Terracing is found widely in the Mediterranean and in other hilly and mountainous regions of the world. Yet while archaeological attention to these ‘mundane’ landscape features has grown, they remain understudied, particularly in Northern Europe. Here, the authors present a multidisciplinary study of terraces in the Breamish Valley, Northumberland. The results date their construction to the Early to Middle Bronze Age, when they were built by cutting back the hillside, stone clearance and wall construction. Environmental evidence points to their use for cereal cultivation. The authors suggest that the construction and use of these terraces formed part of an Early to Middle Bronze Age agricultural intensification, which may have been both demographically and culturally driven.

Environmental information from place-names has largely been overlooked by geoarchaeologists and fluvial geomorphologists in analyses of the depositional histories of rivers and floodplains. Here, new flood chronologies for the rivers Teme, Severn, and Wye are presented, modelled from stable river sections excavated at Broadwas, Buildwas, and Rotherwas. These are connected by the Old English term *wæsse, interpreted as ‘land by a meandering river which floods and drains quickly’. The results reveal that, in all three places, flooding during the early medieval period occurred more frequently between AD 350–700 than between AD 700–1100, but that over time each river's flooding regime became more complex including high magnitude single events. In the sampled locations, the fluvial dynamics of localized flood events had much in common, and almost certainly differed in nature from other sections of their rivers, refining our understanding of the precise nature of flooding which their names sought to communicate. This study shows how the toponymic record can be helpful in the long-term reconstruction of historic river activity and for our understanding of past human perceptions of riverine environments.

Findings as to whether individuals’ experiences of physical maltreatment from their parents in childhood predict their own perpetration of physical maltreatment toward their children in adulthood are mixed. Whether the maltreatment experienced is severe versus moderate or mild may relate to the strength of intergenerational associations. Furthermore, understanding of the roles of possible mediators (intervening mechanisms linking these behaviors) and moderators of the intervening mechanisms (factors associated with stronger or weaker mediated associations) is still relatively limited. These issues were examined in the present study. Mediating mechanisms based on a social learning model included antisocial behavior as assessed by criminal behaviors and substance use (alcohol and drug use), and the extent to which parental angry temperament moderated any indirect effects of antisocial behavior was also examined. To address these issues, data were used from Generations 2 and 3 of a prospective three-generational study, which is an extension of the Oregon Youth Study. Findings indicated modest intergenerational associations for severe physical maltreatment. There was a significant association of maltreatment history, particularly severe maltreatment with mothers’ and fathers’ delinquency. However, neither delinquency nor substance use showed significant mediational effects, and parental anger as a moderator of mediation did not reach significance.

Poor effortful control is a key temperamental factor underlying behavioral problems. The bidirectional association of child effortful control with both positive parenting and negative discipline was examined from ages approximately 3 to 13–14 years, involving five time points, and using data from parents and children in the Oregon Youth Study—Three Generational Study (N = 318 children from 150 families). Based on a dynamic developmental systems approach, it was hypothesized that there would be concurrent associations between parenting and child effortful control and bidirectional effects across time from each aspect of parenting to effortful control and from effortful control to each aspect of parenting. It was also hypothesized that associations would be more robust in early childhood, from ages 3 to 7 years, and would diminish as indicated by significantly weaker effects at the older ages, 11–12 to 13–14 years. Longitudinal feedback or mediated effects were also tested. The findings supported (a) stability in each construct over multiple developmental periods; (b) concurrent associations, which were significantly weaker at the older ages; (c) bidirectional effects, consistent with the interpretation that at younger ages children's effortful control influenced parenting, whereas at older child ages, parenting influenced effortful control; and (d) a transactional effect, such that maternal parenting in late childhood was a mechanism explaining children's development of effortful control from middle childhood to early adolescence.

Conduct problems are a general risk factor for adolescent alcohol use. However, their role in relation to alcohol-specific risk pathways of intergenerational transmission of alcohol use is not well understood. Further, the roles of alcohol-specific contextual influences on children's early alcohol use have been little examined. In a 20-year prospective, multimethod study of 83 fathers and their 125 children, we considered the predictors of child alcohol use by age 13 years. The predictors included fathers' adolescent antisocial behavior and alcohol use, both parents' adult alcohol use, norms about and encouragement of child use, parental monitoring, child-reported exposure to intoxicated adults, and parent-reported child externalizing behaviors. Path models supported an association between fathers' adolescent alcohol use and children's use (β = 0.17) that was not better explained by concurrent indicators of fathers' and children's general problem behavior. Fathers' and mothers' adult alcohol use uniquely predicted child use, and exposure to intoxicated adults partially mediated the latter path. Other family risk mechanisms were not supported. However, parental alcohol use and child alcohol use were linked in expected ways with family contextual conditions known to set the stage for alcohol use problems later in adolescence.

Evidence from optic ataxic patients with bilateral lesions to the superior parietal lobes does not support the view that there are separate planning and control mechanisms located in the IPL and SPL respectively. The aberrant reaches of patients with bilateral SPL damage towards extrafoveal targets seem to suggest a deficit in the selection of appropriate motor programmes rather than a deficit restricted to on-line control.

Mary Warner, as she was mainly known in the mathematical world, died in April 1998. At a time when few women mathematicians reached the top in their profession, she succeeded in doing so through her ability and determination. Her research contributions were commemorated at a recent international conference on fuzzy topology, the field in which she was one of the pioneers and recognized as one of the leading figures for the past thirty years. She was also an outstanding teacher. But to understand her achievements properly it is necessary to know something of her life.

The theorem that the homotopy sequence is exact splits into six statements. Scherk ([4]) obviates the use of homotopy extension in the proof of one of these statements. The purpose of this note is to show that the method can be adapted to give a direct proof of the corresponding statement in the theorem that the Eckmann-Hilton homotopy sequence ([l]) is exact. The note is based on Eckmann' s exposition ([2]). We are concerned with the proof of b2, pp. 34–35.

1. A topological game is a game in which the positions are the points of a topological space; the set of possible moves from any such point varies continuously with the point. Play can start from any point of the space and at each point it is specified which of the players has the initiative. Play ends when a position is encountered at which the set of positions from which the player with the initiative can choose is empty. The payoff to each player depends on the set of positions met in the play. The notion of topological game is due to Berge (1), (2).

The most important statement of Britain's economic and social aims to emerge from the experience of the depression and the Second World War was Beveridge's “Full Employment in a Free Society”. Published in 1944 it marks a revolution in the thinking of liberal economists. Laissez-faire is almost totally discarded. What replaces it is not socialism, but the socialisation of effective demand; the responsibility is thrust upon the State for the provision of income sufficiently large for the full employment of the human resource of labour. There were in 1944 (as there still are) many unfinished arguments concerning the best means of implementing the aim of full employment, but the responsibility of Central Governments in this matter is not in doubt. As the Times stated editorially “There is no question whether we can achieve full employment: we must achieve it. It is the central factor which will determine the pattern of national life after the war, including, perhaps, the fate of democratic institutions.” The revolution in thought which this editorial view point represents had something to do with the New Deal, but how much? in what respects was the New Deal influential? Can we separate out from the whole Anglo-American depression experience some particular features of America's recovery programme and distinguish them as influential in British thinking? I think that we cannot; but there is no doubt, on the other hand, that in the long conversation between British and American economists which went on through the 1930's and into the war years, American views and American experience made themselves felt amongst British economists.