Perfect Medium Research Articles

Word and Music Studies: Essays on Performativity and on Surveying the Field.

Word and Music Studies: Essays on Performativity and on Surveying the Field.

In Memoriam: Philip W. Brickner, MD

Dr. Philip W. Brickner, the founding editor of the Journal of Long Term Home Health Care and immediate past editor of Care Management Journals, a pioneering figure in the field of community medicine for the homeless and homebound elderly, a prolific writer, and a charismatic mentor to countless trainees in medicine and social sciences, died on March 24, 2014, at his home in Riverdale, New York.Brickner received many awards from various organizations for his work at St. Vincent's Hospital and, notably, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Health Care for the Homeless Clinicians Network. He was the author of more than 100 scientific papers, six books, 25 chapters, and many other letters and publications. His latest focus had been on the use of ultraviolet (UV) radiation on air systems for the control of tuberculosis (TB) transmission. This work has been supported by a $7 million grant for the Tuberculosis Ultraviolet Shelter Study. This work is now helping developing countries prevent airborne transmission of tuberculosis.Dr. Brickner was a graduate of the Swarthmore College and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and a proud alumnus of the Bellevue Hospital medicine training program in late 1950s under the famed director, Dickenson W. Richards, MD. After his training and early positions, Phil was poised to apply his deep convictions of care to the indigent in what was then the perfect medium of charitable medical endeavors, St. Vincent's Hospital. From the start, his passion resonated with the mission of the hospital's founders, The Sisters of Charity, as they had forged it in the 1800s.From its inception in 1968, the Department of Community Medicine at St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village was led by Dr. Brickner. He saw the great need of the many who suffered in the interstices of a flawed health care system. As a colleague reflected to me upon the news of Phil's passing, still remember my internship interview with Phil as I was graduating from Cornell Medical School when he told me that, 'St. Vincent's is a place where you can walk into the president's office and propose a plan to help a forgotten group, have no plan as to how to make money from it, and they won't kick you out of the office!' At that interview, the colleague chose St. Vincent's and has gone on to a distinguished career in geriatrics. Similar stories abound: personal accounts of physicians, nurses, health educators, social workers, and others all serving as testimony to Brickner's charisma and beliefs. To those who shared his sense of mission and devotion to the sick poor, he imparted the wisdom that they too would be rewarded by personal growth in their discipline, ability to write, and teach those who follow.Dr. Brickner and his colleagues started a hands-on health care service at homeless shelters. At the time, no such direct-care programs existed in New York City for this population. The indigent men (and women) served here were the start of the St. Vincent's single-room occupancy program who quickly grew to bring teams of physicians, nurses, and social workers to many of the singleroom occupancy hotels in the area at that time. In 1983, Brickner was chosen to direct the Health Care for the Homeless demonstration program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Pew Memorial Trust, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. With his team from St. Vincent's Hospital, he helped develop projects in 19 cities and oversaw the implementation of multidisciplinary primary care efforts, which were based on the work in New York City. The program is regarded as an extraordinarily successful demonstration, having been replicated with the 1987 Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act and now including 249 federally funded homeless health care projects nationally.In 1969, Brickner and colleagues began service to the frail homebound aged in Greenwich Village and Chelsea. It became known as the Chelsea-Village program and later grew to include many monolingual Chinese-speaking patients. …

