Accidental Encounter Research Articles

Tourist Navigation System that Induces Accidental Encounter

Tourist Navigation System that Induces Accidental Encounter

Common Ground?: Tetracyclines, Matrix Metalloproteinases, Pustular Dermatoses, and Loxoscelism

The fear of spiders is ancient and common throughout much of the world. Skin ulceration and necrosis due to Loxosceles spider envenomation ("bites") is among the best known sequelae of a usually accidental encounter. Therapies for Loxosceles envenomations either are not well documented or have adverse side effects that limit their use by generalists. Based on in vitro and in vivo studies in rabbits injected with purified or recombinant sphingomyelinase D2, Paixão-Cavalcante et al. (2007) propose in this issue that topical tetracyclines could become safe, efficacious therapy for cutaneous loxoscelism.

A Vision of Complex Symmetry

A Vision of Complex Symmetry

Show-Stoppers: 1937 And The Chance Encounter With Chiffons

What in end does it matter to human happiness whether [Fred Astaire's] trousers do or do not have cuffs? -Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, Blue Skies and Silver Linings1 In my formulation: eternal is in any case far more ruffles on a dress than some idea. -Walter Benjamin, B [Fashion]2 A Funny Thing Happens . . . For a brief moment, an accidental encounter between a Wall Street tycoon and an unsuspecting working girl takes on spectral eeriness of a surrealist nightmare. A fur coat, thrown from a Fifth Avenue penthouse roof during a marital spat, assumes shape of an ominous, bat-like creature. An overhead shot captures coat as it slowly descends and seems to envelop an oncoming bus. To extent that it triggers coincidental meeting on which plot depends, this moment is central to script. But its appearance as a slow, almost dream-like, unmotivated overhead shot is incongruous with fast-paced screwball action that precedes it. Indeed, it is quite jarring, making it appear excessive and therefore virtually extra-diegetic. That feeling, however, lasts only for a moment. Cut to a medium shot of Jean Arthur riding on double-decker bus as coat falls on her head, and plot soon resumes, unfolding through a series of comic adventures that almost causes stock market to collapse. What do we make of this strange moment appearing unexpectedly in a screwball comedy? Of madcap comedies released during mid-1930s, Mitchell Leisen's Easy Living (US, 1937), a standard studio written by Preston Sturges, was hardly most ingenious. It was neither as fresh as Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (US, 1934) nor as lively as Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey (US, 1936). Although Paramount marketed it as a Sturges comedy, trying to capitalize on sensation he had created as a screenwriter in Hollywood with scripts like The Power and Glory (William K. Howard, US, 1933) and Diamond Jim (Edward Sutherland, US, 1935), was not a commercial or critical success.3 Still, as James Harvey reminds us, everyone remembers moment when the fur coat falls on heroine's head.4 This is ironic because Sturges himself did not even believe moment could be filmed. In script, he suggests that once coat is hurled over parapet, the will probably not pick up.5 But moment did make it to screen, and what intrigues me about it is that it appears in excess. While fur coat is a crucial plot device, it its function. Writing about material of film that surpasses its motivation, Kristin Thompson has argued that cinematic excess surfaces when narrative function may justify presence of a device, but it doesn't always motivate specific form that individual element will take.6 Likewise, fur coat moment from Easy Living is visually extra-diegetic. Its surreal appearance necessities of its screwball narrative; plot would work just as well without that shot. If were to advance from shot of balcony where coat is hurled to medium shot when coat falls on Jean Arthur's head, missing falling shot would not affect our understanding of scene. Yet, fur coat was filmed, and as such, it signifies well in excess of its dramatic content.7 In that sense, it functions like Roland Barthes' description of moment when two courtiers are pouring gold over young czar's head in Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan Grozny I/Ivan Terrible (RU, 1944). There is something in visual detail of courtiers' make-up, Barthes suggests, that is erratic-something that exceeds copy of referential motif, [such that] it compels an interrogative reading.8 The shot of fur coat is similarly incongruous because it is excessive. Unlike look of rest of Easy Living, here, in an instant, a fur coat suddenly appears foreboding, and, for a moment, a screwball comedy seems to surreptitiously encounter surreal. …

