Singular Context Research Articles

Forty Years of HIV Research in French Guiana: Comprehend to Combat.

The drivers of the HIV epidemic, the viruses, the opportunistic infections, the attitudes and the resources allocated to the fight against HIV/AIDS, vary substantially across countries. French Guiana, at the crossroads between Amazonian South America and the Caribbean, constitutes a singular context with poor populations and rich country health funding, which has allowed researchers to gather lots of information on the particulars of our epidemic. We aimed to focus on the little known story of forty years of HIV research in French Guiana and emphasize how local research intertwined with public health action has yielded continuous progress, despite the difficult social conditions of the affected population. We searched Web of Science and associated local experts who worked through much of the epidemic in selecting the most meaningful products of local research for clinical and public health outcomes in French Guiana. Research tools and facilities included, from 1991 onwards, the HIV hospital cohort and the HIV-histoplasmosis cohort. Ad hoc studies funded by the ANRS or the European Regional Development fund shed light on vulnerable groups. The cumulative impact of prospective routine collection and focused efforts has yielded a breadth of knowledge, allowing for informed decisions and the adaptation of prevention, testing and care in French Guiana. After this overview, we emphasize that the close integration of research and public health was crucial in adapting interventions to the singular context of French Guiana.

Incidence of Pediatric Cancers in French Guiana: How Does It Compare to Global Estimates?

French Guiana is a French territory in South America. The exposome of persons living there is quite different from that in mainland France and the ethnic make-up of the population is also quite different. Poverty is also widespread with difficulties in accessing care magnified by the low medical-professional density. In this singular context, we aimed to measure the incidence of pediatric cancers and to compare it with other continents. We used French Guiana's certified cancer registry to study this between 2003 and 2017. Incidences were standardized using the world population with three strata: 0-4 years, 5-9 years, and 10-14 years. There were 164 solid tumors or hematologic malignancies diagnosed in children under the age of 15 (92 in boys and 72 in girls). Over the study period, the standardized incidence rate was 14.1 per 100,000 among children aged under 15 years. There was no significant trend during the study period. The three most common causes of cancer were leukemias-mostly lymphoblastic-CNS tumors, and sarcoma. The standardized incidence of pediatric cancers in French Guiana was similar to those in Western Europe and North America. As others have discovered, we found that males tended to be more likely to develop cancer, notably leukemia, CNS tumors, sarcoma, and retinoblastoma. As elsewhere, the predominant cancer types changed with age. Our initial assumption was that given the singular context of French Guiana, there may have been differences in pediatric cancer incidences. Here we showed that overall, contrary to our assumption and to trends in tropical countries, the incidence of pediatric cancers was in a range between Western Europe and North America with some apparent but non-significant differences in the main types of cancers observed in global statistics. Quality cancer registry data in this tropical region confirm the suspicion that lower incidences in tropical low- and middle-income countries are likely to result from incomplete diagnosis and data collection.

Exploring diversity: student's (un-)productive use of resonance in organic chemistry tasks through the lens of the coordination class theory

Resonance is a crucial concept in Organic Chemistry that enables both deriving chemical properties from molecular structures and predicting reactions by considering electron density distribution. Despite its importance for problem-solving and learning success, learners encounter various difficulties with this concept. Although prior research suggests that learners struggle to reason about resonance in problem-solving tasks, existing studies are often limited to singular contexts. Given that task approaches and reasoning are context-dependent, little is known about how learners use resonance across task contexts and which characteristics underlie productive concept use. To this end, a qualitative interview study was conducted, in which undergraduate chemistry students (N = 21), all beginners of Organic Chemistry, solved three organic case comparison tasks requiring the consideration of resonance. Through the analytical lens of the coordination class theory, we analysed the extent to which students used their representations of resonance structures, their task approaches, and the variety of resonance-related resource activation and connection in problem-solving across three different contexts. The results show that students’ use of resonance is diverse across the contexts. It can be characterized by a complex interplay of multiple factors reflecting the multifold processes when considering resonance. However, some essential characteristics of productive concept use in problem-solving (e.g., the activation of resources across different granularity levels) could be deduced. Implications for supporting learners’ use of resonance in problem-solving are discussed.

