Ambiguous Space Research Articles

Cries of Fire: Psychotherapy in Contemporary British and Irish Drama

The theatricality of the psychotherapeutic encounter has been evident since its origins: Freud complained in 1914 that the patient in the grip of transference-love “gives up her symptoms or pays no attention to them; indeed, she declares that she is well. There is a complete change of scene; it is as though some piece of make-believe had been stopped by the sudden irruption of reality – as when, for instance, a cry of fire is raised during a theatrical performance” (“Observations on Transference-Love”). In the century that followed Freud's observation, the theatre has shown a reciprocal interest in the dramatic possibilities of psychotherapy – the imbalances of power, incomplete access to knowledge and history, and confessional styles of narrative revelation. This theatrical interest in the dynamics of therapy is particularly striking in that it inevitably becomes self-reflexive, an examination of the negotiation of power, knowledge, and autonomy between therapist and patient, analyst and analysand, that ultimately uncovers anxieties about the spectator–actor relationship. In this article, three works from the millennial moment in the United Kingdom and Ireland – Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis, Joe Penhall's Blue/Orange, and Conor McPherson's Shining City – reveal a shifting conception of how psychotherapy works as a theatrical and a metatheatrical device. Kane and Penhall's plays are produced in a historical context in Britain that is equally sceptical about the institutions of psychiatry and the idealism of anti-psychiatry, and McPherson's characters inhabit an Ireland caught in the ambiguous space between the sanitized, globalized conventions of weekly psychotherapy and the ghostly consolations and convictions of spirituality. All three plays suggest that psychotherapy in drama can function metaphorically and metatheatrically by leading us to examine how performances of identity, narrative-making, and interpretation play out both in the theatre and in life.

Diaspora, gender and identity:Twinning in three diasporic novels

The article focuses on young women writers, who have grown up in Europe or North America, one or both of whose parents are African.These parents grew up in Africa and migrated. The cultural consequences of this background are explored. These writers, as Black and female, occupy an ambiguous space of contested citizenship because of what they inherit from Africa and because they wear the signs of their parents’ backgrounds on their black bodies. But they occupy a profoundly different territory from their parents. It is this territory, both a literal place and a space of the performance of multiple imaginings that this article attempts to map out. In order to do so, it examines three writers, who play with form, language and identity through the construction of fictional twins: Diana Evans's 26a (2005), Esi Edugyan's The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004) and Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (2005). The use of twins becomes a coded language for the writers’ own splitting, doubling and questing for their identities in London or Alberta, as well as for their connection with Africa. This inspiration from African oral myths in general, and those of twins in particular, gives rise to a version of gendered magical realism.

Unpacking the terms of engagement with local food at the Farmers’ Market: Insights from Ontario

Amidst much discussion of the values and venues of local food, the Farmers’ Market (FM) has emerged as an important, but somewhat uncertain, site of engagement for producers, consumers and local food ‘champions’. Despite the evident certainty of various operational rules, the FM should be seen as a complex and ambiguous space where (contingent) notions of local, quality, authenticity and legitimacy find expression in communications and transactions around food. This paper seeks to extend current reflections on the nature of the contemporary FM and its relationship to the tenets of local food. An empirical analysis involving sellers, shoppers and managers at 15 markets in the Province of Ontario, Canada sought to understand how participants ‘read’ the market as an operating space and subsequently construct the terms of (their) engagement. Findings suggest that Ontario FM customers wish to support farmers and farming via their food-related spending and express attachments to a wide range of alleged benefits pertaining to local food. Yet these values are also malleable in their meaning and amenable to trade-off against other considerations—particularly where social capital is concerned. The notion of ‘local’ emerges as being widely valued but also highly interpretive in its meaning and variable in its absolute importance. The paper concludes with some reflection on the degree to which the findings support, challenge or modify current normative beliefs about local food at the FM.

