Aesthetic Condition Research Articles

Phosphorus regulates stream injury by filamentous green algae, DO, and pH with thresholds in responses

Nutrient concentrations, benthic algal biomass, dissolved oxygen (DO), and pH were measured in 70 or more streams during spring and summer in the Illinois River Watershed (IRW), which crosses the Oklahoma and Arkansas (USA) border, to determine whether injury to streams occurred and if that injury was related to spreading poultry waste on fields. Definitions of injury were based on Oklahoma water quality regulations and scientific literature. Phosphorus and nitrogen concentrations were each independently related to poultry house density (PHD) in watersheds and percent urban land use in watersheds. In addition, phosphorus and nitrogen concentrations were unusually high compared to regions with similar geology and hydrology. Molar N:P ratios were high and indicated that phosphorus was the most likely limiting nutrient. Phosphorus concentrations, as well as PHD and urban land use, were related to algal biomass during spring, but were less related during summer. A threshold response in cover of stream bottoms by nuisance filamentous green algae (NFGA: Cladophora, Rhizoclonium, and Oedogonium) during spring was observed at 27 μg TP l−1 using regression tree analysis. Great increases in average NFGA cover (from 4 to 36% cover) occurred with relatively small increases in TP concentration at the 27 μg TP l−1 threshold. Average concentrations of DO, variability in DO, and pH during spring were positively related to TP, chlorophyll a, and NFGA cover. Minimum DO during spring and early morning DO during summer were negatively related to TP concentration. Spring pH and summer DO frequently violated water quality requirements for protecting biodiversity that were established by the state of Oklahoma. We conclude that poultry house operations as well as urban activities, independently and interactively, pollute IRW streams with phosphorus, which resulted in injury to aesthetic condition and the potential for injury of biodiversity.

Every Ounce a Man's Whiskey?: Bourbon in the White Masculine South

It is about the aesthetic of drinking in general and in particular of knocking it back ... joy of drinking is not the pharmacological effect of [C.sub.2][H.sub.5]OH on the cortex but rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime.--Walker Percy, Bourbon (1) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In a 1975 essay bluntly and beautifully titled Bourbon, Walker Percy asserts that The pleasure of knocking back lies in the plane of the aesthetic but at an opposite pole from connoisseurship. For Percy, it is Bourbon's aesthetic condition rather than its chemical composition that makes the drink so distinctly appealing. Knocking it back neat serves a transportive function, immersing the drinker in the rich cultural imagery of the American South: woody, sunny, and romantic. hot bite of the sensuously connects the body of the drinker to nation, region, and locale, enjoining his experience with those of imagined, historical bodies, soaking up space and place in the slow burn of what appears an endless southern summertime. For Percy, a southern doctor, author, philosopher, and social critic, drinking serves as an existential, even religious, act which connects the drinker to an imagined history, an act which ultimately provides an evocation of time and memory and of the recovery of self and the past from the fogged-in disoriented Western world. (2) Like Percy, I am a drinker of Bourbon. Although I (and no doubt Percy as well) appreciate both its chemical and symbolic capacities, I am primarily concerned with the symbolic, its aesthetic relation to issues of personal and cultural identity. Percy's personal history with began as a child in the Prohibition Twenties in his family's Birmingham basement, as he watched his father age his own product in a charcoal barrel. personal narrative he recounts in his essay binds consumption to episodes of heterosexuality, homosociality, and UNC football games. My personal history with begins much later, in the suburban 2000s, at the parties of Virginia Beach schoolmates whose parents were out of town. At this point, my interests in men like Evan Williams, Jim Beam, and Kentucky Gentleman were primarily physical, corporeal, chemical. I privileged their bodily, pharmacological capabilities over their symbolic and welcomed their presence in my stilted, surreptitious social life with the same wide arms, open mouth, and ready chaser as any gin, vodka, or creme de menthe that we could prize from our parents' liquor cabinets. I trace the first stirrings of my symbolic appreciation of to my second romantic relationship in college, with a white southern man who preferred it to any other liquor. During the time we spent together, I sensed something decidedly self-conscious in his choice of drink and began to conceive of it as a sort of play, a means of both challenging and asserting his place within a specific narrative of white southern masculinity, in which he was at once bound by his North Carolina lineage and excluded by his sexuality. Back then I did not articulate his liquor choice in the same historical, theoretical terms that I do now, but I did see it as somehow ironic, an act that called into question some unspoken rules of who can drink what. In my time with this man, I began drinking as a matter of choice and of taste, although at first I rather disliked the way it tasted. I drank in a spirit of transgression that I could not pin down but felt that, in so doing, I took some nebulous stand against the heterosexist assumption that women and queer men drank from glasses that came with umbrellas, instead of only with ice. As I looked around me, at the fraternity parties I inevitably attended, the dorm rooms in which I inevitably found myself, and the bars into which I inevitably snuck, I realized that the self-consciousness I saw in his consumption was present in everyone's. …

Side of onset in Parkinson's disease and alterations in religiosity: novel behavioral phenotypes.