The evolution of global cross-border R&D investment: A network analysis integrating geographical thinking

As one of the manifestations of economic globalization, cross-border research and development (R&D) investment of multinational enterprises (MNEs) has become an important way for innovation resources to flow in the world and constitute a worldwide R&D network. The country's position within the network has undergone a gradual evolution, but fewer studies have concentrated on the alterations to the network structure they have brought about and the factors affecting them. Our study of global cross-border R&D investment sheds light on the interactions of the global network within its singular context of country-level determinants, its internal network structure and geographical patterns. The findings suggest that global cross-border R&D investment has formed a stable geographical distribution pattern, and a complete but heterogeneous network structure, including a hierarchical structure and a core-periphery structure, while country features such as technological strength, skill levels, market potential, and economic development not only set the pace of cross-border R&D investment, but that they also influence both the network structure and the power positions of each node. Implications are discussed.

When can cancer patient treatment nonadherence be considered intentional or unintentional? A scoping review.

Treatment nonadherence in cancer patients remains high with most interventions having had limited success. Most studies omit the multi-factorial aspects of treatment adherence and refer to medication adherence. The behaviour is rarely defined as intentional or unintentional. The aim of this Scoping Review is to increase understanding of modifiable factors in treatment nonadherence through the relationships that physicians have with their patients. This knowledge can help define when treatment nonadherence is intentional or unintentional and can assist in predicting cancer patients at risk of nonadherence and in intervention design. The scoping review provides the basis for method triangulation in two subsequent qualitative studies: 1. Sentiment analysis of online cancer support groups in relation to treatment nonadherence; 2. A qualitative validation survey to refute / or validate claims from this scoping review. Thereafter, framework development for a future (cancer patient) online peer support intervention. A Scoping Review was performed to identify peer reviewed studies that concern treatment / medication nonadherence in cancer patients-published between 2000 to 2021 (and partial 2022). The review was registered in the Prospero database CRD42020210340 and follows the PRISMA-S: an extension to the PRISMA Statement for Reporting Literature Searches in Systematic Searches. The principles of meta-ethnography are used in a synthesis of qualitative findings that preserve the context of primary data. An aim of meta-ethnography is to identify common and refuted themes across studies. This is not a mixed methods study, but due to a limited qualitativevidence base and to broaden findings, the qualitative elements (author interpretations) found within relevant quantitative studies have been included. Of 7510 articles identified, 240 full texts were reviewed with 35 included. These comprise 15 qualitative and 20 quantitative studies. One major theme, that embraces 6 sub themes has emerged: 'Physician factors can influence patient factors in treatment nonadherence'. The six (6) subthemes are: 1. Suboptimal Communication; 2. The concept of Information differs between Patient and Physician; 3.Inadequate time. 4. The need for Treatment Concordance is vague or missing from concepts; 5. The importance of Trust in the physician / patient relationship is understated in papers; 6. Treatment concordance as a concept is rarely defined and largely missing from studies. Treatment (or medication) nonadherence that is intentional or unintentional is often attributed to patient factors-with far less attention to the potential influence of physician communication factors. The differentation between intentional or unintentional nonadherence is missing from most qualitative and quantitative studies. The holistic inter-dimensional / multi-factorial concept of 'treatment adherence' receives scant attention. The main focus is on medication adherence / nonadherence in the singular context. Nonadherence that is unintentional is not necessarily passive behaviour and may overlap with intentional nonadherence. The absence of treatment concordance is a barrier to treatment adherence and is rarely articulated or defined in studies. This review demonstrates how cancer patient treatment nonadherence is often a shared outcome. An equal focus on physican and patient factors can increase understanding of the two main types of nonadherence (intentional or unintentional). This differentation should help improve the fundamentals of intervention design.

Convexity of complements of limit sets for holomorphic foliations on surfaces

Let $${\mathcal {F}}$$ be a holomorphic foliation on a compact Kähler surface with hyperbolic singularities and no foliation cycle. We prove that if the limit set of $${\mathcal {F}}$$ has zero Lebesgue measure, then its complement is a modification of a Stein domain. This applies for the case of suspensions of Kleinian representations, answering a question asked by Brunella. The proof consists in building, in several steps, a metric of positive curvature for the normal bundle of $${\mathcal {F}}$$ near the limit set. Then we construct a proper strictly plurisubharmonic exhaustion function for the complement of the limit set by extending Brunella’s method to our singular context. The arguments hold more generally when the limit set is thin, a property relying on Brownian motion.

