Conceptual Breadth Research Articles

Individual differences in affect and personality predict attentional and conceptual breadth

Individual differences in affect and personality predict attentional and conceptual breadth

Introduction

Introduction Rita Copeland and Frances Ferguson Beginning in 2008 the English Institute turned to certain “building blocks” of literary study as topics for the annual conferences. “Text,” the topic of 2012, was the fifth of these “building blocks” (the topics of the previous four conferences were “Periodization,” “Genre,” “Author,” and “Reading”; following “Text,” the English Institute chose “Form” for the 2013 conference). The purpose of returning to these “building blocks” was to promote reflection on how such fundamental critical categories are challenged and transformed under new theoretical pressures. They may persist as references in dynamic theoretical environments, remaining central to our thinking as literary scholars; but as our discipline expands, their conceptual fixity is not assured. Literary scholars have long taken text to be the object of study.1 Yet with the conceptual breadth that has come to characterize notions of text and textuality, literary criticism has found itself at a confluence of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, history, politics, and law. Thus, for example, notions of cultural text and social text have placed literary study in productive dialogue with fields in the social sciences. Moreover, text has come to stand for different and often contradictory things: linguistic data for philology; the unfolding “real time” of interaction for sociolinguistics; the problems of copy-text and markup in editorial theory; the objectified written work (“verbal icon”) for New Criticism; in some versions of poststructuralism the horizons of language that overcome the closure of the work; in theater studies the other of performance, ambiguously artifact and event. “Text” has been the subject of venerable traditions of scholarship centered on the establishment and critique of scriptural authority as well as the classical heritage. In the modern world it figures anew in the regulation of intellectual property. Has text become, or was it always, an ideal, immaterial object, a conceptual site for the investigation of knowledge, ownership and propriety, or authority? If so, what then is, or ever was, a “material” text? What institutions, linguistic procedures, commentary forms, and interpretive protocols stabilize text as an object of study? [End Page 417] The seven speakers who presented papers at the 2012 English Institute devoted to “Text” explored the historical and contemporary challenges of—and to—this critical category. From the productive ambiguities of medieval and early modern textualities to more recent detachments from and recontextualizations of the textual object in literature, theory, theater studies, and anthropology, the speakers considered how “text” remains always at once present and ineluctable. Five of those papers are published here; we were also grateful for the presentations of Gauri Viswanathan (“Heterodoxy and Textuality: Reading the Exoteric, Retrieving the Esoteric”) and Rebecca Schwartz (“Acting in Ruins”), who were unable to contribute to the published proceedings. The papers that follow circumscribe a long arc in the history of the notion of a text. Yet the various scholars who have contributed essays to this dossier in ELH are agreed in thinking of texts as something more than the words and pages and bindings of authoritative copyrighted editions. Mary Carruthers opens her discussion with a comment on the topic statement that invited her and other participants to “consider how ‘texts’ are institutionally ‘stabilized’ as ‘objects of study’” and on the image used in the publicity photo for the session: “an image of a heavily inked bit of printed paper, set in starkly contrasting red and black margins” drawn from the work of Glenn Ligon. How, she wondered, is “the text an object at all,” and when a text “inked aggressively into illegibility except for the lone word ‘not’” becomes an art object as it does in the example of Ligon’s work on the poster, how does such an image of a text “connect . . . to a medieval page image”? The answers she gives involved a vigorous depiction of medieval texts and textualization through the example of the “‘Troilus Frontispiece,’ a painting of around 1420, placed opposite the beginning of an especially beautiful manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.” Arguing that studies of textuality have all too frequently and misleadingly revolved around the technological divide instituted by the invention of the printing press, she stresses that medieval texts and their illustrations continued to have...

Construct Validity of Adolescents’ Self-Reported Big Five Personality Traits

While there are a number of short personality trait measures that have been validated for use with adults, few are specifically validated for use with adolescents. To trust such measures, it must be demonstrated that they have adequate construct validity. According to the view of construct validity as a unifying form of validity requiring the integration of different complementary sources of information, this article reports the evaluation of content, factor, convergent, and criterion validities as well as reliability of adolescents' self-reported personality traits. Moreover, this study sought to address an inherent potential limitation of short personality trait measures, namely their limited conceptual breadth. In this study, starting with items from a known measure, after the language-level was adjusted for use with adolescents, items tapping fundamental primary traits were added to determine the impact of added conceptual breadth on the psychometric properties of the scales. The resulting new measure was named the Big Five Personality Trait Short Questionnaire (BFPTSQ). A group of expert judges considered the items to have adequate content validity. Using data from a community sample of early adolescents, the results confirmed the factor validity of the Big Five structure in adolescence as well as its measurement invariance across genders. More important, the added items did improve the convergent and criterion validities of the scales, but did not negatively affect their reliability. This study supports the construct validity of adolescents' self-reported personality traits and points to the importance of conceptual breadth in short personality measures.