Behavioral neurologists have long been interested in changes in religiosity following circumscribed brain lesions. Advances in neuroimaging and cognitive experimental techniques have been added to these classical lesion-correlational approaches in attempt to understand changes in religiosity due to brain damage. In this paper we assess processing dynamics of religious cognition in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). We administered a four-condition story-based priming procedure, and then covertly probed for changes in religious belief. Story-based priming emphasized mortality salience, religious ritual, and beauty in nature (Aesthetic). In neurologically intact controls, religious belief-scores significantly increased following the Aesthetic prime condition. When comparing effects of right (RO) versus left onset (LO) in PD patients, a double-dissociation in religious belief-scores emerged based on prime condition. RO patients exhibited a significant increase in belief following the Aesthetic prime condition and LO patients significantly increased belief in the religious ritual prime condition. Results covaried with executive function measures. This suggests lateral cerebral specialization for ritual-based (left frontal) versus aesthetic-based (right frontal) religious cognition. Patient-centered individualized treatment plans should take religiosity into consideration as a complex disease-associated phenomenon connected to other clinical variables and health outcomes.

Side of Onset in Parkinson’s Disease and Alterations in Religiosity: Novel Behavioral Phenotypes

Behavioral neurologists have long been interested in changes in religiosity following circumscribed brain lesions. Advances in neuroimaging and cognitive experimental techniques have been added to these classical lesion-correlational approaches in attempt to understand changes in religiosity due to brain damage. In this paper we assess processing dynamics of religious cognition in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). We administered a four-condition story-based priming procedure, and then covertly probed for changes in religious belief. Story-based priming emphasized mortality salience, religious ritual, and beauty in nature (Aesthetic). In neurologically intact controls, religious belief-scores significantly increased following the Aesthetic prime condition. When comparing effects of right (RO) versus left onset (LO) in PD patients, a double-dissociation in religious belief-scores emerged based on prime condition. RO patients exhibited a significant increase in belief following the Aesthetic prime condition and LO patients significantly increased belief in the religious ritual prime condition. Results covaried with executive function measures. This suggests lateral cerebral specialization for ritual-based (left frontal) versus aesthetic-based (right frontal) religious cognition. Patient-centered individualized treatment plans should take religiosity into consideration as a complex disease-associated phenomenon connected to other clinical variables and health outcomes.

Life and Beauty: In the Middle, In the Extreme

Life and Beauty:In the Middle, In the Extreme Alexander García Düttmann (bio) What would be a form of independence that would no longer oppose itself to other forms of independence? If its political determination were based on an aesthetic condition, could it still be bound to a State, as Schiller thought, or would it need to resist appropriation, as can be shown in the wake of Adorno, and stand incompatible with all attempts to make it institutionally viable? 1. In the Middle Again and again Schiller uses the concept of life in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. In the sixth letter, he claims that the division of labor that permeates culture, brings about a "mechanical collective life," and that it destroys the "concrete life of the individual" by affecting the inner nature of humankind and by becoming a general feature of the political organization [End Page 13] of the State (Schiller 1967, 35). This division of labor alienates the State from its citizens. At no point is their "feeling" able to connect with the State. As is well known, Schiller distinguishes between three drives or bents, between a "sense-drive" or a "thing-bent," which aims at change and becoming, at alternating human ways of being; a "form-drive" or "form-bent," which aims at being and intemporality, at establishing a person's identity; and, finally, a "play-drive" or "play-bent," which suspends time within time and thus aims at mediating between the other two drives or bents. According to a transcription of remarks Heidegger made in a seminar devoted to Schiller's Letters in the winter term of 1936-37, the three drives or bents can be regarded as "directions" or "trends" (Heidegger 2005, 48). But it must be noted that the concept of a "drive" belongs, in the first instance, to the sphere designated by the concept of life. Here, then, the word "direction" would need to be understood in the same manner in which Kant understands it when he uses it to speak of a "subjective ground of differentiation," or of a "feeling" that is required for a subject to orient itself, even in thought (1996, 9). When Schiller defines the concept of life in his fifteenth letter, he relates it to the sense-drive: "The object of the sense-drive, expressed in a general concept, we call life, in the widest sense of this term: a concept designating all material being and all that is immediately present to the senses" (1967, 101). Inasmuch as the object of the form-drive, expressed once again "in a general concept," can be called a figure, the object of the play-drive as a mediating drive must be called the "living figure." By "living figure" Schiller means "all the aesthetic qualities of phenomena," in short "what we call beauty." He writes: "According to this explanation, if such it be, the term beauty is neither extended to cover the whole realm of living things nor is it merely confined to this realm." In other words, it is necessary to distinguish between a life that is formed into a figure, and a life that is only "felt." In the twenty-fifth letter, Schiller clarifies his argument further by stating that, on the one hand, beauty is something that we contemplate, an object of reflection for us, and as such a "form" or a "figure," while, on the other hand, it is also "life" because "we feel it" (187). This does not entail, of course, that we can separate reflection and feeling, or activity and passivity, only to then reassemble them once again. Kant says that in the presentation of beauty, the [End Page 14] subject "feels itself " (1987, 44). Pleasure, the feeling of this self-affection, this active relation of the self to the self, is nothing else but the subject's "feeling of life." Hence the living figure of beauty in Schiller neither appears in front of the contemplating subject nor does it simply merge with a feeling. As has become evident, Schiller does not identify beauty, or the aesthetic, with a separate external phenomenon. This is why we must conceive of the appearing...

