Common Reference Point Research Articles

The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde by Dassia N. Posner

Reviewed by: The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde by Dassia N. Posner Jonathan Pitches The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde. By Dassia N. Posner. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016; pp. 344. While Russian theatre directors Meyerhold, Tairov, and Eisenstein have continued to stimulate interest in scholarship since the beginnings of their practice and have been the subject of individual studies and selected pairings right up to the present day—from Mel Gordon and Alma Law’s classic Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics (1996) to Amy Skinner’s forthcoming Russian Theatre in Practice (2019)—no one has yet taken on all three directorial titans in one volume. This is the challenge that Dassia Posner sets herself with The Director’s Prism, an elegantly organized and deeply scholarly book that manages to reveal (or to use her term, “refract”) new insights into the work of these much-discussed Russian creatives. The vehicle for this refraction and the common reference point for all three directors is the German romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), whose own deeply influential mantra for the theatre was for it “to ‘bear the spectator on invisible wings in to the imaginary world of poesy”’ (3). Hoffmann’s impact on Russian art, literature, and theatre is enormous, intensifying in two waves. The first occurred in the nineteenth century, Posner argues, embodied in Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Turgenev; the second wave followed in the early twentieth century as part of the Russian revolt against naturalism and its celebration of the “theatre theatrical,” as Oliver Sayler famously termed it. Posner reveals each of her chosen directors to be profoundly “under the sign” of Hoffmann, in their dedication to adapting his work for the stage and in their reimagination of his theatrical worldview—irony, the grotesque, the pursuit of artistic synthesis, the importance of commedia dell’arte and the power of the mask (4). As such, her focus on Hoffmann as an organizing principle is more than justified and helps to weave a rich narrative of both separate and interlaced strands of theatre history. The book’s structure reflects this organizational focus on Hoffmann. An introduction explains the conceit of the director’s prism and the concept of refraction—“the artist’s deep engagement with a source via the prism of untrammeled fantasy”—positioning Hoffmann both in his own time and in the revolutionary period in Russia (29). Separate chapters then follow treating Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein in turn, but welding each of them to another figure—resonating with Hoffmann’s obsession with alter egos. Thus we have the amalgams: Meyerhold-Dapertutto (chapter 1); Tairov-Celionati (chapter 2); and Eisenstein-Yutkevich, or “pipifax” as they termed themselves (chapter 3). These pairings (either actual in the case of Eisenstein and Yutkevich or metaphorical in the case of Meyerhold) serve productively to destabilize the identity and stability of the lone director. They wittily evoke Hoffmann’s own grotesque and dynamic characterizations, although, at least for this reader, they also run the risk of providing one layer of interpretation too many, blurring what is already a complex and kaleidoscopic narrative. The epilogue reflects on Hoffmann’s centenary in 1922 before moving to an assessment of the “significant afterlife [of ] theatricalist poetics” provoked by the German’s work within and beyond the Russian context (200–201). Posner does this not to construct a lineage or explicit line of influence from Hoffmann onwards, she says, but instead to consider the utility of Louise George Clubb’s term “theatregram,” coined to “describe the process of dissemination via oral, visual, and other largely non-traceable means” (202). There is more to be said on this and further expansion needed on the other suggested Hoffmannian afterlives manifest in Peter Brook, Kneehigh, and Dmitry Krymov. But an epilogue can only do so much, to be fair, and these contemporary figures are served up as “indirect refractions,” to be followed up independently. As a final gift, three useful appendices are also included: essays translated from Meyerhold’s famous Love of the Three Oranges journal, as well as commedia scenarios from Schnitzler and...

Merchant identities, trading nodes, and globalization: Introduction to the Special Issue

ABSTRACTThe contributors to this Special Issue are concerned by the nature of transregional Asian interactions taking place in the field of commerce. They explore this concern through an examination of the experiences, activities, and histories of commodity traders whose life trajectories criss-cross Asia. The articles share a common geographic point of reference: Yiwu – an officially designated ‘international trade city’ located in China’s eastern Zhejiang province. The introduction to the Special Issue analytically locates the individual papers in relationship to a long-standing body of work in anthropology and history on port cities and trading nodes. In so doing it suggests the importance of considering multiple historical processes to understanding Yiwu and its position in China and the world today, as well as, more generally, for the anthropology of ‘globalization from below’.