Digital adaptation of a therapeutic education program in the context of Covid-19

Thecontext of containment due to the Covid-19 epidemic forced professionals to suspend their face-to-face therapeutic education programs. For young patients with asthma, the situation was made even more complex by anxiety-provoking communications (which turned out to be inaccurate) about the possible aggravating role of corticosteroids in the event of Covid-19, which led to untimely discontinuations and sometimes to a decrease in their therapeutic adherence, exposing them to an increased risk of poor control of their disease. Faced with the feeling of abandonment felt by some families inthis singular context, a team at Trousseau Hospital in Paris decided to rethink and adapt its distance therapeutic education workshops.

Holding on

What resources do people facing great difficulties linked to the increase in social inequalities between territories use daily? Why do some people in precarious situations move from one region to another and not others? How do these relocations, endured or chosen, contribute to locking them in or giving them back control over their lives? A loss of income or the hope of an easier life may lead to residential relocation to areas where the cost of living is lower (rent, food), where relatives are available to share domestic tasks in the broadest sense. Staying put when neighbors leave, having to leave a neighborhood where the cost of living has risen sharply, seeing one's neighborhood become impoverished, empty, collapsed, seeing adjacent neighborhoods get richer: all these factors obfuscate attitudes towards the future and lead to emotions such as anger, shame, or sadness. These questions are raised by a collaborative social science study that examines the role of economic dynamics and public authorities in the selective collapse of portions of the French territory. The photographic investigation conducted in Tonnerre between 2017 and 2022 is the first unit implemented by this collective research. It focuses on the conditions necessary for photography to be an effective heuristic tool in the service of scientific knowledge. Formally, the work is part of a lineage partially interrupted during the second half of the twentieth century, that of alliances between photography and social sciences forged a century earlier in Europe (Thomson and Smith), in Australia (Gillen and Spencer), and in the United States (Boas and Hastings). The project advocates the notion of photographic and ethnographic practice closer to a craft rather than an art form, a profession rather than an artistic gesture, for production of knowledge at the service of accretion of understanding and interdisciplinary cooperation rather than the competitive search for innovation. On the zoom.able platform, the visual essay unfolds on three levels. The first layer presents a map of the city of Tonnerre that highlights the important structures for the survey: pictograms indicate the entry points to the territory, the caring institutions that allow people to survive, the vacant places that play a key role in the arrival of precarious populations, and the shelters that provide protection from the cold and rain. The second layer shows a selection of portraits, with captions providing information on the different ways in which people have settled in Tonnerre over the past ten years. The framework engages the people photographed at several stages of the production. They have chosen the places where the pictures were taken. They have also chosen the places to which their portraits are linked on the map, either because they spend time there, or because they have in those locations an emotional connection, related to their hopes and doubts. And they have also coauthored the captions accompanying the photographs, to explain their singular relationship to the area. The third layer follows two rationales: the places identified on the map refer to photographic documentation of the territory, while each portrait refers to the resources mobilized to deal with daily life as well as photographic situations. From an epistemological perspective, this is about restoring the gap between the observed world and its photographic representation, a reminder that photographic materials, in order to be usable, must be related to the singular context of their production: the distance between photographer and subject; monochromatic effects; and things that are out-of-frame, such as the photographer's body language during the shoot.

Vers la compréhension des demandes d’aide à mourir de résidents d’EHPAD. Une étude qualitative multicentrique

