Interesting Stuff Research Articles

The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Jonathan Senchyne

Reviewed by: The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Jonathan Senchyne Alexandra Socarides JONATHAN SENCHYNE The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. xiv+194 pp. Long before Jonathan Senchyne published The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), I knew him as the nineteenth-century paper expert. Whenever I had a question about paper, I went to him, and whenever somebody I knew was thinking about paper, I’d ask them if they had talked to him. You might think that this is a small world–people who care about paper–but just a few months ago, a hybrid panel called “Interesting Stuff! Techniques and Approaches to Research with Paper” was held at Harvard University, and the event organizer reports that over a hundred people were in attendance. Why, you might ask, are so many people drawn to thinking and talking about paper? Senchyne’s book helps us answer this question, as it posits paper as a substance both around and within which so much happens. In literary studies, we are always pitching one thing against another: content/form, aesthetics/ideology, public/private, sound/sense. On the one hand, the very presence of paper invites more of these: material text/alphabetic text, bibliographic code/linguistic code, substrate/inscription. In other words, the very presence of paper as a subject of analysis forces us to think about the paper itself versus what the paper holds. Although he acknowledges that many people have been tempted to read paper in this way, Senchyne’s approach to paper is rooted in his desire to undo such a dichotomy. In his words: “Paper is the thin plane where presence and meaning, the ontic and mimetic, the bibliographic and the linguistic cohere and become mutually constitutive” (3). Or, later, “The way paper cuts across, or under, as it were, the division between manuscript and print dissolves the hold of that division on the mind” (19). Thinking about paper in this way sets Senchyne up to challenge theories of the print public sphere that depend on such binaries, arguing, eventually, against Habermas’s limited inclusion of public sphere subjects, since Senchyne shows that considering paper allows us to think instead about “a more diverse range of actors, [End Page 40] many of whom are women and laborers” (29). Paying attention to paper is, in this sense, a transformative experience on multiple levels. The opening chapter of The Intimacy of Paper provides the reader with everything they need to know about how paper was made in America between 1690 and 1867, and simply for this reason alone this book is an incredibly valuable contribution and will be used by a variety of different kinds of scholars for years to come. This period of rag paper production can be split into two periods: 1690–1817, when rag paper was made by hand, and 1817–1867, when rag paper was made by machine. Then, in 1867, “a wood-based pulp replaced a rag-based pulp as the primary ingredient in the majority of paper making” (12) and “ways of writing about one’s relation to paper changed markedly” (13). During this long rag paper period, an “intimacy” of, within, and because of paper is possible precisely because the traces of people who brought it into existence–the people who handled, collected, and worked with the rags–are present within it. And, as this book goes on to prove, literary texts that feature paper and papermaking bear this out. On the one hand, this intimacy is personal, since “writing about rag paper animates thought about readers’ sensual relationships with material texts, revealing similarities in ways of writing and feeling” (4), and, on the other hand, it is political, as Senychne argues that “rag paper drew people together into recognizably political, even national, affiliation before it circulated and was read as a printed text, or even as a precondition of a printed text’s circulation” (37). Once we understand that paper is not subsumed by meaning-making, and that its very presence in the lives of...

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Summa quadripartita that Descartes Never Wrote

Roger Ariew’s new book, Descartes and the First Cartesians will not be a methodological surprise for those who already read his previous work, Descartes and the Last Scholastics, as well as its expanded version, Descartes Among the Scholastics. But Descartes and the First Cartesians not only revisits interesting stuff, it also presents new material and does so in a new way. To put it bluntly there are at least two novelties in Descartes and the First Cartesians. First, it takes into account not only scholastics, but as the very title of the book indicates, the “First Cartesians”: Ariew’s heroes here are Jacques Du Roure, Antoine Le Grand, and Pierre-Sylvain Regis. the second novelty of Descartes and the First Cartesians, amounts to highlighting the idea that philosophy should be presented in textbooks, that is, as summae quadripartitae. Because of this idea, Ariew applies the category “First Cartesians” not so much to the Cartesians who were the first to follow Descartes’ doctrine from a chronological point of view, as to those who were the first to carry out Descartes’ unfinished project of writing a textbook in Latin.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Summa quadripartita that Descartes Never Wrote