Images of Time and Timelessness: A Musical Reading of Death in Venice

This essay is based on an old, well-known question in aesthetics: how to represent time in its fleetingness without halting, appropriating, objectifying, or transcending it? The question inspires a reading of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice as the account of a transformation in which a wish to overcome time turns into the erotic desire of being delivered to time. As such, the story reflects the tension between two competing views of music: music as an Apollonian play of time-transcending, auditory forms, and music as the Dionysian art in time. A phenomenological reading of Luchino Visconti's adaptation of the novella complicates this plainly dualistic opposition. The essay traces how the aesthetic suspension of time is contrasted with, but also depends on, the spectator's real-time experience. Similarly, the two classical, competing views of music stand in a complex dialectical relation to each other and reflect our existential relation to time. Like the harmony of the spheres, the time that is not our time--time in general--is excluded from immediate sensory perception. Yet, as it is filled with things, episodes, and actions, we can abstractly distinguish between its worldly effects and time as the cause that transcends experience. Still, it is hard to conceive of time in itself without imaginatively turning it into an abstract state of timelessness, a static, eternal realm of time. To be sure, many great thinkers have questioned the out-thereness of time and have regarded it, rather, as a universal post rem or a priori form of intuition. Even within the confines of human experience time causes philosophical puzzlement. It dictates our whole lives, imposes its monomaniac regime of irreversibility on everything it touches, but eludes our grasp whenever we try to engage in it, in and of itself. At first sight, its intangibility may facilitate a common desire to bracket time or our consciousness of it. Who has never longed for a world in which the persons and things we love simply stay the way they are? On the other hand, we are also obsessed with time, as we love punctuality and as we delight in races against the clock. The obsession with exact time can easily be exposed, however, as yet another attempt to control its unceasing and unforgiving movement. It is as if time plays with us, being both present and absent, not only in and to our experience but even in our thoughts. Time does not just fly--it plays hide-and-seek. In and Out of Time In its play of presence and absence, the experience of time is closely related to the fear of death. To appease this fear, it is often said that death needs to be given a face. Following Emmanuel Levinas and Philippe Aries, Rudi Visker argues that naming or representing death symbolically separates it from life and fends it off as a heterogeneous element. The correct way to exorcize the dead and keep them from haunting the living consists neither in explaining death philosophically nor in calculating its medical probability. To be a successful image of death, not even resemblance is needed. All that is required is for us to put it boldly in its proper place--on the shelf--thereby isolating it from life (Visker 2007, 140-54). Similarly, time can be represented symbolically. Successful images of time offer a handle on its otherwise uncontrollable fleetingness; by bringing it under our explicit attention and making it graspable to the senses they enable us to relate to time and vicariously help us deal with life's transience. The question, however, is what kind of time such images relate us to. When time is placed there, is it not transfigured into something else--a timeless object--just like symbols of death are purported to do? To what extent, then, is it still an image of time? Music--not the celestial, inaudible music of the spheres but our own earthly music--has often been considered to be the perfect medium to represent time. According to Arthur Schopenhauer, however, music offers an escape from the threat of time by taking us out of it. …

Plastic Exfoliation of a Rigid Rectangular Inclusion Under the Action of Concentrated Forces

We solve the antiplane problem of plastic exfoliation of a rigid rectangular inclusion in a perfect elastoplastic medium under the action of forces directed along the axis of the inclusion. It is assumed that the plastic strains are concentrated on the boundary of the inclusion in layers of thickness zero propagating from the tip of the inclusion. We determine the dependences of the lengths of plastic strips on the acting loads. The conditions of coalescence of plastic layers propagating along the smaller faces of the inclusion and the conditions of complete exfoliation of the inclusion are established. We propose a criterion of applicability of the theory of thin inclusions and the linear model of plastic zone. It is shown that the application of this criterion to inclusions whose width does not exceed 5% of their length gives an error of the theory of thin inclusions that does not exceed 5%.

Mobile learning for literacy, teacher training and curriculum development

While the field of mobile learning is not new, in recent years it has received vastly increased attention, both from seasoned researchers and practitioners in the field, and from new entrants. The new players include those who have been involved in traditional education and are now turning their attention to the promise of mobile learning, companies interested in its commercial potential, and agencies now seeing mobiles as a perfect medium to deliver their humanitarian missions. The new players may not have either the interests or the subject-matter expertise of those who have been involved in mobile learning for many years. As a result, there is some concern around the level of discussions and claims being made in the name of mobile learning. Is everything being said about mobile learning in fact true? Are all the initiatives that claim to offer mobile learning actually delivering on that promise? Has the spotlight on mobile learning helped to deepen the discussion and maturity of the field, or has it created hype that overpromises and underdelivers? Behind these questions are fluid and contending views and definitions of mobile learning. There are definitions based on pilots, programmes, and interventions within the education system that enhance, extend and reform the system, ones driven by the rhetoric and funding of innovation; at the other extreme, there are definitions based on new ways of producing, transforming, sharing, discussing ideas, images, information and opinions in the real world, challenging the relevance, credibility and authenticity of the education system. These definitions also challenge the modalities and priorities of UNESCO, working as it does with the institutions of government and the education systems of member states. The pressure for change in education moves from the top-down to the outside-in, and these views and definitions have profound implications for the sustainability and scale of those changes, as well as for the policies and practices related, for instance, to literacy, teacher training and curriculum development. The present special issue deals precisely with these important problems and uncertainties, while showing how they play out in different contexts and countries. The guest

