Reader's Companion Research Articles

AI in breast screening mammography: breast screening readers' perspectives.

This study surveyed the views of breast screening readers in the UK on how to incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology into breast screening mammography. An online questionnaire was circulated to the UK breast screening readers. Questions included their degree of approval of four AI implementation scenarios: AI as triage, AI as a companion reader/reader aid, AI replacing one of the initial two readers, and AI replacing all readers. They were also asked to rank five AI representation options (discrete opinion; mammographic scoring; percentage score with 100% indicating malignancy; region of suspicion; heat map) and indicate which evidence they considered necessary to support the implementation of AI into their practice among six options offered. The survey had 87 nationally accredited respondents across the UK; 73 completed the survey in full. Respondents approved of AI replacing one of the initial two human readers and objected to AI replacing all human readers. Participants were divided on AI as triage and AI as a reader companion. A region of suspicion superimposed on the image was the preferred AI representation option. Most screen readers considered national guidelines (77%), studies using a nationally representative dataset (65%) and independent prospective studies (60%) as essential evidence. Participants' free-text comments highlighted concerns and the need for additional validation. Overall, screen readers supported the introduction of AI as a partial replacement of human readers and preferred a graphical indication of the suspected tumour area, with further evidence and national guidelines considered crucial prior to implementation.

Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men: A Reader's Companion by Jonathan S. Cullick

Reviewed by: Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men: A Reader's Companion by Jonathan S. Cullick Sean Heuston Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men: A Reader's Companion, by Jonathan S. Cullick. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018. 144 pp. $24.95 hardcover. This slim, useful volume should be guaranteed to elicit mixed feelings from readers. Jonathan S. Cullick's deep understanding of Warren's best-known novel shows in his deft explanations of its most salient elements and many of its subtler ones, and he argues convincingly that the 1946 novel has become increasingly relevant in recent years. Readers will definitely benefit from Cullick's expertise as a Warren scholar and his facility for reinterpreting classic texts, skills displayed to great effect in his excellent Making History: The Biographical Narratives of Robert Penn Warren and sure to inform his forthcoming Mockingbird Grows Up: Re-reading Harper Lee Since Watchman. The mixed feelings will likely result from the fact that Cullick does his job so well. He compellingly argues that Warren's tale of political corruption "is the textbook for our time" (xv). This is a good thing for Cullick's book and Warren's novel, but not for the US or much of the world. The book does make some minor missteps: its references to technology (including iPhones, FaceTime, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr) will likely age badly, as will the phrase "Spoiler alert" (14). Lee Atwater died in 1991, so encountering his name in a list of "today's celebrity campaign strategists" is jarring (63). Claims about timelessness (several in a chapter titled "The Timelessness of All the King's Men") are vague and ultimately unprovable, and are at odds with Cullick's detailed claims about the novel's relevance vis-à-vis the peculiarities of the Trump era (or whatever one chooses to call it). The epilogue goes into tedious detail describing the route Cullick and his wife followed driving from New York to the cemetery in Vermont where Warren and his second wife Eleanor Clark Warren are buried. The Cullicks each recited a Warren poem and left a copy by Warren's headstone before traveling home to Kentucky. This was no doubt an important, memorable moment for them, and would be for anyone who feels moved by the work of a great writer, but the epilogue (which never mentions [End Page 161] Warren's novel) seems unrelated to the rest of the material. The book would have been better without these glitches, but it is impressively effective even with them. Throughout A Reader's Companion, Cullick balances two imperatives (one presumably assigned and one presumably a matter of conscience): the need to provide insightful criticism appropriate for a reader's guide and the need to point out the ways All The King's Men seems to have anticipated many aspects of America's recent political turns toward demagoguery and a politics of simmering rage. Cullick notes that Willie Stark's "speeches demonstrate what [political scientist and Warren scholar Steven D.] Ealy calls 'redneck resentment not as something incidental to his campaign, but as its emotional core'" (65); mentions Stark leading the crowds at his rallies to chant "Nail 'em up!" (meaning nail the hides of his opponents and cultural elites to a barn door, a chant that will sound somewhat familiar to anyone who has paid attention to American politics in recent years) (66); aptly coins the word "nonspeeches" because Stark tells his crowds he is not going to give a speech and then launches into long, improvisational rants (56); and observes that in politics "power starts with language, power is pursued through language, and, in the end, the deal is closed through language" (55). In part because Cullick repeatedly points out the need for the nation to return to a civil, non-dysfunctional political dialogue and persuasively claims that All the King's Men can help inoculate readers against propaganda and demagoguery ("Citizens must learn how this kind of rhetoric works. We must be able to identify how language is weaponized. We must be able to name and recognize the strategies of persuasion" [xv]) and in part because Cullick draws...

