Chance Encounters Research Articles

Captive-housed male cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus soemmeringii) form naturalistic coalitions: Measuring associations and calculating chance encounters

Cheetahs are known to reproduce poorly in captivity and research suggests that the reasons for this are behavioral, rather than physiological. In the wild, male cheetahs remain in stable groups, or coalitions, throughout their lifetime. Appropriate social group housing is important in enhancing welfare and reproductive success in captivity and this study examined the effect of changes in social group composition on the behavior of four male cheetahs: two siblings and two half siblings. During the study, the cheetahs were housed both in pairs and as a group of four, before one male was relocated. The remaining cheetahs were then housed in a trio. Affiliative behaviors were frequently shown within pairs and overt aggression was seldom observed. Association indices were calculated for each cheetah pair and corrected for chance encounters based on data generated from a Monte Carlo simulation. The indices showed that two coalitions existed before the relocated male departed. Following the relocation of one of the half siblings, the remaining cheetahs appeared to form a coalition of three, as the indices of association between the unrelated male and the siblings increased and allogrooming between unrelated individuals was observed. The findings of this study indicate that natural social groupings of male cheetahs can be successfully replicated in captivity, which could potentially improve the chances of reproductive success when they are introduced to female cheetahs.

Watching Genes Loop the Loop

Watching Genes Loop the Loop

Seattle Experimental Opera's Artistic Insurrection

July–August 2013 • 7 W orld music” has become part of an advertising lexicon promising the buyer of CDs entrée into unfamiliar conventions. The operatic creations of husband and wife team Christian Asplund (composer) and Lara Candland (poet/librettist) promise listeners something similar. Asplund and Candland helped create Seattle Experimental Opera, a guerilla arts organization formed in the 1990s that disbands and reorganizes like a fluid artistic insurrection. Resource starved, the group compensates with conviction. By always acting as though everything going on is perfectly normal, they foster the sense that unknown conventions are at play. The result are creations akin to opera transported on covered wagons by an underfunded kinship group so far from home that their efforts to re-create their abandoned culture produce fresh conventions. Take their work Liquid: An Epistolary Opera (2004). A rock band of guitar, bass, and drums supports the work. Midway through the overture they are joined by a wordless singer. Asplund had a singer available on the set of Liquid, so his make-due aesthetic urged him to transform her temporarily into an instrumentalist. Another singer plays piano during the production. The story unfolds through five letters from Eva Eve, the outer two to Charles and the inner three to Catherine . The opera’s cast of three singers all convey the letters’ contents heterophonically , which is to say simultaneously , thus denying the opera the convention of characters in the ordinary sense. The audience joins the correspondence at an advanced and intimate point. Parsing their meaning is complicated as no replies are conveyed. Eva Eve reveals herself to be a dramatic heroine entangled in a strange love triangle that may include a misshapen duck. The duck’s death prompts the romance to spiral downward. The fresh convention of an epistolary opera prompts the sort of winning confusion that makes chance encounters with worlds of convention so pleasing. Their next collaboration, Sunset with Pink Pastoral (2006), takes the conventions of a “road movie” to present audiences with likeable innocents abroad amid the vast landscape of the American West. The visual ambition of Candland’s libretto meets the material poverty of experimental opera head-on and without compromise. Milk, the opera’s male protagonist, has a chance encounter with a young Native American and after hearing his prayer exclaims guilelessly, “That’s cool, dude. I wish I had, like, a cultural heritage or whatever.” Such a naïve young man might invite meanness from another composer/writer team courting cruel laughter, but Asplund and Candland treat Milk and everyone else inhabiting their operas gently, effectively cutting themselves off from opera’s traditions of violent emotions. Their most recent collaboration, Lalage (2011), features Candland’s voice reading from her poetry manipulated and embellished by Asplund’s live, low-tech electronics. They might have called this collaboration an “opera,” too, but they didn’t. “Opera” means something to them, but the conventions informing that meaning belong to them alone. A WLT contributing editor, Michael Lee is a professor of music (musicology) at the University of Oklahoma. Editorial note: Visit WLT’s website for online links to the music. World Music Seattle Experimental Opera’s Artistic Insurrection Michael Lee notebook photo : curtis asplund ...