Elemental Forms

This paper considers the way the nineteenth-century newspaper was oriented towards information. Despite their political differences, nineteenth-century newspapers were often discussed as if they were universal, with a paper for every segment of society. My argument is that this apparent universality, where the newspaper was figured as a print genre potentially open to all, laid the foundations for the emergence of the popular press. The paper is in two parts. The first considers the nineteenth-century newspaper as a genre, arguing that its periodicity enabled it to serve as a perfect medium, passing on content derived from elsewhere. The second explores the way information was conceived in the period. By looking at the way the newspaper drew upon, represented, and distributed information, it is possible to understand how it functioned as material media. In conclusion, I look at the way the nineteenth-century newspaper is changed through digitization today. When scholars access nineteenth-century newspapers through digital resources, they engage with a different material media that, in turn, reconfigures the source material. Such encounters foreground the importance of genre while providing new opportunities for its study.

Progress in study on the skin mucus lectin in fish

Since water is a perfect medium for both bacteria and parasitic microbes, fish skin is constantly exposed to pathogen attacks. It is generally believed that skin mucus serves a mechanical as well as biochemical barrier. Lectins, an important part of the mucus, are carbohydrate-binding proteins that are neither antibodies nor enzymes, yet play important roles in innate and adaptive immunity. Based on the structure of the carbohydrate recognition domain (CRD) and their function, fish mucus lectins are classified as four types. Recent research has shed light on the structural diversity and functions in innate immunity of mucus lectins. Here, we reviewed recent research progress on the classification, biological properties and functions of fish mucus lectins. Analyses on other fish species are therefore important in clarifying lectin diversity and their functions in skin mucus.

‘Even the Ghost was more than one person’: Hauntology and Authenticity in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There

If the opening sequence of a film is a microscopic 'event' that achieves far more than setting the tone and whetting the appetite for what we are about to see, then Todd Haynes' I'm Not There is exemplary. This paper works its way through the conceptually dense and intricately woven textual layers of the film's opening to stage a three-way dialogue between Haynes, Bob Dylan and Jacques Derrida: three mavericks who defy simple categorisation, by transgressing the boundaries of their respective fields (song writing, cinema and philosophy). By introducing Derrida's deconstructive logic of hauntology as a strategy for reading Haynes' biopic on Dylan, the figure of the ghost is called upon to situate the quest for an identity's authenticity as a perennial, irresolvable problem in song, cinema and philosophy. Belonging to a time that is neither past nor present, a place that is neither here nor there, the ghost offers the perfect medium to join Haynes, Dylan and Derrida in (re)thinking identity in terms that respond to a call (in the name of art, justice and truth, among other things) that is not based on an unyielding conception of authenticity.

Will we ever find a perfect medium for mammalian cell culture?

Will we ever find a perfect medium for mammalian cell culture?

Welcome to JBJS Reviews!

