Alp makes some factual corrections regarding the ‘second obfuscation’ and ‘third obfuscation’ identified in the article. Regarding the ‘second obfuscation’, Alp is correct that the man-haulers (of the 3 X.S. supplies) had not yet returned from base on 17 January 1912, and would not return until 23 January. However, Alp's objection does not exonerate Meares. On 31 January 1912, expedition member Apsley Cherry-Garrard recorded that Meares supposedly had considered departing on the ‘second journey’, but had been assured by the man-haulers that there was already ‘plenty for all parties’ with ‘what they had left at 1 Ton’. The key date was 17 January 1912, when Meares still had time to either leave (for the ‘second journey’, a projected two-week depot run) or remain at base. Meares’ inaction on that date therefore cannot be excused by reassurance from the man-haulers on what they ‘had left’ at One Ton, as on 17 January the man-haulers had not yet returned to base to deliver such reassurance.

This article examines the creation, preservation, and destruction of the defensive forest that the Northern Song built in Hebei along the Song–Liao border. Created as a landscape barrier against the Kitan attacks, this forest established the necessary strategic depth between the capital city and the northern frontline of the Song empire to compensate for Kaifeng's geographical vulnerability. While the Song government painstakingly maintained this forest throughout most of the dynasty, Liao troops, Hebei borderland residents, and many Song officials had nonetheless posed incessant challenges to this military forestation project. In 1122/23, at the onset of the war on the Liao to retrieve the Sixteen Prefectures, the Song army removed this borderland forest that blocked their northern expedition. The destruction of this defensive forest, which could have had thwarted attacks from the north, dismantled the strategic depth between Kaifeng and the Hebei borderland and henceforth presaged the fall of Kaifeng to the Jin, the Liao's successor, in a few years. I argue that this strategic depth was not only a physical distance, but also a diplomatic, sociopolitical, and military link that connected the ecology of the Song's northernmost periphery and the fate of the entire empire.

The principle known as ‘anonymous Pareto’ has it that an alternative A is better than another, B, in case it is (strictly, non-anonymously) Pareto superior to either B or a permutation of it. It is an attractive idea, offering to apply Pareto-based judgments to a broader range of cases while preserving some of the intuitive appeal of the standard, more familiar principle. This essay considers some ways in which anonymous Pareto is defended and argues against each separately, as well as in more general lines. It suggests that the reasons in light of which people find strict Pareto so compelling are the reasons for doubting the anonymous variation of that principle.

Paul Draper has recently developed an account of intrinsic probability according to which a theory's intrinsic probability is determined by its modesty and coherence. He employs this account in an argument that Source Physicalism (SP) and Source Idealism (SI) are equally intrinsically probable. Since SP and SI are not exhaustive, and Theism is one very specific version of SI, it follows that the intrinsic probability of Theism is very low. I argue here that considerations of fundamentality show that more work needs to be done to defend the claim that P(SP) = P(SI).

The article Could Captain Scott have been saved? Cecil Meares and the second journey that failed, by Karen May and Sarah Airriess, first published in Polar Record in 2014 (May & Airriess, 2015), builds a case against Cecil Meares for a failure to restock One Ton Depot in accordance with Scott's instructions. The authors claim that Meares was guilty of disobedience, neglect of duty and ‘obfuscation’. However, their case is diminished – in my view – by three significant mistakes that undermine their charges against Meares. In the three sections below, I identify those mistakes and consider whether the strong claims May and Airriess make about Meares are justified.

More than 800,000 people were exiled to Siberia during the nineteenth century. Exile was a complex administrative arrangement that involved differentiated flows of exiles and, in the view of the central authorities, contributed to the colonization of Siberia. This article adopts the “perspective from the colonies” and analyses the local dimension of exile to Siberia. First, it underscores the conflicted nature of the practice by highlighting the agency of the local administrators and the multitude of tensions and negotiations that the maintenance of exile involved. Secondly, by focusing on the example of the penal site of Tobolsk, where exile and imprisonment overlapped, I will elucidate the uneasy relationship between those two penal practices during Russian prison reform. In doing so, I will re-evaluate the position of exile in relation to both penal and governance practice in Imperial Russia.

