Sort Of Picture Research Articles

Cultivating Critical Self-Reflection in an International Context: The Development of an American Studies Curriculum in Turkey

Many literature professors in the U.S. strive to foster skills of critical self-reflection: we ask students to be responsible to textual evidence, historical context, and the implications of the interpreter's acts. Recent teaching also stresses the transnational contexts for literary expression and interpretation. But what happens when these pedagogical practices are transported to classrooms abroad? This essay addresses this broad question through the problem of developing an American Studies curriculum in Turkey. The authors outline the conceptual genealogy of departments of "American Culture and Literature" in Turkey and then relate it to narratives of emergence for American Studies in the U.S. and other countries. The authors then discuss the evolution of the curriculum they revised. They conclude by assessing the outcome, especially noting the difficulty of cultivating critical self-reflection in a social and institutional setting that has few of the safeguards for freedom of expression found in the U.S.

Complex Regional Pain Syndrome.

Complex Regional Pain Syndrome.

Brain Waves, Picture Sorts®, and Branding Moments

<h3>ABSTRACT</h3> This paper describes a method to identify potential branding moments in television commercials. It involves the convergence between two fundamentally different nonverbal moment-by-moment measurement techniques. The first is a picture-sorting technique. The second is brain-wave measurement. At the intersection of the two can be found special moments where the personalized meaning of the esthetic experience of an advertisement appears to flow into the positioning concept of a brand.

Van der Waals quintessence

We discuss the cosmology derived by taking into account the Van der Waals equation in order to describe the thermodynamic state of the universe. The approach is more realistic with respect to the usual one where the perfect fluid equation of state is taken into account. The universe can be described as a two-phase fluid where a component can be seen as a sort of large scale structure fluid and another one as a background fluid. Another main result is that we recover an asymptotic critical state which acts as a cosmological constant. In this sense, we recover a sort of quintessential picture where the cosmic fluid undergoes an accelerated behaviour.

An integrated approach to the elicitation of customer requirements for engineering design using picture sorts and fuzzy evaluation

Product definition is widely accepted as one of the key factors to be considered in the early stage of product design and development. It has a direct impact on the success of a new product in the marketplace. Frequently, product definition is solicited through the voice of the customer (VoC). As such, an organization will obtain a prominent competitive edge over its competitors if it is able to effectively capture the genuine VoC or the requirements of a customer. Sorting techniques provide a means to elicit customer requirements. Although a number of sorting techniques were developed, few of them are able to handle the uncertainty and imprecision inherited from the VoC and subjective judgment because of their crisp decision making. An integrated approach is described, which is based on repeated single-criterion sorts and fuzzy evaluation, for the elicitation of customer requirements. The details of the integrated approach are presented. The approach is validated using a case study on the design of a wooden golf-club head. The details of the validation are discussed.

Beauty's Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism

Introduction: the gender ideology of the aesthetic 1. She has a lovely face: the feminine and the aesthetic 2. I knew the beauty of her: aestheticism, fleshliness and resistance 3. Hidden just behind those screens: art objects and commodities 4. A sort of live picture: woman and the aesthetic craze 5. The girl never really lived: decadent beauty in the 1890s Afterword Notes Works cited Index.

"First the Bow is Bent in Study... " Dominican Education before 1350 (review)

