Work Of Mason Research Articles

Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health After an Epidemic by Katherine A. Mason

Katherine A. Mason, Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health After an Epidemic. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 272 pp.Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) first appeared in late 2002 in southern China. Symptoms of infection with the novel coronavirus include high fever, body aches, and a dry, nonproductive cough. A proportion of cases require intensive care services, including mechanical ventilation. Fatalities not uncommon. Following cases reported in Guangdong Province and Hong Kong during February-March 2003, more cases emerged in Beijing and farther afield, with infected travelers seeding hotspots in global centers such as Toronto, Singapore, and Hanoi. By the end of July 2003, more than 8,000 suspected and confirmed cases of were identified in 29 countries, resulting in 774 deaths.In Infectious Change, Katherine A. Mason provides a captivating analysis of public health in China in the wake of SARS. Mason's research is situated at the regional epicenter of the pandemic, in the city of Tianmai (pseudonym), nestled on the border with Hong Kong. Once a conglomeration of quiet fishing villages, Tianmai rapidly developed through statesponsored economic liberalization initiated in the early 1980s. Now a thriving megapolis, Mason takes Tianmai as representative of China's future: busy, mobile, and cosmopolitan (32). Working from the Tianmai Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Mason is ideally placed to research the reinvention of public health in China after SARS, and her work is further informed by public health experts in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Beijing.Mason locates her analysis of public health in China after within the intersection between the literature on governance, science studies, public health ethics, and the global. Broadly, she examines the tension between service and governance during an era of scientization and global health. This tension exposes new problematics in the lives, work, and aspirations of public health professionals, as they seek to serve commons locally and afar. Mason's work also offers an important underrepresented vantage to understand global health, one that is neither from the perspective of the drivers of global health nor from the recipients of global health assistance. Mason's Chinese informants are non-Western, but they aspire in some ways to be included in the Western world (28). She argues that local public health professionals' efforts to serve and govern must be understood within both local and global webs of engagement. Her work follows as a skillful navigation of disparate fields of engagement, local and non-local, which in combination provides a comprehensive, grounded analysis of public health practices in China.Mason begins by laying down the historical and contextual foundation from which to understand what is meant by a reinventing of Chinese public health. Soon after the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, China implemented a public health system drawing on Soviet expertise. The public health system focused on improving hygiene and sanitation, with the aim of eliminating the primary causes of morbidity and mortality. Since the market reforms initiated in the late 1970s and 1980s, the public health system, like many other public services, was dismantled. Funding was dramatically reduced, health insurance coverage levels plummeted, and marketization painted a new healthcare landscape. By the turn of the century, Chinese officials sought to reincarnate public health as a modern, science-driven system, fashioned after the US CDC. The emergence of dovetailed with reforms already underway, and as Mason aptly points out, SARS and the [Chinese] CDC system were 'co-produced' (13), as SARS ultimately functioned...to provide not so much a threat or a push but an opportunity (33).Mason's work captures the tensions, aspirations, and possibilities engendered by this critical turning point. …

Reporting on the unreported with Paul Mason: Scenes from Sydney, 2011

This article engages with Paul Mason's 2012 book Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: the New Global Revolutions from the perspective of a place where things have not quite ‘kicked off’ – Sydney, Australia. Through this engagement, I argue that Mason's book provides a useful framework for interrogating the political dynamics of events in a range of places beyond those which feature in its pages. Mason emphasises the importance of relationships between alienated young people, the (sub)urban poor, and organized labour in the events he considers. I apply this frame to examine the potentials and limits of three events that took place in Sydney in 2011; a major union campaign against public sector cuts, the public launch of the community organising efforts of the Sydney Alliance, and the formation of Occupy Sydney. The article concludes with some discussion of the need to extend Mason's work by paying more attention to the translation, as well as the transmission, of political repertoires from place to place.

‘Mason's work in all its branches’: an introduction to the Earles and the Keyworths of Kingston-upon-Hull

Having settled in Hull in the 1770s, the Earles established a working network of carvers, gilders, stuccoists, builders, surveyors and builder-architects that them to provide ‘mason's work in all its branches’. Furthermore, while speculative building played its part in securing the business, they were further assisted when family members began importing Italian marble. The Earle workshop provided training and commissions for successive generations. Moreover, their workshop enabled rival sculptors - most notably Willliam Day Keyworth the Elder - to gain a foothold in the Town. However, opportunities were strictly limited and the more ambitious Thomas Earle and William Day Keyworth the Younger moved to London. Nevertheless, they both maintained strong working links with their hometown and capitalized on prevailing civic pride. Local dignitaries were eager to commission homegrown talent and were anxious that public sculpture should signal the town's distinctive medieval origins. While civic pride played its ...

