared exposure to a stress regime of penal servitude, forced labour and exile. It uses survival and family formation of a lineage as the key measures of life outcomes. It finds that male convicts, while not producing many descendants because of sex imbalances, did well biologically out of being transported, while female convicts, entering servitude under a greater burden of previous abuse and deprivation, continued to suffer a severe gender penalty in survival and significant secondary infertility after sentence. Early life effects from the social environment, or crime economy, into which men were born remained remarkably persistent, while the previous history of prostitution and/or alcohol abuse dramatically shortened the lives of women. These were the embodied effects, over generations, of structural violence against women in the most deprived and dangerous neighbourhoods of from the late-eighteenth century through to the 1840s in Great Britain and Ireland, and transported with them to the Australian colonies.     

14C analyses quantify time lag between coca leaf harvest and street-level seizure of cocaine

Measurements were made on the natural abundance (14)C content (Δ(14)C) of cocaine specimens seized between 2003 and 2009. The objective of this study was to determine the extent to which Δ(14)C analyses could quantify the "age" of recent cocaine seizures. Here "age" of a seized cocaine specimen is defined as the time period between when a coca leaf was harvested in South America and its seizure as cocaine at either the international or domestic street levels. Based on Δ(14)C analyses of seizure specimens, there were no statistically significant differences in the ages of domestic cocaine HCl and cocaine base specimens seized on the streets in different locations across the United States. Between 2007 and 2009, the average age of a street-level cocaine seizure in the United States was 24.6±1.1 months. Cocaine shipment seizures that were in excess of 150 kg during this time period had an average age of 18.2±1.4 months, whereas smaller shipment seizures were significantly older with an average age of 22.3±0.6 months. Analyses of the largest cocaine shipment seizures suggested that these seizures were composed of specimens with different ages, possibly representing accumulations over as much as a 31-month period.     

Disentangling effort and performance: a renewed look at gender differences in commercializing medical school research

Recently, questions about gender gaps in science have extended to academic technology transfer. Using systematic data on US medical school faculty, we capture both behavior and performance, examining the hypothesis that women are less likely than men to commercialize their research findings. We pooled faculty invention data from ten departments in three Academic Health Centers from 1991 to 1998??a period when patenting had become prevalent and other researchers note that a gender gap was pronounced. Rather than focusing on patenting, we capture the first step in the commercialization process, as well as the subsequent successful licensing of faculty inventions to a company. We find no significant gender differences in the likelihood of reporting inventions or successfully commercializing them. We do find differences in the number of inventions reported, however, with women disclosing fewer inventions than their male counterparts. Our results demonstrate that gender effects are highly conditioned by employment context and resources. We attribute differences in our findings with regards to gender to the use of outcome measures that capture both behavior and performance, and the inclusion of a more extensive set of control variables.     

'The fact that possesses my imagination': Rachel Carson,Science and Writing

Rachel Carson is a famous but unknown writer. She is remembered as a pioneering heroine of the ecological movement, but even her Silent Spring is hardly read and the great books about the sea that made her name are unknown to the public. Recent biographical accounts have focused on the problems Carson faced as a woman entering the male-dominated scientific community, and the sexist reception of her books. But her real life was plainly in her writing. Although the accounts of geology in The Sea around Us and of genetics in Silent Spring are outdated, her books remain classics, not only for their lucidity and beauty, but for a vision of the impersonal processes of evolution and geological time comparable to Darwin's. This is especially true of her trilogy of books on the sea: The Sea around Us , describing the biochemistry, history and geography of the oceans and their tides, Under the SeaWind, focusing on the interdependent lives of sea-creatures, while The Edge of the Sea deals with the lives, great and microscopically small, of the intertidal world. The corresponding theme of Silent Spring is the death of nature through man's folly.     

‘ … we congratulate ourselves that reason has not with us yet left its seat’: first generations of American missionary women in the Near East

A reference to insanity among New England Protestant missionary women serving in the Near East from a letter written during the early nineteenth century offers a provocative opportunity to reexamine the motives, experiences, and mental health of these American pioneers to foreign countries. Two paradigms emerge: the married woman who tried to embody the ideals of True Womanhood while helping her missionary husband, maintaining home and children, and serving local women and children in myriad ways; and the single woman who took on missionary work as a professional career to teach, provide health care, administer, and model Anglo-American ideals. One type fared better than the other, both physically and mentally. Both served as prototypes for later secular humanitarians and both formed a dialectical relationship between the male missionary administration and target populations. The stresses of their encounters and how those affected their abilities to cope are the subject of this essay.     

Alliteration in Mate Selection: Does Barbara Still Marry Barry?

More than 30 years ago research found that alliteration is a factor in assortative mating (i.e., marriages). Alliterative matches were even more frequent when using nicknames than when using given names. Subsequently, researchers have confirmed the higher than chance occurrence of alliterative matches for given names. But nicknames have not been examined over the past 30 years. The present research finds support for three hypotheses. As predicted, nicknames are more associated with alliterative matches than are given names. Implications for practice are discussed.