Reviewed by: “First the Bow is Bent in Study …” Dominican Education before 1350 by M. Michèle Mulchahey John Inglis M. Michèle Mulchahey. “First the Bow is Bent in Study …” Dominican Education before 1350. Studies and Texts, vol. 132. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1998. Pp. xxi + 618. Cloth, $110.00. In his The Setting of the Summa theologiae of Saint Thomas, Leonard Boyle represents one of the more interesting directions in the recent historiography of Latin medieval philosophy (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1982). His claim is that if we are to understand Aquinas, we need to pay closer attention to the Dominican intellectual context. With a focus on the moral component of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, Boyle establishes that Aquinas did not converse alone with Aristotle and Averroes in some philosophical ivory tower as historians often imply, but that he wrote and disputed in light of Dominican goals. This point helps to clarify the context of Aquinas’s texts—a type of historical context not found in the standard philosophical accounts. In the book under review, the first detailed history of Dominican medieval education, M. Michèle Mulchahey supplies a more extended treatment of this intellectual context. Commonly, intellectuals in the high middle ages are presented as spending their lives at universities studying philosophy, conducting disputations, and lecturing on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard. Anthony Kenny and Jan Pinborg present such a picture in their helpful contribution to The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy ([Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], 11–42). Mulchahey argues that this sort of picture is rather simplistic when applied to the Dominican intellectual life. From the early years of the order, there was to be a “doctor” in each and every local Dominican house (132). One of Mulchahey’s more interesting conclusions is that the schools associated with these local houses were more advanced than has often been thought. For example, each house was to include lectures on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard and on Scripture, that is, on the very texts which historians commonly associate only with the universities (134–136). Furthermore, disputations were conducted frequently at local houses (134, 167) and by the middle of the thirteenth century, the works of Aristotle were often taught (220). Her point is that if we are to understand the intellectual world in which a Dominican like Aquinas spent his life, then we need to be clear about this context and not just about that of the universities. Even at the university, Dominicans studied and lectured at Dominican houses and not at institutions of the secular clergy. For instance, even when Aquinas was a Bachelor of the Sentences and a Master of the Sacred Page at the University of Paris, he lived and taught at the Dominican convent according to the distinct traditions and practices [End Page 361] of the order. Furthermore, select Dominican schools of higher learning, including those associated with universities, produced teachers for local Dominican communities. Mulchahey argues convincingly that the structures of Dominican education came to exist from the bottom up within a Dominican context and not as an extension of the statutes of the universities (351–378). This Dominican context helps to provide a response to an objection that John Jenkins raises to Boyle’s view of the audience of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae—an issue that has important implications for how to read this work. Boyle argued that the Summa arose out of the pastoral needs of ordinary Dominicans and reflects this institutional purpose. Jenkins “rejects” this claim, arguing that Aquinas’s text is so dense and conceptually difficult that it could only have been written for those who were prepared to study the Sentences of Peter the Lombard at the University of Paris. (See John I. Jenkins, Knowledge and faith in Thomas Aquinas [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 81, 89–90.) Mulchahey provides important support for Boyle’s view by establishing that it was the policy of the order to prepare ordinary Dominicans to study the Sentences of Peter the Lombard at the local houses. At a time when there were few universities, the Dominicans established hundreds of sites of higher education at...

The sorting techniques: a tutorial paper on card sorts, picture sorts and item sorts

Although sorting techniques (e.g. card sorts) are widely used in knowledge acquisition and requirements acquisition, they have received little formal attention compared to related techniques such as repertory grids and laddering. This paper briefly describes the main sorting techniques, then provides a detailed tutorial on one variety (repeated single‐criterion sorts), using a worked example. Guidelines for choice and sequencing of techniques are given, both in relation to varieties of sorting technique and in relation to other techniques. It is concluded that the sorting techniques are a valuable part of the elicitor's methodological toolkit.

Dietary assessment using a picture-sort approach

Food-frequency questionnaires are usually administered as a list of foods to be checked off by the respondent or interviewer. Techniques in which participants sort into categories cards on which names or pictures of foods are printed can also be used to assess food intake. Food-frequency scores were obtained from a five-category picture sort administered to 4643 men and women aged > or = 65 y in the Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS). This one-step (qualitative) assessment yielded significant associations in expected directions between frequency scores and sex, age, race or ethnicity, body mass index, and use of a special diet. In the two-step (semiquantitative) version of this instrument, an interviewer documented specific frequencies and portion-size information for the foods in each sorting category. A substudy of the two-step version with 96 CHS participants indicated relative validity similar to that of conventionally administered food-frequency questionnaires. The one-step version may be broadly applicable to situations in which general food-pattern data can be informative and cost and time limitations are great. When it is feasible, the two-step picture sort may offer certain methodologic advantages because respondents have a chance to change their responses and the format may simplify the cognitive-response task. Sorting or picture-sort procedures deserve systematic attention in research on dietary assessment methods.

A KALEIDOSCOPE MODEL: DEFINING NATURAL ENVIRONMENTS

Research on the relationship between people and nature has rarely incorporated a definition of natural environments. This exploratory project was designed to uncover underlying themes which comprise conceptualization of natural environments. Fourteen interviews were conducted with adult respondents, combining a biographical section with a picture sorting exercise. Content analysis revealed a myriad of dimensions and attributes which can be organized into four meta-level themes used to categorize environments as natural or not natural. The meta-themes included: (1) people as separate from nature; (2) assessment of natural elements; (3) human impact on nature; and (4) the human place within natural environments. Further analysis of the meta-level themes led to hypothesis generation about possible subcategories of natural environments, including ‘totally natural’, ‘civilized natural’, ‘semi-natural’ and ‘quasi-natural’. ‘Non-natural’ environments were also included in this schema, as they define the boundary of natural environments. A kaleidoscope model is used to illustrate how nature is defined through a complex web of interrelationships.