Revolt and engage: the novels of Anita Mason

This essay provides an introduction to the novels of Anita Mason, a neglected British author whose substantial body of work deserves wider recognition. It contends that, across the wide variety of historical and geographical settings she employs (from first century Judea to Nazi Germany), Mason's principal concern is with characters who resist unequal divisions of power. Such inequalities are often based around issues of gender, class, and race, but resistance is shown never to be straightforward. Mason's protagonists are often conflicted intellectuals who are torn between their desire for self-determination and a concomitant need for social involvement and collective meaning. Both directions lead either to complicity with tyranny, or to personal disintegration. The essay also argues that, beneath their diverse settings, Mason's novels actually represent a critique of the libertarian discourses foregrounded by the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s that were appropriated by politically conservative movements in subsequent decades. Mason's work is important to socially engaged fiction in that her principal characters are attempting to reconcile the often contradictory demands of libertarian and communitarian impulses.

Prospective secondary teachers repositioning by designing, implementing and testing mathematics learning objects: a conceptual framework

This article describes a conceptual framework developed to illuminate how prospective teachers’ learning experiences are shaped by didactic-sensitive activities in departments of mathematics. We draw from the experiences of prospective teachers in the Department of Mathematics at our institution in designing, implementing (i.e. computer programming) and testing mathematics learning objects. Based on Mason's work on awareness, a pilot small-scale study, and reflections on practice, we identified ownership, engagement, and pride as keys for positive learning experiences. We postulated that prospective teachers experience more ownership, engagement and pride while creating learning objects than doing more traditional tasks. This called for a large-scale study and hence a need for a conceptual framework. Embedded in our research is the question of whether there is a shift in prospective teachers’ relationships to mathematics and mathematics didactics in terms of ownership, engagement and pride provoked by one activity relative to another. We characterize this shift as ‘repositioning.’

Introduction

Introduction Catharine Mason (bio) and Richard Thomas (bio) Folklore, ethnomusicology, linguistics, anthropology, literary criticism, and philology: none of these fields can be left aside in a thorough attempt to gain insight into the rich dynamics and designs of Bob Dylan's performance artistry. It is indeed in the combined views and equations of these disciplines that scholars may identify with greater precision the complex subtleties or, shall we say, the subtle complexities of Dylan's creative breakthroughs into an art form uniquely his own and yet soundly embedded in American popular culture. Let there be no confusion: the artist under scrutiny performs not for the mathematician's final analysis, even if numbers and calculations abound in the unfolding meaning of his lyrics. From Dylan's powerful allusions to the divisive increments and common denominators of human experience, from his descriptions of the sole heartbeat to the elaborate use of the formulaic that creates a unison of voice, and from his devotion to both new and old, present and past, the avant-garde and the archaic, emerges that deep-set connection between the personal and cultural that is essential for lasting artistic creation. In light of this complexity, no single academic paradigm could enlighten these dynamics in isolation. The multi-disciplinary emphasis of the Caen Colloquium, held at the Université de Caen in March 2005 was intended to provide a strongly interdisciplinary approach to Dylan's work. Coming together as specialists of fields as diverse as structural anthropology on the one hand—inspired by half a century of field research throughout indigenous America—and threadbare grammatical analysis on the other, Caen Colloquium participants sought to exchange scholarship on Bob Dylan's body of song. Sharing a fascination with Dylan's creative impulses, we also brought to our analyses the effects of his lyrics on our own personal perceptions of art, music, social life, cultural manifestations, personal struggles, universal meanings, and so on. The Colloquium as event allowed us to share our experiences and [End Page 3] inspiration as listeners and as conscious interpreters equipped with the academic insights, tools, methods, and concepts—as well as the limitations—of our respective fields. The present publication seeks to provide the more objective and scholarly results of that encounter. To a certain extent, the selection of the disciplines to be represented at the colloquium was methodic. But, as artistically inspired events will have it, the group that gathered might never have been anticipated. With considerable difficulty, we have divided the papers submitted to us into four disciplines: literary criticism, ethnomusicology, anthropology, and linguistics. Two of the papers appear to us as a melding of two disciplines: Mike Daley's study of Dylan's use of intonation provides new paths into both ethnomusicology and linguistics, while Catharine Mason's work on blues poetics also draws from linguistic analysis as it reaches for a literary approach. Whether the papers be clear-cut contributions from the specified disciplines or, as these two papers show, an essentially interdisciplinary venture, the editors have come to believe that ongoing Dylan studies—and song and performance studies more generally—will profit from the input and collaborative inquiries of a truly interdisciplinary approach. Studies of song must account for a wide array of cultural phenomena. Linguists points to lexical choices, grammar, phonology, syntax, and stylistics; literary critics lead us to consider the sung text, lyrics, word use, intertextuality, fluctuation of literary register, dialogism, and interpretive strategies; ethnomusicologists focus on melody, rhythm, timbre, intonation, harmony, vocalization, instrumentation, and intermusicality; and anthropologists and culture critics are concerned with social groups and their organization, cultural context, history, tradition, transmission, collective meaning, and so on. All four of these fields can be of tremendous benefit for a more thorough understanding of song and performance. It all began when an American mother (CM) living abroad with her toddler and newborn began listening closely to the songs from Bob Dylan's album Under the Red Sky (1990). Feeling a million miles away from her home country, she asked, "what is this guy doing with my language?" The children, at that stage compliant with their mother's enthusiasm, soon began to share in the music that Michael Gray (2000...