Orthopaedic knowledge is in a state of rapid growth, and all indicators suggest that this trend will continue for a long, long time. This expansion of knowledge, of course, is very good as it will have a major positive impact on the care that we provide to our patients. However, we must continually examine our expanding knowledge to be sure that it is truthful, accurate, valid, and relevant. Then, we must present this knowledge to the orthopaedic surgeon in a concise, organized, and efficient manner and make sure that it is based on the best evidence available. That is what the Current Concepts Reviews section of The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery has been doing ever since its inception. Indeed, on reader surveys, Current Concepts Reviews have been among the highest-rated articles in The Journal. The popularity of such articles led The Journal leadership to consider providing readers with even more information in this format but in a way that takes advantage of online access and the opportunities for enhanced communication that are available in this digital electronic age. As a result, we are proud to present the newest member of the JBJS family of publications, JBJS Reviews. Supported by a distinguished board of Associate Editors and featuring authors who are recognized experts in the field, JBJS Reviews is an online journal that is unconstrained by the limits of the print medium. The mission of JBJS Reviews is to publish the best evidence and most compelling clinical information in an easy-to-read format that is optimized for tablet, mobile, and online use. JBJS Reviews also will feature more international authors; will provide direct links to video, commentary, and other forms of online media; and will feature new topic areas such as health policy and the role of government in the future of our specialty. In order to ensure a steady flow of new information while also helping readers to allocate their time most efficiently, JBJS Reviews will follow a continuous publication model, with the goal of publishing at least one new article each week. JBJS Reviews will focus on the quality of the evidence upon which articles are based. Approximately half of the reviews will be considered “Critical Analysis Reviews,” which will include a “Recommendations for Care” table that will rate operative and nonoperative care options according to the quality of the evidence upon which the recommendations are based. JBJS Reviews is also the perfect medium through which to obtain continuing medical education (CME) credit, with each article being accompanied by at least five CME questions and linking to a mechanism that will allow readers to answer the questions and claim their credit. Questions will be as relevant as possible to the day-to-day practice of a general or subspecialized orthopaedic surgeon. The goal of JBJS Reviews is to be the highest-quality orthopaedic review journal, with all articles being written by senior authors who are well established in their subspecialties. Each issue will update the orthopaedic community on important topics in a concise, time-saving manner, providing expert insights into musculoskeletal skeletal research and clinical experience. We hope you will find that JBJS Reviews lives up to the high expectations that we have set for it. Please feel free to share your thoughts with us and let us know if we are providing you with the kind of information that you need to stay current, to stay informed, and to provide the best orthopaedic care to your patients through enhanced acquisition of dependable knowledge.

Superficial dosimetry imaging based on Čerenkov emission for external beam radiotherapy with megavoltage x‐ray beam

Čerenkov radiation emission occurs in all tissue, when charged particles (either primary or secondary) travel at velocity above the threshold for the Čerenkov effect (about 220 KeV in tissue for electrons). This study presents the first examination of optical Čerenkov emission as a surrogate for the absorbed superficial dose for MV x-ray beams. In this study, Monte Carlo simulations of flat and curved surfaces were studied to analyze the energy spectra of charged particles produced in different regions near the surfaces when irradiated by MV x-ray beams. Čerenkov emission intensity and radiation dose were directly simulated in voxelized flat and cylindrical phantoms. The sampling region of superficial dosimetry based on Čerenkov radiation was simulated in layered skin models. Angular distributions of optical emission from the surfaces were investigated. Tissue mimicking phantoms with flat and curved surfaces were imaged with a time domain gating system. The beam field sizes (50 × 50-200 × 200 mm(2)), incident angles (0°-70°) and imaging regions were all varied. The entrance or exit region of the tissue has nearly homogeneous energy spectra across the beam, such that their Čerenkov emission is proportional to dose. Directly simulated local intensity of Čerenkov and radiation dose in voxelized flat and cylindrical phantoms further validate that this signal is proportional to radiation dose with absolute average discrepancy within 2%, and the largest within 5% typically at the beam edges. The effective sampling depth could be tuned from near 0 up to 6 mm by spectral filtering. The angular profiles near the theoretical Lambertian emission distribution for a perfect diffusive medium, suggesting that angular correction of Čerenkov images may not be required even for curved surface. The acquisition speed and signal to noise ratio of the time domain gating system were investigated for different acquisition procedures, and the results show there is good potential for real-time superficial dose monitoring. Dose imaging under normal ambient room lighting was validated, using gated detection and a breast phantom. This study indicates that Čerenkov emission imaging might provide a valuable way to superficial dosimetry imaging in real time for external beam radiotherapy with megavoltage x-ray beams.