Playas del Árbol: Una visión transatlántica de las literaturas hispánicas (review)

Marrero-Fente, Raúl. Playas del Árbol: Una visión transatlántica de las literaturas hispánicas. Madrid: Huerga y Fierro, 2002. 250 pp. In Playas del Árbol: Una visión transatlántica de las literaturas hispánicas , Raúl Marrero-Fente marks the space of the beach as the symbolic point of contact between the cultures of Spain and Spanish America. The fluid consistency of the Caribbean waters that converge with the sandy shores serves as a significant, yet ambiguous setting which makes possible the infinite transgressions of language, culture and literature shared by both sides of the Atlantic. A closer look inland reveals the tree situated in the forefront of this imagined beach, which much like the complex dialectic between both cultures, strives to grow outward and upward, while at the same time planting its roots firmly into the ground. It is within this complex dialectic between time and space, conquest and resistance and growth and stagnation that Marrero-Fente explores the shared commonalities between both cultures offering a critical literary investigation beginning with Juan Ruiz’s Libro de Buen Amor and ending with the dualistic approximations of the chronicling of the Latin American experience by twenty first-century writer and critic Carlos Fuentes. In each of the nine chapters of this highly condensed book, Marrero-Fente celebrates the indeterminate and ambiguous space of literature, noting the constant movement and transformations that occur transculturally. He embarks upon the medieval text of Juan Ruiz’s Libro de Buen Amor, showing how the character of Trotaconventos takes on a symbolic role of the future trajectory of literature as she pushes the borders of medieval life with her erotic suggestions and her assistance in the archpriest’s pursuance of amorous adventures. Fiction mixes with reality in the following chapter as this critic explores the fictional characteristics of the “Capitulaciones de Santa Fe,” which consequently open up a space for a re-interpretation of the “Legalities” of the Discovery and Conquest . In chapter 3, “‘Espíritu desnudo y sombra muda’: El fantasma de la épica y los estudios coloniales,” he laments the forgotten genre of the epic poem, which he argues to be an important and valuable source of the convergence of two cultures. Using the interdisciplinary focus of the phantom theory made popular by Agamben, Derrida, Schmitt and Rabaté, he approaches the epic poem as a phantom genre due to its lack of critical attention during the colonial era. The focus of the next three chapters relies on the transgressions of literary technique and style as boundaries are pushed and prodded while identities are shown to be in a continual mode of transition. In chapter 4, Marrero-Fente examines Silvestre de Balboa’s appropriation of European literary models including Homer and Virgil as he introduces a new national identity of Cuba in his epic poem “Espejo de paciencia.” The American depiction of epic heroes is now multi-dimensional revealing the collective community of the New World including Creole, Portuguese, Amerindian, African and Spanish Reseñas 109 inhabitants confronted with a common enemy. While the Americas are celebrating new racial identities in the New World, Miguel de Cervantes tests the limited waters of gender in his world renowned Don Quixote de la Mancha. Marcela, dissatisfied with the gendered limitations of the pastoral novel, refuses the amorous approaches of Grisóstomo, and instead searches for a more appropriate space or genre that will meet her needs. In this analysis, both gender and genres are challenged, thus opening this chapter and the text to broader interpretations. The concluding four chapters offer critical investigations of more modern narrative including works written by José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Fuentes. In chapter six, Marrero-Fente discusses the importance of the changing historical context of Mexico in the time period in which Lizardi wrote Don Catrín de la Fachenda. Departing from traditional readings of the novel focusing on its picaresque origins, he argues that the multiple levels of irony employed in the text reveal its rupture from both traditional and authoritative modes of discourse. In this way, Don Catrín differs from peninsular models...