Picture-Sort Method for Administering a Food Frequency Questionnaire to Older Adults

Objective To assess the validity of a picture-sort approach to administering the National Cancer Institute food frequency questionnaire to older adults Design A picture-sort interview was conducted in each respondent's home. After the picture sort, a 24-hour recall interview was administered on the same occasion. Five additional in-home recall interviews were subsequently conducted at approximately 1-month intervals. Subjects/setting Forty-seven female and 49 male volunteers aged 66 to 100 years were recruited from among Cardiovascular Health Study participants from Maryland and North Carolina. Main outcome measures Estimates from the picture sort and the recall for intakes of macronutrients, cholesterol, fiber, and selected vitamins and minerals exclusive of supplements. Statistical analyses Comparison of means estimated by the two methods and correlation analyses were used. Correlations were adjusted under varied assumptions about the nature of the information contained in the six 24-hour recalls relative to respondents’ usual intakes. Results After correction for attenuation, Pearson correlation coefficients for macronutrients ranged from .41 for protein to .74 for saturated fat and cholesterol. For vitamins and minerals, correlations ranged from .26 for beta carotene to .62 for calcium. Applications Picture-sort estimates of mean nutrient intakes were comparable with estimates based on 24-hour recalls, and correlations with reference data were similar to those reported in the literature for conventionally administered food frequency questionnaires. This dietary assessment method may, therefore, offer a way to simplify or structure responses to improve ease of administration and increase respondents’ liking for the interview without loss of data quality. J Am Diet Assoc. 1996; 96:137-144.

Tropes of Nationhood: Body, Body Politic, and Nation-state in Fieldings Journal of a voyage to Lisbon

Tropes of Nationhood: Body, Body Politic, and Nation-State in Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon Terence N. Bowers I. Imaging the Nation A society is possible in the last analysis because the individuals in it carry around in their heads some sort of picture of that society. — Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia 1 Many readers are familiar with the energetic odyssey Fielding narrates in Tom Jones (1749), and admire the rich, vibrant picture it presents of England. Few readers are acquainted with the rather different odyssey Fielding himself undertook at the end of his life, when he left his native country for a warmer climate in a desperate attempt to restore his failing health and save his life. Yet it is his account of that odyssey in Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) — a book that says little about Portugal and mainly narrates a journey along England’s southern coast — where one may find Fielding’s last and, in many respects, most interesting and far-reaching thoughts on England’s health and status as a nation. 2 Indeed, in this neglected work, I shall argue, Fielding employs his immense literary talents to reflect on how one should conceptualize England as a nation at a time of fundamental transformation when having a proper concept of England was, in Fielding’s mind, a matter of life and death for the country. Yet to speak of the Voyage as a book that investigates the issue of nationhood may seem a rather large, even far-fetched claim for a work that has sparked little interest or admiration. In fact, the Voyage has generally been considered a disappointment both as an end to an otherwise brilliant literary career and as a travel book. In contrast to the panoramic, perspicacious, and humane view of English society that Tom Jones provides, the Voyage offers a cramped, myopic view. Preoccupied with ailments and personal comforts, and obsessed with such mundane matters as eating, lodging and prices, the Voyage often seems self-centered, uninformative, and downright petty. Fielding’s self-absorption undermines his credibility and violates [End Page 575] eighteenth-century dictates of good travel writing, as they have been explained by Charles L. Batten Jr. 3 And even according to Fielding’s own criteria the Voyage seems to fail: despite his awareness that many travel books bog themselves down in trivial observations, and despite his promise not to burden his readers with information that “they could not possibly have attained of themselves” (V, 24), the Voyage dwells on seemingly insignificant quotidian matters and digresses repeatedly from its announced serious topic of maritime reform. 4 Like the journey it narrates, which is full of false starts, delays, and backtracking, the Voyage seems to go nowhere and to be mired in a world of trivia and narrow horizons. Such a view, however, fails to take adequate account of the haunting image that occupies the imaginative center of the Voyage — the image of Fielding’s misshapen, grotesque, and dying body. 5 It is this image — at once repellent and fascinating, eliciting both disgust and sympathy — that, on the one hand, gives coherence and meaning to the scattered and seemingly trivial concerns of the text, and that, on the other, illuminates the anxieties and contradictions of a perplexing socio-cultural problem in eighteenth-century Britain, one that has not yet received adequate attention: the problem of how Britain should imagine itself as a nation and how it should be imaged as a social entity. 6 The literary and cultural significance of the Voyage comes into focus when we recall Benedict Anderson’s definition of nations as “imagined communities,” in the minds of whose members “lives the image of their communion”: the Voyage wrestles with precisely this issue, asking what England’s “image of... [national] communion” should be and whether any adequate image is even available. 7 If, as Mannheim claims, “society is possible... because the individuals in it carry around in their heads some... picture of that society,” then the question of finding an agreed upon picture or image is not a peripheral matter, secondary to issues of political organization, the law, or modes of production, but a...