"Dear Heart": Homage to Henry Rosemont, Jr., 1934–2017

"Dear Heart":Homage to Henry Rosemont, Jr., 1934–2017 Roberta E. Adams (bio) What can be said about me is simply that I continue my studies without respite and instruct others without growing weary. Analects 7.34 We can read the list of Henry Rosemont's accomplishments—the books and papers he wrote, edited, and translated, and his classes and workshops, conference papers, and seminars. The 2008 collection of essays in his honor, Polishing the Chinese Mirror, edited by Marthe Chandler and Ronnie Littlejohn,1 provides almost two dozen testimonies to the influence and reach of his work. In her introduction, Marthe Chandler emphasizes as well Henry's political activism, quoting the ideal he expressed in 1991, in A Chinese Mirror, of a dream "that can be shared by all peoples, holding their humanity in common."2 Henry worked toward that dream. He was a scholar, teacher, philosopher, and activist. His publications will long outlive him, but he truly lives in the people he touched, the communities he created, his quests for social justice and social change, and the ideas he espoused in conversation with others—these define him. In his preface to Against Individualism (2015), Henry expressed his purpose to advance "the views of the early Confucians on what it is to be a role-bearing person," which he considered "a genuinely viable alternative answer to the question of what it is to be a human being."3 Henry lived as a role-bearer; many of us found in him a role model, an exemplary person (junzi). We learned from him the value of appropriate behavior, of authoritative conduct, of ritual embodied in performance. Confucius said that he would never get to meet a sage (sheng ren) (Analects 7.26); those of us who had the good fortune to know Henry were luckier. I met Henry Rosemont, along with Roger Ames, when I was a participant during the summer of 1996 in their NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Institute at St. Mary's College, "Teaching the Chinese Classics in Translation." Henry and Roger were completing the text that appeared the next year as The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation.4 Among the many joys of that workshop was that, as Henry and Roger tried [End Page 1] Click for larger view View full resolution Henry Rosemont, Jr., 1934–2017. Photo by Stan Shoptaugh. [End Page 2] out their translations with each other, they included us and took our responses seriously: they created of us a community of scholars, and modeled the roles of teacher, scholar, disputant, and friend. At the end of this experience, we were invited to become members of the Asian Studies Development Program (ASDP) of the East-West Center at the University of Hawai'i. Launched in 1991 by Roger Ames, Betty Buck, and Peter Hershock, ASDP is one of the many families that Henry helped to foster. The importance of this enterprise is that it enables academics from a variety of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, and even the sciences—many without prior formal training in philosophy or Asian Studies—to introduce the study of Asia into the curricula of small colleges, universities, and community colleges throughout the United States. Henry Rosemont was the consummate teacher of philosophy who had the opportunity through his various teaching appointments to train students in their work over the course of several years. He worked collaboratively with other scholars on significant publications. But he also led a number of NEH and ASDP faculty workshops that brought his ideas to an expanded group of teachers eager to bring a global focus to their campuses and to give students an understanding of Eastern traditions and alternate ways of viewing the world. Faculty who participated in these programs then invited Henry back to their campuses for further professional development. The publication of A Reader's Companion to the Confucian Analects5 in 2013 increased the demand for Henry to conduct master classes, to teach teachers how to teach Confucius. This eulogy presents a few of the voices of friends from some recent tributes to Henry Rosemont. In September 2017 many of Henry's colleagues, students, and neighbors gathered...