Found in the UK's National Collection of the Art of Photography

Even so, it is clear that one does not collect paintings by Old Masters in the same spirit that one collects cigar bands. --The System of Collecting, Jean Baudrillard Thirty years ago, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London set in motion a process that resulted in the formation of a prestigious national collection of the art of photography. In 1977, around 300,000 prints began a journey from an archive in the art library, where they were classed by subject, to the department of prints and drawings, where they were destined to become exemplars of the art of photography, classified according to author. In pursuing this ambitious aim, the V & A (as it is better known) conformed to a long established trend in the highest institutions in the United States to enshrine photography within an aesthetic discourse of medium autonomy that was originally developed by modernist historians for art history. (1) With the consolidation of the art collection at the V & A came many of the trappings of modernism: the hegemony of the photographer's print, the narrative of the artist's oeuvre and the mystique of taste. So it might be surprising to learn that within the heart of the V & A's photography collection is a fascinating assortment of worthless photographic ephemera. More an archive or assemblage than a collection, this is much smaller than the art collection that houses it, but no less specialized. It is of interest because it contains rich, visual items that can be attributed to established photographers. The items that comprise this collection are photographers' Christmas cards. It is unusually personal because the recipient of every card was the museum's first curator of photographs, Mark Haworth-Booth, who donated them on his retirement in 2004. The dates indicate that the earliest are from the late 1970s, the time that the national collection began to be built. The presence of recent cards, addressed to a new curator, reveals that the archive is to some degree self-replenishing. It is not unusual to find photographers' Christmas cards within the context of a serious photographic collection. The fact that some photographers (among them Philippe Halsmann and Angus McBean) are represented in major collections by pictures made for dissemination as Christmas cards suggests that this is a genre in its own right. The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, devotes a section to photographers' Christmas cards as a type of vernacular, without distinguishing between well-known names and anons. The V & A keeps Christmas cards by photographers dispersed over various departments of the museum, including one that keeps interpretative materials such as personal papers, promotional material, and so on. Cards have been known to surface in a few low-key displays by the design department. The material that resides in the art collection, however, has the distinction of being proscribed from the catalog of art objects. One effect of this is to render it invisible to the visiting public even though it is, strictly speaking, publicly accessible. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Comprising over one hundred assorted objects by photographers of two generations, the material resides within a small, anonymous box with a hinged lid. The present curator, Martin Barnes, thinks of the box (classified as FID or found in department) as a holding bay where items are kept on the off chance that their status and value might change when conditions change. So, if the V & A decides to follow the example of the George Eastman House and establish a special collection, then it can be built on this material. For the moment, however, it occupies what Barnes likes to call institutional limbo. (2) What is the meaning of the ambiguous space it occupies? Culture reserves a special imaginative place for the box of photographs; readers of Camera Lucida (1981) will recall that it was from such a box that Roland Barthes extracted the fabled winter garden portrait of his dead mother and experienced the wound of the punctum. …

Bonded Bodies

This article is about the tragic journeys and livelihood insecurities of coastal fisherfolk of India and Sri Lanka, who are arrested and jailed by these countries for having entered each other's arenas. These fisherfolk are victims of defined and undefined boundaries in the seas, and increasing conflicts over renewable resources. The article questions the cartographic and border anxieties of these countries, which come into fundamental contradiction with the lives, livelihoods and desires of the majority of coastal fisherfolk, who are short-term migratory subjects on an everyday basis. They are constantly subjected to categories such as insider and outsider, safety and danger, domestic and foreign, self and other. At the same time, the article reveals how these fishing communities themselves mark an ambiguous space, located as they are on the margins of the two countries, thereby providing emancipatory possibilities that can emerge from the spatial freedoms which they have practised. However, there are also some contradictory voices. Some of these fisherfolk are articulating the very same language which is used to suppress them. In attempting to highlight these complexities, the article widens our definitions of migrations, diasporas, and transnational subjects.

