Famous Names Research Articles

Categorical priming of famous person recognition: A hitherto overlooked methodological factor can resolve a long-standing debate

The Burton, Bruce and Johnston [Burton, A. M., Bruce, V., & Johnston, R. A. (1990). Understanding face recognition with an interactive activation model. British Journal of Psychology, 81, 361–380] model of person recognition proposes that representations of known persons are connected by shared semantic attributes. This predicts that priming should be observed between persons from the same category, e.g. famous persons with the same occupation. Empirical investigations to date have produced mixed results, and comparison of methods suggests that priming based on shared occupation may have been suppressed by the presence of prime-target pairs representing a stronger relationship of close association. In the present experiment, 72 participants performed a familiarity decision to famous names preceded by close associates or members of the same occupational category. As predicted, categorical priming was observed in the group of participants for whom the same occupation prime-target pairs were presented before the close-associate pairs, but not in the group for whom the two types of relationship were intermixed. Associate priming was significant in both groups. These results are attributed to differing levels of processing of the primes, invoked by participants’ observation of the most salient prime-target relationship.

Seeing Sounds and Hearing Sights: The Influence of Prior Learning on Current Perception

It is well known that previous perceptual experiences alter subsequent perception, but the details of the neural underpinnings of this general phenomenon are still sketchy. Here, we ask whether previous experiences with an item (such as seeing a person's face) leads to the alteration of the neural correlates related to processing of the item as such, or whether it creates additional associative connections between such substrates and those activated during prior experience. To address this question, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to identify neural changes accompanying subjects' viewing of unfamiliar versus famous faces and hearing the names of unfamiliar versus famous names. We were interested in the nature of the involvement of auditory brain regions in the viewing of faces, and in the involvement of visual regions in the hearing of names. Evoked responses from MEG recordings for the names and faces conditions were localized to auditory and visual cortices, respectively. Unsurprisingly, peak activation strength of evoked responses was larger for famous versus nonfamous names within the superior temporal gyrus (STG), and was similar for famous and nonfamous faces in the occipital cortex. More relevant to the issue of experience on perception, peak activation strength in the STG was larger for viewed famous versus nonfamous faces, and peak activation within the occipital cortex was larger for heard famous versus nonfamous names. Critically, these experience-related responses were present within 150-250 msec of stimulus onset. These findings support the hypothesis that prior experiences may influence processing of faces and names such that perception encompasses more than what is imparted on the senses.

History and prospects of plant sexual reproduction congresses, the IASPRR and sexual plant reproduction

HistoryAs we enter the 21st year of the journal Sexual PlantReproduction, it seems both fitting and appropriate toconsider the genesis both of this journal and its parentorganization, the International Association for Sexual PlantReproduction Research (IASPRR)—particularly throughits much longer history of plant sexual reproduction con-gresses, informal interactions and this area of scientificpursuit as it is transformed in the modern era.Interestingly, the parent organization for the journal didnot formally exist until 2 years after Sexual Plant Repro-duction was first published in 1988. The IASPRR wasformally founded in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in1990 and since that time has represented scientists workingon various aspects of plant sexual reproduction rangingfrom molecular to structural levels. Nowadays, there arefrequent congresses and workshops all over the worldwhere scientists report their work on plant sexual repro-duction, from the local level to regional, national andinternational meetings. The congress series under the aus-pices of the IASPRR, however, is the only one with a longhistory and an exclusive focus on all aspects of sexual plantreproduction providing researchers around the globe with aunique opportunity to discuss most recent progress anddevelopments in the field. Additionally, there have beenperiodic Eastern European Plant Embryology congresses, asymposium series on Frontiers in Sexual Plant Reproduc-tion was initiated in 2000, as well as some other topicalcongresses of a more local nature. Increasingly, emergingmolecular data has made sexual plant reproduction a pop-ular topic at national and international botany and plantbiology conferences.The science of sexual plant reproduction has a longhistory that reaches beyond the 315 years interval sinceCamerarius uncovered the sexuality of plants (Zˇa´rsky´ andTupy´ 1995), passing 150 years of neglect before the dis-covery of gametes, and then a great period of exploration inthe 1800s concluding with the discovery of double fertil-ization in 1898 by Nawashin. It could be argued that ourtrue classical era diminished with the untimely death ofProf. Panchanan Maheshwari, but he was notably present atthe first congress in this series. In the same volume wherevan der Pluijm (1964) presented the first ultrastructuralfindings on degenerate synergid participation in receivingpollen tubes, Prof. Maheshwari asked astute questions onhis findings (see Linskens 1964). This modern era includedelectron microscopic findings and witnessed the rise ofmolecular biology to answer questions in plant repro-duction. Famous names and schools attended theseconferences that preceded the founding of IASPRR andconference proceedings chronicle the collected data andideas leading to concepts that sustain the science of today(Kapil 1967; Hesse 1987; Cresti and Linskens 1999).Over the last 50 years, the number of congresses hasincreased (Mulcahy et al. 1986; Ottaviano et al. 1992;Bednara 1996; Kuta 2005), and congresses, workshops andnewsletters relating to plant sexual reproduction havegradually increased to their current position. In the first half