Excerpt from <em>Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee (A Reader's Companion)</em>

Author(s): Fishkin, Shelley Fisher | Abstract: Excerpt from Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee (A Reader's Companion) (Rutgers University Press, 2015)

August Wilson's twentieth-century cycle plays: a reader's companion

August Wilson's twentieth-century cycle plays: a reader's companion

Review of Henry Rosemont, Jr.'s A Reader's Companion to the Confucian Analects

A Reader's Companion to the Confucian Analects by Henry Rosemont, Jr. Palgrave Macmillan Publishers, New York, NY, 2012, 88 pages, hardbound, $45.00

Two Screen Versions of "The Secret Sharer"

Two Screen Versions of "The Secret Sharer" Joseph A. Kestner (bio) There is a considerable body of scholarship about Joseph Conrad on screen, including a monograph by Gene Phillips (1997) and an anthology of essays from Cambridge University Press edited by Gene Moore (1997). In addition, there is fine scholarship about particular aspects of the screen and Joseph Conrad, including works by Wallace Watson, William Thomaier, Paul Kirschner, Roderick Davis, and Stephen Donovan. The essay collection Joseph Conrad and the Performing Arts edited by Katherine Isobel Baxter and Richard J. Hand contains richly suggestive essays about Conrad and cinema. This is appropriate, for as Owen Knowles and Gene Moore write in their Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad, "by the end of the 20th century, almost 90 film or television adaptations were based on works by Joseph Conrad" (110-111). The earliest is a famous adaptation of Victory, which still exists, directed by Maurice Tourneur in 1919 for Paramount. According to Gene Moore, Conrad saw the film in the autumn of 1920 (40-41). Incidentally, Paramount was the studio behind the 1930 and 1940 film versions of Victory. All three versions, 1919, 1930, and 1940, end happily with Heyst and Lena alive and reconciled.1 Lop off the last minute and you have intriguing versions of Conrad's novel. The latest Conrad film adaptations are Chantal Akerman's 2011 Almayer's Folly and U-Wei Bin HajiSaari's 2011 Hanyut/Almayer's Folly, both of which are based on Conrad's novel of 1895, Almayer's Folly. The release of these films will undoubtedly resurrect interest in Carol Reed's 1950 Outcast of the Islands, based on Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands of 1896. I Yet, with this plethora of films, there is nevertheless one great challenge in adapting Conrad to the screen, the author himself, for Conrad's reaction to [End Page 133] cinema was ambiguous. For example, Conrad wrote to Richard Curle on 18 August 1920: If one is to condescend to that sort of thing [adaptation] well then, all considered, I prefer Cinema to Stage. The Movie is just a silly stunt for silly people—but the theatre is more compromising since it is capable of falsifying the very soul of one's work both on the imaginative and on the intellectual side—beside having some sort of inferior poetics of its own which is bound to play havoc with that imponderable quality of creative literary expression which depends on one's individuality. (CL 163) Although this statement is more of a critique of theatre than cinema, Conrad nevertheless raises the spectre, noted by many scholars, that while one might put the contents of a Conrad narrative on screen, it is nearly impossible to convey the irony, the complex narratology, and achronological narrative discourse that are hallmarks of his texts. More broadly, he alludes to the inherent complications of any adaptational format. One can trace Conrad's complicated reactions to cinema. In a letter to his agent Eric Pinker, 9 April 1923, Conrad claimed his sense of literary art is that "the imaginative literary art [is] like a cinema; with this addition that for certain purposes the artist is a much more subtle and complicated machine than a camera, and with a wider range, if in the visual effects less precise" (cited in Rude 22). In 1923, Conrad made his only visit to America, at the behest of his publisher Frank Doubleday. During his stay, Conrad delivered remarks in May 1923 in a brief address entitled in his notes "Author and Cinematograph." In his remarks in "Author and Cinematograph" Conrad argues that "the aim of the novelist has been [. . .] to present humanity in action on the background of the changing aspects of nature and a series of acted scenes exhibiting part of life in a connected series up to some appointed conclusion. But the author unlike the camera had the power to react not only to light, shades and colour but also to form" (cited in Schwab 345). Citing Henry Fielding and Victor Hugo, Conrad mentions the "fundamental condition of visuality" of the novelistic text (345). Conrad goes on to argue that "fundamentally the creator...