Is semantic memory consistently impaired early in the course of Alzheimer's disease? Neuroanatomical and diagnostic implications

To establish whether semantic memory is consistently impaired in patients with very mild dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT), we assessed episodic and semantic memory in 52 patients with DAT who were divided into three sub-groups according to dementia severity on the Mini-Mental State Examination (minimal > 23, mild 17–23 and moderate < 17) and 24 matched controls. The minimal group showed impairment on the following semantic memory measures: category fluency, naming of line drawings, naming to verbal description, answering semantic feature questions and a non-verbal picture-picture matching task (the Pyramids and Palm Trees Test). The mild and moderate groups showed additional deficits on picture sorting and word-picture matching tests. Within the minimal and mild groups there was, however, considerable heterogeneity. While some patients showed a consistent impairment across all of the semantic memory tests, others were impaired only on a subset of these tests and a few even performed flawlessly. In contrast, all patients showed a profound deficit in episodic memory: delayed recall of new verbal and non-verbal material appears to be a particularly sensitive marker of early DAT. These data are in keeping with recent neuropathological studies demonstrating that the transentorhinal region is consistently involved at a very early stage. Lesions in this site cause a functional disconnection of the hippocampus, and hence a profound episodic memory disorder. The fact that many, but not all, patients with early disease also show impairment of semantic memory suggests that damage to the transentorhinal region is not sufficient to produce significant disruption of semantic memory. Such disruption reliably occurs, we hypothesize, only when the pathology extends to the temporal neocortex proper.

Using Students' Invented Spellings as a Guide for Spelling Instruction That Emphasizes Word Study

This article outlines a theory of developmental spelling that has evolved from qualitative research on children's invented spelling. We show how an analysis of students' invented spellings can inform teachers when to teach what. Examples of 3 students' (ages 6, 8, and 14) invented spellings are provided, and an alternative approach to spelling instruction, called word study (word sorting, picture sorting, word hunting), is discussed within the context of several minilessons about examining words by sound, within-word patterns, and meaning.

Photoevaporation of the Solar Nebula and the Formation of the Giant Planets

We review the prevailing theories for the formation of the jovian planets and comment that they do not provide a natural explanation for the oft-noted subdivision into two separate classes: the gas-rich giants, Jupiter and Saturn, and the gas-poor giants, Uranus and Neptune. To account for the observed differences in envelope mass relative to core mass, the conventional discriminants would seem to require special timing for the phases: assemblage of the protoplanetary cores, runaway accretion of gas, and the dispersal of nebular gases. We propose a discriminant that relies on photoevaporation by Lyman continuum photons of the outer parts of the disk as the primary hydrogen (and helium) loss mechanism. We show that Saturn's orbit constitutes the natural transitional radius between gas retainage and loss in this sort of picture and that the evaporative wind in the Uranus and Neptune regions would have been large enough to get rid of the hydrogen and helium gas before these planets assembled a critical core mass for runaway gas accretion, if the primitive Sun had an enhanced extreme ultraviolet luminosity for a duration comparable to those estimated for classical T Tauri stars.

Bottle, Tulip and Wineglass: Semantic and Structural Picture Processing by Savant Artists

Semantic and structural aspects of picture processing were investigated with graphically gifted mentally handicapped subjects and intellectually normal children. The results suggest that savants as well as controls rely primarily on semantically organised memory schemata when reproducing pictures. A semantically determined strategy also determines picture sorting. The findings indicate that within the domain of expertise there appears to be no difference between savants and normals regarding the nature of the mental structures underlying specific talents. The mental structures on which such talents are based, should therefore be regarded as being relatively independent of the level of general cognitive functioning.

Semantic memory impairment in Alzheimer's disease: Failure of access or degraded knowledge?