Introduction: Culture and Psychiatry

Introduction: Culture and Psychiatry

Sea snake envenomation

Sea snakes are common venomous reptiles found in the warmer waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The most common circumstance for sea snake bite is an accidental encounter by a fisherman while emptying a fishing net. The venom is extremely toxic and most significant on the nervous and musculoskeletal systems. Significant envenomation occurs in about 20% of bites, with death occurring in about 3% of bites. Death most often occurs from respiratory arrest secondary to neurotoxicity. Myotoxins may cause muscle pain and stiffness and lead to clinically significant rhabdomyolysis and possible acute renal failure. Sea snake bites should all be considered a medical emergency. Immobilization of the victim with compression of the envenomed area is important first aid, followed by transporting the victim to an emergency medical facility. Artificial ventilation and hydration with crystalloid may be important lifesaving maneuvers. Sea snake antivenom may be critical for survival in a significant envenomation.

A irmã da bruxa: liderança religiosa feminina e perigo

Resumo Este paper retorna ao movimento sócio-religioso dos chamados Mucker (RS, 1874), estimulado pelo encontro recente da autora, na Inglaterra, com uma sacerdotisa pagã, que se autodenominou bruxa. Aproveita este encontro para retomar a reflexão sobre o discurso acusatório contra Jacobina Maurer, líder dos Mucker, discutindo-o a partir da identidade percebida por uma bruxa do século XX entre ela e Jacobina. Quer explorar, para além do discurso desta bruxa, a riqueza dos símbolos que possibilitaram a identificação.

By Accident

This article interrogates postmodern and Levinasian conceptions of ethics with recourse to Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and certain psychoanalytical concepts formulated in Jacques Lacan's Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Since Levinas, ethical thinking has, in some quarters, moved away from conventional questions about moral agency, rights and social justice, on to a concern towards the ultimate unknowability of `the other'. Ethics depends, for Levinas, on an unpredictable, accidental encounter with something Other, that, in its singularity, demands a response; it is precisely the contingency of the encounter that constitutes the ethical difference from the realm of morality and law. Tarantino's movie narratives are also structured around accidents, disclosing the pain and jouissance of accidental expenditures that lie at the heart of any relation to the Other. In the midst of trauma, the Thing ( das ding) emerges, around which goods and signification circulate, that both delimits the identification of the Good and marks a space beyond moral law that becomes the site of radical ethical questioning.

Terrorism as Memory: The Historical Novel and Masculine Masochism in Contemporary Basque Literature