The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2006

The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2006 David Bratman In Tolkien studies, 2006 was the Year of the Encyclopedias. Each of the two volumes of Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond's J.R.R. Tolkien Companion & Guide outweighs their already massive 2005 book, The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion. The Companion & Guide, while a chronology and encyclopedia rather than a biography, instantly superseded Humphrey Carpenter's long-standard Tolkien: A Biography as the source of first reference for biographical data on the man. Together, these three compact volumes, filled with tiny print, dominate the field of Tolkien reference books. To nobody's surprise, the Companion & Guide received the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies in 2007, as the Reader's Companion had the previous year. As if that weren't enough to make the year memorable for encyclopedias, the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, edited by Michael D.C. Drout, also appeared on the shelves. A folio-sized volume with very large print, the Drout encyclopedia looks quite unlike Scull and Hammond, and it reads very differently as well. Its entries by many hands are full of individual character, which is the book's strength as well as its weakness. Two notable anthologies appeared in 2006. The Lord of the Rings, 1954-2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, edited by Hammond and Scull in that order (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2006), is the proceedings of a conference held at Marquette University, where Tolkien's Lord of the Rings papers are deposited, in 2004 in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the book's publication. The lucidity and insight of almost all the contributions make this a major anthology in Tolkien studies. This commentator intends no boastfulness, for it could be said even more strongly were he not among the contributors: the quality of this book comes simply from the fact that, if you invite the best Tolkien scholars to your conference, you will get the best papers. Tolkien and Modernity is a two-volume set edited by Frank Weinreich and Thomas Honegger (Zollikofen, Switzerland: Walking Tree Publishers, 2006). On volume 2 the editors' names are given in reverse order, apparently an attempt at impartiality by the publishers, but one which will only cause sighs of exasperation in library catalogers. The volumes are properly kept together, and all their contents will be cited as Weinreich and Honegger, with volume number, in this survey. The articles sometimes step on each others' toes, but largely avoid the definitional question of whether Tolkien was a modernist, whatever that means. Instead, most [End Page 315] discuss his approach to matters deemed typical of modern literature. Like the two encyclopedias, other publications of the year tended to cluster. There were two books in the previously untilled field of Tolkien and plants: Ents, Elves, and Eriador by Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans, primarily a study of Tolkien's environmental views with some material on secondary world horticulture, and The Plants of Middle-earth by Dinah Hazell, basically a botanist's guide to the sub-creation. In shorter papers, the subject of Tolkien as a modernist attracted Ralph C. Wood and John C. Hunter outside the Weinreich and Honegger anthology. Marjorie Burns and Jane Chance both wrote on class structure in Tolkien. Norman K. Swazo and Zak Cramer both wrote on Jewish cultural influences on Tolkien. Character studies of Aragorn and Tom Bombadil also each came in pairs. No fewer than four papers diligently pursued parallels to Beowulf in The Lord of the Rings. Studies of Tolkien's linguistic aesthetics came to the fore and swamped out the translation studies that had dominated Tolkienian philology for the previous couple of years. Journal publications of the year devoted to Tolkien included Volume 3 of this journal, Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review; Mallorn issue 44 from the Tolkien Society, dated August; Parma Eldalamberon 16 from the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship; and two double issues of Mythlore from the Mythopoeic Society: issue 93/94 (Vol. 24, no. 3/4, dated Winter/Spring), and issue 95/96 (Vol. 25, no. 1/2, dated Fall/Winter). Hither Shore, the yearbook of the Deutsche Tolkien Gesellschaft, for...