Roger Ariew’s new book, Descartes and the First Cartesians will not be a methodological surprise for those who already read his previous work, Descartes and the Last Scholastics, as well as its expanded version, Descartes Among the Scholastics. But Descartes and the First Cartesians not only revisits interesting stuff, it also presents new material and does so in a new way. To put it bluntly there are at least two novelties in Descartes and the First Cartesians. First, it takes into account not only scholastics, but as the very title of the book indicates, the “First Cartesians”: Ariew’s heroes here are Jacques Du Roure, Antoine Le Grand, and Pierre-Sylvain Regis. the second novelty of Descartes and the First Cartesians, amounts to highlighting the idea that philosophy should be presented in textbooks, that is, as summae quadripartitae. Because of this idea, Ariew applies the category “First Cartesians” not so much to the Cartesians who were the first to follow Descartes’ doctrine from a chronological point of view, as to those who were the first to carry out Descartes’ unfinished project of writing a textbook in Latin.

The NHS in 1991: Parallels with today

of ministers and NHS leaders. It took quite a while to work out what was happening. The parallel with today is the result of the Five Year Forward View. By stating, virtually for the first time in the history of the NHS, that the structural arrangements no longer have to be the same everywhere, a clutch of different ways of doing things—the new models of care—are being tried and permitted. From apparently total devolution of the health and care budget in Manchester and Cornwall; to GPs and the hospital in Northumbria seeking to turn the latter into an accountable care organisation; to multispeciality community providers in Kent and Birmingham; to other ways of trying to bring the primary and acute systems together elsewhere. In other words, the really interesting stuff, the work that may shape the way the NHS functions in future, is out there on the ground. In 1991, the centre was distinctly nervous about how the new freedoms would be used, and in some cases— notably London—rapidly pulled the new freedoms back for fear of the effect they would have. This time round the various bits of the centre that Lansley’s legislation created, are struggling to work out just how far they can— statutorily or otherwise—let go to let the new models of care emerge. And there, probably, the parallel ends. One huge difference is that in 1991 the reforms were lubricated by cash to make sure the purchaserprovider split did not crash and burn on day one. This time around, providers are projecting big deficits and a mere £200 million has been allocated so far to a transformation fund to help the innovators get there. Huge amounts depend on the outcome of the spending review now underway—how much at what speed does the NHS get? How much does social care? Will the double counting of shifting NHS cash into the Better Care Fund continue? Or, despite the political commitment to eliminating the deficit primarily through spending cuts, will there be sufficient cash to allow a tolerable settlement for each? Do these new models of care signal— if not necessarily the complete end of the purchaser-provider split—a pretty radical reshaping of it, as Sir David Nicholson suggested in his formal lecture for NHS Providers last month? The answer to that lies in the diversity being attempted locally, as well as in the decisions that will be made centrally over the coming months. BJHCM Nick Timmins, senior fellow at the Institute for Government and the King’s Fund, compares the NHS reforms of 1991 to those ongoing today The NHS in 1991: Parallels with today

Play the Music, not the Instrument

None

Revenge of the Optimum Currency Area

Revenge of the Optimum Currency Area

The Temptations of Theory

When students of religion are tempted to theorize, they are more apt to spread confusion than to get things right. In Believing and Acting (2012), Scott Davis offers philosophical therapy for the resulting perplexities. There is no more instructive methodological essay in the field. Because the temptations Davis identifies are real, any would-be theorist of religion, society, or culture would be well advised to take his diagnoses seriously. “Understanding religion,” according to Davis, “requires nothing more than the sensitive and imaginative reading of human phenomena informed by the best available historical narrative.” The study of religion is a tangled garden in need of “judicious pruning and weeding” (2012, 3). In some cases, the prudent gardener will need only to reshape something that goes by the name of “theory.” Davis praises Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz, and Wayne Proudfoot for freeing earlier research programs of their theoretical excesses. These are Davis’s model gardeners, the heroes of “the pragmatic turn” he recommends. What links the three together, he argues, is that they borrow their pruning hooks from the same shed—the pragmatic philosophical tradition initiated by C. S. Peirce.1 The book has villains as well as heroes. In “cognitive studies and the postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion,” Davis finds nothing worth saving. He concludes that they “should probably be uprooted altogether” (2012, 4). In somewhat different ways, these programs fail to learn what pragmatism has to teach about studying human beings as rational agents. The lessons that figure most heavily in Davis’s critical project come from Donald Davidson.2 While I mostly agree with Davis on what those lessons are and admire the acumen with which he explicates them, I worry that he is too quick to dismiss some research programs as worthless. If we are not careful here, something valuable will end up in the compost heap. Davis argues that Peirce was basically right about how inquiry works. Inquiry is the activity in which human beings engage to resolve their doubts about what is the case and what to do. Like other things we do, it is something we can do well or poorly. Properly conducted, inquiry is part of living well.

