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A rare and unusual large solitary discoidal fossil has been discovered on a paving slab quarried from the cyclothems of the Central Clare Group (Kinderscoutian, Pennsylvanian, Carboniferous), western Ireland. The fossil impression consists of a smooth raised inner discoidal area, surrounded by a slightly lower relief outer ring, ca. 130–135 mm in diameter, with eight prominent equidistant ovoid raised nodes towards the outermost margin. The octoradial body plan of this enigmatic specimen suggests a cnidarian connection and, as it is preserved as a positive hyporelief cast, it is tentatively interpreted as the resting trace of a large benthic anemone, which was either partially or fully infaunal. The discoidal fossil is interesting palaeoecologically; it occurs within the well-known Liscannor flag-stone, which consists of thinly bedded, fine-grained sandstone that is extensively covered by prominent, sinuous to meandering, horizontal grazing trails attributed to Psammichnites plummeri. This sedimentary facies likely represents mouth-bar sedimentation on a delta front of a river-dominated delta. The discoidal impression occurs on a portion of the slab where these trace fossils are relatively scarce. Uncertainty surrounds the classification and interpretation of the disc due to its relatively simple morphological form, coupled with a lack of unequivocally diagnostic features — a problem commonly encountered in studies of discoidal fossils from both the Ediacaran and the Phanerozoic

Abstract Deep neural network algorithms are becoming intimately involved in the politics of the border, and are themselves bordering devices in that they classify, divide and demarcate boundaries in data. Deep learning involves much more than the deployment of technologies at the border, and is reordering what the border means, how the boundaries of political community can be imagined. Where the biometric border rendered the border mobile through its inscription in the body, the deep border generates the racialized body in novel forms that extend the reach of state violence. The deep border is written through the machine learning models that make the world in their own image – as clusters of attributes and feature spaces from which data examples can be drawn. The ‘depth’ that becomes imaginable in computer science models of the indefinite multiplication of layers in a neural network begins to resonate with state desires for a reach into the attributes of population. The border is spatially reimagined as a set of always possible functions, features, and clusters – as a ‘line of best fit’ where the fraught politics of the border can be condensed and resolved.

Abstract From the first history of the Society of Jesus, written in the late sixteenth century, to modern scholarship on the order, texts by and about Jesuits have suggested that their approach to sacramental confession distinguished them from other religious groups in the eyes of the laity and ecclesiastical hierarchy. Recent histories have suggested that the particular spirituality, approach and talent of the Society’s confessors compelled popes to single out the Jesuits for privileges, empowering the Society as a papal task force in the fight against heresy. Focusing on the privilege of absolving heretics in confession, this article challenges this notion, arguing that popes empowered religious orders, including the Jesuits, for pragmatic reasons, not because of their particular charism or way of proceeding. The article compares the status and character of religious orders that emerged in the same period as the Jesuits to show that it was the Society’s scale, availability and orthodoxy that compelled popes to grant them the privilege of absolving heretics, allowing them to reconcile heretics autonomously where papal inquisitors could not. Using records from the Jesuit archive and the archive of the Roman Inquisition, the article confirms this conclusion with a case-study of privileges granted to Jesuit and Capuchin missionaries in Savoy–Piedmont at the turn of the seventeenth century. There, popes empowered both orders alike depending on practical need and availability, and despite the fact that the Capuchins had initially refused to administer the sacrament of confession.

Abstract This article explores the patriotism and national identity of English soldiers during the First World War. Using this conflict as a case-study, it draws together work on Great War mentalities and scholarship on Englishness. It argues that individuals’ national identity focused on and formed around the ‘implicit nation’, which was primarily concerned with communities and parochial local (or regional) spaces. There was no ‘essential’ England: the homeland could be rural or urban, natural or human. English national identity embraced this plurality. Using published material, soldiers’ newspapers and private letters, diaries and postcards, this article highlights the ways in which allegiance to an ‘implicit nation’ was nurtured by a military that championed local and regional identities. As subjects, not citizens, soldiers naturally centred their attention on the communities and landscapes of their homeland. The war did not diminish men’s emotional connections to these homelands; in fact, it made them all the stronger. In concentrating on the subjective and emotional features of patriotism, this paper suggests that Englishness was inherently heterogeneous and drew its strength from this. Rather than a commitment to abstract structures such as the state, or theoretical political principles, it argues that English national identity embraced a composite, or patchwork, of mutually supporting patriotisms attached to particular homelands. It was a sense of these homelands that underlay men’s identification with Britishness, the Empire and the monarchy. Importantly, soldiers’ experience of the First World War gave this a new (or at least more vocal) articulation.