ContextMoving into a nursing home is the cause of considerable upheaval for the elderly. The end of life is a reality in these establishments and residents are regularly confronted with it. Death is part of life in a nursing home and at the same time, it is one of the least discussed subjects due to avoidance strategies. The desire to die can take many forms, from suicide to refusal of care, and it is studied in particular through an analysis of requests for euthanasia and assisted suicide. The studies conducted on this subject show that the wish to die is a request expressed by a significant number of patients at the end of their life, regardless of the legislation adopted by the countries. Few studies have analyzed the demand for euthanasia or assisted suicide in a country where it is prohibited. ObjectivesA qualitative study is needed to provide an in-depth analysis of the expressions used by residents who make a request for euthanasia or assisted suicide, in the specific context of nursing homes. The DESAGE study (Demandes d’Euthanasie et de Suicide Assisté des personnes Âgées) is a multi-centric qualitative study which aims to describe, analyze, and understand, through semi-directive interviews, the determinants of requests for euthanasia and assisted suicide among residents of these facilities. This research is part of a comprehensive approach to these requests based on the residents’ verbatim statements. Patients, materials and methodsThe data collection was carried out in several nursing homes in a region of eastern France near Switzerland. For inclusion in the study to be effective, explicit requests for assistance in dying had to be made to health professionals. Following inclusion, an initial semi-directive interview of the resident was conducted. A second interview took place several weeks later to understand the timing of such a request. The analysis of the data followed the logic of thematic content analysis. ResultsData collection took place from May 2019 to July 2021 in seven nursing homes in France. Seven situations were explored. These testimonies shed light on the reality of a little-investigated field and highlight meaningful life pathways. The testimonies of these individual inform us about the requests for euthanasia and assisted suicide that are made, and undeniably place them in a singular context. Suffering, whether physical or psychological, is present in the statements and death is perceived as the only solution to relieve this suffering. Multiple factors underlie it: dependence, the difficulty of finding meaning in one's current life, loneliness, the feeling of boredom, the impression of being a burden on one's loved ones. It is also linked to the fear of a deterioration of the physical state and the apprehension of the conditions at the end of life. It is rooted in an experience marked by successive, sometimes brutal, losses: physical losses linked to ageing, the loss of autonomy, the loss of reference points in the initial environment when entering a nursing home, and in some cases the loss of a spouse or main caregiver. ConclusionIt would be relevant to introduce into the daily practice of caregivers the implementation of more tools that promote, for example, the deployment of the function of restraint. Focusing on taking care of the body could be an illustration of this, because when we enhance the body, we also enhance the psyche. Moreover, the analysis of the discourse makes it possible to provide the caregivers with keys to understanding. It is an assignment to find common issues in the exchange. It is in this space of speech that the answers can be found and that an importance is given to the understanding of a common construct. The speech of a person who asks to die is an attempt to express the unspeakable, an attempt to express a singular suffering. It is essential to question the function of speech, what is at stake, and to train caregivers to confront these issues.

The Promise and Perils of Comparing Nonprofit Data Across Borders

The movement to democratize data and the advent of virtual research teams provides a near-perfect opportunity for an explosion of comparative nonprofit research. This manuscript provides a useful framework for scholars interested in utilizing comparative nonprofit data. By documenting how the lived context of the data is influenced by governmental, institutional, and social forces, we illustrate how effective comparative data work will involve knowing both the how (data details) and the why (institutional history) of the data elements. We offer three extended examples to illustrate the complexity of comparative data: the definition of nonprofit, the concept of governance, and the definition of financial liability. This approach provides a thoughtful path of not only careful empirical work but also the route to theoretical improvements as well. Furthermore, comparative work also leads the researcher to question assumptions and document the processes which shape the data, even within their singular context.

Strict domain monotonicity of the principal eigenvalue and a characterization of lower boundedness for the Friedrichs extension of four-coefficient Sturm–Liouville operators

Using the variational characterization of the principal (i.e., smallest) eigenvalue below the essential spectrum of a lower semibounded self-adjoint operator, we prove strict domain monotonicity (with respect to changing the finite interval length) of the principal eigenvalue of the Friedrichs extension \( T_F\) of the minimal operator for regular four-coefficient Sturm–Liouville differential expressions. In the more general singular context, these four-coefficient differential expressions act according to $$\tau f= \frac{1}{r}(-(f^{[1]})'+sf^{[1]}+qf)\, {\rm with}\, f^{[1]}=p[f'+sf]\, {\rm on}\, (a,b) \subseteq \mathbb{R}, $$ where the coefficients p, q, r, s are real-valued and Lebesgue measurable on (a, b), with p > 0, r > 0 a.e. on (a, b), and \( p^{-1},q,r,s \in L^{1}_{loc}((a,b);dx)\), and \( f\) is supposed to satisfy $$f\in AC_{loc}((a,b)),p[f'+sf] \in AC_{loc}((a,b)). $$ This setup is sufficiently general so that \(\tau \) permits certain distributional potential coefficients q, including potentials in \(H^{-1}_{loc}((a,b)) \).As a consequence of the strict domain monotonicity of the principal eigenvalue of the Friedrichs extension in the regular case, and on the basis of oscillation theory in the singular context, in our main result, we characterize all lower bounds of \(T_F \) as those \(\lambda \in \mathbb{R} \) for which the differential equation \(\tau u =\lambda u \) has a strictly positive solution u > 0 on (a, b).