Automatic tag recommendation algorithms for social recommender systems

The emergence of Web 2.0 and the consequent success of social network Web sites such as Del.icio.us and Flickr introduce us to a new concept called social bookmarking, or tagging. Tagging is the action of connecting a relevant user-defined keyword to a document, image, or video, which helps the user to better organize and share their collections of interesting stuff. With the rapid growth of Web 2.0, tagged data is becoming more and more abundant on the social network Web sites. An interesting problem is how to automate the process of making tag recommendations to users when a new resource becomes available.In this article, we address the issue of tag recommendation from a machine learning perspective. From our empirical observation of two large-scale datasets, we first argue that the user-centered approach for tag recommendation is not very effective in practice. Consequently, we propose two novel document-centered approaches that are capable of making effective and efficient tag recommendations in real scenarios. The first, graph-based, method represents the tagged data in two bipartite graphs, (document, tag) and (document, word), then finds document topics by leveraging graph partitioning algorithms. The second, prototype-based, method aims at finding the most representative documents within the data collections and advocates a sparse multiclass Gaussian process classifier for efficient document classification. For both methods, tags are ranked within each topic cluster/class by a novel ranking method. Recommendations are performed by first classifying a new document into one or more topic clusters/classes, and then selecting the most relevant tags from those clusters/classes as machine-recommended tags.Experiments on real-world data from Del.icio.us, CiteULike, and BibSonomy examine the quality of tag recommendation as well as the efficiency of our recommendation algorithms. The results suggest that our document-centered models can substantially improve the performance of tag recommendations when compared to the user-centered methods, as well as topic models LDA and SVM classifiers.

Is it actually possible to measure knowledge sharing?

This Community Note describes the discussion around the question ‘Is it actually possible to measure knowledge sharing?’ which took place on the emailing list of KM4Dev in the summer of 2010. This led to an active discussion with some 76 responses covering a wide range of topics: knowledge sharing and behavioural change, complexity theory, subjectivity and possible indicators, before arriving at reflection on the very nature and value of scientific exploration. Participants were members of the KM4Dev community and were largely knowledge management practitioners in development. I have to say – I am loving this discussion thread and every day eagerly open my hotmail in anticipation of what new interesting stuff I get to read about. (Posted by Amina Singh on 16 August 2010)

Sapere Aude!

Sapere Aude!

Useful tool for equine practitioners

THIS book sets out to give an experienced practitioner readily accessible summary information, and I found it possible to get significant information on almost anything that I could think of;...