Effect of Four Wave Mixing in WDM Systems for Higher number of Channels

The integration of wireless and optical networks increases the capacity and mobility as well as decreases costs in the access networks. However, there are nonlinearity and obstacles preventing them from being perfect media. A serious issue for WDM systems is the presence of resonant four wave mixing (FWM) terms, as a result of interactions between different channels. FWM presents a major source of non-linear cross talk since they often fall near or on top of the desired signals. So the best solution is to avoid the FWM generation from early design stages. The effect of four wave mixing (FWM) as one of the influential factors in the WDM for RoF has been studied here using Optisystem. The investigation of FWM effect with different number of channels at various channel spacing has also been done. The simulation results reveal that the less number of users at input cause less FWM but in today’s technology, it is important for the circuit to handle WDM.

The magic of clay

Judit Horvath explains how clay is the perfect medium to use within adult-guided, child-led sessions, and gives some guidance on different ages and stages of physical development.

Ubiquitous Mobile Real Time Visual Translator Using Augmented Reality for Bahasa Language

 Abstract—Mobile technology have rapidly advanced over the years, successful researches of augmented reality on mobile phones under the different mobile platforms have made it possible to implement augmented reality technology on mobiles. Now the possibility of combining real time visual with augmented reality seems to be a success. This paper is simply to emphasize on combining real time visual with augmented reality technology on mobiles for education purpose. The research is based on how the implementation of real time visual translator on augmented reality mobile applications can help people in understanding/translating and give meanings to some writings displayed around them ubiquitously.  possible new kind of applications that manipulate the person's surrounding perspective. AR systems combine virtual information into a person's physical environment so that he or she will observe that information as existing in their surroundings. Mobile augmented reality systems (MARS) provide this service without limiting the individual's location to a specially equipped area. Augmented Reality (AR) is currently being used in disciplines of computer science (visualization, robotics, nanotechnology), engineering, applied psychology, education, environmental design, medicine, engineering, tourism, and archaeology. The use of mobile phone is the perfect liberation medium for learning in near future. The concept of augmented reality seems to be succefully implemented on mobiles and by combining Mobile Augmented reality, real time rendering and ubiquitous; the idea is to develop a real time translator that will translate Bahasa language to English language and give meanings of the words translated, anywhere to any environment whenever desired (ubiquitous). This application is mostly based on education that is providing or diverting knowledge to people who actually need it (4), (5).

Freedom of Expression, Internet Responsibility, and Business Ethics: The Yahoo! Saga and Its Implications

In the late 1990s, the Internet seemed a perfect medium for business: a facilitator of unlimited economical propositions to people without any regulatory limitations. Cases like Yahoo! mark the beginning of the end of that illusion. They demonstrate that ISPs have to respect domestic state legislation in order to avoid legal risks. Yahoo! was wrong to ignore French national laws and the plea to remove Nazi memorabilia from its auction site. Its legal struggle proved futile and may have harmed its business. This essay argues for the adoption of standards of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR considerations may trump some forms of anti-social, highly offensive expression.