Good war/bad war: a war to remember, a war to forget?

ABSTRACTThis paper uses the distinction that has been developed within organizational studies between collected memory and collective memory to explore and contrast the nature of one multinational company’s organizational memory of World War I and World War II. Although the British American Tobacco Company (BAT) experienced severe upheavals as a result of each of the two global military conflagrations of the twentieth century, this paper argues that in terms of its organizational memory there exist clear distinctions between the two. During the course of World War I, BAT was able for the first time to generate a degree of common identity which served it well in the course of its post war expansion during the 1920s. This emergence of a more unified culture, underpinned by a range of common reference points for its staff based on texts, buildings and monuments, facilitated a company-wide collective memory of the war which was subsequently used to promote an esprit de corps across the organization. During World War II, these common cultural reference points were not developed. Thus an organizational memory of World War II only emerged many decades after the event and took the form of a collected memory based on individual recollections.

Postcolonialism and the Study of Anti-Semitism

In recent years Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) has become a common point of reference for those within postcolonial studies—such as Paul Gilroy, Aamir Mufti, and Michael Rothberg—who wish to explore the historical intersections between racism, fascism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism. “Postcolonialism and the Study of Anti-Semitism” relates Arendt’s comparative thinking to other anticolonial theorists and camp survivors at the end of the Second World War—most prominently, Jean Amery, Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Primo Levi, and Jean-Paul Sartre—who all made connections between the history of genocide in Europe and European colonialism. The article then compares this strand of comparative thought with postcolonial theorists of the 1970s and 1980s who, contra Arendt, divide the histories of fascism and colonialism into separate spheres. It also contrasts postcolonial theory with postcolonial literature by exploring the intertwined histories in the fiction of V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Caryl Phillips. Said’s late turn to Jewish exilic thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Erich Auerbach, and Sigmund Freud is also related to this Arendtian comparative project. The main aim of the article is to promote a more open-minded sense of historical connectedness with regard to the histories of racism, fascism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism.

“English is an unwritten rule here”

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of corporate language policies that are implemented without formal decision-making processes.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative case study based on three Scandinavian multinational corporations which use English as a common corporate language without formal language policy decisions.FindingsNon-formalised language policies are found to be clearly distinct from formalised language policies in terms of language policy format, language policy focus, language policy formation, language planning agency and management style. Non-formalised language policies can represent a type of informal control, but the absence of a policy document leaves employees without a common reference point which may cause confusion and inter-collegial conflict.Originality/valueThe study offers a nuanced perspective on the role of language policies in corporate communication by demonstrating that language policies may come in a variety of different forms, also as implicit assumptions about language use. Findings reveal benefits and drawbacks of the different language policy approaches.

A conceptual model of heritage dimensions and agrotourism: Perspective of Nandi County in Kenya

Conceptual frameworks have previously been used to give a structure to research that essentially simplifies thinking and clarifies issues, while at the same time providing a common reference point. Agrotourism is fast emerging as a key player in the activation of rural economies. An understanding of the interplay between variables that may help sustain agrotourism no doubt provides an avenue through which the practice can be exploited. The aim of this paper is to develop a conceptual model that can explain the interrelationship between heritage dimensions and agrotourism. It envisages that such a model can provide the basis upon which researchers can investigate ways of exploiting the abundant heritage dimensions in Nandi County.