Cannibal Joyce

Reviewed by: Cannibal Joyce John Gordon (bio) Cannibal Joyce, by Thomas Jackson Rice, with a foreword by Sebastian D. G. Knowles. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. 210 pp. $59.95. Reviewing Richard Adams's best-selling Watership Down for The Atlantic, Phoebe Adams spoke highly of the author's talents as a teller of adventure stories but wondered why he had chosen to confuse things with a cast of characters "inexplicably camouflaged as rabbits."1 Thomas Jackson Rice's Cannibal Joyce is a collection of smart, provocative, wide-ranging essays on matters having to do with Joyce. Good for it, and for all such. What it is not is a book about Joyce and cannibals. Cannibalism is certainly one of the many subjects considered in its pages but one that competes for attention with, for instance, the histories of Berlitz Schools, condoms, television, and much else. The problem is not so much that the title is a red herring for the reader—who really cares that The Merchant of Venice is not really about the merchant of Venice or that A Midsummer Night's Dream is set in May?—but that it was apparently one for the author as well. The book's weakest chapter is the first, precisely because it attempts to set up cannibalism as a master trope for all to come; and its weakest moments thereafter are those that try to make good on the promise by corkscrewing the meaning of "cannibalism" into odd shapes so as to insert it into spaces where it has no business being. If, like me, you are familiar with some of these chapters in their original forms, you cannot help but notice a kind of "and now a word from our sponsor" rhythm to the way the very word "cannibal" has been, as Stephen would say, "spatchcocked" onto patches of text once innocent of its presence (U 9.991). In short, and in spite of the title, this is far from being what Hollywood scriptwriters call a high-concept project. But high-concept is not everything. The digressive, the free-form, the shaggy-doggish have their claims too. With Cannibal Joyce, the best policy is to dispense with any lingering rage for order on your part or the author's and settle down to enjoy a ramble through a lot of interesting stuff more or less related to Joyce and his times. Rice is curiously learned. In accumulating material for this book, he has followed where his curiosities led him, and, because he is a determined fellow with an interesting mind and a knack for tracking those curiosities down through library stacks and Google rabbit holes, one is usually happy to follow after. Symptomatically, some two-thirds of the bibliography consists of non-Joycean sources; a typical list of entries in the index is [End Page 585] this one, under "V": "Valensi, Georges; Valéry, Paul; Vampirism; Vico, Giambattista; Victor Talking Machine Company; Virgil." Of the six items, only "Vico, Giambattista" sounds an expected note. Accordingly, the main virtue of Cannibal Joyce is that it surprises. Think doctoral dissertation, and then imagine its opposite. The close readings of Joyce, when they appear, are, on the whole, of very high quality, but the real appeal of the book is the background noise churning behind those readings, noise from which the subject of Joyce fades in and out like a song from a staticky radio. At times, it seems to be daring the reader to protest: "All very interesting, Mr. Rice, but exactly what does this have to do with the issue at hand?" The section on Tom Swifties is as good an example as any. Is anybody out there old enough to remember the Tom Swifties fad of the early sixties? ("You may take the prisoner down, said Tom condescendingly"; "She loves me, she loves me not, said Tom lackadaisically.") Rice gives us some entertaining examples, discusses their American genesis (Minneapolis, believe it or not), and points out that Tom Swifties got their name from the immensely popular Tom Swift series of boys' books, whose hero's specialty was inventing things, like television, well ahead of the technological curve. To which...

More on scholarship in management history: moving the “interesting stuff” from the bottom of the page to the top

More on scholarship in management history: moving the “interesting stuff” from the bottom of the page to the top

Architects, Bandits and Knights

Some quotations: «A new disaster has been added to pollution of the unique lake–it is cottage development of the coast». «The trouble is that the projects are realized without even being seen by architectural society. Including the objects on the coast of Lake Baikal. We took Sergey Kiselev to see one of such objects, it was a halfcompleted building. Like other Moscow colleagues he admitted that it was an obviously conceited excess. In general almost every object recently built in Listvyanka represents a burst of excess… What is happening here with architecture and urban planning is absolutely inadmissible». «Current capital development at Lake Baikal visually pollutes the coast, bringing alien elements to the landscape and view (for example, the cottages of pseudorussian style and cabin cars)». Acting as a client of architectural and design project Russian mafia has a number of individual characteristics. Firstly, an ordinary businessman is childishly confident that the architect's (or designer's) work is a very interesting and fascinating stuff. He believes that this work gives lots of pleasure and entirely consists of creative discoveries and triumph. By the way already ancient Greeks considered creativity to be a sort of Eros. So the mafia client is eager to take part in such a pleasant thing. In spite of expressing his wishes clearly and giving the way to the professional, the client strives for being both a participant and a coauthor of the project. At best he is constantly bothering the architect with many pieces of advice and «valuable suggestions ». At worst the project, which is already finished, approved and even paid, is altered by the client during the process of its realization, while the author is not even informed about it. The building completed, the shocked architect sees a monster that has arisen from his project as a result of «the editing». Secondly, any typical Mafioso finds it very important to persistently exhibit his aggressiveness and readiness to start the struggle end even to die. The cult of physical strength and defiance of danger is one of fundamental principles of the mafia corporate culture. The client's drive to provoke a quarrel and to explain «who is the boss» makes the relations between the architect and the client very peculiar. Thirdly, a productive labour interdiction is another important feature of traditional mafia culture. This view is a variation of the famous «idle class» ethos brilliantly described by Veblen Thorstein in his classic work. The ethics of the members of the idle class, which is also called by Veblen a «predatory class», forbids them to work or to be involved in any productive labour. Instead it allows them to fight, to govern the state and to go in for sport. From the point of view of the predatory culture there are only two types of people. The first one includes warriors, fighters and bandits, they arouse «fair» emotions of anger and fury as rivals or companionsinarms on the field of battle. The second type is represented by bastards, brutes and plough cattle, they are worth nothing but contempt. Most citizens' opinion on the building is of no importance. Only what the respected people of the same type, that is mafia «good guys», say (or think) about it is taken into account. The tendencies to erect such incongruous and ugly buildings on the coast of Lake Baikal can hardly be stopped easily and quickly. Those tendencies have very deep roots. They are based, though in a perverted and wry manner, on the old traditions of Siberian culture. So it is senseless to struggle, to forbid and to show anger and contempt towards an uncultured wilful client. As well as it is no good to have «what can I do for you?» attitude and to follow all the whims of the predatory class.

