Squiggly Lines Research Articles

Doodling in the Style of Jesus: A Non-Interpretation of the Adultery Pericope

In the story of the adulterous woman, Jesus is remembered to have saved a woman’s life by writing on the ground. What he wrote, however, is not preserved in any tradition. That hasn’t stopped commentators from imagining what he might have written. But why imagine he wrote at all? Why imagine there's “content” there to be interpreted? Perhaps when confronted with an ethical dilemma he wanted no part of, Jesus simply bent down and began to doodle. If so, then what matters is the fact that he doodled, the shapes and the size and the squiggly lines of his doodling. In this article, I want to offer a reading of John 7:53-8:11 that engages with the very act of Jesus's wordless doodling. I then want to try and tease out a few ethical principles from this doodling. By focusing on a story where Jesus was remembered primarily for his gestures and not simply his speech, and by reimagining a Christian ethics that emerges from the space opened up by those gestures, we are keeping front and center the conviction that Christian ethics is a matter of style.

Enhancing Physiology Education Through Physiological Simulation

Advances in Physiology Education began publishing papers in 2005, using classic papers in physiology teaching [1]. This approach has several valuable outcomes: Classic experiments, conclusion of which form the foundation of much of our undergraduate teaching textbooks, require less specialized knowledge to understand and interpret the data and conclusions. It demonstrates the scientific method, demonstrating both "what do we know" and "how do we know." It promotes inquiry-based learning. It fosters data literacy, teaching students to interpret graphs and provides historical context for physiology [1]. Traditional practical classes achieve many of these outcomes while also providing a tactile experience, and have added benefits to students’ data literacy — in as much as the students perform the protocols themselves. Students will gain insight to what “squiggly lines” on a screen are measuring and the individual variability in what raw physiological recordings look like. Students will gain a greater appreciation for analytical techniques, and the manipulations and analysis that needs to be performed to interpret data. Students also gain an appreciation of the difference between textbook vs real data. Nevertheless, in person practical classes have limitations due to resource intensity, including space, materials, and curriculum time. HumMod (hummod.org) is a freely available mathematical model of Human Physiology, a "time-dependent physiologic simulation engine" [2]. JustPhysiology (justphysiology.com) is an education-focused web interface for HumMod [3]. We have written four physiology-based workshops utilizing simulated data from JustPhysiology. The JustPhysiology workshops were setup as a structured inquiry activity where students are expected to apply their content knowledge to interpret data, and students submitted their reports after each workshop for evaluation and feedback. In preparing the workshop activities for deployment, we trialed the activities with students who had previously completed our second year Human Physiology subject (and were thus familiar with the content). We then engaged students in focus group interviews —ascertaining the students’ perceptions of the learning experience. The outcome of the focus group interview suggests that students engaging with the workshop tasks enter into a positive learning cycle: [Formula: see text] The spontaneous emergence of a learning cycle, promoting deeper understanding of the physiology suggests that these data driven workshops will have improve student learning in Human Physiology.

Classification of Emotion using Eeg Signals: an FPGA Based Implementation

An electroencephalograph is a device that records all electrical energy in the human brain using wearable metal electrodes placed on the skull. Electrical impulses connect brain cells and are always mobile, even at rest. This activity appears as a squiggly line in EEG recordings. Activity gaze data is pre-processed to a frequency range of 0 to 75 Hz. This creates a new matrix with a sample rate of 200 Hz and a range of 0-75 Hz. A finite-impulse-response low-pass filter was used because the bandpass would distort his EEG data after processing. Each pre-processed EEG signal has an output, which completes feature extraction. Principal Component Analysis or PCA is passed in the feature reduction phase. PCA is an analytical process that uses singular value decomposition to transform a collection of corresponding features into mutually uncorrelated features or principal components. Principal component analysis: (a) mean normalization of features (b) covariance matrix (c) eigenvectors (d) reduced features or principal components. The above steps are passed to the SVM classifier for sentiment output. His VHDL code and testbench for 2*2 matrices were written, waveforms and RTL schemes were created in Xilinx 14.5. For the FPGA implementation, a Simulink model was designed, and the eigenvalues were pre-determined using a system generator.

