This article examines the ways in which Fflur Dafydd’s 2008 novel Twenty Thousand Saints negotiates notions of the island space in a post-devolution Welsh context. It argues that the novel is a rich site in the analysis of the literary dimension of what Baldacchino describes as the “island-mainland [...] dialectic” (Baldacchino, 2006, p. 10). Set on Bardsey, a real small island off the coast of...

The Scientific Manuscript This is a basic overview of a scientific manuscript. In the sections to follow, we will break down each section in detail. Structure of a Research Article The structure of a research article usually depends on the journal to which the article is being submitted. Many journals have page limits, figure limits, or specific article divisions to which authors must adhere. T...

According to the realistic approach to semantics the meaning of an expression is something out there in the world. In technical terms, a semantics for a language is seen as a mapping from the grammatical structures to things in the world (or in several possible worlds). Often meanings are defined in terms of truth conditions. A consequence of this approach is that the meaning of an expression i...

Illusions confuse and bias the machinery in the brain that constructs our representations of the world, because they reveal a discrepancy between what we perceive and what is objectively out there in the world. But both illusions and accurate perceptions are governed by the same lawful perceptual processes. Despite the deceptive simplicity of illusions, there are no fully agreed theories about ...

Are you saying that religion is also something that geneticists should be studying? No, not at all. Every individual has to find their own accommodation between their spirituality and their scientific knowledge. For me personally, there is no need for a god, and a secular world view is much richer and more hopeful, but obviously there are millions of Christians and Jews and Hindus and others wh...

In this Wednesday night section for Algebraic Number Theory, we will go through basic facts about one dimensional formal groups and hopefully get to see how they might be useful and interesting. All rings are commutative with identity. The sources of this material are my notes from Elliptic Curves, a course taught by Tom Fisher at Cambridge last year, J. Silverman’s Elliptic Curves Book. A few ...

Professor Arras' article' provides a fascinating and persuasive account of an important shift in bioethics. The move from theory-based systems of ethics to narrative-based systems of ethics is paralleled by shifts in several related fields. In legal theory, one can see this development in the rise of legal pragmatism and the questioning of abstract and comprehensive theories, whether those theo...