A battery of neuropsychological tests designed to assess semantic knowledge about the same items both within and across different modalities was administered to a group of 22 patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) and 26 matched controls. The DAT patients were impaired on tests of category fluency, picture naming, spoken word-picture matching, picture sorting and generation of verbal definitions. A relative preservation of superordinate knowledge on the sorting and definition tests, as well as a disproportionate reduction in the generation of examplars from lower order categories was noted. Analysis of the errors made by each patient across the different tests, revealed a significant correspondence between the individual items. These findings offer compelling evidence that the semantic breakdown in DAT is caused by storage degradation.

Detailed information about parasites revealed by sexual ornamentation

One hypothesis assumes that sexual ornamentation has evolved to reveal an individual's health and vigour. Therefore, choosy mates may use ornamentation as an indicator of the presence and effectiveness of genes for resistance against parasites (Hamilton & Zuk (Science, Wash. 218, 384 (1982))). However, the connection between parasites and sexual ornamentation may be more direct: the different characters of the ornamentation could reveal the contribution of each sexual hormone to the whole hormone mix that induced the ornamentation. As androgens and oestrogens are known to weaken specifically parts of the immune system (Grossmann 1985), and several parasites require a specific aspect of the immune system to be countered effectively, the hormone mix may reveal the actual use of an animal's immune system which depends on the presence and burden of, or even susceptibility to, different parasites. Therefore detailed information about a host's parasites could be available by studying its sexual ornamentation. Breeding tubercles, the sexual ornamentation of many fish, are induced by several androgens and at least one oestrogen (Wiley & Colette 1970). I studied four characteristics of the ornamentation of male roach (Rutilus rutilus) and found that two of them could be used to discriminate between males that are infected with either Diplozoon or nematodes, the two most severe parasites found. Furthermore, the number of parasites of each group correlates negatively with the expression of one or both of the other ornamental characters. A female roach could potentially decode a male's ornamentation to gather a sort of clinical picture of him and use this information in her choice of mate.

A Picture of the Self Which Supports Moral Responsibility

Let us assume (as surely we must) that we can hold at least some people morally responsible for at least some of their actions. What sort of picture of the self is compatible with that assumption? In particular, we need to ask the question of whether we can hold people responsible for actions which follow inevitably from their characters (whether they are innate or have been formed through experience) being what they are. Prima facie, there appears to be a problem in reconciling the two com monly assumed prerequisites of an action for which one can be held morally accountable: (1) that the action be done freely and (2) that the action be, in a significant sense, the self's action. The first requirement might be thought of as entailing that (1') no antecedent conditions, including the self's character being what it is, determine the action. The second requirement, on the other hand, might be interpreted as maintaining that (2') the action follows from the self's character being what it is (or, more precisely, that the action follows from facts about the self's character together with facts about the circumstances). To avoid a contradiction, one must either a) deny that (1) and/or (2) is a prerequisite of moral responsibility, b) deny the in terpretation given above of one of these requirements so they will no longer be incompatible, or c) deny both interpretations (1 ') and (2') of these re quirements. Typically, philosophers select the second alternative. They ac cept both (1) and (2) as prerequisites of moral responsibility but reject one of the above interpretations of those requirements. Many Soft Determinists (or Compatibilists), for instance, deny that (1 ') is the correct interpretation of (1), while accepting (2') as the correct interpretation of (2). Libertarians, on the other hand, deny that (2') is the correct interpretation of (2), but ac cept (1 ') as the correct interpretation of (1). I shall consider options a), b) and c) in turn and argue that c) may well be the most defensible position, in that it preserves more of our intuitions about moral responsibility than do the other positions. The consequence of denying (2 '), in particular, is that we must have a picture of the self which is more complex than customarily envisioned in order to hold people responsi ble for at least some of their actions.

Organization of and access to semantic memory in aphasia

Previous experiments with picture sorting and matching tasks have shown aphasics to give more deviant responses than controls when decisions require the identification of single features of concepts, whereas their responses are close to normal whenever decisions have to be based on the relative overlap of broad associative fields. The present experiment was designed to compare picture matching based on single features (property verification) with picture matching based on category membership (category verification). Fifty-five aphasics (14 amnesics, 18 Brocas, 13 Wernickes, 10 global aphasics) and 29 right-brain-damaged control patients served as subjects. Aphasics were poorer than right hemisphere controls on property as well as on category sortings, especially when the sorting criterion was not a dominant property of the object or when the object in question was not a typical member of the criterion category. Contrary to other studies, the “semantic distance” variable did not differentially affect Brocas as compared to Wernickes aphasics. Verbal labels denoting the sorting criterion and added to the picture presentation did not affect the performance of the right hemisphere controls but significantly improved that of the aphasics.