U.S. Mounted Bands and Cavalry Field Musicians in the Union Army during the Civil War—Background, Duties, and Training

Introduction Military music is a key component in the global history of instrumental music, and while hundreds of military bands still exist throughout the world, the last century has seen the wind band tradition shift from its military origins to an increase of community bands in Europe, as well as school, college, and university bands in North America. Modern concert and marching bands are direct descendents of military bands in terms of instruments, instrument development, repertoire, and pageantry. Part of this convention rests within the mounted tradition when trumpet and drum signals were crucial for cavalries within European armies--especially after the advent of gunpowder, when something louder than the human voice was needed for communication on the battlefield. These signalers, as well as the Saracen model of horse- and camel-mounted musicians playing hautbois (shawm-like instruments--predecessors of today's oboe), kettledrums, trumpets, and other horns in processions, ceremonies, and battle movements, served as the basis for mounted bands in Europe. While the mounted band tradition had been introduced to Europe through the Crusades-probably by the French-the practice caught on initially in the areas of Hungary and Austria, where it was reinforced through repeated connections in war with the Ottoman Turks. (1) Mounted bands of trumpeters and kettledrummers had become common in the trains of artillery and cavalry in Europe when moving to and from battle, with musicians gathering from individual units at the heads of trains to serve as an impetus on the march, as well as to provide a noble presence at and away from court. Capitalizing on this centuries-old custom, which had originally been reserved for nobility, the U.S. Cavalry employed horse-mounted bands for roughly a century, at least from the 1840s until World War II. The purpose of the present study is to chronicle the function and training of U.S. horse-mounted field musicians and bands through the time of the Civil War, with the intent of illustrating one aspect of the predecessors of present-day school bands. American music education in the 1860s was a far cry from that of the following century. It was not yet thirty years past the time of Lowell Mason's work in Boston. Luther Whiting Mason served in the Civil War and had not yet made a name for himself with the National Music Course, and the school band and orchestra movements were still several decades away. Professional and amateur music-making, however, was abundant in many areas across the country, with vocal and instrumental instruction being provided by private teachers, singing schools, and on-the-job training. Professional orchestras like the Philharmonic Society of New York had been in existence since 1842; the Boston Handel and Haydn Society was a half-century old, and town bands were thriving even in rural areas across the country. Within this context, the period of the Civil War propelled bands further into the popular mainstream with bands playing at recruitment rallies and troop farewells, and within most of the major campaigns. While several individuals, including Custer himself, mentioned mounted bands and field musicians in memoirs and other chronicles, it is the intent of this study to add to the body of knowledge of band history and document the rich heritage of contemporary band music education and performance practices by gathering these accounts, letters, and narratives into a single record. U.S. Military Music Background While a detailed history of military bands is outside the parameters of this study, a brief review of bands leading up to those of the Civil War warrants mention, as does making a distinction between field musicians and band musicians, who had different duties and were regarded separately. U.S. Military Band History As direct descendents with strong British and Continental ties, military bands in the American colonies stemmed from their European roots in instrumentation. …