On the Feasibility of Adding Carrier Phase - Assistance to Cellular GNSS Assistance Standards

In this invited contribution a brief review will be presented of the integer estimation theory as developed by the author over the last decade and which started with the introduction of the LAMBDA method in 1993. The re- view discusses three different, but closely related classes of ambiguity estimators. They are the integer estimators, the integer aperture estimators and the integer equivariant estimators. Integer estimators are integer aperture estima- tors and integer aperture estimators are integer equivari- ant estimators. The reverse is not necessarily true how- ever. Thus of the three types of estimators the integer es- timators are the most restrictive. Their pull-in regions are translational invariant, disjunct and they cover the ambi- guity space completely. Well-known examples are integer rounding, integer bootstrapping and integer least-squares. A less restrictive class of estimators is the class of inte- ger aperture estimators. Their pull-in regions only obey two of the three conditions. They are still translational invariant and disjunct, but they do not need to cover the ambiguity space completely. As a consequence the inte- ger aperture estimators are of a hybrid nature having either integer or non-integer outcomes. Examples of integer aper- ture estimators are the ratio-testimator and the difference- testimator. The class of integer equivariant estimators is the less restrictive of the three classes. These estimators only obey one of the three conditions, namely the condi- tion of being translational invariant. As a consequence the outcomes of integer equivariant estimators are always real- valued. For each of the three classes of estimators we also present the optimal estimator. Although the Gaussian case is usually assumed, the results are presented for an arbi- trary probability density function of the float solution. The optimal integer estimator in the Gaussian case is the inte- ger least-squares estimator. The optimality criterion used is that of maximizing the probability of correct integer es- timation, the so-called success rate. The optimal integer aperture estimator in the Gaussian case is the one which only returns the integer least-squares solution when the in- teger least-squares residual resides in the optimal aperture pull-in region. This region is governed by the probability density function of the float solution and by the probabil- ity density function of the integer least-squares residual. The aperture of the pull-in region is governed by a user- defined aperture parameter. The optimality criterion used is that of maximizing the probability of correct integer esti- mation given a fixed, user-defined, probability of incorrect integer estimation. The optimal integer aperture estimator becomes identical to the optimal integer estimator in case the success rate and the fail rate sum up to one. The best integer equivariant estimator is an infinite weighted sum of all integers. The weights are determined as ratios of the probability density function of the float so- lution with its train of integer shifted copies. The optimal- ity criterion used is that of minimizing the mean squared error. The best integer equivariant estimator therefore al- ways outperforms the float solution in terms of precision.

Hésitation, déchiffrement, et le rôle de l’adolescente dans le récit fantastique de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle

This article examines the role of deciphering and hesitation in the reading of late 19th-century fantastic texts, especially as they relate to the role of the young woman in the texts. It is argued that parallels can be drawn between the male gaze upon the adolescent character and the gaze of the reader upon the fantastic text itself. The female adolescent character represents the ambiguous space between childhood and adulthood, an ambiguity that is often figured as androgyny. She also represents a certain threatened innocence. Works by Theophile Gautier and Henry James provide the basis for this analysis of the relationship between deciphering, hesitation and the female adolescent character in the fantastic text. They present characters who are themselves “reading” events occurring around them, and can refuse to see, misinterpret what they see, or willfully misread the signs around them. The characters are also themselves being “read,” both by other characters and by the reader of the text. It is finally the reader who must decide what he or she is seeing/reading, despite the often misleading or ambiguous information contained therein.

Becoming In-formed: Genetic Counselling, Ambiguity and Choice

The paper presents findings from an ethnography of dysmorphology, a specialism in genetic medicine, to explore genetic counselling as a process through which parents 'become informed.' Current professional and policy debate over the use of genetic technology in medicine emphasises the need for informed choice making, and for genetic services that provide parents with what is referred to as 'non-directive genetic counselling.' In the paper the process of becoming informed is shown to be very specific and to have its own effects. Specifically, genetics is performed in dysmorphology as a space of ambiguity and uncertainty. In addition, parents are engaged by the clinic as participants in the very processes through which their child, and perhaps their family, are clinically classified. The paper examines the effects of parents' immersion in this clinical space of deferral to suggest how the need for reproductive choice, and calculation, is predicated upon clinical processes that shift parents between the experience of definition and uncertainty. The paper thus troubles simple stories about autonomous and informed choice, particularly reproductive choice, as icons of contemporary versions of what it is to be fully human.