Ethics Commentary: The Psychotherapeutic Relationship

Immanuel Kant once observed, “We are not gentleman volunteers; we are conscripts in the army ofmoral law” (Murdoch 1992, p. 35).We recognize that many individuals act primarily, perhaps exclusively, in self-interest. But Kant’s observation that there is a moral imperative—what he called a “categorical imperative”—is indeed compelling. We cannot ignore the fact that moral demands are placed upon us by virtue of our living in a social order with other human beings. Physicians and health professionals in particular live in a moral order, with obligations incumbent on them by virtue of the needs of those who seek their help. Acknowledging that there are scoundrels among professionals, those motivated solely by self-interest and not in the service of others, we recognize that there are certain demands that health professionals cannot escape. Specific moral obligations are imposed on them by virtue of their relationship with patients or clients. This relationship is shaped by the clinician’s promise and expertise to heal and by the imbalance that naturally exists between a person in need and a person who seeks to provide treatment, answers, and comfort in relation to that need. Whether one understands those obligations as allegiance to conscience, allegiance to God, allegiance to society, or a more direct allegiance to the patient or client, the obligations are present. PROFESSIONALISM IN THE PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP

A lifetime of migration

Careers in any profession can take a curious path. One small choice can seemingly change a career path and chance encounters open doors to new opportunities that take a person in new, unforeseen directions. For Chris Wylie this has certainly been the case. This interview highlights how someone can build a successful career in science, how that career can be fulfilling and fun and at the same time, it is possible to have a family and a life outside of science. Chris has certainly had success in science, having built very successful labs at many institutions and helped found and grow world-renowned research centers. He gives great credit for his success to his longtime collaborator and wife, Janet Heasman. Although they have indeed made major contributions to their chosen fields of study, what is remarkable is the number of trainees that they have had pass through their labs. Ultimately for any scientist that might be their greatest legacy and it is obvious the impact that great mentors such as J.Z. Young and Ruth Bellairs had on how Chris ran his own lab. As Chris moves on to the next stage of his career, it seems likely that he will pursue it with as much vigor and passion as he pursued his love of scientific research and have a lot of fun. I can't wait for the next interview!

Love, longing and danger

This article is concerned with the representation of memory in sf films at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It will examine three films in particular: Michael Winterbottom's Code 46 (UK/US 2003), Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (US 2004) and Wong Kar-wai's 2046 (France/Germany/Hong Kong/China 2004). These films are concerned with the complexities of chance encounters and elusive relationships, highlighting themes of memory, love, nostalgia and longing. They follow on from an earlier tradition of sf films that focus on memory's subjectivity, preoccupied with the use of technology in creating false or prosthetic memories. The films examined here, however, focus less on the details of technology used in manipulating memory. Instead, their concerns are with the blurring of the distinctions between remembering and forgetting.

A Still Practically Relevant AristotleReal Social Science: Applied Phronesis. Edited by Bent Flyvbjerg, Todd Landman, and Sanford Schram. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

fieldworker invests a great deal of time and effort to gain rapport and learn a language for which there is little or no written history and literature. My only regret in reading this wonderful collection of essays by mature scholars is that there were too few contributions by anthropologists who have combined multisited ethnography with long-term fieldwork in a single location during the course of a career. Starting in one place and changing to another is only one way of developing a comparative perspective in anthropology. Missing are accounts by anthropologists who have invested a great deal of time in one location with one group, done fieldwork in other places, and returned to the first field site with a fresh pair of eyes and ears and new theories. Those who have followed this trajectory have discovered new topics to explore, changed their ideas about the culture they thought they had fully understood, and learned how their informants interpret their historical experiences in unanticipated ways. An enjoyable aspect of all of these essays is the embrace of serendipity as a source of creativity. Changing life situations and chance encounters led to unanticipated discoveries in new locations for all of the contributors. I would hope, however, that the contributors’ embrace of serendipity does not mean that choosing new field sites according to some kind of plan is necessarily obsolete. It is interesting that Herzfeld, who presents one of the most coherent accounts of his professional trajectory, makes the most impassioned defense of serendipity. My impression from reading his essay and his work is that his earlier fieldwork on the Island of Rhodes and in Crete was the source of a vision that carried him through his ethnography of the state in Rome and in Thailand, which came about because of many chance encounters. The strength of this collection is that the contributors reveal how anthropologists face many personal challenges in their struggle to combine life and work: they have come up against institutional prejudices based on the area-studies focus in many universities; they have struggled, sometimes valiantly, to master new languages; and they have read pages of history, ethnography, and theory to prepare for fieldwork in a new place. These essays show rather than tell why there is no one best way to develop a comparative perspective in anthropology and how fieldwork, wherever it takes place, is our lifeblood.