Our Pool by Lucy Ruth Cummins

Reviewed by: Our Pool by Lucy Ruth Cummins Natalie Berglind Cummins, Lucy Ruth Our Pool; written and illus. by Lucy Ruth Cummins. Atheneum, 2023 [48p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781534499232 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781534499249 $10.99 It’s the perfect day to go to the city pool, and our kid narrator and their mother join other parent-child duos heading for a swim. When they arrive, the narrator is covered with a heaping amount of sunblock, and then they cannonball right into the water with the rest of the poolgoers. As they swim, they make various observations about the people around them (“I spy bigger bodies, smaller bodies, taller bodies, and the smallest-of-all-bodies”; “I see lots of different types of skin, [End Page 324] even sunburned skin—OUCH”) and enjoy being part of the flow, as “we do flips and we do handstands” and “take turns swimming through each other’s legs.” This picture book never shows viewers which of the parent-child pairings the narrator belongs to—rather, four or more sets of people of varying races and body types act out the described activities, allowing viewers to insert themselves if they so desire. The gouache art has a childlike draftsmanship, sticking to minimal facial features, squiggly lines, and a marker-like texture, and the vibrant hues convey the chlorine-scented excitement of a cool pool visit on a hot summer day. With an emphasis on inclusivity and communal joy, this is a gentle reminder to kids (and adults) to love the bodies they live in. Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Using Hilbert curves to organize, sample, and sonify solar data

How many ways can we explore the Sun? We have images in many wavelengths and squiggly lines of many parameters that we can use to characterize the Sun. We know that while the Sun is blindingly bright to the naked eye, it also has regions that are dark in some wavelengths of light. All of those classifications are based on vision. Hearing is another sense that can be used to explore solar data. Some data, such as the sunspot number or the extreme ultraviolet spectral irradiance, can be readily sonified by converting the data values to musical pitches. Images are more difficult. Using a raster scan algorithm to convert a full-disk image of the Sun to a stream of pixel values creates variations that are dominated by the pattern of moving on and off the limb of the Sun. A sonification of such a raster scan will contain discontinuities at the limbs that mask the information contained in the image. As an alternative, Hilbert curves are continuous space-filling curves that map a linear variable onto the two-dimensional coordinates of an image. We have investigated using Hilbert curves as a way to sample and analyze solar images. Reading the image along a Hilbert curve keeps most neighborhoods close together as the resolution (i.e., the order of the Hilbert curve) increases. It also removes most of the detector size periodicities and may reveal larger-scale features. We present several examples of sonified solar data, including sunspot number, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) spectral irradiances, an EUV image, and a sequence of EUV images during a filament eruption.

Teasing Meaning Out of a Tangle of Fracturing Data

The snarled red lines on the chart look more like a plate of spaghetti than a source of fracturing insights. It looks like a meaningless mess, which is generally how the ups and downs of difficult stages are viewed. To Adam Hoffman, a completion engineer for Chesapeake Energy, those 47-stages-worth of data look like a valuable opportunity. “We see so many stages with so many odd spikes and drops or chatter. We chop it off and say that was an odd stage. In my mind when we are looking at all those stages, we should wonder, ‘what was that pressure spike telling us,’” he said. That curiosity became a research project after Chesapeake encountered a spate of blockages in recently fractured Eagle Ford wells. The investigation into the cause of the casing damage led to a collaboration with Well Data Labs to look for connections between pressure changes and what is happening in the wells. Based on hundreds of stages of data from 19 wells fractured in the Eagle Ford, and later in the Powder River Basin, they reported finding a distinctive pressure signature that provides a reliable, but not foolproof, guide to when casing damage is likely. Well Data Labs has automated the search for those signatures as it looks for the meaning of the terabytes of fracturing data in this overwhelming number of seemingly random, squiggly lines. The oilfield data and software company is working on ways to monitor changes in the fracturing-fluid chemistry, the proppant intake into perforations, and an explanation for the pressure spikes seen before the pressure falls, said Jessica Iriarte, research manager at Well Data Labs. The troubleshooting and pressure analysis were covered in paper SPE 201484 presented at the 2020 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition (ATCE). It described how engineering trouble-shooting revealed that geological stresses were the likely source of problems in one case, and faulty pipe in the other. It followed up with data analysis, which used machine learning to identify distinctive patterns that provide an early warning of what is happening in the well faster and more objectively than a completion engineer studying the chart. Based on the troubleshooting, Chesapeake made changes that largely eliminated those costly problems. But it was also a costly learning process. In the Eagle Ford, they identified the underlying problem by investigating why multiple coiled-tubing runs were blocked while they were trying to drill out plugs after fracturing. When that happens, Hoffman said, “it can mean a week lost working past it.” Failure to drill out a plug can block access to the productive rock further down the lateral. A reliable automated treating-pressure analysis in the daily report could alert the completion team to problems while fracturing is in progress. They could then make adjustments on later stages and create a plan to limit the time lost when drilling out plugs on stages where they are likely to encounter tight sections.