Pushing the limits of a data challenged stock: A size- and age-structured assessment of ling (Molva molva) in Icelandic waters using Gadget

In recent years a greater emphasis has been placed on developing management strategies that prevent over-exploitation. Harvest control rules (HCRs) have therefore, in many places, been developed and implemented. Commonly these HCRs are developed for stocks that are assessed using age-structured models, and various platforms exist to evaluate their performance and analyze various sources of bias for that particular class of models. Many stocks, however, cannot be assessed reliably using classical age-structured methods due to data limitations (gaps in data series, unreliable age readings, etc.). One such stock is the common ling (Molva molva) in Icelandic waters. Availability of data on the stock dynamics, in particular age data for both survey and commercial samples, has been a limiting factor when assessing the stock. When modeling stocks such as this, data limitations need to be considered, and how associated uncertainty is propagated both through the assessment and into the advice. In this study, ling was assessed using the size- and age-structured model Gadget after synthesizing all available data. Having limited age data available causes high uncertainty in the model fitting process, especially in estimating growth. However, including this key uncertainty in the assessment allowed the subsequent management strategy evaluation to take it into account directly while deriving common management reference points and estimating uncertainties in stock status and other derived quantities. Uncertainty was estimated using a specialized bootstrap for disparate data sets that mimics the sampling process. The process of assimilating data for the assessment model and the bootstrap procedure was performed using a specialized database program, MFDB, ensuring that the whole process is reproducible.

‘Don’t just look for a new pet’: the Vietnamese airlift, child refugees and the dangers of toxic humanitarianism

ABSTRACTThe Kindertransport remains the most common historical point of reference in contemporary debates over the present position of refugees in Europe. Taylor's article instead focuses on a very different emergency movement of children—the airlift of ninety-nine ‘orphans’ from Vietnam before the fall of Saigon in April 1975—as a historical point of entry into Britain’s relationship with child refugees. Although superficially a one-off event, and an example of ‘toxic’ humanitarianism, in fact it is suggestive of some of the key themes of modern refugee history. These include the tendency of humanitarianism to hollow out political contexts from the objects of their concern; the prominent, and sometimes problematic, role of voluntary organizations in the movement, reception and resettlement of refugees; and the place of expressions of spontaneous compassion by individuals who become involved in refugee operations. Taylor's article suggests that all these themes could fruitfully bear greater historical attention.

Cultural (Re)Codings: Copyright, Trademarks and the Right of Publicity

In his critique of consumption, Jean Baudrillard contends that the consumer no longer relates to a particular object in its specific utility, but to a set of objects in its total signification. Thus, increasingly, when consumers make their purchases, they do not simply select goods and services purely for their functional or utilitarian values, but are buying into the significations of these commodities in the construction of their self-identities. Objects of intellectual property (IP), in particular copyrighted works, trademarks and the celebrity personality, represent far more than a bundle of legal rights. They are invariably associated with a set of cultural narratives and semiotic meanings which are ultimately consumed. A well-known literary or artistic work does much more than simply educate, inform or entertain; it also functions as a signifier of a set of signified meanings. A trademark does not only designate the source or origin of goods. Famous brands like Louis Vuitton, Apple and Nike possess particular configurations of meanings that offer peculiarly powerful affirmations of belonging and recognition in the lives of their customers around the world. Celebrities, whose identities may be protected against commercial appropriation by the right of publicity, have become common points of reference for millions of individuals who may never interact with one another, but who have, by virtue of their participation in a mediated culture, a shared experience and a collective memory. This essay explores how the encoded narratives in certain objects of IP may be read as polysemous texts that invite playful semiotic recodings, culture jamming and poststructural disruptions. It also suggests how audiences who engage with works of copyright, trademarks and celebrities via such textual signification may avail themselves of a number of legal defenses under the current legal regime.