Looking at pandemics: From Black Death to swine flu

200 British Journal of School Nursing April 2011 Vol 6 No 4 This paper will look at some of the history’s most destructive epidemics and pandemics that have occurred, including the Black Death in the 14th century, smallpox, cholera, typhoid and the influenza outbreak of 1918. Throughout history, magic, religion and science have ‘fought for supremacy’ over the explanations of the causes of disease (Ayliffe and English, 2003). Although direct observation of the patterns of infection occurrence eventually led to an understanding of the spread of disease, this took a long time. From the 1st century AD, infections such as cholera, the plague and chlamydia were thought to be spread through ‘miasma’ or bad air. It was believed that the air was filled with particles from decomposing matter (miasmata), which caused poisonous vapours to infect people. This was not an unreasonable supposition given that stagnant or contaminated possibly to different countries or continents. Infection has been a major cause of morbidity and mortality throughout man’s history. Along with genetics, environment, lifestyle choices and biology, it forms one of the five main causes of illness and death. Diseases spread by infection are transmitted through orifices in the human body, such as cuts in the skin, the mouth or respiratory tract, and through sexual activity. They are carried through the human body in the blood, saliva or in semen. The development of microscopes (in the 17th century) helped the development of germ theory. These discoveries enabled scientists to look closely at the microbes responsible for disease. Bacteria and viruses have the capability, as with other organisms, to mutate and adapt to their environment, as Darwin suggested in his theory of evolution (Darwin, 1859). We see this today with the occurrence of new strains of infections such as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) (Ayliffe and English, 2003). Bacteria have been found in ancient Antarctic sedimentary rocks and ice (Magna, 2009). They are believed to have been among the first living things on earth, meaning that they have survived the course of the last three and a half billion years. Their ability to cause epidemics depends upon the virulence of the pathogen, the size of the host group, the immune response and the ability to find a victim (Magna, 2009). This ability to find a host was helped by changing social and economic developments. The domestication of animals provided opportunities for infections to cross species, and the development of increasingly larger social groups allowed them to be easily and quickly transmitted between human hosts. In addition to this, as cities grew, there were unclean living conditions with no human waste disposal, no safe drinking water and overcrowding; all contributing to the spread of disease. Poverty was also a major factor in increasing death rates; water has a foul smell and provides a perfect medium for microorganisms to grow: water borne infections, such as diarrhoea, dysentery, cholera and typhoid have been responsible for many epidemics over history. The explanation of bad air causing infections led to better sanitation and hygiene, which, despite being based on misguided assumptions, was positive for public health. Florence Nightingale subscribed to the miasma theory and, during the Crimean War, helped the introduction of cleaner hospitals and better conditions for recovering soldiers. Although this did not stop the spread of disease completely, it did reduce their transmission. In her Notes on Nursing, Nightingale refers to fresh air and describes an unventilated room:

Magnetoacoustic surface gravity waves at a spherical interface

Aims. The plasma structured by magnetic fields in the solar atmosphere is a perfect medium for the propagation of guided magnetic and magnetoacoustic waves. Geometrical restriction of wave propagation is known to confer a dispersive character for waves. In addition, waves propagating along discontinuities in the medium are known to remain localized. As an extension to theories of guided waves in magnetic slabs and cylinders under solar and stellar conditions, we aim to study the propagation of magnetoacoustic-gravity waves at a spherical interface in the low solar corona (considered here as a density discontinuity), modelling global waves recently observed in the corona in EUV wavelengths. Methods. Using conservation laws at the interface we derive the dispersion relation in spherical geometry with a radially expanding magnetic field in the presence of gravitational stratification. The obtained dispersion relation describing fast magnetoacoustic-gravity surface waves is derived using an approximative method taking into account that propagation takes place near the solar surface. Results. Theoretical results obtained in the present study are applied to investigate the propagation of EIT waves in the low corona. The frequency of waves is shown to increase with decreasing density contrast at the interface. We also show that, for a given azimuthal wavenumber, the magnetic field has a very small effect on the value of the frequency of waves. When plotted against the location of the interface (in the radial direction) the frequency varies inversely proportional to the distance, while for a fixed density ratio and location of the interface the frequency is obtained to be defined in a very narrow region.

Such a Rare Thing: The Art of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (review)