GROWTH, MINERAL UPTAKE AND STEM ELONGATION OF LILLIUM SPP. AS A FUNCTION OF PLANT DENSITY

The economic importance of floriculture and the Lilium production as cutting flower in Mexico has increased in the last years. Little research exists related to Lilium production in closed hydroponic systems with inorganic substrates. Therefore it is considered important to develop studies about plant density, plant growth, the nutrients demand, and their effect on stalk height. The objectives of the research were: evaluate the effect of three population densities of Lilium for cutting flowers on the stalk height and, to estimate the accumulation for the dry matter and some nutrients during the plant growth. Previous reports suggest the biggest stalk height corresponded to densities of 49 and 35 plants m -2 ; the models for each plant height were sigmoid population density effect on total dry matter. All the mathematic models concerning accumulation of dry matter, the nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, calcium and magnesium uptake revealed a significant adjustment (p<0.05). In fact, floral buttons and flowers showed an excellent sanitary and aesthetic condition. Flower harvest was performed 62 days after planting the bulbs.

Rhinobase: A Comprehensive Database, Facial Analysis, and Picture-Archiving Software for Rhinoplasty

Rhinobase: A Comprehensive Database, Facial Analysis, and Picture-Archiving Software for Rhinoplasty

Root coverage procedures for the treatment of localised recession-type defects

Gingival recession is defined as the oral exposure of the root surface due to a displacement of the gingival margin apical to the cemento-enamel junction and it is regularly linked to the deterioration of dental aesthetics. Successful treatment of recession-type defects is based on the use of predictable periodontal plastic surgery (PPS) procedures. To evaluate the effectiveness of different root coverage procedures in the treatment of recession-type defects. The Cochrane Oral Health Group's Trials Register, CENTRAL, MEDLINE and EMBASE were searched up to October 2008. The main international periodontal journals were handsearched. There were no restrictions with regard to publication status or language of publication. Only randomised controlled clinical trials (RCTs) of at least 6 months' duration evaluating recession areas (Miller's Class I or II > 3 mm) and that were treated by means of PPS procedures were included. Screening of eligible studies, assessment of the methodological quality of the trials and data extraction were conducted independently and in duplicate. Authors were contacted for any missing information. Results were expressed as random-effects models using mean differences for continuous outcomes and risk ratios for dichotomous outcomes with 95% confidence intervals. Twenty-four RCTs provided data. Only one trial was considered to be at low risk of bias. The remaining trials were considered to be at high risk of bias. The results indicated a significant greater reduction in gingival recession and gain in keratinized tissue for subepithelial connective tissue grafts (SCTG) compared to guided tissue regeneration with resorbable membranes (GTR rm). A significant greater gain in the keratinized tissue was found for enamel matrix protein when compared to coronally advanced flap (0.40 mm) and for SCTG when compared to GTR rm plus bone substitutes. Limited data exist on aesthetic condition change related to patients' opinion and patients' preference for a specific procedure. Subepithelial connective tissue grafts, coronally advanced flap alone or associated with other biomaterial and guided tissue regeneration may be used as root coverage procedures for the treatment of localised recession-type defects. In cases where both root coverage and gain in the keratinized tissue are expected, the use of subepithelial connective tissue grafts seems to be more adequate. Randomised controlled clinical trials are necessary to identify possible factors associated with the prognosis of each PPS procedure. The potential impact of bias on these outcomes is unclear.