Visual Methods in Ethnographic Fieldwork – On Learning from Participants Through their Video-accounts

This article reflects on the value of engaging with visual methods in a fieldwork situation. It portrays various forms of visual methods used in a recent research in Botswana and discusses – by using a concrete example – how video-accounts produced by participants and subsequent video-dialogues came to complement insights gained from observation and interviews in fortunate ways. A theoretical value was that the video-recordings – as they represented a ‘thicker’ description of ‘practice in practice’ than interview audio recordings or notes from observational situations – helped to build insights into the non-linguistic, embodied and socio-material aspects of practices. A methodological value was that the use of video-recordings assisted in bringing out participants perspective and thereby helped to produce more relevant data. When participants communicate by recording practices in private spheres this gives an inlet into situations of significance in the everyday that usually are inaccessible for observation and ungraspable through interviews. The video-recordings also had analytical value as they could be used to facilitate a common point of reference for dialogical and collaborative interpretation between the participant and researcher on concrete events. When participants decide what to discuss with the researcher and they together reflect on and put into words what is the meaning of concrete events, this improves the validity of interpretation and fosters a more symmetrical understanding between researcher and participants – hence also of donors and recipients – about what is significant and at stake.

Implicit Cooperative Positioning in Vehicular Networks

Absolute positioning of vehicles is based on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs) combined with on-board sensors and high-resolution maps. In cooperative intelligent transportation systems, the positioning performance can be augmented by means of vehicular networks that enable vehicles to share location-related information. This paper presents an implicit cooperative positioning (ICP) algorithm that exploits the Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) connectivity in an innovative manner, avoiding the use of explicit V2V measurements such as ranging. In the ICP approach, vehicles jointly localize non-cooperative physical features (such as people, traffic lights, or inactive cars) in the surrounding areas, and use them as common noisy reference points to refine their location estimates. Information on sensed features are fused through V2V links by a consensus procedure, nested within a message passing algorithm, to enhance the vehicle localization accuracy. As positioning does not rely on explicit ranging information between vehicles, the proposed ICP method is amenable to implementation with off-the-shelf vehicular communication hardware. The localization algorithm is validated in different traffic scenarios, including a crossroad area with heterogeneous conditions in terms of feature density and V2V connectivity, and a real urban area by using Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) for traffic data generation. Performance results show that the proposed ICP method can significantly improve the vehicle location accuracy compared to the stand-alone GNSS, especially in harsh environments, such as in urban canyons, where the GNSS signal is highly degraded or denied.

The Power of literature and Sustenance of Human Dignity in the 21st Century: a Study of Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero

The article deals with the treatment of human dignity in El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero. We begin with an extended methodological and conceptual exploration, asking what should be taken as primary in examining human dignity. Noting a particularly close relationship between contemporary uses of human dignity, international law, and human rights, this connection is treated as focal without assuming that it is definitive of the concept. The use of human dignity in public international law is a marker for understanding the moral, legal and political discourse of human dignity. A characteristic expression is found in the Preamble of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) whose rights “derive from the inherent dignity of the human person” and whose animating principle is “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family [as] the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” This assertion and others like it form a common reference point in contemporary literature on human dignity. Importantly, this ‘inherent dignity’ represents a potential bridge between a number of different ideas and ideals, namely freedom, justice and peace. Literature has a unique capacity to touch the hearts and minds and engage readers in a way that is distinctly different from political or academic texts. This paper argues for a rich understanding of human dignity, an understanding that cannot be reduced to rigid principles. Cultural forms, imagination, and fantasy employed in Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero allow us to see this richness.

Exact Moonlight Measurements Could Aid Earth-Observing Missions

A new telescope’s unprecedented study of subtle variations in lunar light could finally give Earth-facing satellites a common reference point for their observations.

Principles of economic union: An extension of John Rawls's theory of justice

AbstractIn this article I identify the principles of justice by which an economic union is to be constituted. For this purpose, I extend John Rawls's constructivist theory of justice to economically integrated societies. With regard to the principles identified, I defend a twofold claim. First, the principles of economic union generated by this extended procedure of construction can serve as common points of reference for the subjects of an economic union. Second, these principles cannot come into conflict with similarly constructed prior principles of social justice and international justice.