Working-class students, habitus, and the development of student roles: a Canadian case study

As their numbers at university grow, we need to gain a better understanding of the different ways in which working-class students negotiate their potential outsider status in what is often considered an essential middle-class institution. Based on data from a four-year longitudinal, qualitative study of working-class students at a Canadian university, I argue that their acceptance of the ends and means of both the academic and social demands of university contributes to the development of different student roles, which in turn affects their likelihood to succeed academically. Drawing on works by Bourdieu and Bernstein, I present four case studies of students who lived through university committed, alienated or in transition toward either commitment or alienation. I show that despite similar working-class backgrounds, study participants’ reaction to university was anything but predictable. Instead, prior socialization, clear and realistic career goals, and chance encounters at university played an important role in their approach to university life.

The Linda Crane Lecture Professionalism & Core Values in Physical Therapy: Lessons Learned From Linda Crane

The professional behaviors demonstrated by Linda Crane were exemplary as documented in the above personal accounts and objective measures of professionalism using the APTA Professionalism in PT Core Values Self-Assessment. Our professional development should likely include many facets of those so keenly portrayed by Linda Crane. It is likely that Linda's professionalism was strongly facilitated by becoming a member of the APTA and the Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Section. She found a professional association and section in which she could comfortably and easily share her ideas. She found a section in which she could contribute by serving in a variety of manners (ie, development of entry-level competencies, specialization, research, and education). Linda strongly believed that the professional development of each and every PT is critical to the profession of PT. Following the above examples of Linda Crane, optimizing one's “chance encounters,” and choosing an environment in which to grow (and relax) will likely facilitate one's professional development in PT. The APTA Professionalism in PT Core Values Self Assessment provides us with a tool to measure our own level of professionalism. Please examine your level of professionalism using this tool and contribute to the profession of PT by becoming a professional in whom Linda Crane would be proud.

Nespresso: Branding the "Ultimate Coffee Experience"

Nespresso: Branding the "Ultimate Coffee Experience"

Participation and Alienation in Online Networked Learning

The success of informal learning in large online learning networks largely depends on the existence of a sound social space that encompasses the networks of interpersonal relationships each individual has formed within this space. These personal social networks form the social capital of the individual and it is through this social capital that social interaction becomes possible and, thus, learning and knowledge co-creation can occur. It would appear that the existence of social capital is self-evident in large online learning networks as these networks are meant to connect people. However, online learning networks depend on technological systems that are incapable of transferring all the awareness cues necessary for finding people and feeling a sense of social presence. In this sense technological systems may hinder the development of a social space and the growth of social capital. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that the technological systems incorporate social affordances - subsystems or widgets that compensate for the missing awareness information and that provide mechanisms to get into contact with others and to share information. In this position paper we propose that these social affordances should orient towards promoting impromptu encounters, social navigation, and social browsing. Social affordances that enable people to experience a psychological proximity (in contrast with physical proximity) with each other will facilitate impromptu or chance encounters which will in turn lead to in increased probability of meeting people. Social affordances not only are important to get in contact with people but also because of the informal conversations that arise from these meetings. Through these conversations, a person meets new people and maintains old contacts as well as gets information that may contribute to learning. Social navigation is the process in which people use other people (direct social navigation) or other people's traces (indirect social navigation) to find other people, perhaps the ones who possess expert knowledge and from who they may learn a lot. Social browsing is using directories of people (the social 'yellow pages') for browsing through the user profiles stored in these directories to find other people that have similar interests or other commonalities that are important. Ultimately, social affordances enable individuals to participate in online networked learning and experience the social presence of all other members of the network who may become part of the individuals' personal social capital. Without these affordances, individuals may feel alienated in these large online learning networks.

Good Neighbours in Bad Neighbourhoods: Narratives of Dissociation and Practices of Neighbouring in a ‘Problem’ Place

This paper challenges the idea that living in a ‘problem’ neighbourhood strains neighbour relations, by examining the relation between narratives of dissociation and practices of neighbouring. Several studies have suggested that confrontations with ethnoracial diversity, disorder and stigma would cause residents to withdraw from interacting with their fellow-residents. Based on a mixed-method study in a ‘problem’ and a ‘problem-free’ neighbourhood, the paper shows that, while narratives of dissociation may suggest withdrawal, such talk does not necessarily reflect in practices of neighbouring. First, negative neighbourhood talk can go together with efforts to connect with fellow-residents. Secondly, perceptions of diversity or disorder do not matter much when neighbour relations evolve around chance encounters and norms of good neighbouring. Inferring practices from narratives risks reproducing images of deprived neighbourhoods as dysfunctional and applying a double standard in explaining distant neighbour relations, while misrecognising the ways in which residents do maintain neighbourly relations.