Acknowledging the gap between sex education and the lived experiences of young people: a discussion of Paula Rego's The Pillowman (2004) and other cautionary tales

In this paper I consider the ways that the instrumental and cautionary profile of sex and relationship education is used to regulate the sexuality of young people in the United Kingdom. This regulation is partly a counter to the commodification of sex in the mass media but also a means to reinforce the social and cultural norms that are performed within the binary structure of gender identities as exemplified by the nuclear family. I offer an alternative strategy where works of art become the locus for a discussion of young people's concerns about sexuality. With reference to the recent work of Paula Rego, I examine the imaginary and symbolic space afforded works of art to demonstrate how interpretation can provide insights into the workings of desire, and the way such interpretative acts might enable young people to discuss eroticism. I argue that because this ambiguous space provides a certain distance, sexual norms can be questioned without either the prurient/censorial attitudes of the tabloid press or the clinical/moralising agendas of pedagogic discourse. In other words, within the discursive/hermeneutic space engendered by works of art, young people are able to bypass those instrumental discourses that are unhelpful in the formation of sexual well‐being.

Intelligent nursing: accounting for knowledge as action in practice

This paper provides an analysis of nursing as a knowledgeable discipline. We examined ways in which knowledge operates in the practice of home care nursing and explored how knowledge might be fruitfully understood within the ambiguous spaces and competing temporalities characterizing contemporary healthcare services. Two popular metaphors of knowledge in nursing practice were identified and critically examined; evidence-based practice and the nurse as an intuitive worker. Pointing to faults in these conceptualizations, we suggest a different way of conceptualizing the relationship between knowledge and practice, namely practice as being activated by contextualized knowledge. This conceptualization is captured in an understanding of the intelligent creation of context by the nurse for nursing practice to be ethical and effective.

Charge Flipping at Work: A Case of Pseudosymmetry

Charge flipping (CF) is an amazingly simple structure solution method that uses single-crystal X-ray diffraction data. It is truly ab initio, no preliminary information on atom types, chemical composition, or space group symmetry is required. The algorithm is iterative and alternates between real and reciprocal spaces. Its simplest version only changes (flips) the sign of the electron density below a threshold, while in reciprocal space, it prescribes the moduli of observed structure factors. In this communication, we apply the algorithm in practice. The selected example presents a whole range of difficulties: it is large, contains only light atoms, is noncentrosymmetric, and shows a particularly awkward pseudosymmetry. To solve it with any of the traditional methods requires many hours of computer time, followed by a day of expert's handwork to find missing and to remove spurious atoms. In contrast, the CF algorithm provides the complete structure in a few seconds and without human intervention. It is also remarkable that the success rate is 100%, that is, any starting point in the high-dimensional phase space leads to the solution. The treatment of translational pseudosymmetry is obviously a favorable case. Similar resistant structures with pseudosymmetries or ambiguous space groups are the practical applications where the CF method could well complement standard software procedures.

Italo Calvino and Georges Perec: the Multiple and Contrasting Emotions of Cities and Puzzles