Reviewed by: Such a Rare Thing: The Art of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio Christopher Nesmith Such a Rare Thing: The Art of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. By Clarence Lindsay. Kent: Kent State Univ. Press, 2009. 192 pp. Cloth, $24.95. Clarence Lindsay's Such a Rare Thing takes its title from a letter from Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in which she wrote "Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to tell it." But it may have taken its approach to Winesburg, Ohio from a line of her poetry: "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant," because Lindsay's book presents a strong argument that Anderson's novel reveals a powerful truth about the nature of American identity, not by looking directly at the issue but by subtly revealing the fictive nature of American identity. For this, Lindsay argues, the novel's "interrelated tale" form was ideal. Rather than privileging the individual, as in the traditional novel, Anderson's radical structure examines the manner in which each figure in the narrative effects a version of romantic selfhood and how these internalized scripts collide with prevailing community narratives, portraying American identity as a self-authored negotiation between the individual and the community. The introductory chapter discusses some theories about Anderson's small town aesthetic, in which the problematic nature of the American self is particularly heightened. The small town, Lindsay notes, was for Anderson not a folksy venue for celebrating American values but rather the perfect medium for revealing a postmodern awareness of the fictive nature of American identity. Anderson's theory about the nature of that identity, Lindsay argues, is what he famously referred to as the "Grotesque." What makes one a "grotesque" is adopting a truth for one's self and trying to live according to this invented "truth." The democratically inclusive nature of Winesburg reveals that all of its denizens are thus "grotesques," which, as the word generally denotes something aberrant or bizarrely strange, is rather oxymoronic. But this was just the point, according to Lindsay. Winesburg, Ohio shows that the common trait of Americans is a sense of identity predicated on being a singular, solitary individual at odds with the larger community. The first two chapters after the introductory one examine this nature closely, showing how the ways in which the characters' ingrained meta-narratives contend with one another and help form the "grotesques" that populate [End Page 184] the story—particularly how sexual desires are internally narratized so that the principal self metaphorically becomes the romantic script. The story of the misanthropic and misogynistic Wash Williams, for instance, is unfolded to show how Wash's early romanticized idealization of his wife is simply an inversion of his later hatred of all women. The inner desire of the respectable and well-liked Reverend Curtis Hartman to experience God's numinous power as would an Old Testament prophet is grafted, rather fetishistically, onto Kate Swift. The next two chapters look at how Anderson's theory of the self engages critically with the female characters, and especially in their relationships to men. Lindsay argues that Anderson's women deserve more than the dismissive treatment of earlier critics and suggests that many of these women (though not immune to falling prey to their own romantic narratives of selfhood) recognize the fictive nature of this selfhood more clearly than the men, and that in them Anderson has created some of the strongest female characters in American fiction. Lindsay's task, as he describes it, is two-fold: he wishes to argue that both Anderson and Winesburg, Ohio deserve more critical attention and that the text is as worthy of close sustained reading as any authored by Anderson's more canonical modernist contemporaries (e.g., Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald). Carefully scrutinizing the text's interweaving narratives, Lindsay demonstrates that Anderson's technique of overlapping stories is not haphazard or accidental but the sure and skillful work of an artist, revealing nuances and surprises that layer meaning upon meaning. Although his attention to only a relatively small number of "stories" somewhat belies his contention that the text should be treated as a novel and not a collection of...

Natural occurrence of Fusarium mycotoxins in oil crop seed

Oilseeds are a perfect medium for microfungi spread and mycotoxin production. With increasing demand for oil crop produce such research has gained a special relevance since research evidence on this issue is scarce. During 2007-2009, prevalent fungi genera, including Fusarium genus, potential producer of deoxynivalenol (DON), zearalenone (ZEA), T-2 toxin (T-2) etc. were determined in our tests. The ELISA immunoenzymatic method and Veratox Fast kits were used to identify and quantify mycotoxins, while Fusarium fungi species were identified using conventional fungi determination techniques. Higher Fusarium fungi contamination level was found on linseed compared with that on spring or winter rapeseed. The difference was even more obvious in different experimental years, however, having identified Fusarium species, F. avenaceum and F. oxysporum were found to be prevalent in the seed of all crop species tested. In 2009, spring rape samples were found to contain F. dimerum which is a significant human pathogen.The presence of DON was identified in 18.2-100%, ZEA in 40 -100%, and T-2 toxin in 100% of seed samples of all oil crop species tested. From the food safety viewpoint, the concentrations determined did not exceed the levels hazardous for health, laid out in the EU regulations, however, the effect of low toxin concentrations is slow and the negative consequences manifest themselves only after some time and in various forms, which poses a serious health risk for humans and animals.

New phenotyping methods for screening wheat and barley for beneficial responses to water deficit

This review considers stomatal conductance as an indicator of genotypic differences in the growth response to water stress. The benefits of using stomatal conductance are compared with photosynthetic rate and other indicators of genetic variation in water stress tolerance, along with the use of modern phenomics technologies. Various treatments for screening for genetic diversity in response to water deficit in controlled environments are considered. There is no perfect medium: there are pitfalls in using soil in pots, and in using hydroponics with ionic and non-ionic osmotica. Use of mixed salts or NaCl is recommended over non-ionic osmotica. Developments in infrared thermography provide new and feasible screening methods for detecting genetic variation in the stomatal response to water deficit in controlled environments and in the field.