Local Public Libraries Serve Important Functions as Meeting Places, but Demographic Variables Appear Significant, Suggesting a Need for Extensive Further Research

Local Public Libraries Serve Important Functions as Meeting Places, but Demographic Variables Appear Significant, Suggesting a Need for Extensive Further Research

‘MAYBE YOU DON'T ACTUALLY EXIST’: CONTAINING SHAME AND SELF‐HARM IN A SCHOOL COUNSELLING SERVICE

abstractIn this paper, I argue that the school counsellor occupies a liminal position in the school environment, on the boundary between the private and the public, and that this position intrinsically reflects the paradoxical nature of shame, at once hidden and viewed. I review arguments that locate the development of primitive shame in early containment failure, with shame being defended against by rage against others or the self. I argue that the school counsellor's position commonly oscillates through the three positions of the child–home–school triangle, but that this is felt particularly acutely when the dynamics projected through this triangle are those of shame and shaming. For adolescents, the paradoxical nature of shame also finds a counterpart in self‐harm, a simultaneously hidden and viewed act which I see as a mapping of shame on the body. In exploring the operation of shame in self‐harming students, I also argue that chance encounters between counsellor and student in the external school world render projections about intimacy, intrusion and shame particularly powerful.

Excerpts from "Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog"

Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog (trans. Eight Muses of the Fall) is on the one hand a young man’s frustrated attempt to write the great Filipino novel, and on the other, his coming to terms with the futility of his search for his lost mother. Along the way, he is guided and misdirected by some muses and demons to reimagine his personal past without the burden of national history. He will be forced to accept that truth can somehow be in the deceptive, inchoate recreation of memories, without which, the fall seems inevitable. The following chapter is part of the second half of the novel, when the protagonist Daniel tries to revise his personal history, with the help of his dreams, and his attempts at analyses of his chance encounters. In this chapter, he first meets Teresa, the prostitute who can read other people’s minds, but only after dark.

As Accessible as a Book on a Library Shelf: The Imperative of Routine Simulation in Modern Health Care

As Accessible as a Book on a Library Shelf: The Imperative of Routine Simulation in Modern Health Care

Effects of recent experience and background features on prey detection of foraging American kestrels (Falco sparverius) in captivity

Predators activate a search image process for the most frequent prey type as a result of repeated chance encounters with that prey. In addition, selective attention to a limited subset of prey visual features should increase the precision with which the prey is discriminated from the background. In our experiment, we investigated the effects of multiple backgrounds on prey detection by captive American kestrels (Falco sparverius). We predicted that the background itself can serve to cue attention towards the prey type and that a most recent experience provided predictive information. As expected, we observed the effects of search image formation where the background was informative (familiar substrate). Nevertheless, search image effects disappeared with extended practice and kestrels rapidly increased the use of unfamiliar background where prey were completely non-cryptic. Our data suggest that short-term changes in prey detection of a predator cue with the background upon which this prey is found. We discussed the results in the light of related studies on neophobia, visual acuity and achromatic and chromatic contrasts.

Efficient Gene Transfer in Bacterial Cell Chains

Horizontal gene transfer contributes to evolution and the acquisition of new traits. In bacteria, horizontal gene transfer is often mediated by conjugative genetic elements that transfer directly from cell to cell. Integrative and conjugative elements (ICEs; also known as conjugative transposons) are mobile genetic elements that reside within a host genome but can excise to form a circle and transfer by conjugation to recipient cells. ICEs contribute to the spread of genes involved in pathogenesis, symbiosis, metabolism, and antibiotic resistance. Despite its importance, little is known about the mechanisms of conjugation in Gram-positive bacteria or how quickly or frequently transconjugants become donors. We visualized the transfer of the integrative and conjugative element ICEBs1 from a Bacillus subtilis donor to recipient cells in real time using fluorescence microscopy. We found that transfer of DNA from a donor to a recipient appeared to occur at a cell pole or along the lateral cell surface of either cell. Most importantly, we found that when acquired by 1 cell in a chain, ICEBs1 spread rapidly from cell to cell within the chain by additional sequential conjugation events. This intrachain conjugation is inherently more efficient than conjugation that is due to chance encounters between individual cells. Many bacterial species, including pathogenic, commensal, symbiotic, and nitrogen-fixing organisms, harbor ICEs and grow in chains, often as parts of microbial communities. It is likely that efficient intrachain spreading is a general feature of conjugative DNA transfer and serves to amplify the number of cells that acquire conjugative mobile genetic elements.