Acceptance of the Mineralogical Society of America Award for 2007

It is an absolute honor to accept this year’s MSA award. In preparing this acceptance speech I looked at the list of previous recipients of this award and found it a very humbling experience to see my name alongside so many famous names. I can’t help feeling that my award must be the result of a fortunate clerical error! Now is a very exciting time to be working in the field of mineral magnetism, as new experimental and computational techniques allow us to tackle the key issue of magnetism at the nanometer scale. I have been extremely fortunate to be in the right place at the right time to take advantage of some of these techniques, and it is only with the hard work and dedication of my friends and colleagues that I am in a position to accept this award today. My introduction to mineral magnetism came from Andrew Putnis, whose undergraduate lectures taught me the …

The First Generation Reception of the Novels of Emile Zola in Britain and America: An Annotated Bibliography of English Language Responses to his Work, 1877-1902

Alma W. Byrd attempts to document Zola's nineteenth-century translation and reception in the English-speaking world: a worthwhile objective, since much of the evidence is buried in the archives of the transatlantic press. However, Byrd does little to facilitate further research. She fails to respond to important scholarship — such as Andrew King's work, published in 2004, on the English serialization of Au Bonheur des Dames — and her annotations offer minimal insight. Indeed, Byrd seems insufficiently acquainted with her material: for instance, an entry on ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1889) — the well-known dialogue which features a discussion of Zola — does not mention that its author is Oscar Wilde. Since she has nothing to say about Wilde, it is no surprise that Byrd is unable to contextualize the views of such rather less famous names as Emily Crawford, W. H. Gleadell, W. S. Lilly and H. Schutz Wilson. A prolix introduction quotes these and other similarly forgotten writers with reverence, but gives no sign of how or why their views on Zola mattered. The greatest flaw is the lack of an argument as to what constitutes a response to Zola's work. While Byrd's approach seems admirably holistic — she records, for example, a 40-page article that contains a single reference to Zola — a truly comprehensive bibliography would require far more than 170 pages; with no explanation of method, we are left guessing the rules for inclusion. (In general, Byrd privileges prestigious literary periodicals, and ignores the rich discussions of Zola which took place in the newspaper press.) This bibliography will not harm a researcher seeking information about Zola's reception, but its benefit is doubtful. There is too narrow a range of material, and what there is can be unreliable: beware misquoted titles and inaccurate dates.