Архитекторы, бандиты и рыцари

Some quotations: «A new disaster has been added to pollution of the unique lake–it is cottage development of the coast». «The trouble is that the projects are realized without even being seen by architectural society. Including the objects on the coast of Lake Baikal. We took Sergey Kiselev to see one of such objects, it was a halfcompleted building. Like other Moscow colleagues he admitted that it was an obviously conceited excess. In general almost every object recently built in Listvyanka represents a burst of excess… What is happening here with architecture and urban planning is absolutely inadmissible».«Current capital development at Lake Baikal visually pollutes the coast, bringing alien elements to the landscape and view (for example, the cottages of pseudorussian style and cabin cars)».Acting as a client of architectural and design project Russian mafia has a number of individual characteristics.Firstly, an ordinary businessman is childishly confident that the architect's (or designer's) work is a very interesting and fascinating stuff. He believes that this work gives lots of pleasure and entirely consists of creative discoveries and triumph.By the way already ancient Greeks considered creativity to be a sort of Eros. So the mafia client is eager to take part in such a pleasant thing. In spite of expressing his wishes clearly and giving the way to the professional, the client strives for being both a participant and a coauthor of the project. At best he is constantly bothering the architect with many pieces of advice and «valuable suggestions ». At worst the project, which is already finished, approved and even paid, is altered by the client during the process of its realization, while the author is not even informed about it. The building completed, the shocked architect sees a monster that has arisen from his project as a result of «the editing».Secondly, any typical Mafioso finds it very important to persistently exhibit his aggressiveness and readiness to start the struggle end even to die. The cult of physical strength and defiance of danger is one of fundamental principles of the mafia corporate culture. The client's drive to provoke a quarrel and to explain «who is the boss» makes the relations between the architect and the client very peculiar.Thirdly, a productive labour interdiction is another important feature of traditional mafia culture. This view is a variation of the famous «idle class» ethos brilliantly described by Veblen Thorstein in his classic work. The ethics of the members of the idle class, which is also called by Veblen a «predatory class», forbids them to work or to be involved in any productive labour. Instead it allows them to fight, to govern the state and to go in for sport. From the point of view of the predatory culture there are only two types of people. The first one includes warriors, fighters and bandits, they arouse «fair» emotions of anger and fury as rivals or companionsinarms on the field of battle. The second type is represented by bastards, brutes and plough cattle, they are worth nothing but contempt. Most citizens' opinion on the building is of no importance. Only what the respected people of the same type, that is mafia «good guys», say (or think) about it is taken into account.The tendencies to erect such incongruous and ugly buildings on the coast of Lake Baikal can hardly be stopped easily and quickly. Those tendencies have very deep roots. They are based, though in a perverted and wry manner, on the old traditions of Siberian culture. So it is senseless to struggle, to forbid and to show anger and contempt towards an uncultured wilful client. As well as it is no good to have «what can I do for you?» attitude and to follow all the whims of the predatory class.