The Wounded King: Bobbie Ann Mason's "Shiloh" and Marginalized Male Subjectivity

The Wounded King:Bobbie Ann Mason's “Shiloh” and Marginalized Male Subjectivity Greg Bentley Several of Bobbie Ann Mason's works have been approached from the perspective of myth-ritual criticism—especially the Grail motif—with mixed results.1 Perhaps the most central element of the Grail motif is the king's wound, which is clearly sexual in nature, and critics who approach Mason's work from this perspective have pointed out how she develops central characters, most notably Emmett in In Country and Leroy in "Shiloh," who seem to play analogous roles to that of the wounded king in Grail legend. However, if we approach these characters—and most particularly their wounds—from the perspective of psychoanalytic semiotics rather than myth-ritual criticism, we arrive at some very different observations about them, observations which produce some strikingly different conclusions about their identities and the texts they inhabit. In this essay, for example, I argue that Leroy's wound, although it incapacitates him physically, is not synonymous with sexual impotence. Instead, Leroy's wound functions as a psychic symptom, an externalization and a representation of his figurative castration within the family structure and his psychic emasculation within the symbolic order. That is, Leroy's wound signifies his lack, a lack that, in turn, generates his desire. One of the fundamental principles of psychoanalytic semiotics is the [End Page 144] absence of sexual difference. Psychically, there is no sexual difference between men and women. Nevertheless, psychoanalytic semiotics acknowledges that our present dominant fiction is above all else the representational system through which the subject is accommodated to the Name-of-the-Father. Its most central signfier of unity is the (paternal) family, and its primary signifier of privilege the phallus. 'Male' and 'Female' constitute our dominant fiction's most fundamental binary opposition. (Silverman 34-35) More specifically, the dominant fiction's representation of normative male identity "depends [not only] upon a kind of collective make-believe in the commensurability of penis and phallus, but this ideological 'reality' [also] solicits our faith above all else in the unity of the family, and the adequacy of the male subject" (Silverman 15-16). Clearly, Leroy Moffitt has been sexually and economically captated by the dominant fiction. As Mason illustrates, Leroy equates his subjectivity with his sexual prowess and his economic position. Because of his wound, though, he has been forced to give up his job as a long-haul trucker, and, thus, he loses his role in the family as the principal means of production. He is no longer the primary "breadwinner." Because his sense of identity depends so completely on his occupation, on his sense of production, the loss of the latter signifies a loss of the former. Feeling economically marginalized and emasculated, Leroy questions his sexuality. As the narrator informs us, he "is reasonably certain [Norma Jean] has been faithful to him, but he wishes she would celebrate his permanent homecoming more happily" (98). Similarly, when Norma Jean tells Leroy that his name means "the king," he again questions his sexual prowess and position, for he asks his wife: "Am I still king around here?" (111). Conscious of the sexual subtext of Leroy's utterance, Norma Jean reassures him by commenting: "'I'm not fooling around with anybody, if that's what you mean'" (111). Ironically, however, Mason prefaces Norma Jean's speech act with a physical act that calls it into question. Before verbally stroking Leroy's insecure self, "Norma Jean flexes her biceps and feels them for hardness" (111). On a surface level, Mason simply suggests that Norma Jean, who has enrolled in a body-building course (108) and who exercises constantly, is simply toning her body. In contrast, because of his wound, Leroy spends most of his time lying on the couch smoking dope and getting flabby. On a subtextual level, though, Mason clearly implies that while Norma Jean's sense of self is getting [End Page 145] firmer and stronger, Leroy's sense of self is becoming more and more flaccid. If he is not sexually impotent, he is psychically so, for he has been figuratively castrated. Leroy's accident affects him emotionally and physically. As the narrator...