The Crankypants Tea Party by Barbara Bottner

Reviewed by: The Crankypants Tea Party by Barbara Bottner Natalie Berglind Bottner, Barbara The Crankypants Tea Party; illus. by Ale Barba. Dlouhy/Atheneum, 2020 [40p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781481459006 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781481459013 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad 4-7 yrs Clarissa plans a tea party with her stuffies, but her toys are bitter about being mistreated: Rabbit is angry about being left outside; Pig has a tear from roughhousing; and Bear has been neglected all week. The mutinous stuffed animals refuse to participate in Clarissa's tea party, but eventually Clarissa gives each an explanation ("I didn't forget Bear. I was saving him for his birthday next week"), and the animals come around, thank her for the things she's done for them, and have their party. With its playscript-style dialogue format, this gives ample opportunity for readersaloud to ham up different voices. Some of the art clashes with the text, however, making the dialogue confusing, particularly when the illustration excludes the lines' speaker. The style successfully invokes the playfulness of children's doodles, with squiggly lines in watercolor against negative, white space. Though the animals rebel against Clarissa, some of them have valid complaints that she brushes off without apology—still, some kids may think twice about leaving their toys in the line of danger. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Failing arguments for the presence of iron in Denmark during the Bronze Age Period IV.

The dark squiggly lines of the razors from Kjeldbymagle and Arnitlund are often mentioned, along with the knife from Grødby, as the earliest examples of iron in Denmark. The razors can be dated to the early Late Bronze Age (Period IV) – around 1000 BC – due to their form and ornamentation, while the iron knife from Grødby is reported to have been found in a slightly earlier urn burial.
 Recent metallurgical analyses have, however, shown that the squiggly lines are not in fact iron, but rather copper covered by a layer of iron-bearing corrosion, and that the knife’s context with the other grave objects must be considered uncertain. This means that there is no evidence for the presence of iron in Denmark until the very end of the Bronze Age – around 700–500 BC.

Failing arguments for the presence of iron in Denmark during the Bronze Age Period IV. Regarding the razors from Kjeldbymagle and Arnitlund and a knife from Grødby

The dark squiggly lines of the razors from Kjeldbymagle and Arnitlund are often mentioned, along with the knife from Grodby, as the earliest examples of iron in Denmark. The razors can be dated to ...