Playgoing in Manhattan

Playgoing in Manhattan Ed Minus (bio) The 2007–8 Broadway season was framed by Lincoln Center’s productions of two of the least familiar plays by two of the world’s most famous dramatists. Early fall brought us Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and early summer a brief engagement of the National Theater of Scotland’s confrontation with The Bacchae by Euripides (a play so rarely performed that my computer thinks I don’t know how to spell it). As is true of most Lincoln Center offerings, no apparent expense had been spared in the mounting of Cymbeline. And yet the highly professional direction, casting, acting, sets, and costumes combined to blur the identity of the play further. Although it is most often referred to as a romance, unmistakable elements of comedy, tragedy, history, and myth crop up all over the place. On the basis of this version (and a prior rereading), I would think that almost any producer/director trying to come to conceptual terms with the play would be sorely tempted to do it as farce. I cannot easily imagine any other way to keep it from riding off in all directions. Cymbeline comes late in the canon, at a time when Shakespeare was less governed by traditional forms and perhaps less intent on limpidity of style. I have no complaint about American actors doing Shakespeare in (phonologically) American English; but the fact remains that British actors, for whatever reason—education, training—tend to be more accomplished at making accessible the syntactic sophistications of the late style. In Lincoln Center’s almost exclusively American cast, John Cullum (in the smallish title role) achieved notably greater mastery of the language than most of his fellows—hence greater presence and credibility. Although excessive reverence for the Bard may have been a contributing factor in the limitations of Cymbeline as staged in 2007, neither reverence nor tradition nor theatrical horse sense got in the way of the mishmashing of The Bacchae. Here Dionysus has become a sort of rock (or rap or hip-hop) idol given to self-indulgent flirting with the audience; and the mænads are his backup group of girl singers in bright red dresses of assorted styles. While it may be true that celebrities have become our contemporary gods, they do not as a rule collude in the dismemberment of even their fiercest critics; they may be given to trashing hotel rooms now and then—but not whole cities, so far as I know. Nor can one readily envision even the most frenzied of girl singers “suckling the wild-wolf’s cub” or making cosmetic use of serpents or ripping open with her bare hands a live calf or heifer (at least not in public, at what was supposed to be a picnic). Still, if the music and choreography had been less conventional and less insistent; if every dramatic scene had not been immediately undercut by musical commentary, reprise, [End Page 155] or irrelevance; if the main set had looked less like a passageway on a cruise ship—then one might have felt something other than profound sympathy for the actors, several of whom were admirable. Even Alan Cumming, woefully miscast as Dionysus, has a strong voice; and in the penultimate scene Paola Dionisotti as Agave and Ewan Hooper as Cadmus delivered their stunning and heartbreaking lines with the authority and devotion often in abeyance in this rendering of a brilliantly dramatic and brutally dark play. So the season began with a king and ended with a god; and in between famous names not ordinarily or primarily associated with the theater appeared in the ads and on the bills around Manhattan’s rialto and its far-flung outposts: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mark Twain, Spinoza, Darwin, Seurat, Gauguin, Hemingway. Unfortunately none of these large reputations was enhanced as a result of theatrical recruitment; on the other hand none suffered irreparable damage either. From the first moments of Tolstoy’s unaccountably neglected play The Power of Darkness, I felt myself immersed in the bleak and desperate lives of the Russian peasants helplessly trapped by their lots in life and by their own passions. Similarly Hemingway’s rarely seen play The Fifth Column...

How we are: photographing Britain from the 1840s to the present

This is the first book to tell the story of British photography as a coherent whole, from the pioneers of the early nineteenth century to photographers today who may display their images on websites, as projections, on computer screens or on i-Pods. The authors have travelled the length and breadth of the UK, researching both well-known and forgotten ouevres and uncovering many lost masterpieces. As well as the famous names - William Henry Fox Talbot, Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, Bill Brandt, Madame Yeronde, Angus McBean, Susan Lipper and Tom Hunter among them - they have examined post-cards, family albums, photographic illustrations in books, medical photographs, war-time propoganda and social documents. Previous imbalances in the available history of photography have been corrected, not least by the inclusion of women photographers and photographers from Britain's ethnic minorities. Through their exhaustive research the authors demonstrate the extraordinary range and diversity of roles that photography has played in British cultural life over the past one and half centuries.

Event-related potentials indicate different processes to mediate categorical and associative priming in person recognition.

Whether representations of people are stored in associative networks based on co-occurrence or are stored in terms of more abstract semantic categories is a controversial question. In the present study, participants performed fame decisions to unfamiliar or famous target faces (Experiment 1) or names (Experiment 2), which were primed, either by highly associated celebrity names or by names from the same occupational category, or were unprimed. Reaction times and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Reaction times yielded significant priming effects for both associated and same category conditions. ERPs to targets in the associated condition were significantly more positive than were ERPs in all other conditions over central and parietal areas (300-600 ms; N400 priming effect). By contrast, a more posterior effect was found for categorical priming. These findings held for both cross-domain (Experiment 1) and within-domain conditions (Experiment 2). Results (a) demonstrate behavioral and ERP evidence for categorical priming in person recognition, consistent with the assumption that shared semantic information units can mediate semantic priming, and (b) suggest that associative and categorical priming are based on mechanisms that are at least partially different.

The importance of the Subotica Faculty of Law in the legal life of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia

The work shows the role of the Faculty of Law of Subotica, during the short time of its existence in the legal, cultural and social life of the first common state of southern Slavs. After the introduction to the legal tradition in Vojvodina, the paper presents the facts gathered from the rich archive of the Faculty of Law of Subotica, stored in the Historical Archive of Subotica. Particular attention has been put on the organization of courses which, in that time, aimed at maintaining the establishment of legal system of the new state and broadening of the national awareness, and on professors as well, taking into account that some of them became the most famous names of Serbian legal thought.