The Nave of Stone Church in Kent

The parish church of St Mary the Virgin at Stone near Dartford, under construction in about 1260, is justly famous for its ambitious choir, the work of masons from the premier Gothic building in England, Henry III’s Westminster Abbey. The choir of Stone is a miniature Westminster: its generous bar-tracery windows and its lusciously carved wall arcades bring the metropolitan glamour of the abbey to a north Kent parish church on the Thames estuary (Fig. 1). Not surprisingly, this mysterious transfer has distracted attention from the virtues — indeed almost from the very existence — of the nave of the church. Only John Newman, in what is still the most incisive analysis of the whole building, gave proper weight to the nave’s elegant enrichment and noble proportions. There can be little doubt that the nave, which was built sequentially to the choir in the 1260s, belongs to the same Westminster milieu; but whereas the choir seems to depend solely on the abbey church, the nave reflects a much wider range of inspiration, from the hinterland of Westminster’s own sources, namely the architecture of southern England in the second quarter of the thirteenth century. Most importantly, the nave stands in self-conscious contrast to the choir, a contrast which offers important clues to its unnoticed significance. Despite the choir’s elan , it is the nave which ensures Stone’s place of honour in the history of English Gothic architecture.

The transport of adsorbate mixtures in porous materials: Basic equations for pores with simple geometry

The basic equations governing the transport of single and binary adsorbate mixtures through single pores are considered. An irreversible thermodynamic formulation is adopted and both viscous and diffusive terms are incorporated following the earlier work of Mason and co-workers. The links between phenomenological coefficients and molecular properties are demonstrated. For single components, the gas phase and high density limits are considered. By using simple hydrodynamic models it is shown that the phenomenological coefficients in the mixture equations can all be expressed as functions of the coefficients for the individual components in the same pore, and the properties of the component adsorption isotherms. Whilst it is appreciated that the hydrodynamic approach will be of limited value in very small pores, it is argued that useful insights can be gained into the feasibility of membrane separation processes from this method. The general equations can be used in future development of network models for porous materials.

A surface micromachined electrostatic ultrasonic air transducer

Airborne ultrasound has many applications such as, ranging, nondestructive evaluation, gas flow measurement, and acoustic microscopy. This paper investigates the generation and detection of ultrasound in air at a few MHz. Conventional plane piston lead zirconium titanate (PZT) based transducers perform poorly for this application due to the lack of proper matching layer materials. Electrostatic, or capacitive, transducers promise higher efficiency and broader bandwidth performance. The device structure in this work consists of a capacitor where one plate is a circular silicon nitride membrane coated with gold and the other is a rigid silicon substrate. By applying a voltage between the membrane and the silicon substrate, an electrostatic force is exerted on the membrane which sets it in motion, thus generating a sound wave in air. Presented here is an electrical equivalent circuit model for electrostatic transducers which is based on the early work of Mason (1942). The electrostatic transducers were designed and constructed for operation at 1.8 and 4.6 MHz. The transducers were fabricated using standard micromachining techniques. An optical interferometer was used to measure the peak displacement of the 1.8 MHz electrostatic transducer at 230 /spl Aring//V. A transmit-receive system was built using two electrostatic transducers. The system had a signal to noise ratio of 34 dB at a transducer separation of 1 cm. Each transducer had a 3-dB bandwidth of 20%, and a one-way insertion loss of 26 dB. There is excellent agreement between the measured device performance and theoretical predictions.

The Beta Israel (Falasha) in Ethiopia, From Earliest Times to the Twentieth Century (review)