Terrorism as Memory: The Historical Novel and Masculine Masochism in Contemporary Basque Literature Joseba Gabilondo Bryn Mawr College Any analysis of contemporary Spanish culture that takes into account the recent proliferation of literary and nonliterary historical discourses must take Basque literature into consideration. This essay argues that the recent multiplication of historical discourses has to be connected to attempts to imagine anew the national foundations of the democratic communities that make up Spain. To illustrate this assertion this study focuses on the recent historical fiction of two prominent Basque writers, Bernardo Atxaga and Ramon Saizarbitoria. By studying the way in which the historical fiction of these Basque writers articulates a specific national memory and subject position, we can draw some general conclusions about the formation of historical discourses in post-Franco Spain.1 Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities discusses the importance of historical discourses in national processes of community imagining . When Anderson introduces his theory of the nation as an "imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (15), he underlines the importance of the historical convergence of capitalism, language diversity, and print (46). However , when attempting to explain the "attachment" (129) or "political love" (131) nations elicit from their citizens (without which nations would fail as social constructs) Anderson returns to language's natural fatalism—in the sense that languages are not chosen by the people— and its connection to history: "If nationalness has about it an auta of fatality, it is nonetheless a fatality embedded in history.... Seen as both a historical fatality and as a community imagined through language, the nation presents itself as simultaneously open and closed" (133). The proliferation of historical discourses, such as in Spain, can be understood as a sign of change in the ways in which a nation imagines its historical openness in the face of language's fatality. In the case of the Spanish state, the political sanction in the Constitution of other historical national communities ("nacionalidades") and the globalization of a society isolated by 40 years of Francoism would explain this Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 2, 1998 114 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies need to historicize and re-imagine the openness of the closed Spanish state and its nation(s). The latest literary texts by key Basque writers Bernardo Atxaga (1951-) and Ramon Saizarbitoria (1944-) exemplify Basque literature's own turn to history. This turn represents a radical departure from previous production, for this time around Basque literature addresses the issue of terrorism, the problem at the core of Basque society, headon in its historical complexity. In the last few years, both authors have published an historical novel in which Basque terrorism takes center place in the process of imagining the history of the new democratic Basque Country.2 I am referring to Atxaga's Gizona bere bakardadean (1993; translated as El hombre solo and The Lone Man) and Saizarbitoria's Hamaika pauso (1995; translated as Los pasos incontables, henceforth Many Steps). Both novels tell the stories of protagonists who were involved in the Basque terrorist group ETA during the Franco era but, after democracy is restored, decide to lead a normal life in civil society. In the end, however, each protagonist is haunted and destroyed by an accidental encounter with present ETA members. In order to capture the radical departure these novels represent it is worth quoting Jesús MarÃ-a Lasagabaster's remarks about Basque literature: "It seems as if Basque writers are afraid to face historical and social reality, be it past or present" ("Introduction" 19). So far ETA has been approached by both Basque and Spanish literatures as either the leading political movement of Basque nationalism or the exotic political other of the Spanish state. In either case ETA's terrorism has merely served as political justification or background for the development of narratives that were little concerned with the Basque problem in itself. As DarÃ-o Villanueva already pointed out in 1987, this treatment was connected with a literary tendency, journalistic and otherwise, to feed on the immediacy of contemporary events: "The novel in genetal, not only those written by journalists, takes advantage of events deriving from the...

The Tail that Wags the Dog: Football and the American University

The Tail That Wags the Dog: Football and the American University Charles H. Martin (bio) Robin Lester. Stagg’s University: The Rise, Decline, and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. xxii + 301 pp. Photographs, appendixes, notes, and index. $32.95. Fifty-seven years have now passed since the University of Chicago shocked the sports world by abolishing its once prestigious football program in 1939. Most educators and sports fans have long since forgotten this controversial decision, as well as Chicago’s previous gridiron accomplishments. Yet during the first quarter of the twentieth century the original “monsters of the midway,” guided by legendary coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, established themselves as a national powerhouse and a dominant force in the Big Ten Conference. Chicago’s football success played a pivotal role both in attracting public support for the new university and in making football a genuine national sport. No other college better embodied the Faustian bargain of combining big-time football with serious academic life than did Chicago, where Stagg’s athletic empire dominated the campus for decades. To the community and the nation, Chicago truly was “Stagg’s University.” Robin Lester, a social and cultural historian, has rescued those “glory days” from obscurity, but he has done much more than merely revive faded memories of heroic stars, exciting plays, and triumphal seasons. Instead he skillfully develops the Chicago story into a case study of the creation of a national collegiate sporting culture and the construction of football as a secular ritual for both town and gown. Chicago played a central role in this process “because Stagg’s university pioneered in making football a mass entertainment industry on the American campus” (p. xvii). The author also explores in detail the corrosive influence of intercollegiate athletics within the university, a sensitive area that most official college histories prudently avoid. Although Lester’s account ends in 1939, the problems that he identifies concerning the relationship of athletics and academics remain as central to campus life today as they were nearly a century ago. Lester first stumbled onto his topic thirty years ago when as a young Chicago graduate student working in the library he was assigned the task of [End Page 629] unpacking the recently acquired Amos Alonzo Stagg papers. This accidental encounter between student and manuscript collection has produced an important study, though one whose appearance in print has been long delayed. The book’s narrative revolves around the interplay of three major themes: the specific gridiron exploits of Chicago football teams, the educational development and internal politics of the university, and the spread of a national collegiate football culture which created unprecedented public support for American universities. By examining Chicago football within the broader social and cultural forces of the period, the book is representative of the rapidly growing body of outstanding sport history studies now appearing in print. Recent works by such scholars as Susan Cahn, Susan Cayleff, Allen Guttmann, Peter Levine, Michael Oriard, and G. Edward White have clearly demonstrated the growing sophistication of the field. 1 A volume in the pioneering “Sport and Society” series of the University of Illinois Press, Stagg’s University is a worthy addition to this literature. One of Lester’s most valuable contributions is his demythologization of the pre-World War II period of college sports. Readers who expect the book to portray an innocent era when college football was uncorrupted by allegedly modern vices will be severely disappointed. Beginning with unethical recruiting, schools also provided hidden financial assistance and other forms of preferential treatment to their athletes, who in turn were sometimes poorly prepared for college work, frequently absent from class, and often negligent in completing their degrees. Academic fraud was commonplace. Even Stagg himself does not escape Lester’s careful scrutiny. Although his personal ethics were higher than those of many in the profession, the powerful coach regularly convinced administrators and selected professors to provide special consideration for his athletes in order to keep these putative scholars eligible to play. Such problems were not unique to Chicago, of course. Murray Sperber’s recent examination of Knute Rockne and Notre Dame athletics, Shake Down the Thunder...

