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Textual Cacophony explores the behaviors and routines of communication within anonymous internet culture in Japan. Focusing on the video sharing website Niconico, social media aggregation sites, and the notorious 2channel message board, Daniel Johnson uncovers these sites' complex cultures of writing that obscure meaning through playful and opaque forms of deviant script and overwhelming waves of text. Those practices conflate language with images, meaning with play, and confound individual representation with aggregate forms of social identity. Johnson argues that online media cultures in and around Japan are entwined with a cultural logic and visual syntax of cacophony that expresses ambivalence toward representation, media form, and distinct experiences of time. This aesthetic of cacophony provides an alternative way of expressing social identity and belonging, with an unmarked sense of anonymity providing a counter-form to the dissolving institutions and relationships of neoliberal Japan. Textual Cacophony investigates what it means and feels like to participate in this influential online culture

This autobiographical account traces the experiences of a young man, now in his early twenties, through his transition into fatherhood at the age of 16, and recounts his early years as a young parent. His reflections on the joys and challenges of becoming a parent at a young age provide a compelling snapshot of some of the common issues facing young fathers as they navigate the 'fast track' to adulthood. He concludes by considering the value of his support networks, both professional and personal, in managing these transitions.

Beginning in 2011 a festival in honor of the seventeenth-century radical Gerrard Winstanley has been held annually in the town of Wigan, in northwestern England. Through poetry, music, film, and other activities, the celebration commemorates the life and ideas of Wigan-born Winstanley, leader of the Digger, or True Leveller, movement of the English Revolution (1640-1660). From the socialists of the late nineteenth century to participants in the Wigan Festival in the early 2000s, Winstanley and the Diggers have provided inspiration for radical leftists for more than a hundred years. In the twenty-first century, True Leveller thought and practice has had a particularly notable influence on environmental and anti-consumerist activists like guerilla gardeners, freegans, urban allotment advocates, and squatters, among others. Winstanley and the Diggers were unique among political groups in the English Revolution in their advocacy for the interests of the impoverished rural working classes; integral to this support was a unique concern with land use and the environment. Adapted from the source document.

Discusses Lefebvrist Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson's Holocaust denial & its deleterious effects on Catholic-Jewish reconciliation, examining Pope Benedict's role in the incident. Adapted from the source document.

Human capital theory suggests educational investments are made based on expected returns over the lifetime. Most other work in this field, particularly using British data, is based on demand models estimated in reduced form, with no earnings measures, or crudely constructed earnings measures, based on one or two earnings observations per individual.We present a structural model of demand for educational investment which includes estimates of earnings paths for educational options as determinants of educational choice. This provides us with directly interpretable parameter estimates. The discount rate is also determined within our demand model.Ability controlled earnings profiles are estimated by matching individuals from the General Household Survey to individuals in similar occupations from the National Child Development Survey (NCDS).Our results show that expected earnings profiles vary according to observed ability and educational choice. Results from the demand model show that expected lifetime earnings have a significant impact on educational choice.Other socio–demographic factors, particularly social class, also exhibit significant influences on the education decision. We estimate the discount rate to be lower than reported in other studies.