Briefing: Restoration of Bersted Crossing footbridge, Bognor Regis, UK

Bersted Crossing footbridge is a good example of a wrought iron, lattice girder railway structure from the end of the Victorian era. The poor aesthetic condition of the bridge led to public perception that it required replacement. A sympathetic restoration scheme taking into account the unmodified nature of the wrought iron was shown to be economical and was carried with no disruption to train services. The work received a commendation as part of the 2005 Historic Bridge and Infrastructure awards. This briefing article describes the background to the structure and the work that took place to restore it.

Problem in the surgical correction of long-face with vertical open bite

Long-face cases usually need both treatment of orthodontic and surgery. The problem appearing in the correction of long-face might be able to be related with some difficult factors such as the crowded teeth and excessive vertical height. A class III malocclusion and excessive open bite can be also followed in long face. This situation might worsen the facial aesthetic condition and increase the difficulty in orthodontic treatment. The orthodontic approach is oriented toward positioning the teeth pre-surgically to facilitate the surgical plan. The form of mandible which has grown in the downward direction in the area of mandible angle makes an extreme vertical open bite. The maxilla is usually presented with a maxillary hypolasia. Double-jaw surgery was done as the correction of the lower jaw alone would produce a flattened face appearance and difficulty in repositioning the mandible to achieve a good facial performance. Several cephalometric points were measured to observe the facial situation progress after surgery. Two cases of longface are reported, and the same surgical treatments were performed and showed different results.

Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art

Dieter Roth's kalliphobia, to attach to what has been epidemic in avant-garde circles since the early twentieth century the needed clinical term, employs the idiom of threat for something which in any context but that of art would be an occasion for rejoicing. Who would say that it “threatens” to be a beautiful day except an umbrella salesman—or that one's daughter “threatens” to turn into a beautiful young woman, unless one fears the jealousy of the gods? In most contexts of human life, we would speak of the promise rather than the threat of beauty, so kalliphobia calls for diagnosis, since kalliphilia, to give it its antonym, is what one might think of as the aesthetic default condition for humans, connected with fortune and happiness, life at its best, and a world worth living in. How can beauty, since Renaissance times assumed to be the point and purpose of the visual arts, have become artistically contraindicated to the point of phobia in our own era?

Hemifacial Atrophy: A Case Report And Review Of Literature

A case report of hemifacial atrophy and review of literature is presented in this paper. A variety of treatment techniques have been employed in an attempt to improve the atrophic deformity especially in moderate and severe cases. These have included free fat grafts, dermis fat grafts, fascia, cartilage and bone for augmentation purposes. However when dealing with mild cases of hemifacial atrophy, prostheses are particularly useful, in that facial disproportion could be easily lifted up to an acceptable aesthetic condition. Their relative cheap cost, ease of fabrication and more importantly psychological relief from the fear of expensive and multi stage surgical technique is a welcome development for the patient. Moreover, in our environment, where facilities for such advanced procedures are lacking, a simple prosthesis may be the treatment of choice.

Avatar Body Collision: enactments in distributed performance practices

This article is an account and analysis of the work of Avatar Body Collision, a globally distributed, collaborative performance group who use free Internet chat room technologies to perform live across multiple stages and screens. The company’s organising metaphors refer to the distributed performance practices of cyberformance, a form of virtual theatre, in an attempt to encapsulate a phenomenon whose ontological, aesthetic and epistemological condition is contentious, and the hybrid offspring of at least two disciplines: the performing arts and computer technology. The author—a member of the company—locates this undisciplined subject within what Roland Barthes has termed an ‘epistemological slide’, as an emergent performance form. Attention focuses on the process and outcomes of the cyberscript, Screen save her, performed in May 2002 at the 12-12 Time Based Festival, Cardiff School of Arts, and at Riverside Studios, London. Comparison is made between avatar, cyborg and character enactments within the context of distributed performance practices. The primary conceptual framework for this production draws on the work of Murray Gell-Mann and complex adaptive theory. Analysis of spectator feedback from Screen save her ascribes key areas where spectator competencies were misjudged and where spectator expectations remediated the performance event. Additionally, the author speculates about the necessary conditions for developing new performance languages and wonders if a theatre stage is a malleable enough context for such endeavours.