PrEP: A Framework for Malware and Cyber Weapons

The contemporary debate over cyber security rests on a set of linguistic artifacts that date from the Cold War. Attempting to glean a starting point for debate over use of terms like “cyber attack” or “cyber war” is difficult, largely because there is little agreement on what constitutes a weapon in cyberspace, be it “weaponized code” or black hats with root access. For information security professionals, this has led to a proliferation of different taxonomies tied to proprietary anti-virus systems. To social science researchers and the policy community, the result has been unclear definitions and vague terminology, which hinder academic progress and the development of effective policy. This paper proposes a new framework to classify malware and cyber weapons based on the different pieces of malicious code that constitute them, then evaluates competing definitions of cyber weapons, and concludes with implications for this approach. As developed in this paper, Cyber Weapons are any combination of three software components: a Propagation Method, one or several Exploits, and a Payload designed to create destructive physical or logical effects. Defining malware requires a difficult balance between technical specificity and conceptual breadth. The PrEP framework attempts to combine these, while building out a set of concepts useful to both research and policy communities.

The Effect of Reducing Maximum Shift Lengths to 16 Hours on Internal Medicine Interns’ Educational Opportunities

To evaluate educational experiences of internal medicine interns before and after maximum shift lengths were decreased from 30 hours to 16 hours. The authors compared educational experiences of internal medicine interns at Vanderbilt University Medical Center before (2010; 47 interns) and after (2011; 50 interns) duty hours restrictions were implemented in July 2011. The authors compared number of inpatient encounters, breadth of concepts in notes, exposure to five common presenting problems, procedural experience, and attendance at teaching conferences. Following the duty hours restrictions, interns cared for more unique patients (mean 118 versus 140 patients per intern, P = .005) and wrote more history and physicals (mean 73 versus 88, P = .005). Documentation included more total concepts after the 16-hour maximum shift implementation, with a 14% increase for history and physicals (338 versus 387, P < .001) and a 10% increase for progress notes (316 versus 349, P < .001). There was no difference in the median number of selected procedures performed (6 versus 6, P = 0.94). Attendance was higher at the weekly chief resident conference (60% versus 68% of expected attendees, P < .001) but unchanged at morning report conferences (79% versus 78%, P = .49). Intern clinical exposure did not decrease after implementation of the 16-hour shift length restriction. In fact, interns saw more patients, produced more detailed notes, and attended more conferences following duty hours restrictions.

Metamorphosen. Beat Furrer an der Hochschule für Musik Basel. Schriften, Gespräche, Dokumente (review)