It's What You Have

It’s What You Have Amy Sumerton You are a writer, and so you write what you know. You never knew that you wanted to be a mother. You know about being a nanny; you nannied for a little boy for a year and still regularly baby-sit for him and his half-sister in the evening. Write a story about it. You write fiction, so you’re supposed to write out of what you know and into what you don’t know. Base the nanny somewhat on yourself, base the kid on the boy since he’s the only kid you’ve ever really known. Think about “nanny folklore” and incorporate that—it’s the part you don’t know, the part you must write into. Create a mother who’s both sympathetic and insane. Create a mother who is nothing like the mother you worked for, mostly because the character is expected and more interesting that way. You want to make the story more compelling than it actually was. In all actuality, you barely dealt with the mother at all. She was already gone when you got there in the morning and still hadn’t arrived home when you left. You dealt with the father. You got along with him exceedingly well, in fact. Actually, you got along with both of them. You would see her at birthday parties, events, and sometimes in the evenings if you baby-sat. They were, without question, some of the best bosses you’d ever had; they treated you with respect, as an equal, and they paid you fairly and on time. The mother was an employee rights lawyer and such things were important to her. Create a mother who’s a single parent, who has a terrible relationship with the nanny. She doesn’t treat her with respect, she’s jealous, she doesn’t know how to parent her child. All these things are different from what actually happened, but that’s what makes it fiction. It makes for a better story; people don’t want to read about a nanny and a mother sitting around drinking beer and talking after the kid has gone to bed on a Friday night. You are a writer, and so you write what you know. [End Page 39] You write a scene based on events that actually happened—the mother got off work early one day and came home as you were about to take the kid to the pool. She came with you and the three of you had a lovely time, laughing, swimming together. Again, this is not the stuff of good fiction. Recreate the scene when you write it, but twist it around. The mother is embarrassed to change in front of the young nanny. Put in some interesting stuff about the duality of the female body, young versus old, pre-versus post-motherhood. Have the kid cry every time the nanny swims away. All these things are different from what actually happened, but that is fiction. It makes for a better scene this way. An early draft of the story wins honorable mention in a contest. The finished draft gets published in Red Cedar Review. It’s been two and a half years since you nannied, but you still baby-sit for the family a couple times a month. The mother comes home and the kids are in bed, so you and the mother crack a few beers and catch up. You tell her you’re getting published again, this time in a more prestigious publication. Laugh a little—you’re into your third beer at this point—and tell her that, interestingly enough, the new story is about being a nanny. Tell her that you are sort of like the nanny, her child is the kid, but the mother’s character is definitely not based on her. Later, looking back on this conversation, you’ll think about your innocence, that seemingly innocuous thing. With hindsight hardening you, you’ll look back at yourself and laugh, but it will be a bitter, cynical laugh. You had the best intentions. It seemed like the honest thing to do. True enough, the...

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Research, Assessment, Tenure and other Interesting Stuff

Research, Assessment, Tenure and other Interesting Stuff

Just Lookin' for a Home

P ity the bacteria that find themselves in the human gut. They must adjust to high temperature and acidity, not to mention competition from other bacteria for food and space. Bile salts bathe them in a powerful detergent. The constant downward squeeze of peristalsis threatens to dislodge them. Many bacteria survive these conditions through sheer tenacity. Adhering tightly to the intestinal lining, they feed and reproduce, developing colonies that cling to inner surfaces of their human hosts like bits of wet tissue paper. Other bacteria make use of the adverse conditions to spur their growth. Some bacteria, such as varieties of the common bacteria Salmonella and Shigella, however, have broken through the barrier posed by the gut. They've found new homes, either by staying within intestinal wall cells or by slipping through those cells to reach quieter niches in other tissues. bacteria that thrive on the surface of the intestines do no harm to their human hosts. Those that penetrate cells, says Stanford University School of Medicine bacteriologist Stanley Falkow, often become pathogens-microorganisms that cause disease. From the bacterial point of view, Falkow says, pathogenicity is simply another facet of their extraordinary versatility. It's survival. It's how the bacteria make a living. From the human point of view, however, this pathogenicity can mean sickness and death. Bacteria often injure cells directly or fan the immune system into a powerful inflammation that does more harm than good. Accordingly, the aim of medical scientists has long centered on wiping out pathogens after a person has become ill. as more bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, a subtler approach might be better. Most of medicine looks at the product of bacterial invasion, at the disease, Falkow says. But disease may be the last thing we want to study; it comes after all the interesting stuff happens. The interesting stuff, according to Falkow, includes how bacteria attach to and enter the cells and how they survive

Television Coverage of Presidential Conventions: Now You See It, Now You Don’t

Just prior to the opening of the 1972 Democratic convention in Miami Beach, NBC anchorman John Chancellor declared: Convention coverage is the most important thing we do. The conventions are not just political theater, but really serious and that's why all the networks have an obligation to give gavel-to-gavel coverage. It's a time when we all ought to be doing our duty.' This same dutyconscious anchorman, giving a nod toward the podium reluctantly suggested at 1:34 A.M. during the first session of the convention, while the speeches on the Illinois challenge were being delivered: Maybe we should go listen. Frankly, it's not the most interesting stuff in the world.2 Later, perhaps in an effort to inject a bit of seasoning into the convention stuff, Chancellor brought NBC coverage of the third session