Utilization of Row Houses and their Aesthetic Condition in Imai-cho Preservation District

Utilization of Row Houses and their Aesthetic Condition in Imai-cho Preservation District

Negotiating the World of Make-believe: The Aesthetic Compass

Regardless of how far one stretches the definition of virtual reality (VR) (hopefully not so far as to negate its scientific and technological identity), the field is one of high expectations and of many yet unattained goals (technical, scientific, communicational). Some of its hardware (the headset, the glove) indeed became available at bearable prices (as promised by the early innovative entrepreneurs). Tools for building VR applications help in the design and implementation of new products deployed in hard-core science research or, at the other end of the spectrum, in wide-audience entertainment. Progress in the design and production of faster processors, better I/O (i.e., increased bandwidth and speed), and simple, more robust operating systems lead many to predict that the maturity of computer technology will be established in the high performance specific to the domain of virtual reality. However, an issue more significant to the ascertainment and viability of VR has yet to be approached: the crudeness, not to say ugliness, of its means of expression, in particular, of its visual component. The disparity between technological progress, culturally acknowledged formal qualities translated into VR components, and the ability to generate new expressive forms of distinction is undermining the field. The more one has the chance to experience new virtual realities, some extremely ingenious from a computational viewpoint, the more one fears that the medium is under the curse of submediocrity, at least in respect to its aesthetic condition. One of the theses of this article is that in the VR domain, as in any other form of human activity, the efficiency of the activity depends upon its underlying aesthetics. The degree of acceptance of new scientific and technological means, methods, and perspectives reflects expectations of human practice more than anything else. The aesthetic component, as difficult to formalize and encode as it is, affects the legitimacy of innovative endeavors, which VR definitely is, by ultimately affecting its efficiency. Hype and hope mix easily in reality, but even more in the realm of the virtual. The expectation of a strict definition of VR might seem an issue of academic interest only. But once we address the encompassing aspect of effectiveness in this field — effectiveness being its raison d'être — we rapidly understand that specificity, i.e., precise scientific and epistemological identity, is reflected in design expectations and requirements for VR applications. These can be seen as instantiations of aesthetic exigencies.

Studies on latent influence by the spectrometer method I: The impact of psychologization in the case of conversion by a minority or a majority

AbstractThe effects of psychologization on the conversion phenomenon were studied for cases where influence was exerted either by a minority or by a majority. In a 2×2×3 ANOVA design (minority source versus majority source, personality versus aesthetics, phases) 48 subjects are faced with a confederate who represents either 18.2 per cent or 81.8 per cent of a population and consistently responds green when an objectively blue slide is shown. Colour perception is said to be associated with either aesthetic or personality factors. The prediction is in this last case that psychologization of the majority induces conversion of the subjects, while psychologization of the minority stands in the way of this latent influence. Influence is measured by four response levels for each trial of the three phases (pre‐influence, post‐influence in the presence or in the absence of the influence source). Manifest influence is measured in terms of the Subjects' Judgements and by the way in which they adjust their stimulus colour perception, as determined with the help of a spectrometer. The latent influence is reflected by the subjects' judgements about the colour of the afterimage upon presentation of the stimulus, as measured on a nine‐point scale and with the help of spectral adjustments of this afterimage. The subjects having been influenced without being aware of their conversion shows up in the shifts toward green or the complementary colour of green. Results indicate a cross‐over for the effect of indirect influence. Under the personality condition, psychologization has the anticipated effect. The majority is the only one to produce a conversion. The attenuating effect of minority influence again manrfests itserf (Mugny and Papastamou, 1980). Under the aesthetic condition, non‐psychologization also induces latent and perceptive shifts, but they go in the opposite direction and coincide closely with other results (Moscovici and Personnaz, 1980; Personnaz, 1981). In this condition, only the minority exerts an influence on all three levels.

The Dreariness of Aesthetics (Continued), with a Remedy

[Twenty-Third Letter]. Accordingly, the aesthetic condition is supervenient upon the spontaneity of reason and sense enhancing their function by a superior judgment in human and scientific affairs. Play, I must insist, is never trivial. The balance of freedom and rule, of joy and restraint as evident in games, and sport is all one with the agility and speed of intellect in its highest reaches; for as intellect meets with perception, necessity puts aside its seriousness, because it grows light [Fifteenth Letter]. A joy of discovery, of surprise, enlivens our most somber inquiries. Man must needs keep before him his games as reminders; for if he is serious with the agreeable, the comprehensible, and the good, with Beauty he plays. Which is to say, he resolves a tension and achieves a state of equipoise, a subtle balance between tension and release, in effect, a discipline of expression of a kind familiar to performing artists-an artistry of living and of inquiry. That is aesthetic education. In concluding my epistle to a later age, I humbly beseech you as I did my Lord and patron in the ninth of my Letters: Live with your century, but do not be its creature; render to your contemporaries what they need, not what they praise.... Think of them as they ought to be when you have to influence them, but think of them as they are when you are tempted to act on their behalf.