Metamorphosen. Beat Furrer an der Hochschule fur Musik Basel. Schriften, Gesprache, Dokumente. Edited by Michael Kunkel. Saar - brucken: Pfau, 2011. [298 p. ISBN 9783897274563. i30.] Music examples, facsimiles, photographs, works list, chronology, discography. From October 2007 to June 2008, the composer and conductor Beat Furrer was resident in Basel as a visiting professor at the Hochschule fur Musik Basel and the Musicological Institute at the University of Basel. The volume under review was prepared as a commemoration of the activities surrounding this year in residence (editor Michael Kunkel is the director of the research department at the Hochschule fur Musik). One example of the book's direct relationship to the events of Furrer's year in Basel is the text printed here of a roundtable discussion by a group of musicologists at the Basel Music Academy on the subject Does New Music Need Mediation? (pp. 199-211; translations throughout this review are my own). The book, however, aspires to be more than a simple catalog of the events of Furrer's residence, a goal that is realized by the incorporation of useful reference information, essays and interviews from a range of years, and assorted documentary material. In addition, scholarly investigations by leading musicologists offer insight into specific topics relating to Furrer's music. An excerpt from Ovid's Metamorphoses (the house of rumor passage that inspired Furrer's opera Fama) serves as a kind of extended epigraph for the volume (pp. 10-11). The passage's evocations of noises, echoes, voices, openness, and space provide a vivid introduction to Furrer's philosophical ideas and compositional materials. These ideas are explored in detail in the essay by Kunkel later in the book, both in reference to Fama and to other Furrer works such as the First String Quartet, the opera Narcissus, and the Aria for voice and ensemble (pp. 81-116). Kunkel's essay is the most comprehensive survey of Furrer's style in the book, and provides welcome concrete music examples for the abstract concepts that are so liberally dispensed in discussions of Furrer's music elsewhere in the book, including in the composer's own essays. Kunkel also emphasizes the influence of Furrer's teacher, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, who was renowned for his innovations in graphic notation; the unconventional visual aspects of Haubenstock-Ramati's scores opened the conceptual gaps necessary to reconceive the relationship between music and space as Furrer has done. A similar desire to trace Furrer's influences surfaces in Simon Obert's essay on the resonances of Schubert and Feldman in Furrer's works (pp. 126-45) and Ulrich Mosch's analysis of how Furrer's organizational strategies for his musical material are a kind of post-serial procedure governing such param eters as rhythm, pitch, and register (pp. 146-68). The extensive tables of pitch patterns presented in Mosch's article tip the essay more toward analysis than explanation, and the paper thus occupies a relatively higher plane of musicological specialization than the book as a whole, with the potential to intimidate the uninitiated. One of the most useful historical aspects of this book is how Kunkel has chosen key essays and interviews to reproduce in one place. Ten different primary sources are included, ranging from 1989 to 2009. The almost purposeful inconsequentiality of reprinting Furrer's recipe for pumpkin soup (likely delicious, but this reviewer did not attempt to make it, p. 49) and his surprisingly simple sketch in answer to the question, Can you draw your music? (p. 43) add a charming sense of the composer's everyday humanity. Particularly valuable for their conceptual breadth, on the other hand, are lectures by Furrer at Darmstadt in 2006 about the spatial aspects of music theater (pp. 55-60) and in 2009 about composition with language and spaces (pp. 73-78). In the latter he treats both the practical aspects of his works (my problem over the years has been the integration of the singing voice with the ensemble, p. …

From the society: Looking to the future of the IBS: the 2011 IBS membership survey

membership corner ISSN 1948‐6596 from the society Looking to the future of the IBS: the 2011 IBS membership sur‐ vey The International Biogeography Society (IBS) was founded 10 years ago, with the goal of promoting biogeographical research, fostering communica‐ tion among biogeographers, and increasing knowl‐ edge of and appreciation for biogeography among the general public. As a neonatal society, growth and stability were crucial: the first practical goals were to organize the first conference (held in 2003) and begin to build a membership base. Five IBS conferences have now been held, the mem‐ bership has grown to 796 members representing 54 countries, an on‐line IBS journal has been es‐ tablished (Frontiers of Biogeography; http:// www.biogeography.org/html/fb.html), and the first IBS off‐year conference (a young investigators conference scheduled for 23‐25 September 2011 at the University of Oxford; http://www.biogeogr aphy.org/html/Meetings/index.html) will be held quite soon. Enthusiasm for the January 2013 IBS conference in Miami, Florida (http://www.biogeo graphy.org/html/Meetings/2013/index.html) is quite high, and we may see record‐high atten‐ dance. Overall, the IBS is now a strong and healthy 10‐year‐old. We all recognize, of course, that we need to maintain regular communication with the mem‐ bers about the details of just how well the IBS is doing: where are there strengths, where are there weaknesses, and where would growth be most effective? Not long after the IBS conference on Crete in January 2011, the Board of Directors of the IBS, newly reconstituted after the meeting, was keen to look to the future immediately. We resolved to perform a survey of members and to use this opportunity to ask important questions about the biennial meetings, the role of Frontiers of Biogeography, the other services the society provides (or does not), and the level of enthusi‐ asm among members for getting more involved in the society. In February, with the Crete meeting still fresh in our memory, the survey went live and IBS members were invited to respond. Background: the IBS membership. The number of members who took the time to respond was, in itself, very encouraging. In total 285 members completed the survey, about 60% of whom had attended the meeting in Crete. Around 30% were students, 3% retired and 67% professionals. About 11% were under 30, 63% were 30–49 and 15% were 50–65; 64% of them were male and 36% fe‐ male. Of the 274 people who responded, about 30% identified themselves as coming from North America, 11% from Central and South America, 18% from northern Europe, 26% from southern Europe, and 5% or less from each of Australia/ New Zealand, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia. A little over 40% of the survey respondents said that the IBS was their primary professional society. The range of “other conceptual affilia‐ tions” of our members is very broad, ranging from evolutionary aspects of genetics and phylogeogra‐ phy, vertebrate biology (mammalogy, ornithology, etc.), systematics, botany, paleontology, and con‐ servation biology to ecology, which was the single most‐frequently mentioned topic. Clearly, geo‐ graphic and conceptual breadth is a hallmark of the IBS membership. Importance of contact from the IBS. While the danger of communication overload must always be considered, members clearly appreciate com‐ munications from the IBS. This was how many learned about the Crete meeting (58% from IBS e‐ mails or website). Responses to open‐ended ques‐ tions about making IBS better and possible web‐ based member benefits all highlighted the value of information flowing from the IBS to members (also among members). The Crete meeting was deemed a success, with 77% rating the meeting as “great” or “very good”; only 0.5% rated it as “not so good”, and none as “poor”. While most respondents (72%) thought the balance between posters and oral presenta‐ frontiers of biogeography 3.2, 2011 — © 2011 the authors; journal compilation © 2011 The International Biogeography Society