Some biochemical thoughts on the RNA world

Ten years ago, Walter Gilbert contemplated “an RNA world containing only RNA molecules that serve to catalyze the synthesis of themselves” [ 11: in other words, selfreplicating systems that function in the absence of protein and DNA. A recent comprehensive monograph describes the current understanding of the above concept and surveys recent progress concerning the biochemistry and molecular biology of RNA [Z]. Here I highlight some facts about the role of the four RNA bases in contemporary intermediary metabolism, and then offer some thoughts on what implications these facts have for the evolution of our present DNA/protein-based world from the postulated RNA world, a perspective rarely mentioned in the discussion of the RNA world’s central themes such as replication. We must start by looking at research at the beginning of the second half of this century, when biochemists began to focus on the monomeric precursors of the larger cell constituents: fats, carbohydrates, proteins and nucleic acids. Before the advent of isotopic tracers, these syntheses were thought to be simply a reversal of the corresponding lytic processes. How naive, in retrospect! Eventually, in the 1950’s, these views became untenable, not because they were rejected as unreasonable but because of chance discoveries pointing to obligatory monomer activation by nucleotides and their derivatives prior to polymerization. The critical event in several of these chance discoveries was reagent contamination. Accidental discoveries Although it was recognized early on as the universal source of chemical energy, ATP, commercial or home-made, proved to be of dubious purity. No one initially suspected that preparations of ATP might contain other nucleoside triphosphates. This unwarranted confidence came to an end in the 1950’s with dramatic consequences. At the time Kornberg and Pricer [3] and Kennedy’s laboratory [4] independently investigated the biosynthesis of phospholipids, but with divergent results. Both groups examined the energy-dependent conversion of precursors to phosphatidylcholine. In the Kornberg laboratory, amorphous ATP (Pabst) was used as a reagent. Somewhat later, Kennedy and Weiss repeated and confirmed the results obtained in Kornberg’s laboratory, but in addition they tested samples of the newly available crystalline ATP. These ATP specimens gave entirely negative results, pointing to a contaminant in the amorphous ATP as the source of the activity; this was later shown to be CTP. The cytosine-containing nucleotide proved to be the energy source that nature had selected not only for the synthesis of phosphatidylcholine, but also for phosphatidylethanolamine and other membrane phospholipids. The discovery of GTP as an energy source closely resembled the accidental encounter of CTP In studies in the 1970’s on a glycogensensitive adenylic cyclase from rat liver membranes [S], Martin Rodbell found that ATP was required for activation, but in unusally high concentrations. Moreover, the responses were variable depending on the source of ATI? Aware of the experiences of Kornberg and Kennedy, Rodbell traced the variable activities of ATP samples to contamination with GTI? Equally inadvertent, the discovery of the importance of uridine triphosphate came about when Luis Leloir found a thermostable cofactor necessary for the enzymatic breakdown of lactose [6]. By chance, his coworker Caputto found a published ultraviolet spectrum of uridine that proved to be identical with that of the cofactor needed for lactose breakdown, now known as UDP-galactose.

Accidental Encounter with a Whale

Accidental Encounter with a Whale