If the question of estrangement is emblematic and inescapable in the literary criticism of Italo Calvino, (1) for Georges Perec the question is that of the 'infra-ordinaire' and of the 'contrainte du reel.' (2) I will try, beginning with these two poles (estrangement and infra-ordinaire) to demonstrate the connections and the disjunctions that pass between Calvino's Le citta invisibili and Perec's La Vie mode d'emploi as regards the way in which they articulate and dislocate space and imaginary geography. The title of OuLiPo's second collection, Atlas de litterature potentielle (1981), was suggested by Calvino. (3) The words atlas and potential are placed together and in relation to literature, which means that we are dealing with a collection of literature and with geographical maps not yet drawn, but rather atlases and literatures to come, yet to be discovered by the emotions. Giuliana Bruno, in Atlas of Emotion, (4) develops an interdisciplinary research project at the heart of which she places la Carte du pays du Tendre (1654), a map designed by Madeleine de Scudery to accompany her story Clelie. Bruno proposes this text as inaugural of a new genre of narrative in which geography is not a cold scientific discipline but rather is in a relationship with psychology and emotion; the voyage and the space of the map open paths to narrative, in a movement both real and emotional, in the relationship between image and text. The map incarnates a narrative voyage for which, writes Bruno, visualizes, in the form of the landscape, an itinerary of emotions which is, in turn, the topos of the novel. (2) On the subject of tendre or tender, the author reminds us that this word in romance languages recalls, if not a romantic attachment, at least an affectionate tie between people. In ways that turn out to be near opposites, the texts that I analyze are pervaded by this emotive connotation of the map, and furthermore, as we will see, y a du tendre, there is tenderness between these texts. On one hand is Calvino with the glare of cities both potential and surreal, on the other hand Perec, who plays at blowing up maps and their universes of sense, yet both touch on themes which, thanks to the elaboration and construction of the narrative space, lose their analytical coldness. Nevertheless, if there's tenderness, geographical tenderness, between the texts, there's also tension, the tension between singularity and the complexity of the modern metropolis, a tension not unlike that which Walter Benjamin describes in his unfinished Arcades Project. In comparing them, I will show the strong echo of tension inherent in modernity, as described by Benjamin, in which the city becomes an ambiguous space, somewhere between a room and a landscape. Regarding the experience of the flaneur, Benjamin writes: Landscape--that, in fact, is what Paris becomes for the flaneur. Or, more precisely, the city splits for him into its dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room. (5) Considering modernity, Benjamin develops a mode of thought according to which the vast open space of the landscape or the cityscape and the closed space of a room are confused, or rather, alter and alternate with each other; such an interchange takes place between the texts of Calvino and Perec. Italo Calvino and Le citta invisibili: Interdisciplinary Geography among Dialogical and Descriptive Illuminations The theme of travel and that of the map are one of the foci of Calvino's poetics. In the period of the drafting of Le citta invisibili, Calvino is interested in the map and travel: in Com'era nuovo mondo (6) he speaks about the relationship between them as the tracing of a route, in fieri, and also as the opening of a landscape and a way of giving coordinates to a new one which has just begun to make itself known. In Il viandante e la mappa (7) Calvino writes that: il primo bisogno di fissare sulla carta i luoghi e legato al viaggio: e promemoria della successione di tappe, tracciato di un percorso (426), and adds that a map always presupposes the idea of an itinerary and of a narrative. …

Review of *Transcultural Graffiti: Diasporic Writing and the Teaching of Literary Studies*, by Russell West-Pavlov

Teaching occupies a beguiling, often terrifying, and consistently ambiguous space in the life of a Humanities academic. And as the pressures grow for scholars to intensify their research output without sacrificing the quality of their teaching, thinking through the relationship between teaching and research is a particular challenge. Russell West-Pavlov, like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Elaine Showalter, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and others, offers his project as an example of the ways in which research and teaching can be positively integrated. He is concerned with looking at ways in which the 'previous marginality of teaching begins to be cast into question', by 'transforming' rather than 'reversing' the relationship between research and teaching (15). He argues for a model of research in which the 'possible pedagogical implications are integrated as a central element from the outset' (15).

Reconfiguring Relatedness in Anorexia

Anthropological concepts of relatedness have not been addressed in any of the writings on anorexia, despite the literature being replete with negative connotations of sociality such as withdrawal, regression, and toxic families (in the form of ‘obsessive mothers’ or ‘absent fathers’). As a departure to the vast literature on this topic, this multi-sited ethnographic project draws on the recent critiques and broadening of the concept of kinship to examine the ways in which a group of people with a diagnosis of anorexia understood and experienced relatedness in their everyday lives, that is, how they continually transformed connections by truncating, creating, sustaining and abandoning them. Those practices that are taken for granted as creating and sustaining relatedness—from the everyday practices of commensality to the capacity to have children—were consistently negated. Negating consensual avenues of relatedness did not leave these people in a void. On the contrary, new and productive meanings and experiences of being related were created and people entered into a relationship with anorexia that, in turn, tempered their relationships with their everyday worlds. In examining the ‘relational matrix’ of anorexia, new spaces of agency, ambiguity and power are illuminated.