Amusement Dark

It could be said Iraqi installation artist Adel specializes in humor. In fact, it has been said, or something close to it: is how New York Times art critic Carol Vogel described Abidin's 2007 installation, Abidin Travels, in her review of the Nordic Pavilion at the [52.sup.nd] Venice Biennale. In his fictional cut-rate travel agency, deployed images of post-occupation Baghdad in a slew of cheesy brochures, videos, and websites promoting junkets, services, and lodgings. Certainly, there was plenty of grim irony in the quixotic efforts of Abidin Travels to promote tourism in what is perhaps the world's most ancient, lovely, and war-ravaged city, home of the Golden Gate Palace and Qasr al-Khalifa: Sightseeing 1. All the beautiful places that you might have read about have either been destroyed or looted. There really are no sights left. 2. Do not walk on sidewalks, they are filled with mines. But any pat reduction of Abidin's work to humor amounts to critically selling it short, no matter how or black that humor might be. How can we define as dark work that sheds so much light on the dyadic force relations of East and West, patriotism and terrorism, masculinity and femininity, visibility and (mis) recognition? Indeed, it is precisely because positions so many of these elements on the same interstitial playing field that his works complicate what is defined as 'humor -which, as Julia Kristeva points out in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), is not always a prerequisite of laughter. Moreover^ the fact that humor is not always present in Abidin's work makes his pieces more rewarding, as the artist tangibly resists perpetuating a trademark aesthetic. In this manner, avoids stumbling into the pitfalls that plague agit-prop old and new: the didactic gesture, myopic scope, and intellectual peevishness of Werner Horvath's Clash of Civilizations (2006), or the schoolboy hectoring of Banksy's graffiti. It is Abidin's frequent alternation--not entirely seamless--between humor, tenderness, and melancholy that keeps his political tooth sharp, and makes any irony in his works bite more keenly. I will return to this notion in a moment, but suffice it to say that a nuanced blend of humor and abjection runs through all of Abidin's pieces. It can be detected in his Oil Paintings (2004), a series of three interactive plexiglass photographs slathered with axel grease, as well as more recent video installations, such as Abidin Travels/' Tasty (2007), and Foam (2007). Any humor present in these pieces is interlaced with an ominous melancholy, while their eye to conceptual breadth ensures the work remains multifarious and evocative. Foam, in its manifestation at Vienna's Projektraum Viktor Bucher in 2008, consisted of a simple video projection at the end of a long, shadowy room--a stark, even bleak setting that lent itself to the more critical aspects of the piece. In the video projection, we see a group of Iraqi barbers' apprentices learning their trade the old-fashioned way: shaving a series of black balloons with a straight razor. Each boy approaches his balloon with practiced, bored caution, slathering it with white lather and attempting to whisk it clean. The boys have conducted this ritual innumerable times and are all too familiar with the fatal slip as the razor nicks the skin, yet they always seem shocked, puzzled, and humiliated at the moment the balloon explodes (an explosion amplifies to bomb-like proportions). Even though their performances are unrehearsed, the pragmatic fact of their repetition makes them cohesive, while the formal composition of Abidin's video is tight and crisp, its colors stark and stylized. The ancient barber's chair, with its battered metal and crackled leatherette, recalls gangland scenes in Bogart movies, the faces of tough mugs wrapped in steaming cloths. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The implicit violence of the piece is clearly endemic to the balloons, which typically serve as children's toys, the trappings of birthday parties and other celebrations. …