The misleading narrative of the canonical faculty productivity trajectory

A scientist may publish tens or hundreds of papers over a career, but these contributions are not evenly spaced in time. Sixty years of studies on career productivity patterns in a variety of fields suggest an intuitive and universal pattern: Productivity tends to rise rapidly to an early peak and then gradually declines. Here, we test the universality of this conventional narrative by analyzing the structures of individual faculty productivity time series, constructed from over 200,000 publications and matched with hiring data for 2,453 tenure-track faculty in all 205 PhD-granting computer science departments in the United States and Canada. Unlike prior studies, which considered only some faculty or some institutions, or lacked common career reference points, here we combine a large bibliographic dataset with comprehensive information on career transitions that covers an entire field of study. We show that the conventional narrative confidently describes only one-fifth of faculty, regardless of department prestige or researcher gender, and the remaining four-fifths of faculty exhibit a rich diversity of productivity patterns. To explain this diversity, we introduce a simple model of productivity trajectories and explore correlations between its parameters and researcher covariates, showing that departmental prestige predicts overall individual productivity and the timing of the transition from first- to last-author publications. These results demonstrate the unpredictability of productivity over time and open the door for new efforts to understand how environmental and individual factors shape scientific productivity.

Introduction

These three essays on distinct research areas and case studies cover a broad history of educational institutions in India, their focus on theatre and cultural education, and their role in creating citizens active in the public sphere and civic communities. The common point of reference for all the three essays is the historical transition from pre- to post-independence India, and they represent three dominant genres of Indian theatre practice: the amateur progressive theatre emerging out of sociopolitical movements; the State Drama School, which has remained at the core of the state's policy and vision of a national theatre; and college theatre, which comprises the field from which the National School of Drama sources its acting students, as well as new audiences for urban theatres.

Changes in Apparent Diffusion Coefficient of the Dominant Tumor During Dose-Painted Radiation Therapy and High Dose Rate Brachytherapy for Prostate Cancer

Dose escalation has successfully improved cancer outcomes for patients with localized prostate cancer. Targeting subprostatic regions of tumor burden for dose-intensification may further improve tumor control and reduce dose to surrounding normal tissues. Quantitative MRI may provide a clinically useful evaluation of early radiation response to enable the adaptation of dose. Our objective is to determine whether the ADC derived from diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) of prostate tumors may be used as a biomarker for evaluation of early radiation response and dose adaptation. Patients with biopsy proven prostate adenocarcinoma visualized on MRI prior to radiotherapy were recruited to participate in a prospective trial in which patients received 76 Gy in 38 fractions to the prostate and either an integrated boost (IB) (19 Gy/38#) or an HDR boost (10 Gy/1#) to the dominant tumor. Patients underwent endorectal coil multiparametric MRI (3T Verio, Siemens) at baseline and during week 6 of treatment. ADC was calculated from in-line processing of DWI (b values of 0, 100, 600, and 1000 s/mm2). Dominant tumors, prostate, and common reference points were defined on the baseline T2 weighted (T2w) image (Pinnacle). The prostate and common reference points were again defined on the week 6 T2w image. Deformable registration (Morpheus) was applied to the baseline prostate and reference contours to guide segmentation of the tumor volumes (no longer clearly visible) in the week 6 ADC maps. Volume of interest (VOI) voxel based histogram analysis of mean, skewness, and kurtosis were used to assess ADC response. Of 80 enrolled patients, the first 17 were analyzed. 8 patients received IB and 9 patients received HDR. Tumor volumes were small (baseline mean 2.0 cm3, 95% CI 1.6-2.9 cm3). For all 17 patients, there was a statistically significant increase in tumor ADC from baseline (mean 1.12x10-3 mm2/s, 95% CI 1.04-1.19 x10-3 mm2/s) to week 6 of treatment (mean 1.34x10-3 mm2/s, 95% CI 1.29-1.39 x10-3 mm2/s, p<0.001). Tumor ADC kurtosis increased significantly from 3.1 to 4.0 (95% CI 2.7-3.6 at baseline, 3.3-4.8 at week 6, p=0.04). Mean tumor ADC increased by 24.5% (95% CI 10-39%) in the IB-VMAT arm and 20% (95% CI 6-34%) in the VMAT+HDR arm (p=0.6). Our preliminary data confirm a statistically significant increase in tumor ADC during radiotherapy, worthy of further investigation. Complete analysis of the study cohort will elucidate relationships between early changes in tumor ADC and subsequent response to treatment.