Atomic Screen Test

Atomic Screen Test Jennifer Fay (bio) Atomic Disappointment On April 22, 1952 Americans watched the first televised live broadcast of an atomic explosion. A relay of cables and microwave transmissions from the Yucca Flats Proving Grounds to the Los Angeles KTLA station brought the blast into millions of living rooms using the latest and most innovative telecast technology. Yet, as the countdown commenced, in place of the much-anticipated sublimity of scientific triumph, viewers were instead witness to a kind of televisual failure or electronic gag. Just before the blast, the crew lost microwave power and had to shift the signal to the even more remote back-up camera some forty miles away. The greater challenge, however, was the explosion itself. At the moment of detonation, the camera, overwhelmed by atomic light, transcribed nuclear fission into a tiny white dot in the middle of a black sphere, as if it were the television and not the desert warming up. The image momentarily flickered only to fade into indistinct grey scales when the signature mushroom cloud formed.1 New York Times television critic Jack Gould mused that during the broadcast it seemed as if “electronic gremlins had taken charge.” At its most dramatic, the explosion appeared like “a big doughnut” in the sky before morphing into a “more conventional white puff of cotton.” “When most of the excitement was over, of course, the picture came in much better.” To make matters less interesting, the broadcast ended before American troops marched to ground zero, what would surely have been a recordable and exciting display of wargame maneuvering. For most viewers, writes Gould, “everything happened so fast—and so far away from the camera—that as a visual spectacle on TV the blast was a little anti-climatic.”2 [End Page 611] Networks were flooded with complaints after the fact. TV set owners, presuming the problem was a matter of fine tuning, attended more to the technology than the content of the broadcast itself, frantically changing channels and manipulating the horizontal and vertical hold knobs on their receivers. For such tinkerers, Gould speculates, “the atomic bomb meant geometric swirls, diagonal bars and their own large-screen trauma” (“Radio and Television,” 35). In Los Angeles, viewers could either look at the heavens or watch their TV sets. According to the Los Angeles Times, both options were disappointing. Gazing skyward at H-hour, one saw nothing but the “Southland morning haze”; on the tube, “a big black circle, and in the center a small white flash. Then slowly, like a giant rising from the earth, the fantastic mushroom cloud—a jagged lollipop on a narrow stick.”3 One hears in these descriptions the diminution of atomic expectation. Television, that centerpiece of the American living room, was a technology of counter-sublime abstraction, or worse, perhaps, domesticating the forces of nuclearism into cartoon figures of big donuts, jagged lollipops, and conventional white puffs of cotton. The Times assured readers that all stations would soon broadcast the extensive newsreel footage, for only emulsified film could translate television’s black blobs and squiggly lines into the event of nuclear detonation. But it could do so only belatedly.4 The problem of atomic disappointment predated this televisual blunder. According to Bob Mielke, the US Signal Corps deemed as only adequate the film coverage of the Trinity test, but “there was less satisfaction” with the bombing footage from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.5 In comparison to the eviscerating effects of the bomb on the ground, the image of the explosion itself was distant, brief, and shaky.6 To compensate for the paucity of this visual archive, the United States government amassed one and half million feet of film to document the 1946 tests, Operation Crossroads, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, leading to a worldwide shortage of film stock and producing the most stunning images of mass destruction (Mielke, “Rhetoric and Ideology,” 29). Here, too the military was wracked by nuclear performance anxiety. The stated purpose of Operation Crossroads was to measure the impact of atomic explosions on naval vessels. Quoted in the New York Times, one scientist cautioned that, however spectacular the explosion, “damage to a large fleet spread...