Naïve English-speaking learners’ use of indirect positive evidence

Abstract When second language learners are faced with acquiring a grammar that is a subset of their native language grammar, direct positive evidence is unavailable. We question whether learners can instead use indirect positive evidence: evidence drawn from errors in the learner’s L1 made by native speakers of the learner’s L2. We examine if naïve English-speaking learners of Mandarin can determine from plural omission errors in Mandarin speakers’ English productions that Mandarin marks plural in a subset of conditions under which English does. Participants were exposed to indirect positive evidence via an English-medium dialogue where a native Mandarin-speaking interlocutor produced all contextually plural nouns as singulars. Subsequently, participants learnt 12 Mandarin-like nouns in singular contexts, after which their word learning was tested using both singular and plural pictures as prompts. Forty percent of participants correctly deduced that strings to which they had assigned singular interpretations were also appropriate in plural contexts. Follow-up questions revealed that they noticed the errors in the dialogue and used these to inform their understanding of plural marking in Mandarin. This result suggests that indirect positive evidence may be an effective tool for real language learners to acquire a grammar that is a subset of their native grammar.

Code-Switching and Social Media in Bangladesh: Emergence of a New English

Using two or more languages in a singular context or conversation is similar to going with the flow these days, specifically on social sites. This is referred to as "code-switching" by sociolinguists. The study aims at finding out the ratio and scenario of code-switching on social media in Bangladesh, and whether a New English has emerged or not for that. The study was conducted on a randomly chosen sample population of 40 participants across the country. It applied a mixed-method approach consisting of both qualitative and quantitative research methods to conduct this study. The study collected data through a close-ended questionnaire sent to the sample population via email, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Google Docs and some relevant data in the form of screenshots from Facebook posts, comments, and messenger chats. The findings of the study show that more than half of the participants in this research does not have the proper knowledge and intention regarding code-switching, and they perform it for sheer convenience in colloquial practice and communication. However, most of the participants do not support code-switching because they are concerned about their English language efficiency. And they also assert that Code-switching does not play a major role in the emergence of new sorts of English language because there are, in truth, other reasons behind this.

3D modeling of the Mosteirinho de São Francisco in Paudalho (Brasil) for an adaptive reuse proposal

The Mosteirinho de São Francisco was built around 1635, in a period when the Dutch dominated the northeast of Brazil. It is a building of simple architecture but representative of this singular historical context. It was declared as national heritage in 1966, but today it is abandoned, in an advanced state of degradation, and involved in a judicial process regarding its property. This paper presents the main results of the architectural and conservation studies on the building, as well as the methodology to create a 3D model of its current state as a basis for designing an adaptive reuse proposal that seeks to rescue its heritage values.

Contexto como espaço de criação e cocriação: um olhar sobre obras de Bakhtin e o Círculo

ABSTRACT This article aims to discuss the meaning of context in the works of Bakhtin and the Circle. The research corpus consists of works signed by Vološinov, Bakhtin and Medvedev published in Brazil. We set an image related to a space of creation and cocreation where discursive, ideological, cultural or artistic modes of communication exist. Results show four types of contexts: the context of the utterance in the speech communication mode of which borders are locutor and interlocutor; the unique and singular context in semiotic communication mode of which borders are active comprehension and evaluative intonation; the aesthetic context in the artistic communication mode of which borders are author and contemplator in a work of art, author and characters in the novel and lyric hero and his/her other in poetry; and the extraverbal context in the cultural communication mode of which borders are a “I-we” and the event of Being.