Exploring the Bridge from Multimedia Cases to Classrooms: Evidence of Transfer

This article reports findings from a follow-up study of teacher education students who utilized multimedia cases in coursework in preparation for teaching students with emotional/behavioral disorders. The purpose of the study was to examine the extent to which knowledge, skills, and attitudes gained through multimedia case-based instruction were maintained following coursework with the cases and transferred to discussions of classroom practice. Research subjects included 16 students who agreed to participate in an online follow-up support group during the two semesters after their use of multimedia cases in their teacher education courses. The independent variable was testing condition (postinstruction versus follow-up Semester 1 versus follow up Semester 2). Dependent variables included the breadth of concept (nodes), the interconnectedness of concept (links), and the quality of content contained in concept maps completed at preinstruction, postinstruction, and two follow-up points in time. Results indicated that conceptual change occurred between preinstruction and the first follow-up phase, and these changes in conceptual knowledge were maintained during the follow-up period while participants were employed in schools. Qualitative data provide a rich understanding of the study findings by relating transfer of knowledge, skills, and attitudes to the prior case instruction and scaffolds embedded in the cases.

Defending Mitbestimmung: German trade unions and European company law regulation (1967-2000)

Recent years have witnessed an enormous growth of research about European Union legislation in the field of employee participation. Besides studies analysing the legislation itself, many publications also deal with the impact of EU developments on employee participation in member states. While impressive in its conceptual breadth and empirical detail, this literature lacks a historical dimension. Taking the example of Germany and of the German trade union confederation, DGB, this article demonstrates that such a historical perspective is important not least because it sheds new light on contemporary debates. The case study chosen concerns the impact of regulatory initiatives for a European Company (Societas Europaea, SE) Statute on DGB co-determination policy since the late 1960s. The article argues that DGB positions shifted from an exclusive focus on the protection of national achievements, towards an approach that combined protection with attempts for re-regulation at the European level from the late 1980s.

The Supreme Court Confronts The Ghosts of Enron: Assessing The Past, Present and Future of Corporate Fraud Enforcement

The U.S. Supreme Court ended its 2010 term with a significant ruling on the appeal of former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling that sharply curtailed application of the “honest services” doctrine, which had figured prominently in Skilling’s conviction. The Court held that the conceptual breadth of the term “honest services” and the apparent inconsistency of rulings applying the doctrine rendered it unconstitutionally vague unless confined to cases of bribery or kickbacks. Notably, Enron and other corporate fraud cases did not involve either form of corruption. This article reviews the development of the honest services doctrine, discusses and analyzes the Skilling decision, and argues that future corporate fraud enforcement is likely to be hindered not only by the specifics of the Skilling decision but also by its underlying ethical philosophy.

Sleep–wake functioning along the cancer continuum: focus group results from the Patient‐Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS®)

Cancer and its treatments disturb sleep-wake functioning; however, there is little information available on the characteristics and consequences of sleep problems associated with cancer. As part of an effort to improve measurement of sleep-wake functioning, we explored the scope of difficulties with sleep in a diverse group of patients diagnosed with cancer. We conducted 10 focus groups with patients recruited from the Duke University tumor registry and oncology/hematology clinics. Separate groups were held with patients scheduled to begin or currently undergoing treatment for breast, prostate, lung, colorectal, hematological, and other cancer types and with patients who were in posttreatment follow-up. The content of the focus group discussions was transcribed and analyzed for major themes by independent coders. Participants not only reported causes of sleep disturbance common in other populations, such as pain and restless legs, but they also reported causes that may be unique to cancer populations, including abnormal dreams, anxiety about cancer diagnosis and recurrence, night sweats, and problems with sleep positioning. Many participants felt that sleep problems reduced their productivity, concentration, social interactions, and overall quality of life. Many also shared beliefs about the increased importance of sleep when fighting cancer. The findings underscore the need for interventions that minimize the negative impact of cancer and its treatments on sleep. This study will inform efforts now underway to develop a patient-reported measure of sleep-wake functioning that reflects the breadth of concepts considered important by patients with cancer.