Ad Lib: Improvisation, Imagination and Enchantment in Siegfried Kracauer

The writings of the German–Jewish social /cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) have been overshadowed until recently by those of his contemporaries and colleagues, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. Indeed, all too often judged exclusively on the basis of his post-war English-language writings on film and cinema, Kracauer has long been misread and maligned in the Anglophone academy as a naive ‘realist’ film theorist. Fortunately, this erroneous assessment is now changing. Renewed interest in Critical Theory and its Frankfurt School exponents is leading to a growing appreciation of the originality, subtlety and complexity of Kracauer’s works and especially his earlier essays penned as a journalist / feuilletonist for the Frankfurter Zeitung during the Weimar Republic. In these fragmentary texts, Kracauer provides an intriguing and insightful critique of modern metropolitan mass culture, identifying the formation and pre-eminence of new class groupings in the contemporary city and interrogating the conditions and qualities of everyday urban experience itself. This essay does not provide a general introduction to Kracauer’s work or overview of his themes, but rather explores one key motif with which he was preoccupied throughout his writings: the evocative yet elusive concept of ‘improvisation’. Strongly influenced by his erstwhile tutor in Berlin, the sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel, Kracauer presents a pessimistic vision of metropolitan modernity, a system and a space in which increasingly powerful forms of rationalisation, calculation and abstraction lead to the atomisation, overstimulation and eventual indifference of the spiritually impoverished urban individual. Yet Kracauer is also attentive to what he sees as positive, indeed perhaps utopian, moments lodged in this otherwise bleak and forbidding environment. In its confusion and profusion of chance encounters and contingencies, the modern city is where the fortuitous, the haphazard and accidental take on a particular significance, ephemeral conjunctions and configurations best captured, kracauer contents, by the new medium of film. This paper traces how Kracauer comes to see the improvisional (literally: the ‘unforseen’), as both a necessary and a critical response to the exigencies of metropolitan living. As a spatial, bodily, material and temporal practice, improvisation draws upon the playfulness and imagination of children’s fairytales and of slapstick comedy to suggest possibilities and potentialities transcending the alienated, mechanised, commodified life-world of modernity. In presenting us with images of improvisation, the films of comics such as Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin, envision a world of renewed and non-instrumental relations between humans and objects, of revived and benign relations between humans and Nature. These are ludic realms in which the powerful are outwitted by the weak and downtrodden, and human ‘character’ serendipitously triumphs over fate and death. The paper concludes with some brief reflections on the critical, utopian promise of the improvisional conceived as the ad lib.

Creativity as social and spatial process

PurposeThis paper seeks to argue that creativity in the workplace is a very complex construct that is difficult to measure not only in its own right, but also in its interrelation with physical space. Since creativity is a social process, this paper aims to suggest studying interaction patterns as a fundamental feature of creativity.Design/methodology/approachBased on the literature, two criteria for creativity in workplaces were developed: spaces for chance encounters with people from different teams; and a balance of spaces for communication and concentration. Using a mixed‐methods research design, a UK media company was studied before and after a relocation and refurbishment project in 2007‐2008. The case study included structured interviews, satisfaction surveys, social network surveys, space observations, and a Space Syntax analysis of floor plans.FindingsThe paper showed that only the first criterion was successfully met in the media company studied, and that the pressure on the industry inhibited the full implementation of the second.Research limitations/implicationsOwing to the nature of the research results cannot be generalised. The relationship between creativity, interaction and space requires further investigation.Practical implicationsThe findings highlight the need to balance spaces for communication and concentration, as well as the importance of bringing people together to enhance creativity. This knowledge may be useful for workplace professionals in design, architecture and facility management.Originality/valueThe paper presents a valuable data set comparing one organisation in a pre‐post research design, where the impact of spatial changes on working processes can be monitored. It combines innovative approaches normally used in separation.