Book Reviews 145 The Beta Israel (Falasha) in Ethiopia, From Earliest Times to the Twentieth Century, by Steven Kaplan. New York: New York University Press, 1992. 231 pp. $45.00. The author ofthis history of events prior to about 1892 is chairperson of the Department of African History and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University ofJerusalem. This research is largely based on written sources in the Ge'ez language, the ancient Semitic which linguists call "Ethiopic" and which survives in the liturgy of both the Beta Israel and Christian rituals in what used to be known as Abyssinia. One immediate problem, which Kaplan admits, is that we have no reliable sources on Jews in Ethiopia from the fourth to the thirteenth centuries. He dismisses both the Solomon-Sheba and Danite origin theories as mythic or legendary and disclaims concern with the halachic status of the Falashas. Much of Chapter 1, "Obscure Beginnings," is based on Edward Ullendorff's Ethiopia and the Bible (Oxford University Press, 1968) and The Ethiopians (1973), plus updating. Kaplan prepares the basis of his own views in Chapter 3, subtitled "The Invention of a 'tradition," which he believes happened in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries: "The Beta Israel appear to have chosen works [of religious literature] whose Christian versions already displayed a clear biblicalJewish tone" (p. 73). In consequence of military defeats, especially in the early seventeenth century (Chapter 4), the Falasha had to survive by serving royal patrons with marketable skills such as mason work and ironsmithing, and the latter craft changed their status to a despised and feared semi-caste (Chapters 5 and 6). The great famine of 1888-1892 weakened their resistance to the overtures of foreign Protestant missionaries. Kaplan's basic argument is that the Falashas are the product of events that took place in Ethiopia between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. He had concluded this in his earlier, French-language book Les Falachas (Abbaye de Maredsous, Belgium: Edition Brepols, 1990). But while one can certainly agree with him that "the history of the Beta Israel can only be understood in the context of Ethiopian history in general" (p. 7), a more comprehensive analysis should also point out their involvement with the specifically Jewish elements of their tradition, as I attempted in my book The Story of the Falashas (New York, 1982). Nevertheless, one is impressed by Kaplan's perseverance in wading through scattered, often episodic, sources and fitting them into a frame of reference, in order to reconstruct at least a tentative history. Thus it 146 SHOFAR Winter 1994 Vol. 12, No.2 contributes to the literature of the subject for the general reader, even if one does not agree with his basic conclusion. Perhaps future archeology, especially at Aksum, will be able to reduce some of the gaps of the historical record. Simon D. Messing Professor Emeritus ofAnthropology Southern Connecticut State University Jewish Symbols in Art, by Abraham Kanof. Woodmere, NY: Gefen Publishing House, 1990. 112 pp. 115 plates. $24.95. Based on his past published work, one would expect of Abraham Kanof a solid, interesting book, and in hisJewish Symbols in Art, one gets precisely that. Intended for a broad, general audience, rather than a narrow, scholarly one, Kanofs work is well-written and accessible. Kanofs interest in this work is two-fold: to explore some of the wealth of symbols which are part ofJewish art; and to consider sources for these symbols outside (and prior to) Judaism as well as their place outside (and contemporary with) Judaism. His admirable goal is to emphasize the universality of human needs that is connoted by the commonality of religious impulses suggested by "the multicultural use of symbols to express them." The volume ofinformation and the range of illustration are useful and interesting, as is the glossary which follows the text. So, too, the organization of material offers a nice rhythm and logic. It moves from a discussion of pre-Jewish ideas that figure early into Jewish symbolism-such as that of the sun and its symbolism or of Dionysus and his attributes-to those which develop as Judaism unfolds in post-destruction dispersion-such as Messianic and Temple...

Lichens as Monitors of Pollutant Elements at Permanent Sites in Maryland and Virginia

Concentrations of sulfur, nitrogen, and seven metal elements are reported for the lichen Flavoparmelia baltimorensis from three monitoring stations in Maryland and Virginia. At Plummers Island, Maryland, 15 km from the center of Washington, D.C., lichens have been collected for nearly 100 years. The other two stations, Bear Island, Maryland (21 km) and Stony Man Mountain, Virginia (120 km), were established in the 1970's by Mason Hale to help document changes in ambient air quality in the Washington, D.C. area. Concentrations of cadmium, chromium, nickel, zinc, and lead were consistently highest at Plummers Island and lowest at Stony Man Mountain; concentrations of the other four elements (nitrogen, sulfur, aluminum, and copper) were also consistently higher at Plummers Island than at Stony Man Mountain. Recent collections, in 1988 and 1992, revealed marked reductions in the concentration of all nine elements except aluminum at all three stations, providing limited, but encouraging, signs of improved air quality in the region. Known primarily for his research on lichen systematics, Mason Hale has nevertheless made a number of important contributions to the study of lichens as environmental indicators. From 1977 until shortly before his death in 1990, Mason and I participated in a number of environmental studies in the Washington, D.C. area designed to monitor changes in regional air quality. One of our principal sites was Plummers Island, Maryland, a small Potomac River island located just 15 km from the heart of Washington, D.C. The studies we carried out there were an extension of Mason's work begun in the late 1950's, and all have been supported by the Washington Biologists' Field Club, a local scientific society that promotes research on Plummers Island and the Potomac River Basin. In initiating his work on Plummers Island, Mason believed it was important to establish permanent study sites for monitoring lichen growth, element accumulation, and floristic composition as the regional environment changed. Mason's early work on the island was involved mainly with the longterm assessment of lichen growth rates (Hale 1970, 1972, 1973; Lawrey & Hale 1977); after 1965, it was expanded to include elemental analysis for pollutant elements, especially lead (Pb). This shift in emphasis was intended to document changes on the island caused by the construction of a bridge (The American Legion Memorial Bridge) supporting a major interstate highway (Interstate 495) over the island. The initial analyses of lichens from Plummers Island during the 1970's (Lawrey & Hale 1979) revealed extraordinarily high Pb values, which were indicative of the high Pb concentrations in automobile exhaust fallout reaching the island. It was at this time that another study site was established on Bear Island, Maryland, 6 km upstream from Plumm rs Island. Bear Island lichens have consistently contained lower concentrations of Pb and other pollut nt elements than Plummers Island lichens (Lawrey 1980; Lawrey & Hale 1981). Floristic analysis of the two islands (much of it unpublished) has also shown that the lichen communities on Plummers Isla d are far less diverse than those found on Bear Island, and that the growth rate of thalli of the dominant lichen species on both islands, Flavoparmelia baltimorensis, is significantly lower in Plummers Island communities. In 1980, we established another long-term study TABLE 1. Lead concentrations in thalli of Flavoparmelia baltimorensis collected from Plummers Island and Bear Island, Maryland and Stony Man Mountain, Virginia at various times. All values are mean concentrations (.tg/g dry weight ? S.E. of the mean). Sample size is two for historical samples and 10 for recent samples. Year Plummers Island Bear Island Stony Man Mt. 1907 82.3 (8.2) 1938 127.8 (14.8) 1958 327.9 (12.6) 197