The IAEA Radiotracer Biodistribution Template – A community resource for supporting the standardization and reporting of radionuclide pre-dosimetry data

Radionuclide absorbed-dose dosimetry is an active area of development and has the potential to positively impact molecular radiotherapies. At present, many of the operations required to perform dosimetry calculations are unstandardized and unestablished. While the current methodology allows reasonable dosimetry estimates to be derived and published, it can be difficult to understand, and reproduce, each others’ work. To help alleviate this we have identified the collection of biodistribution information as a key step in all internal dosimetry calculations, and present a template that can be used to standardize its documentation and reporting.A generalized biodistribution template entitled the IAEA Radiotracer Biodistribution Template (IAEA RaBiT) has been built and distributed for users performing biodistribution measurements in the community. The template enables robust recording of dosimetry-relevant information through standardization of details and their format. It has been designed to be simple and easy to use, and establish a structured recording of a common reference point in dosimetry operations – biodistribution data documentation. Improved documentation procedures may benefit organization of in house data, or be used to disseminate details throughout the community – for example to supplement dosimetry related publications. The standard format information may also enable the creation of new dosimetry related tools and protocols and support robust population databases.As dosimetry in nuclear medicine becomes more routinely applied in clinical applications, we need to develop the infrastructure for robustly handling large amounts of these data. Our IAEA RaBiT can be used as a standard format structure for data collection, organization, and dissemination.

Relationship between Coordinate Transformation Uncertainty and Arrangement of Common Reference Points in Large-Scale Metrology

Large-scale coordinate measurement frequently involves unifying coordinate frames of individual measurement systems by aligning two sets of common reference points, which is called coordinate transformation. During this transformation process, some uncertainty is introduced into the final measurement results from common points. This paper studies the relationship between this introduced uncertainty and common points in order to minimize it. First, an uncertainty estimation model of coordinate transformation is developed to quantify the introduced uncertainty. Then the relationship between the introduced uncertainty and the arrangement of the common points is simulationally and experimentally investigated and some feasible and efficient arrangements are proposed in view of minimizing it.

American Society of Functional Neuroradiology-Recommended fMRI Paradigm Algorithms for Presurgical Language Assessment.

Functional MR imaging is increasingly being used for presurgical language assessment in the treatment of patients with brain tumors, epilepsy, vascular malformations, and other conditions. The inherent complexity of fMRI, which includes numerous processing steps and selective analyses, is compounded by institution-unique approaches to patient training, paradigm choice, and an eclectic array of postprocessing options from various vendors. Consequently, institutions perform fMRI in such markedly different manners that data sharing, comparison, and generalization of results are difficult. The American Society of Functional Neuroradiology proposes widespread adoption of common fMRI language paradigms as the first step in countering this lost opportunity to advance our knowledge and improve patient care. A taskforce of American Society of Functional Neuroradiology members from multiple institutions used a broad literature review, member polls, and expert opinion to converge on 2 sets of standard language paradigms that strike a balance between ease of application and clinical usefulness. The taskforce generated an adult language paradigm algorithm for presurgical language assessment including the following tasks: Sentence Completion, Silent Word Generation, Rhyming, Object Naming, and/or Passive Story Listening. The pediatric algorithm includes the following tasks: Sentence Completion, Rhyming, Antonym Generation, or Passive Story Listening. Convergence of fMRI language paradigms across institutions offers the first step in providing a "Rosetta Stone" that provides a common reference point with which to compare and contrast the usefulness and reliability of fMRI data. From this common language task battery, future refinements and improvements are anticipated, particularly as objective measures of reliability become available. Some commonality of practice is a necessary first step to develop a foundation on which to improve the clinical utility of this field.