Revisiting Violence in The Godfather: The Ambiguous Space of the Victimage Model

Revisiting Violence in The Godfather: The Ambiguous Space of the Victimage Model

Some properties of decorrelation techniques in the ambiguity space

The most recent contributions to ambiguity resolution techniques have mainly focused on resolution in the ambiguity domain. Two techniques utilizing a decorrelation approach are compared. These techniques are the least-squares ambiguity decorrelation adjustment method and the lattice basis reduction. The latter is also known as the LLL method. The main focus in this article is on the decorrelation performance of these state-of-the-art techniques, which are aiming at ambiguity space decorrelation through unimodular transformations. The performances of the two-decorrelation techniques are compared through their ability in making the ambiguity space as orthogonal as possible.

Where Is Guantanamo?

This essay argues that Guantánamo lies at the heart of the American Empire. The legal status of the prisoners there must be understood in the context of an imperial history that dates back to the U.S. occupation of Cuba in 1898. This history explains how the U.S. Naval Station, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has become an ambiguous space, both inside and outside national and juridical borders and how this ambiguity reinforces the harsh penal regime. The essay argues that the legacies of U.S. imperialism inform key contemporary debates about Guantánamo: the question of national sovereignty, the codification of the prisoners as "enemy combatants," and the uncertainty about whether the U.S. Constitution holds sway there. Turning to the 2004 Supreme Court decision, Rasul v. Bush, the essay argues that the justices are not only interested in restraining executive power to bring Guantánamo within the rule of domestic law; they also show concern with the scope of U.S. power in the world and the extent to which the judiciary should accompany or limit U.S. military rule abroad. A close reading of the Supreme Court's decision and dissent shows that the logic and rhetoric of Rasul v. Bush rely on and perpetuate the imperial history the decision also elides. In concert other recent decisions about civil liberties and national security, Rasul v. Bush contributes to the global expansion of U.S. power by reworking the earlier history of imperial rule. The Court's legal decisions respond to the changing demands of empire today by creating new categories of persons before the law that extend far beyond Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“Said tree is a veritable nuisance”: Ottawa’s Street Trees 1869-1939

Street trees exist in an ambiguous space between built and natural environments, their status reflecting shifting attitudes towards the natural world. Their place was especially evident in debates over street trees in Ottawa between 1869 and 1939. In the late nineteenth century, homeowners were encouraged to plant trees, to bring esthetic order to the residential streetscape and to reduce miasma. But as they matured, the trees came into conflict with the rapidly expanding infrastructure of sidewalks, asphalt paving, and utility wires. The Ottawa Horticultural Society, led by Dominion Horticulturalist W. T. Macoun, urged city council to have them managed professionally. In response, during the 1920s and 1930s the city engaged in an extensive program of tree trimming and removal, targeting the American elm.

On conditional spectral moments of Gaussian and damped sinusoidal atoms in adaptive signal decomposition

It is well known that the convergence (with different speeds) of the matching pursuit (MP) signal decomposition algorithm for any dense dictionary is guaranteed. In this paper, we have analysed (in theory and through simulations) the performance and properties of both Gaussian and damped sinusoidal atoms for the MP signal decomposition. We have examined the decomposed signal in ambiguity space (to look for auto-terms concentrated around the origin), and investigated the requirement to have a positive time–frequency representation. We are thus able to propose what kind of dictionary might be more suitable for MP signal decomposition. We have also derived general formulae for the first and second conditional spectral moments, which are useful generalizations of the concept of instantaneous frequency and instantaneous bandwidth, respectively. While the second conditional moment is not positive for many bilinear time–frequency distributions, thus making useless its interpretation as instantaneous bandwidth, we have proved that for MP decomposition based on Gaussian or damped sinusoidal atoms, it is always guaranteed positive.