A Key to Xanthoparmelia in North America, Extracted from the World Keys of Hale 1990

The worldwide Hale keys to the 406 species of Xanthoparmelia are here extracted for the 55 species occurring in North America and Mexico. The last published work of Mason E. Hale was his complete world monograph of the lichen genus Xanthoparmelia (1990). With 406 species studied-- using thin-layer chromatography, scanning electron microscopy, computer-generated keys and descrip- tions, plus worldwide field experience-it makes available a thorough study of this common genus. The keys are so long and comprehensive that I thought it would assist North American lichenol- ogists if the parts dealing with the species occurring in North America and Mexico were extracted and made available in a separate key. Hence this com- pilation. Hale was a strong believer in the use of chemical characters in the recognition of species and the key reflects this. As the users of this extracted key may not have available the laboratory facilities for TLC or HPLC, they may have to resort to the less sen- sitive microcrystal tests for which references are in

Capillary pressure behavior in pores with curved triangular cross-section: Effect of wettability and pore size distribution

The capillary behavior of two immiscible fluids in pores of angular cross-section differs appreciably from that in pores of circular cross-section. We have extended the work of Mason and Morrow [G. Mason and N.R. Morrow, J. Colloid Interface Sci., 141 (1991) 262; N.R. Morrow, Paper presented at 1st Int. Symp. on Evaluation of Reservoir Wettability and Its Effect on Oil Recovery, Socorro, NM, September 18–21, 1990] to pores whose cross-section is a triangle with curved, rather than straight, sides. Capillary pressure vs saturation curves were obtained for single pores, as well as for bundles of parallel pores with log-normal pore size distributions of varying geometric standard deviation. Wettability, as expressed by the contact angle, was varied also. In many ways, the computed behavior is qualitatively similar to that observed for real porous media, such as petroleum reservoir rocks. That is, there is drainage—imbibition hysteresis, a residual non-wetting-phase saturation upon imbibition, and a reversal in the sign of the capillary pressure upon imbibition in systems that approach neutral wettability. However, because of the lack of network effects, there is no mechanism for a true irreducible wetting-phase saturation. It seems likely that, to capture all aspects of multifluid behavior in real porous media (capillary pressure, relative permeabilities, electrical resistivity, etc.), models of such media should not only be based on networks but must also incorporate pore angularity.

On the invariance of the hybrid position/force control

Recently, the noninvariance nature of the Raibert and Craig hybrid control scheme, based on the work of Mason and others, has been pointed out. In fact, on the basis of the screw theory, Lipkin and Duffy demonstrated that the selection of the position and force controlled degrees of freedom in the Raibert and Craig scheme, may give wrong results if a translation or change in unit length of the coordinate frame is performed. A general theoretical solution to this problem, called ‘kinestatic filtering’, has been given by Lipkin and Duffy. In this paper, the two approaches are summarized and discussed. First, the conditions in which the Mason filtering technique fails are determined and, second, the situations where the Lipkin and Duffy approach cannot be applied owing to degeneracy of the twist and wrench spaces, are reported. As a consequence of this analysis, a new invariant kinestatic filtering method is proposed. The method here presented is based on the original Mason approach and requires the definition of a task-dependent filter based on the knowledge of the position of the compliant frame. Examples are presented and discussed.

The First Liberty: Religion and the American Republic

In Northern Virginia, south of Alexandria, at a point equidistant from George Washington's home, Mount Vernon, and George Mason's home, Gunston Hall, stands the beautiful red brick Pohick Episcopal Church. From the founding period to the present it has remained an active church, keeping alive by oral tradition and church record the worship habits of two famous neighbors, the Washingtons and the Masons. It identifies Washington, the founder of the Republic, and Mason, the father of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, as members of an Anglican vestry responsible for oversight of church properties and the physical care of needy communicants. Pohick Church was built as a result of Washington and Mason's joint collaboration, combining Washington's surveying skills to select the site convenient to both families with the work of Mason's British architect. According to the oral tradition that has preserved the memory of Washington's religious practices, the first President attended church faithfully when he was at home, giving attendance at worship precedence over his domestic duty of offering hospitality to visiting dignitaries. Washington and Mason were sometime political allies, as when Washington carried the Fairfax Resolves, authored by Mason, to Williamsburg in 1774. Yet they profoundly disagreed on the propriety of state ratification of the federal Constitution absent a Bill of Rights. But Pohick Church is still a reminder that these two political stalwarts shared religious duties and exercised their religion together, reflecting what it meant to be orthodox Anglican churchmen in the colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, but being neither enlightenment deists nor evangelical enthusiasts. Perceptions of the religious character of historical figures are often preserved by the memory of the community of which a person was a member, rather than in written records or other materials that historians typically consult. Washington is an important example of

Pole assignment in decentralised systems: a structural approach

The necessary and sufficient conditions for complete pole assignment in decentralised control systems with output feedback are established by a graph theoretic method, related to the early work of Mason. An example illustrates the approach, which is in effect a multilevel assignment problem, and also the use of an APL algorithm for general application.

Finite Groups With Product Fusion

In several recent papers concerning the classification of finite simple groups, the investigators were forced to treat subsidiary problems involving a group G whose Sylow 2-subgroup S is a direct product S = S, x S2 in which the fusion of 2-elements of G corresponds to that of the direct product of two groups having S, and S2, respectively, as their Sylow 2-subgroups. For example, in the study of groups, with Sylow 2-subgroups of type G2(q) or Psp(4, q), q odd, the determination of the structure of the centralizer of a central involution requires a solution of this subsidiary problem in the case in which S, and S2 are dihedral groups ([9]). The analogous problem arises with S, dihedral and S2 wreathed in Mason's work on groups with Sylow 2-subgroups of type L4(q), q odd. Likewise in the analysis of groups with Sylow 2-subgroups of type Psp(6, q), q odd, two other such direct product problems arise in the course of determining the structure of the centralizers of involutions. It would therefore appear to be quite useful to have available an effective result about the structure of such a group G when the direct factors S, S2 of S are arbitrary. It is the object of this paper to establish such a general result. Suppose that we are trying to determine all simple groups G satisfying some set of conditions. In such a problem, it is very likely that one can reduce to the case in which the critical composition factors of the proper subgroups of G are of known type. Moreover, in those cases in which such a classification theorem has been obtained, specific properties of such composition factors have entered into the arguments. It is therefore reasonable and most likely necessary to impose some general conditions on appropriate composition factors of the proper subgroups of the group G under investigation. It turns out that a single assumption stated in terms of the notion of balance is all that is necessary. Moreover, we make this assumption only on the composition factors of certain subgroups of G which possess a Sylow 2-subgroup of the form T1 x T2with T, z Si, i = 1, 2.

Thermal Transpiration in a Cylindrical Tube

Thermal transpiration in a cylindrical tube is studied by using the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook model and methods previously used by Ferziger and Cercignani and Sernagiotto in solving the Poiseuille flow problem. It appears that recent results of Sone and Yamamoto are in slight error. Finally, in analogy with the recent work of Mason and co-workers on the dusty gas model, a relation for ftr, the translational Eucken factor, is developed.