This article focuses on penal transportation to Hokkaido and considers the role of convict transportation in nation-state building and empire building in Japan. In the course of its discussion, the fluidity of the status of the new Japanese territory of Hokkaido will be examined along with continuities of transportation and incarceration. Although Hokkaido was officially incorporated into Japan only in 1869, many Japanese politicians and intellectuals had believed ideologically that it had been a Japanese territory since the early modern period. Depending on the domestic and diplomatic matters confronting them, the Japanese modified the status of Hokkaido and their policy towards it. For example, to secure their borders with Russia, the Japanese introduced penal transportation on the French model in 1881, but the Japanese Ministry of Justice later shifted their legal system to the German model and articles concerning transportation were deleted from the penal code. Nonetheless, the Japanese government continued to send long-term prisoners to Hokkaido, which was reframed as incarceration in a mainland prison.

During the French colonization of Indochina (1863–1954), approximately 8,000 prisoners – many of them convicted of political crimes – were exiled to twelve different geographical locations throughout the French empire. Many of these prisoners came from a Chinese background or a culturally Chinese world, and the sites to which they were exiled (even the penal colonies themselves) contained diasporic Chinese communities. Knowing Chinese might be their greatest asset, or being able to “pass” as Chinese the most valuable tool to facilitate escape. This article explores a group of political prisoners sent from French Indochina to French Guiana in 1913 and their subsequent escape, with the aid of Chinese residents. If exile is, in one sense, the ultimate exercise of colonial power – capable of moving bodies to distant locales – examining these lives through a Vietnamese lens reveals a very different story than the colonial archival record reflects.

This article explores the British Empire’s configuration of imprisonment and transportation in the Andaman Islands penal colony. It shows that British governance in the Islands produced new modes of carcerality and coerced migration in which the relocation of convicts, prisoners, and criminal tribes underpinned imperial attempts at political dominance and economic development. The article focuses on the penal transportation of Eurasian convicts, the employment of free Eurasians and Anglo-Indians as convict overseers and administrators, the migration of “volunteer” Indian prisoners from the mainland, the free settlement of Anglo-Indians, and the forced resettlement of the Bhantu “criminal tribe”. It examines the issue from the periphery of British India, thus showing that class, race, and criminality combined to produce penal and social outcomes that were different from those of the imperial mainland. These were related to ideologies of imperial governmentality, including social discipline and penal practice, and the exigencies of political economy.

Writing for his fellow military officers in early 1903, United States Army Major C.J. Crane reflected on the recent Philippine–American War. The bloody struggle to suppress an insurgency in the Philippines after the United States had annexed them from Spain in 1899 had officially concluded the previous July. The war had been accompanied by fierce racist sentiments among Americans, and in keeping with these, Crane described his foes as “the most treacherous people in the world.” But Crane's discussion drew as much on concepts of law as it did on race. The average American officer, Crane argued, had “remembered all the time that he was struggling with an enemy who was not entitled to the privileges usually granted prisoners of war,” and could be summarily executed, without benefit of “court-martial or other regular tribunal.” If anything, the Americans had been too generous. “Many [American] participants in the struggle,” he maintained, “have failed to fully understand that we were practically fighting an Asiatic nation in arms and almost every man a soldier in disguise and a violator” of the laws of war. But what did those laws mean to the United States during the conflict, and what does this indicate about the broader history of international law's relationship to empire?

In referencing the title of Chris Candlin's (2008) plenary, this paper focuses on the continuing concern to align research and practice in applied linguistics, and more particularly in language for specific purposes (LSP) and professional communication. We examine how Candlin identified practices for trading places between research and practice and for creating synergies between them – and in so doing opened up new spaces for enquiry and understanding in the field. We identify and critically examine four approaches that Candlin developed to promote the alignment of research and practice: through particular research tools and methodologies, through the investigation of professional settings and inter-domain constructs (such as quality, trust and risk), through a concern with both rigour and relevance in relation to research and training, and through a focus on ‘critical moments of interaction’ in ‘crucial sites of engagement’ (Candlin 2008). To this end, we draw on the diverse domains and trajectories of enquiry outlined in the opening plenary symposium at the 4th Asia-Pacific Language for Specific Purposes & Professional Communication Association Conference from five standpoints: in recent impact case studies of professional communication in the Hong Kong context (Cheng 2017), in a ‘multi-perspectival’ account of Candlin's enacted philosophy of teaching and learning (Moore 2017), in examining the communicative basis of expertise (Sarangi 2017) and the concept of interdiscursivity (Jones 2017), and in the extensive fieldwork and analysis of workplace talk underlying the development of resources for new migrants in New Zealand (Holmes & Riddiford 2017). In conclusion, we pay tribute to an inspirational researcher and teacher whose influence will continue to impact applied linguistics for decades to come.