How famous names originated: Hatching a Penguin: The start of paperback populism

How famous names originated: Hatching a Penguin: The start of paperback populism

I The Inscriptional Beginnings of Literary Epigram

As was seen in the Introduction, the generic identity of epigram is governed by two senses of the Greek preposition epi: an epigram may be physically inscribed ‘on’ an object, or ‘on the subject of’ an object (or something else: a person, an event). This chapter is concerned with epigrams physically inscribed on a stone or other object. In spite of the fact that inscribed epigram comes first chronologically (beginning as early as the eighth century BCE), includes some of the most famous lines in Greek literature (such as those above), and numbers famous names such as Simonides among its exponents, it can sometimes be treated as the poor relation of literary epigram, which had its heyday in the Hellenistic period (see Chapter 2). There is a perception that epigram comes into its own once it has ‘escaped’, as it were, from its stone or other physical medium, and is thus at liberty to use its words to create a virtual object in the reader's mind (or not, as the poet chooses).

How famous names originated: How McGraw and Hill were brought together

How famous names originated: How McGraw and Hill were brought together

Guarantees for the success frequency of an algorithm for finding Dodgson-election winners

In the year 1876 the mathematician Charles Dodgson, who wrote fiction under the now more famous name of Lewis Carroll, devised a beautiful voting system that has long fascinated political scientists. However, determining the winner of a Dodgson election is known to be complete for the Θ2 p level of the polynomial hierarchy. This implies that unless P=NP no polynomial-time solution to this problem exists, and unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses to NP the problem is not even in NP. Nonetheless, we prove that when the number of voters is much greater than the number of candidates—although the number of voters may still be polynomial in the number of candidates—a simple greedy algorithm very frequently finds the Dodgson winners in such a way that it “knows” that it has found them, and furthermore the algorithm never incorrectly declares a nonwinner to be a winner.

The Secret Joys of Chinon

Far away from the shining poles of France's two major wine regions, Bordeaux and Burgundy, Chinon is hidden away in the Loire Valley. Its wines are just as secret. Are they intellectuals' wines, as Jules Romains wrote, rife with unexpected savors, or are they simple country quaffers? However the wines of Chinon are seen, they must first be seen at all. And once they are on the oenophile's horizon, they require a certain type of gaze. In a world that is witnessing an increasingly technical approach to wine, both in wine tasting and wine making, Chinon's Cabernet Franc charms are atavistic rather than "Parker friendly." Chinon is a bumpy path rather than a streamlined highway, and for those sensitive to its treasures, that is worth its weight in famous names, critics' points and high-alcohol "fruit-bombs."

Abul Kassim A1 Zahrawi (936 -1013 AD)

“Abul Kassim A1 Zahrawi” known in the west as “Abul Casis” was born in Cordoba in 936 AD. He made a famous name as a brilliant surgeon in the era of A1 Andalus (Muslim Spain). He wrote several books including a large reference book in the methodology of surgery, called Al Tasrif. He affirmed first of all that there is no barrier between Medicine and Surgery, i.e. between “Cutting” experience and knowledge of clinical and functional aspects of a disease. This is in contrast to medieval surgeons of his time whose job was to cut and chop parts and organs with little understanding of the disease problem they were treating. He recommended certainty of diagnosis before any intervention and developed many instruments. He critically analyzed various aspects of fractures and listed different methods of extraction and dis-location of arrow tips (a common injury in his time). His tech-niques were used for centuries. Instrument of traction for the treatment of dislocation and fractures are still displayed at the “Atger Museum”, Montpellier, France.

Temporally Graded Activation of Neocortical Regions in Response to Memories of Different Ages

The temporally graded memory impairment seen in many neurobehavioral disorders implies different neuroanatomical pathways and/or cognitive mechanisms involved in storage and retrieval of memories of different ages. A dynamic interaction between medial-temporal and neocortical brain regions has been proposed to account for memory's greater permanence with time. Despite considerable debate concerning its time-dependent role in memory retrieval, medial-temporal lobe activity has been well studied. However, the relative participation of neocortical regions in recent and remote memory retrieval has received much less attention. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrate robust, temporally graded signal differences in posterior cingulate, right middle frontal, right fusiform, and left middle temporal regions in healthy older adults during famous name identification from two disparate time epochs. Importantly, no neocortical regions demonstrated greater response to older than to recent stimuli. Our results suggest a possible role of these neocortical regions in temporally dating items in memory and in establishing and maintaining memory traces throughout the lifespan. Theoretical implications of these findings for the two dominant models of remote memory functioning (Consolidation Theory and Multiple Trace Theory) are discussed.