On feature-based vocabulary selection mechanisms in late insertion: third person number agreement in the French future tense

We propose that feature bundles in syntactic computations coactivate subset vocabulary items in content-based access. Thus, in French, an inflectional node for the future tense bearing [Number: Plural] activates third-person singular -a underspecified for [Number: Ø] and third- person plural -ont specified for [Number: Plural]. These activations compete in externalization. [Number: Ø/Plural] defines a <-ont, -a> scale where plural-marked -ont carries more information than -a, allowing scalar inferencing in form selection. Given an activated Plural-marked -ont, -a (3ps.sg) is automatically interpreted as [–Plural] via scalar inferencing and becomes unsuitable for insertion. Thus, -ont (3ps.pl) must be selected when -a (3ps.sg) is eliminated. We tested our model assuming an interaction of cross-domain inferencing with morphological selection, using two experiments. In forced-paced reading and listening tasks, 19 native speaker subjects per task classified picture probes accompanying matching and mismatching subject-verb future tense agreement. Classification times for pictures semantically linked to the verb probed for an interaction between the processing of agreement morphology and the ongoing conceptual processing of the sentence. Classification times were modulated by the type of morphological mismatch. Singular verb form mangera (eat-fut.3ps.sg) in plural contexts slowed down picture classifications, whereas plural verb form mangeront (eat-fut.3ps.pl) in singular contexts did not. This specific interaction between purely formal agreement and conceptual-structure processing is unexplained by superset models of late insertion, or by interface relations, frequency, load of stored information, and phonological cohort activation. It suggests that domain-general principles of inference enrich domain-specific feature-based computations accessing vocabulary items through the coactivation of features.

Prepositional phrases in German in Austria – identifying patterns of variation

AbstractGerman in Austria is claimed to be shaped by wide-spread dialect use and historical language contact. In this context, variation in prepositional phrases (PPs) is frequently cited, but still underresearched. Three linguistic variables are particularly interesting: (1) preposition choice (p-choice), (2) case marking in PPs and (3) preposition–determiner contractions. The present study aims at identifying linguistic and sociolinguistic – including regional – patterns of variation in the realization of PPs with two-way prepositions in German in Austria on the basis of natural production data including formal and informal registers from urban and rural adults of different age groups and different socioeconomic backgrounds living in Bavarian regions of Austria. The data were compared against the German standard variety from Germany to identify all constructions (possibly) specific for German in Austria. Results indicate that p-choice (particularly in directed motion constructions) shows mostly regional effects: South Bavarian varieties are characterized by preposition drop, whereas in the other regions, the prepositionauf‘on(to)’ seems overrepresented. However, case marking is more dependent on sociodemographic variables and accusative–dative syncretism appears more frequently in plural than in singular contexts. Finally, specific preposition–determiner contractions are widespread across all regions and groups investigated, even in (close-to-)standard registers.

Simulating the Acquisition of Verb Inflection in Typically Developing Children and Children With Developmental Language Disorder in English and Spanish.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have significant deficits in language ability that cannot be attributed to neurological damage, hearing impairment, or intellectual disability. The symptoms displayed by children with DLD differ across languages. In English, DLD is often marked by severe difficulties acquiring verb inflection. Such difficulties are less apparent in languages with rich verb morphology like Spanish and Italian. Here we show how these differential profiles can be understood in terms of an interaction between properties of the input language, and the child's ability to learn predictive relations between linguistic elements that are separated within a sentence. We apply a simple associative learning model to sequential English and Spanish stimuli and show how the model's ability to associate cues occurring earlier in time with later outcomes affects the acquisition of verb inflection in English more than in Spanish. We relate this to the high frequency of the English bare form (which acts as a default) and the English process of question formation, which means that (unlike in Spanish) bare forms frequently occur in third-person singular contexts. Finally, we hypothesize that the pro-drop nature of Spanish makes it easier to associate person and number cues with the verb inflection than in English. Since the factors that conspire to make English verb inflection particularly challenging for learners with weak sequential learning abilities are much reduced or absent in Spanish, this provides an explanation for why learning Spanish verb inflection is relatively unaffected in children with DLD.