Recent ground surveys in the Samtskhe-Javakheti region of southern Georgia have investigated a previously undocumented group of sites along a ridge overlooking the upper Kura river valley. Features and artefacts recorded at Varneti suggest long but episodic occupation from the Chalcolithic to the later medieval periods, with prominent phases in the Early to Middle Bronze Age and the Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age. Varneti has the potential to contribute to understanding economic and strategic aspects of the long-term settlement pattern in the southern Caucasus, especially the interplay between lowland and highland zones. Its position in the landscape, at a transitional point between the river valley and the upland pasture (yayla), may explain its persistent use by agro-pastoral communities that operated in varied cultural situations. The survey results help us frame a series of questions regarding economic and social dynamics at a local and regional scale and the continuity and discontinuity of practice in highland environments through long timespans.

A sociolinguist's first reaction to Lewis’ critique of Labov's thirty-five-year-old principle of error correction (PEC) would likely be defensive or dismissive. While never formulated as the full-fledged ‘theory of social change’ Lewis portrays it to be, the PEC has indeed offered a valuable ‘theoretical starting place for diverse social-change efforts’ (Lewis, this issue, p. 326) by (socio)linguists over the years, repeatedly allowing us to use our technical training to provide more accurate diagnoses of language-related social issues than nonlinguists could, and thereby paving the way for their successful (re)solution. An early example is the 1985 trial of Paul Prinzivalli (see Labov 1988), who was rightfully found not guilty of making telephone bomb threats against Pan Am Airlines on the basis of Labov's careful phonetic evidence that his speech did not match the caller's recorded Boston accent. A more recent example is that of Voigt et al. (2017), whose computational analysis of police body-camera footage from 981 stops of Black and White drivers in Oakland, CA revealed that officers showed significantly more verbal respect to White than to Black drivers. This research is now being used to improve police training and police-community interactions in Oakland. In both cases, we could argue that, as in medicine, without an accurate diagnosis, a successful solution would elude us. And we might add that community beneficiaries of the (socio)linguist's on-the-ground ‘error correction and knowledge dissemination’ (Lewis, this issue, p. 339) might value this more than the critical race theorist's lofty theorizing.

Mark Lewis asks that socially engaged linguists go beyond Labov's (1982) principle of error correction (PEC) so that we can enlist critical race theory (CRT) to address ‘more difficult and fundamental questions of the sociohistorical conditions of a representation of language, challenging its premises and showing its connections to racial, economic, or other forms of violence’ (Lewis, this issue, p. 341). The ultimate goal is the actual transformation of the socioeconomic structures responsible for structural violence against speakers of stigmatized languages.

This article assesses the historical failures and limits of the dominant ‘error correction’ approach within sociolinguistics. The error correction approach supposes that social change can be achieved when knowledge is shared by researchers with the public or figures of institutional authority. This article reviews reflections on sociolinguists’ work toward social change, especially those of Labov, through scholarship in language ideologies and critical race theory. From a language ideological and critical race perspective, error correction is limited in its engagement with marginalizing representations of language because it does not jointly address material conditions and social positions supported by these representations. Exemplifying these limitations, sociolinguistic error-correction efforts that address the evaluation of language practices racialized as Black may have unfortunately distracted from social change agendas that confront material and institutionalized racism directly. To address these limitations, this article highlights existing critical reflexive scholarship that explicitly interrogates disciplinary assumptions. (Critical race theory, error correction, language ideologies, social change, critical reflexivity)*

Labovian sociolinguistics constitutes an important paradigm that brings to theforefront issues of social justice in linguistics and asks about the debt thescholar has towards the community once s/he gets information from it.Nevertheless, as many scholars have discussed, and even though this paradigm hasfocused on changing society for the better, it has serious limitations on how itconceptualizes the relationship between language and society. Based on criticalrace theory and language ideologies, Lewis powerfully contributes to thisdiscussion by critiquing the principle of error correction(PEC) proposed by Labov as a particular way of conceptualizing social change. AsLewis points out at the end of the article, this principle reflects an ‘earlierera’ and needs to be reconsidered in light of the significant transformationsnot only in the study of language in society developed in recent decades butalso in critical theory and humanities in general.