A Reader's Companion to Against Prediction: A Reply to Ariela Gross, Yoram Margalioth, and Yoav Sapir on Economic Modeling, Selective Incapacitation, Governmentality, and Race

From parole prediction instruments and violent sexual predator scores to racial profiling on the highways, instruments to predict future dangerousness, drug-courier profiles, and IRS computer algorithms to detect tax evaders, the rise of actuarial methods in the field of crime and punishment presents a number of challenging issues at the intersection of economic theory, sociology, history, race studies, criminology, social theory, and law. The three review articles of Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age by Ariela Gross, Yoram Margalioth, and Yoav Sapir, raise these challenges in their very best light. Ranging from the heights of poststructuralist and critical race theory to the intricate details of mathematical economics and criminological analysis, the articles apply different disciplinary lenses to the analysis of the actuarial turn offered in Against Prediction and set forth both substantive and structural challenges to the book. By means of a detailed reply to the three reviews, this article provides a reader's companion to Against Prediction.

The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion (review)

The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion (review)

Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot

Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot

A Reader's Companion to Augustine's Confessions (review)

A Reader's Companion to Augustine's Confessions (review)

BOOK REVIEW: edited by George Levine.THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO GEORGE ELIOT. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001, and edited by John Rignall.Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Of all the major Victorian figures, it may be most difficult to imagine George Eliot cozying up with any kind of literary "companion," and yet here are two such volumes devoted to her: The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, edited by George Levine, and the Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot, edited by John Rignall. What would she have made of them? They certainly do not seem to offer knowledge in the way she herself would have found congenial, for as we know, she was an inveterate independent scholar. She learned Hebrew from Isaac Deutsch, taught herself Greek, investigated seaweed under a microscope with George Henry Lewes, and she left us remarkable traces of her own learning. But even in this account, I find, I am relying on my new friends. Of course, I already knew all these things, but I did check them in the Oxford Reader's Companion, so I know that I'm right. How much less reassuring information, wisdom, and ideas all seem in the fictional world of George Eliot—and how much more doubtful the outcome of scholarly labor, whether it be Casaubon's fruitless assemblage of his "Key to All Mythologies" in Middlemarch (1871-72)or the hard-worked truths of Rufus Lyon's sermons in Felix Holt (1866). Much learning all too often comes to much frustration, and the fantasy of ready- to-hand, always-on-your-desk encyclopedic knowledge is far from Eliot's imaginary realm.

A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence by Patricia Hersch (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998) 391 pp., plus Reader's Companion (interview with author, reading group questions & topics). 1999 Paperback edition reviewed.

A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence by Patricia Hersch (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998) 391 pp., plus Reader's Companion (interview with author, reading group questions & topics). 1999 Paperback edition reviewed.

A Reader's companion to the short story in English

A Reader's companion to the short story in English

Oxford reader's companion to George Eliot

Oxford reader's companion to George Eliot

Oxford reader's companion to Hardy

PREFACE CONTRIBUTORS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CHRONOLOGY SUBJECT INDEX A-Z ENTRIES APPENDIX A: INDEX OF HARDY'S POEMS APPENDIX B: CHARACTERS IN HARDY'S NOVELS APPENDIX C: PLACE-NAMES IN HARDY'S WRITINGS APPENDIX D: GLOSSARY OF DIALECT WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS APPENDIX E: HARDY IN THE CINEMA AND ON RADIO AND TELEVISION BIBLIOGRAPHY

Oxford reader's companion to Conrad

Oxford reader's companion to Conrad

The Reader's companion to the American presidency

The Reader's companion to the American presidency

Oxford reader's companion to Trollope

Oxford reader's companion to Trollope