Territories Named Desire: From the Breadth of Concepts to the Containment of Experience*

Several reasons have contributed to focusing the attention of the social sciences on the dynamics linked to territories, given the relevance that the themes of power, development and social cohesion have taken on in those dynamics. This article addresses the way in which territorial contexts have actually embraced recent conceptions of power and the State, discussing the extent to which this expresses a new way of doing politics or, on the contrary, whether customary and insufficiently innovative modalities of action continue to be reproduced at local level.

Towards a New Conceptualization of Democratization and Civil-Military Relations

The purpose of this article is to contribute to a better understanding of the contemporary importance for democracy of the relationship between elected leaders and the security forces. It attempts to present a conceptualization and framework to help comprehend what security forces actually do and how they interface with democratic governments. The article aims to extend the conceptual breadth of the literature on civil–military relations beyond control to include two further dimensions – effectiveness and efficiency. The research is based on the authors' experience in conducting programmes for officers and civilians throughout the world in line with at least six different roles and missions of security forces. The conceptualization draws on literature in comparative politics, organization theory, and defence economics, as well as civil–military relations, and security sector reform.

“To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious”

“To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious”

The Caveat Emptor Index

IN January 2006, I used this space to depart from my all-too-dystopic view of the world of education reform to welcome, albeit tepidly, the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL). I spent several paragraphs describing the political risks that historically accompany national education initiatives in Canada, but I wrote that the initial signals had been positive. While the CCL had fallen well short of pledging to speak truth to power, its leadership seemed determined to create and use research to inform its own practice and the advice it would offer to policy makers. It had accumulated significant amounts of good will with stakeholders and was making the right noises about collaboration, vision, and new paradigms. It was true that some of the CCL's key players seemed as recycled as the corporate-speak they used to promote their product, but, hey, my New Year's resolution for 2006 was to be less judgmental. Now that we're well into 2007, I can report that neither that resolution nor this year's sequel--to be less critical--survived its respective holiday season. Others who made similar resolutions were apparently more successful in keeping them, since I have been unable to find any stakeholder prepared to criticize the CCL's flagship initiative, the Composite Learning Index (CLI). Everyone with any interest in lifelong learning, however tangential, praised the release of the CLI: 2006. The CCL even excerpted on its website choice bits of fan mail it had received. (1) Shortly after it was established with $85 million in funding from the federal government, the CCL promised to create an annual index. Skeptics who had been battered by superficial, league-table approaches to comparing educational outcomes were heartened by CCL's avowed fealty to the vision expressed in Learning: The Treasure Within. (2) This 1996 report to UNESCO, often referred to as the Delors Report, remains the touchstone of many progressive educators. CCL's president and CEO, Paul Cappon, promised to choose indicators associated with the four pillars of the Delors Report: Learning to Know, Learning to Do, Learning to Live Together, and Learning to Be. The conceptual breadth of the project pleased those who believe that education is not well served by simplistic comparisons of test scores. The provinces were pleased that the index would eschew any awkward mention of inputs, such as funding for education, in favor of outputs. Colleges and universities believed that including items pertaining to postsecondary participation might advance their arguments for deregulated tuition, increased funding, or both. Employers' groups and corporate lobbies were assured that competitiveness and productivity would be front and center. The quant-o-philes would be able to play with interactive online charts of data and surf an impressive website. So much mileage from a mere 15 indicators and a single grand total! To be fair, relying on indicators is a risky business--made much riskier by counting on bundles of indicators to describe complex phenomena. An indicator is always a proxy for the real thing being measured: the average price of a restaurant's entree selections may, or may not, indicate the quality of the food being served. Everything flows from the nature of the relationship between the proxy and the real thing. Well, almost everything. Even if the proxy is a valid indicator of what is being measured, how accurately the proxy is assessed matters as well. Knowing what the restaurant charged for steak three years ago--under different management and presided over by a different chef--can mislead the most discerning client. I should acknowledge that educational researchers are often forced to settle for second-or even 10th-best indicators when the ones they want don't exist. The information void at the center of Canadian education, a problem I also addressed in my previous article on the CCL, has resulted in a dearth of national data in certain domains and an overreliance on data that were collected for very different purposes or too long ago to be helpful. …