Strategic Collaborations–Essence of Survival

Traditional organization and management structures, inherited from the Industrial Revolution, are no longer adequate for the 21st century. They were designed for an era when product and process life cycles often lasted for decades, but rapidly advancing technology now has collapsed life cycles in most industries to just a few years. Corporate survival, let alone sustainable and profitable growth, will increasingly depend upon intensive, continuous development of next-generation technologies. Management, consequently, has become the management of continuous change--in other words, innovate, automate or evaporate! The opportunity for continuous innovation is significantly greater today because in the early 1980s the U.S. put in place a unique environment conducive to investments in higher-risk, very-early-stage product and process developments. This involved creating strong capital gains incentives for investment, legislating modifications of the antitrust laws that allowed large companies to collaborate in R&D and manufacturing programs, providing private sector access to about $100 billion in advanced government-funded technology previously bottled up in bureaucratic processes, and creating specific incentives for increased quality and productivity. The reduction in the capital gains tax to 20 percent (it had been 49 percent in 1979), almost overnight generated several hundred million dollars in venture capital and jump-started new business formations four fold to about 800,000 per year. Since 1982, 600,000 to 800,000 new businesses have incorporated each year in the United States, even during recessions. The direct result has been the astonishing incorporation since 1982 of some 23 million new small businesses, the generation of 87 million new jobs (offsetting 40 million jobs lost by big businesses over the same period), the creation of 94 percent of all household wealth, and the production of about 70 percent of all the growth in the gross world product. Europeans have called this historically unprecedented phenomenon the American Miracle. I attribute this loss of 40 million jobs to the fact that entrenched bureaucracies in many large firms are often resistant to change, and that their intrapreneurial innovation processes have in many cases become ineffective. This may help explain why 80 percent of the famous corporate names originally among the Fortune 100 are no longer listed (1). Moreover, at the current rate of attrition, many of those now listed may also disappear. Fortunately, there exists an important synergism between entrepreneurial small businesses that are developing next-generation technologies and large smokestack businesses, which are in urgent need of renewal. Small businesses often lack access to critical skills and resources, as well as to early-stage risk capital that large businesses can provide. As I have written before in these pages, the R&D Limited Partnership model of organization and management, originally developed in the early 1980s by the Technology Office in the U.S. Department of Commerce to allow large businesses to collaborate without antitrust concerns, provides an excellent format for such synergistic collaborations (2). Such partnerships can be structured outside the corporate structure, insulated from bureaucratic impediments, and provide a process for the large companies (as Limited Partners) to access the next-generation technologies which they need for survival but are unable to generate internally. The Strategic Alliance Model The R&D Limited Partnership model, which was the basis for the 1984 CRADA legislation, initially was developed to allow large companies to collaborate in developing next-generation technologies without antitrust concerns. Sematech was organized on this basis, and later Genentech was the first to use it for funding development of its gamma interferon and growth hormone products. …

“What do you know about Ho Chi Minh?” Italian norms of proper name comprehension

Ninety-eight healthy participants were examined with a new test of Famous Name Comprehension which, in the framework of a serial model of person processing, sequentially assessed Name Recognition (i.e., the ability to classify items as familiar or unfamiliar) and Person Identification (i.e., the ability to provide biographical knowledge of recognised items). Names were presented in a written format. A perfectly equivalent face version of the test allowed a comparison of familiarity and identification of people from name and from face input. Furthermore, the effect of the "age" of the items, i.e. the time elapsed from the presumed first exposure to the stimulus to the time of testing, was also investigated. Normative data are provided. Education was the only significant variable for recognition, while education, age and gender turned out to be significant for identification. Recognition was significantly better with name than with face input, while on identification names and faces did not differ significantly. "Oldest" items were both recognised and identified significantly worse than recent ones. The results of face-name comparison are interpreted in terms of the different opportunities to be exposed to names and faces, the relevance of visuoperceptual attributes linked to faces and the evidence of shared knowledge from different inputs. The relative advantage of recent celebrities supports the semantic characterisation of knowledge of famous people.

Flicker Alley: Cecil Court and the Emergence of the British Film Industry

Cecil Court is a small pedestrian passageway in the London Borough of Westminster. Under its more famous name of Flicker Alley, it is also the mythic birthplace and romantic heart of the early British film industry. This essay sets aside romantic myths and adopts the economic theory,of agglomeration, using the film businesses moving in and out of Cecil Court as a case study to demonstrate the changing patterns within the industry. In doing so it charts the growth patterns and expansion of the British film industry from 1897 to 1911. It shows its development from its origins,in equipment manufacture, through to production and finally to rental and cinema building and outfitting, marking the transition from its small-scale artisan-led beginnings into a large and complex network of distinct but interlocking film businesses.

How famous names originated: Chambers on Chambers “My own commencement in business”

How famous names originated: Chambers on Chambers “My own commencement in business”