Escape to the beach : pre-retirement in-migrants' narratives of change, place and identity : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Sociology at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand

The pre-retirement cohort (45-65 years) that migrates within Aotearoa New Zealand remains largely ignored in social research. This cohort encompasses people experiencing an emergent mid-life life-stage characterized by increased fluidity between previously distinct phases such as work and retirement. Once relocated, in-migrants seek ways to become endogenous actors in their new locale and construct new identities. A change of habitus is required to successfully navigate the transition from city-dweller to ‘local’. One avenue to achieve this is to engage with local volunteer organisations for the development of attachment to place, identity and for the re-narration of life-meaning. This qualitative research took place in Mercury Bay on the Coromandel Peninsula, Aotearoa New Zealand, with pre-retirees who in-migrated from city locations and who sought volunteer roles in local community organisations. My initial exploration looked to understand how social capital is manifest for these individuals in their volunteer roles in their new location. Findings suggest the existence of a paradox within that development of social capital: participants’ narratives indicate that they unconsciously seek to reproduce the very conditions from which they sought to escape, as associated with urban stressors such as workplace stress, urban pressures, financial considerations, social isolation and the demands for ‘efficiency’ of new-capitalist workplaces. More particularly, the paradox plays out in the development of new forms of habitus by which participants might embed themselves within the community

Making the Bed in Later Stuart and Georgian England

This is a chapter that deals with perhaps the most important item of furniture and its soft furnishings that any early modern probably invested in and owned. In 2001 Roger Ekirch suggested that the 'elusive realm of sleep' had been long ignored by historians of most stamps; only now are we 'waking up' to what he calls the 'profound role pre-industrial sleep played in the lives of ordinary men and women' being of concomitant importance as investigating what they did in their waking hours. And yet this is not a chapter about sleeping or dreaming or conversing with God or sexual congress, in bed. It is rather an examination of the material making and maintaining of the bed – from frame to cord to 'bed' or mattress, linens and 'furniture' or curtains and valences – and their routes into and out of the consuming lives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century householders

Electrocardiographic (ECG) criteria for determining left ventricular mass in young healthy men; data from the LARGE Heart study

Background: Doubts remain over the use of the ECG in identifying those with increased left ventricular (LV) mass. This is especially so in young individuals, despite their high prevalence of ECG criteria for LV hypertrophy. We performed a study using cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR), which provides an in vivo non-invasive gold standard method of measuring LV mass, allowing accurate assessment of electrocardiography as a tool for defining LV hypertrophy in the young.Methods and results: Standard 12-lead ECGs were obtained from 101 Caucasian male army recruits aged (mean +/- SEM) 19.7 +/- 0.2 years. LV mass was measured using CMR. LV mass indexed to body surface area demonstrated no significant correlation with the Cornell Amplitude criteria or Cornell Product for LV hypertrophy. Moderate correlations were seen with the Sokolow-Lyon Amplitude (0.28) and Sokolow-Lyon Product (0.284). Defining LV hypertrophy as a body surface area indexed left ventricular mass of 93 g/m(2), calculated sensitivities [and specificities] were as follows; 38.7% [74.3%] for the Sokolow-Lyon criteria, 43.4% [61.4%] for the Sokolow-Lyon Product, 19.4% [91.4%] for Cornell Amplitude, and 22.6% [85.7%] for Cornell Product. These values are substantially less than those reported for older age groups.Conclusion: ECG criteria for LV hypertrophy may have little value in determining LV mass or the presence of LV hypertrophy in young fit males

Prenatal maternal stress associated with ADHD and autistic traits in early childhood

Research suggests that offspring of mothers who experience high levels of stress during pregnancy are more likely to have problems in neurobehavioral development. There is preliminary evidence that prenatal maternal stress (PNMS) is a risk factor for both autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), however most studies do not control for confounding factors and no study has investigated PNMS as a risk factor for behaviors characteristic of these disorders in early childhood. A population cohort of 2900 pregnant women were recruited before their 18th week of pregnancy and investigated prospectively. Maternal experience of stressful life events was assessed during pregnancy. When offspring were age 2 years, mothers completed the child behavior checklist. Multiple regression showed that maternal stressful events during pregnancy significantly predicted ADHD behaviors in offspring, after controlling for autistic traits and other confounding variables, in both males (p = 0.03) and females (p = 0.01). Similarly, stressful events during pregnancy significantly predicted autistic traits in the offspring after controlling for ADHD behaviors and confounding variables, in males only (p = 0.04). In conclusion, this study suggests that PNMS, in the form of typical stressful life events such as divorce or a residential move, show a small but significant association with both autistic traits and ADHD behaviors independently, in offspring at age 2 years, after controlling for multiple antenatal, obstetric, postnatal, and sociodemographic covariates. This finding supports future research using epigenetic, cross-fostering, and gene–environment interaction designs to identify the causal processes underlying this association

Trees of Unusual Size: Biased Inference of Early Bursts from Large Molecular Phylogenies

An early burst of speciation followed by a subsequent slowdown in the rate of diversification is commonly inferred from molecular phylogenies. This pattern is consistent with some verbal theory of ecological opportunity and adaptive radiations. One often-overlooked source of bias in these studies is that of sampling at the level of whole clades, as researchers tend to choose large, speciose clades to study. In this paper, we investigate the performance of common methods across the distribution of clade sizes that can be generated by a constant-rate birth-death process. Clades which are larger than expected for a given constant-rate branching process tend to show a pattern of an early burst even when both speciation and extinction rates are constant through time. All methods evaluated were susceptible to detecting this false signature when extinction was low. Under moderate extinction, both the gamma-statistic and diversity-dependent models did not detect such a slowdown but only because the signature of a slowdown was masked by subsequent extinction. Some models which estimate time-varying speciation rates are able to detect early bursts under higher extinction rates, but are extremely prone to sampling bias. We suggest that examining clades in isolation may result in spurious inferences that rates of diversification have changed through time.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure