Official Repositories Research Articles

An efficient improved parrot optimizer for bladder cancer classification

Bladder Cancer (BC) is a common disease that comes with a high risk of morbidity, death, and expense. Primary risk factors for BC include exposure to carcinogens in the workplace or the environment, particularly tobacco. There are several difficulties, such as the requirement for a qualified expert in BC classification. The Parrot Optimizer (PO), is an optimization method inspired by key behaviors observed in trained Pyrrhura Molinae parrots, but the PO algorithm becomes stuck in sub-regions, has less accuracy, and a high error rate. So, an Improved variant of the PO (IPO) algorithm was developed using a combination of two strategies: (1) Mirror Reflection Learning (MRL) and (2) Bernoulli Maps (BMs). Both strategies improve optimization performance by avoiding local optimums and striking a compromise between convergence speed and solution diversity. The performance of the proposed IPO is evaluated against eight other competitor algorithms in terms of statistical convergence and other metrics according to Friedman’s test and Bonferroni–Dunn test on the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation conducted in 2022 (CEC 2022) test suite functions and nine BC datasets from official repositories. The IPO algorithm ranked number one in best fitness and is more optimal than the other eight MH algorithms for CEC 2022 functions. The proposed IPO algorithm was integrated with the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier termed (IPO-SVM) approach for bladder cancer classification purposes. Nine BC datasets were then used to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed IPO algorithm. The experiments show that the IPO-SVM approach outperforms eight recently proposed MH algorithms. Using the nine BC datasets, IPO-SVM achieved an Accuracy (ACC) of 84.11%, Sensitivity (SE) of 98.10%, Precision (PPV) of 95.59%, Specificity (SP) of 95.98%, and F-score (F1) of 94.15%. This demonstrates how the proposed IPO approach can help to classify BCs effectively. The open-source codes are available at https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/169846-an-efficient-improved-parrot-optimizer.

Shoreline Analysis and Extraction Tool (SAET): A New Tool for the Automatic Extraction of Satellite-Derived Shorelines with Subpixel Accuracy

SAET (Shoreline Analysis and Extraction Tool) is a novel open-source tool to enable the completely automatic detection of shoreline position changes using the optical imagery acquired by the Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 and 9 satellites. SAET has been developed within the ECFAS (European Coastal Flood Awareness System) project, which is intended to be the first European service for coastal flood forecasting, management, and recovery analysis. The tool is developed to characterise the shoreline response associated with punctual events such as coastal storms as well as any other phenomenon. For a given beach segment, SAET facilitates the selection of the satellite images closest in time to the analysed events that offer an adequate cloud coverage level for analysing the shoreline change. Subsequently, the tool automatically downloads the images from their official repositories, pre-processes them and extracts the shoreline position with sub-pixel accuracy. In order to do so, an initial approximate definition of the shoreline is carried out at the pixel level using a water index thresholding, followed by an accurate extraction operating on the shortwave infrared bands to produce a sub-pixel line in vector formats (points and lines). The tool offers different settings to be adapted to the different coastal environments and beach typologies. Its main advantages refer to its autonomy, its efficiency in extracting complete satellite scenes, its flexibility in adapting to different environments and conditions, and its high subpixel accuracy. This work presents an accuracy assessment on a long Mediterranean sandy beach of SDSs extracted from L8 and S2 imagery against coincident alongshore reference lines, showing an accuracy of about 3 m RMSE. At the same time, the work shows an example of the usage of SAET for characterising the response to Storm Gloria (January 2020) on the beaches of Valencia (E Spain). SAET provides an efficient and completely automatic workflow that leads to accurate SDSs while only relying on publicly available information. The tool appears to be a useful extraction tool for beach monitoring, both for public administrations and individual users.

An overview of Personalized Medicine landscape and policies in the European Union.

The spread of Personalized Medicine (PM) over the last decade defined a revolution in healthcare systems. PM is among the priorities of the European Commission's research agenda, which funded the IC2PerMed international project aiming to integrate China into the International Consortium of PM (ICPerMed). In the context of this project, we mapped the existing policies related to PM in the European Union (EU) and at the EU Member States (EU-MS) level. PubMed, Google Scholar, Google, Microsoft and national and international institutions' official repositories were searched in order to identify documents on PM-related policies, programmes and action plans at the EU and EU-MS level, published up to December 2020. We identified 28 policies in the EU aimed at improving public health promoting and fostering PM implementation, through some actions including the standardization of good medical practice, use of big data and digital innovation, data sharing and cross-border interoperability, healthcare sustainability, disease prevention and patients'/citizens' engagement. We identified 23 policies at EU-MS level which, notwithstanding national differences, have a common focus, such as patient-tailored treatment and targeted prevention, education of healthcare workers, research and innovation, big data harmonization and healthcare system sustainability. The definition of an integrated regulatory framework is essential to turn PM into an opportunity for citizens and patients with the involvement of all the stakeholders. This work can provide a valuable tool for decision-makers to define common approaches, priorities for research, development and increase international collaboration, which could overcome the fragmented European scenario and align the future direction on PM.

Are chrome extensions compliant with the spirit of least privilege?

Extensions are small applications installed by users and enrich the user experience of browsing the Internet. Browsers expose a set of restricted APIs to extensions. To be used, extensions need to list the permissions associated with these APIs in a mandatory extension file named manifest. In particular, Chrome’s permission ecosystem was designed in the spirit of the least privilege. Yet, this paper demonstrates that 39.8% of the analyzed extensions provided by the official Web Store are compliant with the spirit of least privilege. Also, we develop: (1) a browser extension to make aware regular users of the permissions the extensions they install; (2) a web app where extensions developers can check whether their extensions are compliant with the spirit of the least privileged; and (3) a set of scripts that can be part of the vendors’ acceptance criteria such that when developers upload their extensions to the official repositories, the scripts automatically analyze the extensions and generate a report about the permissions and the usage.

The 18th-Century Common. A Public Humanities Website for Enthusiasts of 18th-Century Studies

Reviewed by: The 18th-Century Common. A Public Humanities Website for Enthusiasts of 18th-Century Studies Mayron E. Cantillo Lucuara Mayron E. Cantillo Lucuara. Review: The 18th-Century Common. A Public Humanities Website for Enthusiasts of 18th-Century Studies It is something of a truism to claim that the web cannot be understood as the all-encompassing archive of human reality and knowledge. Omniscience is not the right attribute to describe the web. When viewed as a Hegelian totality that contains all there is, the internet inevitably fails to fulfil all standards. For this reason, it is more sensible, in conceptualising the nature of the digital world, to discard Hegel in favour of Kant with [End Page 175] his eighteenth-century conception of mind and reality. As a figurative technological brain, the internet does, obviously, offer some access to reality by encoding and decoding the world in all manner of computerised languages. However, its epistemic coverage cannot embrace it all: there are still countless layers of noumenal reality that lie beyond the reach of the digital, awaiting their potential computerisation. Access to those noumenal layers of knowledge has been one of the primary concerns in the burgeoning field of digital humanities (DH) in at least two senses. On the one hand, it is strikingly conspicuous that numerous textual realities of old remain "unprocessed" as "inaccessible materials,"1 thus calling for "new spaces for exploring humanity's cultural heritage and for imagining future possibilities using the transmedia methods and genres of the digital present."2 Said otherwise, much as the internet has grown into a vast encyclopaedia of knowledge, its reach still falls far short, leaving a whole horizon of uncharted textualities from the past. On the other hand, there is a further problem with the actual "accessibility of digital collections to both specialists and non-specialists alike."3 In multiple instances, old materials are rigorously processed, digitised, and made available in official repositories, yet their real availability is "marked by social and economic inequalities"4—with only a small number of subscribers having the prerogative to access and use them. For this reason, as Matthew Kirschenbaum rightly puts it, DH must work concertedly towards eliminating such inequalities and promoting "a culture that values collaboration, openness, nonhierarchical relations, and agility."5 Coincidentally enough, around the same year 2010 when Kirschenbaum published his article arguing for more democratic DH projects with egalitarian accessibility, a new website called The 18th-Century Common came into existence in the very democratic spirit of sharing up-to-date research and general knowledge on the history and culture of the long eighteenth century with "nonacademic readers … in accessible, nonspecialized language." The website's name is in itself aptly eloquent and symbolic: it echoes the historical idea of common land, i.e., a hybrid estate of private ownership that is offered for public usufruct. Transformed into a "symbol of open access for shared benefit," the English common goes digital and becomes a cyberspace where the eighteenth century is epistemically accessible and available to anyone, whether academically affiliated or independent, who wishes to keep up to date with new scholarship on the early modern period. So far, this cyber-common land has been able to attract more than 1,400 subscribers who have signed up for any news stories uploaded to the website. The titular notion of common land that the webpage champions is aesthetically reinforced by the appropriate painting displayed on the background. It is a canvas held at the Yale Center for British Art, dated from 1748–50, and painted by the famous British artist Thomas Gainsborough. It shows, as its title indicates, a wooded landscape with a nearly camouflaged cottage, a resting shepherd, and a modest flock of sheep and goats. This simple ekphrasis may say little per se, but it entails a coherent symbolic meaning: Gainsborough's large landscape, together with the limitless horizon in the background of the painting, lends itself to being regarded as the open space, the shared ground, or the democratic land that the website plants and cultivates in order unrestrictedly to gather all kinds of users interested in the eighteenth century. In other words, the space opened by [End...

The establishment of patent culture preservation system in China and the development of China Center for Type Culture Collection

<p indent="0mm">With the implementation of the Patent Law of the People’s Republic of China in 1985, the China Center for Type Culture Collection (CCTCC), which located at Wuhan University, and the China General Microbiological Culture Collection Center (CGMCC), which located in the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, were designated by the State Patent Office as the official repositories for the preservation of cultures for patent procedures (“patent cultures” for short). In 1995, CCTCC and CGMCC joined the Budapest Treaty on behalf of China and formally became the International Depository Authority (IDA) recognized by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Later in 2016, the Guangdong Microbiological Culture Collection Center (GDMCC), which located in Guangdong Institute of Microbiology, was also approved as IDA. After more than <sc>30 years</sc> of development, the total amount of patent culture collections in China is now the second largest in the world, second only to the United States, and the annual new increment of patent cultures ranks steadily number one in the world. CCTCC has also evolved from a specialized patent culture repository into a comprehensive organization and national sharing platform dedicated to the collection and preservation of diverse cultures and providing services, taking on a broader responsibility for the collection, preservation, and sharing of biological materials.

Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Punk Alternative Publications: Challenges to Fugitive Materials

ABSTRACT Punk scenes are complex and heterogeneous. They have always been prolific producers of physical documentation of their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. At the same time, these scenes have often existed on the margins, which has led to the creation of fugitive collections of self-documentation. In Slavic, East European and Eurasian (SEEE) countries, this documentation has historically taken the form of non-traditional music releases, zines, and samizdat. Due to the often-illegal nature of these creations, the materials did not find immediate homes in official repositories, and the fugitive materials experienced a covert diaspora initially across Eastern Europe and later across multiple continents. The author provides a case study of the current state of collections of non-traditionally published SEEE punk materials to highlight the challenges that face access and use of marginalized, diasporic collections. This paper provides a definition of punk in a SEEE context; offers a literature review to illustrate the discourse and collections that address Slavic and East European punk materials; draws connections between SEEE punk alternative publications and broader marginalized fugitive collections; describes obstacles faced by collections of Slavic punk materials; and concludes by way of recommendations for addressing these challenges in order to improve access and use.

Requirements for web applications firewalls

Domestic and foreign regulations related to the protection of web applications are analyzed. It is established that the requirements for its individual means of protection should be taken into account when developing a comprehensive information protection system. The most effective of the elements of the complex of means of protection for automated systems of class 2 and 3, on which web servers operate is the firewall of web applications, which is not required in open sources. Therefore, the development of such requirements is an urgent and urgent problem, the solution of which will simplify the development of a comprehensive information security system. Based on the relevance of the results of the work are the requirements for firewalls of web applications. One of the few open sources that allows you to implement such a component of a comprehensive information security system as the firewall of web applications is a list of rules from MITRE and the open project to ensure the security of web applications OWASP. However, these rules do not implement the developed requirements, so in addition, proposed and implemented rules for filtering the firewalls of web applications that meet them. The technique of their check on conformity to the established requirements is formed. Based on such utilities as Metasploit FW, nikto, dirb, wafninja, a software application has been developed that implements this technique. It has a direct link to the CVE database, which allows you to detect and check for current vulnerabilities. OWASP ModSecurity is used as a security component, the source code of which is located on official repositories and operates on the basis of the nginx web server. The capabilities of ModSecurity are enhanced by a developed dynamic connector that allows you to use the firewall of web applications as a separate means of protecting information. Certain filtering rules are implemented in the developed protection tool. This satisfies the requirements for a set of security features in a comprehensive information security system such as continuous protection of computer systems and a modular structure.

The global burden of pancreatic cancer.

IntroductionWe provide here an overview on current worldwide epidemiology of pancreatic malignancies, obtained from Global Health Data Exchange (GHDx) and World Health Organization (WHO) repositories.Material and methodsElectronic searches for collecting information on pancreatic cancer epidemiology were performed in official repositories of GHDx and WHO, and retrieved data were then analyzed.ResultsOverall, 447 665 new cases of pancreatic cancer were recorded around the world in 2017 (58.6 per million), with global prevalence of 49.8 per million and 441 083 deaths (57.7 per million). Incidence, prevalence and mortality increased by 55%, 63% and 53% during the last 25 years. Pancreatic cancer accounts for 1.8% of all cancers, causing 3.9% of all cancer disability- adjusted life years (DALYs) and 4.6% of all cancer deaths. No sex differences can be observed for incidence, prevalence and mortality, whilst DALYs are marginally higher in men. Incidence, prevalence and mortality follow a similar age-related trend, with gradual escalation after 30 years of age, reaching the highest burden after 80 years of age. The DALYs peak between 55 and 74 years, and then decline. The epidemiologic burden is positively associated with socio-demographic status. The largest burden of pancreatic cancers is observed in the East and Asia Pacific region, whilst the lowest is found in the Middle East and North Africa. Pancreatic cancer deaths are expected to increase by ~1.97-fold by the year 2060.ConclusionsAlthough pancreatic cancer remains relatively infrequent, its clinical, societal and economic burden is noteworthy. Future projections suggest that its burden may double during the next 40 years.

A Framework for Interrogating Social Media Images to Reveal an Emergent Archive of War

The visual image has long been central to how war is seen, contested and legitimised, remembered and forgotten. Archives are pivotal to these ends as is their ownership and access, from state and other official repositories through to the countless photographs scattered and hidden from a collective understanding of what war looks like in individual collections and dusty attics. With the advent and rapid development of social media, however, the amateur and the professional, the illicit and the sanctioned, the personal and the official, and the past and the present, all seem to inhabit the same connected and chaotic space. However, to even begin to render intelligible the complexity, scale and volume of what war looks like in social media archives is a considerable task, given the limitations of any traditional human-based method of collection and analysis. We thus propose the production of a series of ‘snapshots’, using computer-aided extraction and identification techniques to try to offer an experimental way in to conceiving a new imaginary of war. We were particularly interested in testing to see if twentieth century wars, obviously initially captured via pre-digital means, had become more ‘settled’ over time in terms of their remediated presence today through their visual representations and connections on social media, compared with wars fought in digital media ecologies (i.e. those fought and initially represented amidst the volume and pervasiveness of social media images). To this end, we developed a framework for automatically extracting and analysing war images that appear in social media, using both the features of the images themselves, and the text and metadata associated with each image. The framework utilises a workflow comprising four core stages: (1) information retrieval, (2) data pre-processing, (3) feature extraction, and (4) machine learning. Our corpus was drawn from the social media platforms Facebook and Flickr.

Migration Histories, National Memory, and Regional Collections

Migration Histories, National Memory, and Regional Collections

“Being Alone with Yourself is Increasingly Unpopular”: The Electronic Poetry of Jenny Holzer

“Being Alone with Yourself is Increasingly Unpopular”: The Electronic Poetry of Jenny Holzer Leisha Jones (bio) Internationally renowned visual artist Jenny Holzer has built a storied career appropriating, writing, moving, and projecting text toward both poetic and political ends. She has famously repurposed the advertiser’s text scroll, marquee, billboard, and building surface to engage mass forms of communication in the service of art. Working in and through ‘found’ art practices made famous by Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Sherry Levine’s appropriations, Holzer re-invents the postmodern sign as ad-poem or public aphorism through text grafts, ranging from the philosophical to the mundane. In her text scrolls, projections, and web works, Holzer dissects the language of the cultural mandate in midair, challenging the weighty dominance of word on page toward a surface of pixel and speed. She also interrogates site-specific locales by literally reshaping them in texts, layering official repositories of history under the contradictory stories of individuals. Holzer’s primary strategy of appropriation, both of form and of content, offers a feminist corrective for the marginal and the margin by recontextualizing and foregrounding noncanonical voices in public institutional spaces. This essay examines the lineage of Holzer as a hybrid producer of electronic literature, and investigates the morphology of her most enduring work, Truisms, in light of the electronic literature genre. While some of Holzer’s work falls outside the parameters of this “born-digital” oeuvre,1 I argue that versions of her Truisms series produce [End Page 423] some of the same effects on readers or viewers as their generated for the screen counterparts, such as the experience of text as object, the semiotic fluidity of words in LED motion, the decentering of language as a tool for chronological communication, and a schizophrenia of the ever-present in which the flow of information in the timeless space of the virtual continually exceeds practices of meaning-making. The technological forms Truisms takes across the span of Holzer’s more than 40-year career also chart her development as an electronic artist and writer. She morphs Truisms from paper flyer to LED text scroll to xenon projection to interactive webwork, and with each incarnation Truisms is born anew. Holzer introduced game-changing technologies to reanimate Truisms, with kinetic LED signs in 1982 and xenon projectors in 1996 (Schindler). According to an Art in America review of Holzer’s 15-year retrospective For Chicago, in 2008, she “increased the agility of her art, and over the years she has been able to accelerate and slow the words’ delivery with increasing precision, opening up a playful range of speed and pattern for writing that is often dark and angry” (Obourn). While the origins of Truisms may not strictly adhere to the born-digital criterion necessitated by the genre of electronic literature, the digital milieu and continued innovation of electronic work sustained over the course of Holzer’s career situates it in the emerging canon of electronic literature. Like other literary genre canons, electronic literature has key foundational works that are critically acclaimed and meet the born-digital mandate. It may seem odd to turn toward a contested holdover such as a ‘canon’ in a time when feminist, critical race, and sexuality scholars have all but disintegrated this old hierarchy of white men and token others (in theory more so than practice), but it is precisely this hangover of organized and recognized excellence that can function to familiarize and legitimize the new genre of electronic literature’s cultural and academic purchase. As such, the addition of Holzer’s Truisms to the literary category of experimental women writers, specifically as part of the history of electronic literature, reveals the nexus between the worlds of visual art and literature. “A Sense of Timing is the Mark of Genius”—Introductions Jenny Holzer’s art is exhibited and collected all over the world in places like Berlin, London, Basel, Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, and Istanbul. Her [End Page 424] works are featured on the Museum of Modern Art’s website and in their collection, and lauded by venerable art critic Roberta Smith as “singular, consistent, and relevant . . . and influential.” Truisms and Inflammatory Essays, 1979...

How State Historic Preservation Offices Say “Yes”

How State Historic Preservation Offices Say “Yes” Erik Hein (bio) “Better Check with the SHPO,” is a phrase many preservationists either hear or say on a regular basis. Of course, they are referring to the State Historic Preservation Offices that can be found in 59 states and territories as well as the District of Columbia. SHPOs are defined in the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 (NHPA) as having specific responsibilities for our federal historic preservation program as well as for establishing their own state programs. Their role is to say “yes” to owners and developers who want to rehabilitate properties in historically and architecturally appropriate ways; to citizens who want to see significant places recorded, recognized and preserved; and to federal agencies that make sure that their projects, the permits they issue or the grants they award are not used to destroy the places that matter to all of us. SHPOs rely on the funding they receive from the Historic Preservation Fund (HPF), which they must match with their own state funds. Authorized and appropriated by Congress, the amount of HPF funding available is always subject to change, so the preservation community must be continually vigilant in advocating for funding support. As of this printing, the authorization for the HPF expired on September 30, 2015. There is now a broad legislative effort underway to ensure that our national commitment to historic preservation remains intact. SHPOS PROMOTE STATE AND LOCAL PRIORITIES SHPOs are the product of a national historic preservation program that is unique to the United States. Rather than relying on a centralized, top-down or national “ministry” or some other government entity, our national program, defined by the NHPA, established a system whereby states and local governments would be required to have a voice in determining what historic resources were important in their communities. [End Page 58] Click for larger view View full resolution Applicants for historic tax credits work closely with their SHPO to make sure their rehabilitation projects meet the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards. One prominent tax credit success story is the Fox Theater in Oakland, California, which underwent a $70 million rehabilitation following a prolonged period of vacancy and deterioration. PHOTO BY NATHANAEL BENNETT. SHPOs can be effective advocates for the protection of significant local and regional places because they are positioned to know what resources are important in their states. They maintain comprehensive survey information and are the official repositories of vast amounts of historical data, maps, artifacts and other materials that help tell the stories of the communities in their respective states. There is great variety from state to state not only in the volume of information but also in how this information can be acquired, stored, digitized and shared. Much depends on available funding but also on the types of resources in a state. For example, Western states frequently are more comprehensive in listing archaeological resources while Eastern states’ data sets contain more built resources. Guiding all of the work of the SHPOs are State Preservation Plans, which are required as a condition of the federal funding SHPOs receive. These plans are far reaching and cover topics ranging from ensuring that diverse cultures are represented to addressing the potential impacts of flooding or other climate-related issues. They also describe how the SHPO will provide public education and outreach as well as technical assistance. To ensure that the plans reflect the concerns, priorities and values of many different communities, SHPOs actively seek public input and participation from diverse stakeholders. You can find copies of state plans on the National Park Service website at www.nps.gov/preservation-planning/stateplan-links.html. [End Page 59] Click for larger view View full resolution State Historic Preservation Offices gather information about archeological resources as well as built heritage. Archeologists from the Texas Historical Commission, the SHPO, were excited to uncover, on a private ranch, French cannons buried by the Spanish at Fort Saint Louis in 1689. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE TEXAS HISTORICAL COMMISSION. SHPOS CONNECT STATE AND LOCAL PROJECTS TO FEDERAL RESOURCES Protecting the places that matter to their communities is sometimes difficult. In today’s challenging economic environment, funding sources for preservation...

Life Writing in the Colonial Archives: The Case of Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996) of Nigeria

ABSTRACTCommentators on Europe’s colonial archives often highlight the lack of coherence to be found in official and national repositories. Even within a single file, the archives do not simply, or only, yield evidence about imperial intentions and colonial subjects in Europe’s diverse territories. Focusing on secret files compiled in the 1930s and 1940s around the activities of the prominent Nigerian newspaper editor and later first president of Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996), this article argues that Colonial Office archives reveal the tensions between imperialism as a hegemonic ideology and the diverse practices of individuals, including colonial governors, civil servants in London, and their critics in the colonial public sphere. The article shows how Azikiwe’s biography was produced by spies and informants in Nigeria, and by civil servants at the Colonial Office, but that Azikiwe himself cleverly exploited the meticulous record-keeping procedures in Whitehall to insert his political autobiography into the files for posterity.

Report of the Nomenclature Committee for Fungi 19: Official repositories for fungal names

SummaryThe Committee supports recognition of multiple official repositories over a single repository, and accepted three: Fungal Names, Index Fungorum, and MycoBank starting 1 January 2013, noting that parties representing the three have signed a Memorandum of Cooperation that expires immediately following the next International Botanical Congress in 2017. The effectiveness of this arrangement will be evaluated and reviewed by 2014 when the International Mycological Congress must ratify the NCF recommendations.

Book Review: Margaret and William Huggins: Unravelling Starlight: William and Margaret Huggins and the Rise of the New Astronomy

MARGARET AND WILLIAM HUGGINS Unravelling Starlight: William and Margaret Huggins and the Rise of the New Astronomy. Barbara J. Becker (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011). p. xx + 380. £65. ISBN 978-1-107-00229-6.In 1897, as the author of this dense biography reminds us, William Huggins then well in his eighties published his own account of the astronomy that three to four decades earlier he had helped to launch. In later studies about the emergence of astrophysics as a new discipline of astronomy, many seemed to forget that Huggins himself had emphasized this was a retrospect. An intellectual companion of William and Margaret Huggins for the past twenty years, Barbara J. Becker certainly has the required credentials to reassess the value of the astronomer's narrative. By focusing narrowly on Huggins's exceptional career as well as his wife's, Becker has produced a book that strikes me as being both extremely ambitious and perhaps excessively modest.Becker explains her ambition early in her book. To detach herself from conventional perspectives that have relied too much and too uncritically on Huggins's subjective account, Becker turns to the unpublished material. After a life that was both long and full, the astronomer left an impressive but scattered body of papers that Becker over the years has located and carefully examined. The copious correspondence held in various official repositories and a collection of six observatory notebooks now belonging to Wellesley College near Boston have enabled Becker to go far beyond the published record. She aims at showing that far from merely providing an odd assortment of details and anecdotes (p. 3), this material may yield an intimate knowledge of the material culture of early astrophysics. Held to her own expectations, Becker is brilliantly successful. She does show, as she had hoped, that scientific lives are mosaics fashioned out of happenstance and numerous incremental day-to-day decisions rife with clutter and confusion, dead ends and mistakes (p. 3).With this rich source material, Becker identifies many points omitted by Huggins from his own history. She shows how the hesitations that are characteristic of science as it is practised hardly appear in Huggins's recollections. She examines with great precision the circumvolutions of the astronomer's research agenda in relation to changing technologies and social circumstances. Her close study of Huggins's careful work to detect the motion of stars using the spectroscope is worthy of the best studies of the genre. Like other historians before her (e.g., A. J. Meadows in his biography of Huggins's sometime rival in astrophysics, Norman Lockyer), Becker underscores the personal and institutional controversies that plagued the early history of astrophysics in Britain and that were, by and large, left aside by the older Huggins. …

Smallpox: a disease and a weapon

Essentially, it is impossible to determine when smallpox first infected humans, but evidence suggests that it may have first appeared during the Neolithic Age. The mummified remains of Egyptians, specifically Pharaoh Ramses V (d. 1157BC), provide the first credible evidence of smallpox infection. By the 6th century AD smallpox was firmly rooted in Asia. The Crusades and expanding trade with Asia spread the disease into Europe. From there, the Europeans carried the disease to the NewWorld and by themid 18th century, the disease was endemic virtually everywhere in the world with the exception of Australia. The first smallpox vaccine was developed by Jenner in the late 18th century. Noticing that milkmaids who contracted cowpox (a close relative to smallpox) developed an immunity to the disease, he used the pus from cowpox lesions to create the vaccine. Approximately a century and a half later, the World Health Organization (WHO) initiated a worldwide vaccination program. The program was successful and the last reported naturally occurring case of smallpox was in 1977. WHO officially declared the disease eradicated in 1980. Currently, there are only two official repositories of the virus — one at the Centers for DiseaseControl andPrevention in Atlanta, Georgia and the other at Russian State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Koltsovo. Variola virus belongs to the family Poxviridae, subfamily Chordopoxvirinae, and genus Orthopoxvirus, which includes vaccinia, monkeypox virus,

Smallpox: a disease and a weapon

Smallpox: a disease and a weapon

Picturing Our Past: An Archive Constructs a National Culture

PHOTOGRAPHY'S POSITION IN WESTERN CULTURE is embedded in an ideology of representation that regards it as simultaneously copying and constructing the world that it pictures. Photographic practice, which includes not only the taking of pictures, but also how photographs are looked at, thought about, saved, used, and re-used, illustrates the ways we resolve this apparent paradox. State institutions that rely on keeping records produce photographs that can be used as documents-as replicas of the world-with all apparent disinterest in how their pictorial records construct the objects and arena of the institutional gaze. Yet a closer examination of the routines an institution employs in gathering, selecting, and preserving its records reveals strategies of representation and conservation that create and perpetuate the world within the institutional boundaries, with implications reaching beyond its specific time and place. The photographs thus are joined in a mutually authenticating discourse that validates the institution's picture of its sphere at the same time that the photographs' ideological power is increased by their link to the institutional practices that have produced them. Museums established as official repositories of culture and history offer clear examples of this pattern. Charged with documenting and preserving that which is considered valuable, the museum has also become the institutionalized arbiter of value, determining what is worth collecting and saving for the future. Because photographing and archiving are primary ways of assigning value, they often occupy a central position in the museum's task of constructing and perpetuating a shared conception of a collective past. Since its founding in 1873, the Nordic Museum has been a central institution in the collection and documentation of Sweden's cultural history. Included in the museum's vast and intersecting collections of cultural artifacts are the pic-