Arthur SzeThe Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems

BOOKS IN REVIEW ARTHUR SZE Arthur Sze The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems Port Townsend, Washington. Copper Canyon Press. 2021. 560 pages. THIS COLLECTION IS a book I think you will want to live with, as I have been living with it for a few months now. Arthur Sze offers a stellar collection of lyrical poems that captivate the reader’s heart, even as the personae involved in the individual works also seem affected, sometimes dramatically, sometimes more subtly, but always moved. These poems are full of energy, sometimes boiling below the surface, or recoiling in a desert sunset, but always linking heart and mind with sensation and intellect. The poems presented here simply will not allow a reader to be complacent. We are drawn into a multitude of scenes that assault the senses in various ways at various times—often with the dual effect of life-affirmation in the midst of decay, hopes clarified, truth realized within contexts of mundaneness, confusing everydayness, if not outright violent indifference. This collection includes a significant amount of award-winning work from ten previous collections dating back to 1998, including the critically acclaimed The Ginkgo Light (2009) and the 2019 National Book Award–winning work Sight Lines. Additionally, in a concluding section— “The White Orchard: New Poems”—Sze offers twenty-six new poems. One of Sze’s striking writing characteristics involves his ability and propensity to create simultaneous actions, apparently unrelated, within a singular poem’s context . These apparently unrelated actions are, in a larger sense, connected, and his juxtaposing of scene and character with apparently contradictory elements serves as a (sometimes unsettling) reminder that we are all connected, and everything is connected, for better or worse. For example , in the first poem of “The String Diamond ,” a pleasant “apricot blossom” occurs along with a number of other unpleasant events such as: a mistake in surgery, a compressed nerve, asphyxiation, and other everyday misfortunes. These tragedies, along with the mundane, and with the blossoming apricot, cause “wonder” about other “inchoate griefs” happening all the time. His choice of the word “inchoate” seems to climactically (or perhaps it is anticlimactic ) verify a total truth of a situation not fully observable, at least at first glance. An artist is to help us see, to truly see, and Sze’s poems promote this visionary effect over and over again. The poems engage the contemporary and the historical. Sze’s vision encompasses an amazing variety of animal, reptilian , and vegetal lives. It conveys a rich variety of ecosystems around the globe. It also reaches the heavenly bodies, the ends of the known universe, as well as an abundant variety of human cultures, but always reconnects to the human attempt to perceive. As collected in book form, but also, even more impressively, within the singular context of an individual poem, Sze often presents a speaker enveloped and shaped by concentric circles. The “meaning ” of the poem, or the sensual, artistic value, is to be understood in the various individual circles, but also in the cumulative whole. A consistent feature of Sze’s writing style is his collapsing of past and present into a single moment. In “Cedar Fires,” the speaker “thinks” of “the antelope carved in the rock” even as “we touch the Pleiades.” Though I feel Sze’s poetic vision moves beyond labeling, quite a bit of his work might be classified as “necro-pastoral”— the living enduring in the midst of decay or death—or perhaps even “necromancy.” One of many examples of this occurs in the third poem of “Infloresence” in which “A shrinking loop becomes a noose” and a red snake snags its epidermis, the mind snags, molts from the inside out. Although sand plunges in an hourglass – soon the last white particles will vanish from the top – I ache for a second, sulfur butterfly pinned over black paper, to stop: but eelgrass in tidal water, I catch the scent of tomato leaves on my hands, swing palms near a horse’s head: flies flit and land, flit and reland. It is exhilarating to see a poet’s evolution in style and content, evolving yet grounded in its original soul-stirring lyrical style...

Distribución y consumo de cuentas de fluorita y translúcidas en la península ibérica del VI al II milenios ANE

Los minerales translúcidos fueron apreciados por las sociedades prehistóricas por su rareza, y fueron utilizados como elementos altamente simbólicos. Este trabajo aborda el uso y la caracterización de las cuentas translúcidas de la península ibérica, mediante análisis químico (espectroscopía Raman, espectrómetro de fluorescencia de rayos X portátil, difracción de rayos X y espectroscopia en región visible y en infrarrojo cercano) y contextual, junto a una revisión de la bibliografía arqueológica sobre la producción y uso de adornos y elementos translúcidos durante la Prehistoria Reciente ibérica. Un total de 54 cuentas de 47 yacimientos, mayoritariamente funerarios, han sido analizadas; 33 fueron trabajadas en fluorita, mientras que las restantes 21 fueron realizadas en distintos minerales translúcidos (calcita, cuarzo y varios silicatos). La escasez de adornos translúcidos en el registro arqueológico, su escala regional y suprarregional de intercambio, y su asociación recurrente a otros elementos de prestigio en contextos singulares refuerzan la hipótesis del alto estatus de sus poseedores/portadores.