Debussy’s Arabesque and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (1912)

AbstractJust as arabesque carries a range of visual and literary associations, this ornament assumes a diverse presence in music scholarship, where it characterizes a wide repertoire and assortment of techniques. Despite its conceptual breadth, this essay shows that arabesque upheld a specific musical identity for Debussy and Ravel. This is reflected in their simulation of art nouveau’s intricate and fluid designs through melodic gestures that emphasize irregular rhythms and dissonant metres. Also in keeping with art nouveau is the tendency of these composers to privilege musical arabesque’s structural appearance and expressive capacity. These observations are explored with reference to Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, a ballet that critics admired for its arabesque qualities. An analysis of four dances will reveal how the distinct rhythmic and metric profiles of arabesque melodies portray characters and their narratives. In challenging preconceptions of ornament as marginal and meaningless, this essay shows how arabesque became endowed with structural and expressive significance at the début du siècle.

The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius (review)

Reviewed by: The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius Matthew Rowlinson (bio) The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius, by Dino Franco Felluga; pp. xi + 208. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005, $65.00, $23.95 paper. As its full title suggests, Dino Franco Felluga's The Perversity of Poetry is a work of considerable interdisciplinary ambition. Perversity; poetry, gender, genius, and the popular; Romantic ideology: each of these terms and sets of terms comes with a long history and each is currently the topic of its own body of theoretical and historical criticism. A study aiming to mobilize them all is likely to do so with uneven effect, as is the case here. Besides its conceptual breadth, Felluga's work also straddles the historical and disciplinary boundary that too often divides the study of Victorian culture from that of the Romantic era. The book's principal subject is the figure of the genius as it is projected in the poetry of Walter Scott and Lord Byron and in their critical reception. A coda treats Alfred Tennyson as Scott and Byron's successor, who was given the task of constructing a poetic stance in the contradictory and, Felluga argues, culturally marginal position bequeathed him by his precursors. The book's focus is on poetic romance, especially Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808), Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18) and Don Juan (1818–23), and Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1859–85). This choice of genres is determined by a theoretical argument that casts poetry as a [End Page 366] staging of fantasy, whose fate in the nineteenth century was to lose its cultural authority to the realist novel. It is in the more historically specific and richly contextualized strands of its analysis, particularly those dealing with Byron and his reception, that this book makes its greatest contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century literary culture. These strands are bound up with others, however, in which the formal symmetry of his argument leads Felluga to gloss over important historical distinctions. The pairing and contrast of Scott's and Byron's poetry is an organizing principle of the book. As Felluga documents, this pairing was a commonplace in criticism of the Romantic era, and Byron's verse romances were viewed as a powerful and largely negative example of poetic genius throughout the nineteenth century. To make a similar claim regarding Scott's persistence as a type of the poetic genius, however, he is obliged to ignore a distinction he elsewhere views as crucial, between the generic histories of prose fiction and poetic romance. Much of the evidence given for Scott's continuing importance in the nineteenth century refers not to the poems but to the Waverley novels. Felluga's justification for this confusion is that the fantasy structure of Scott's metrical romances constitutes "the mechanism whereby the emergent capitalist culture of the nineteenth century would secure its disciplinary hold on the people"; though this mechanism principally operates in "middle-class fiction," its logic is "first popularized" in Scott's poetry, to which the novel thus owes a debt that "has been insufficiently acknowledged" (45). The claims here are too broad to be falsified; no evidence, however, is offered either for the disciplinary effect of fantasy in the nineteenth century or for fiction's debt to Scott's poetry. Felluga's major example of the supposed cultural effect of Scott's poetry is an account of the author's stage-management of the royal visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822, the first by a Hanoverian monarch. This event culminated in a levee, at which Scott persuaded George and the Edinburgh gentry who attended him to don full Highland dress, with the monarch himself in Stuart tartan. As Felluga suggests, the episode provided a template for other political pageants later in the century, such as Victoria's coronation and the Eglinton tournament. By analyzing the royal visit as "medievalizing," however, and setting it in the context of Scott's poetic romances, he obscures its immediate context: the Waverley...

Validating timed UML models by simulation and verification

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