Science And In-Between

Science And In-Between James Tadd Adcox (bio) Natural Wonders Angela Woodward University of Alabama Press www.uapress.ua.edu/product 152 Pages; Print, $17.95 In a famous early example of metafiction, the narrator and namesake of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) draws five hopelessly squiggly lines which, he says, represent the plot of the novel thus far; meanwhile promising that he is aiming for a “line drawn as straight as I could draw it, by a writing-master’s ruler….the shortest line, says Archimedes, which can be drawn from one given point to another.” Of course Sterne, Tristram’s author, is aiming for no such thing. He knows that the novel is not the shortest line from one point to another but all the deviations in between. Deviations and “in betweeness” are central concerns in Angela Woodward’s new novel Natural Wonders about a young woman who has been charged with editing an edition of her late husband’s lectures. The young woman, Jenny, a typist at a university, married her much older husband Jonathan after a two-month courtship. Jonathan is a professor of earth science and a specialist on the prehistory of the human jaw. There are the usual snickerings and rumors among faculty and students about an older man marrying a (much) younger woman, extending even to the cause of his death: “In the hallway, in the morning, right after I’d left for work,” I found myself saying to his academic friends….“In bed, then, naked,” they answered, though no one said this aloud. The novel takes the form of the manuscript Jenny is putting together, or perhaps a draft of it. She’s quick to tell us of her difficulties while compiling her late husband’s lectures; the notes she inherited from him are often incoherent or illegible or missing altogether, not to mention mixed in with fragments of pest control advice, stories of Prester John, “clippings his father mailed him, detritus from an alumni magazine, pages of book reviews,” etcetera. “It’s impossible for me to straighten all this out,” she writes at one point, early on; and so, gamely, she often doesn’t try. She continues among divergent routes, adding in anecdotes from her life, her time with Jonathan, her reading. Jonathan’s colleagues insist to Jenny that she “knew him so well,” while Jenny is aware [End Page 18] that she barely knew him at all, barely had time to know him before his death. And yet we as readers begin to see, throughout Jenny’s work of compiling Jonathan’s notes, the ways in which they are alike. Both Jenny and Jonathan are storytellers. Jenny’s “transcription” mixes the history of science with fairy tales, creation myths, elaborate retellings of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) or The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). At times, it is not clear who is speaking, whether it’s Jenny-in-Jenny’s voice or Jenny-in-Jonathan’s voice, whether a little bit of Jonathan is sneaking through when Jenny is ostensibly speaking for herself or vice versa. We get the feeling that she is creating her marriage almost as much as reliving it; she is coming to an understanding of who Jonathan was, who she is, who they were together. There is love here, but it’s not the torrid affair imagined by Jonathan’s colleagues—neither Jenny nor Jonathan are particularly passionate. Here’s Jenny summing up the early days of their love: “He found me soothing, and I believed he was kind.” What grows between them, perhaps as much after Jonathan’s death as during their marriage, is a tenderness, a deep recognition: you, too, have more strata within you than can ever be brought to the surface. “Interpretation,” says Jonathan, “is vigorously condemned by many of my colleagues. We don’t interpret, they say….We only note the facts, and draw from them limited and reasonable conclusions.…We are in no sense creative.” Jonathan’s “they say” is key. He is well aware of how much interpretation is involved in the work of science and how dangerous it can be to forget that. When...

And Then Something Terrible Happened: William Steig’s Children’s Books

And Then Something Terrible Happened:William Steig’s Children’s Books Lee Thomas (bio) On the long and chilly trek to school my three-year-old demands an off-the-cuff, completely original story. He graciously supplies the title. (Luckily, we haven’t read him so many books that he can tell when I’m plagiarizing Chekov, yet.) The task is almost embarrassingly difficult. When the story lags, he’s taken to halting our progress on the crowded sidewalk to stop and shout, “And then, something terrible happened!” Which I duly provide (bison attack, the current crowd-pleaser). I’d like to credit William Steig for this innovation in “progressing the damn story already, mother.” Desolation hardly seems like fertile ground for children’s literature, but it should be. If you cannot remember the abject misery of a playground rejection, or the skittering fear when Mom forgets to pick you up from gymnastics and you immediately assume she’s gone for good, you have forgotten not just a significant leg of the journey into adulthood but practically the whole map. In 1968, after nearly forty years as a prolific cartoonist and the designer of 117 covers for The New Yorker, William Steig published his first children’s book. He was 61 years old. But it was with Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, in 1969, that the themes that infused Steig’s books for the next three decades began to coalesce. His seminal works tell the same essential narrative, a kind of Ur-tale of the child: the wish for magic, magical powers granted, trouble follows, the longing to return home, fulfillment. Born in 1907, the son of Polish-Jewish socialists from Austria, Steig grew up on the Lower East Side of New York. He was a man steeped [End Page 523] in the hustle of the street; the metropolis pulsed in his veins. You may not think you know Steig’s artwork, but if you picked up a New Yorker between 1930 and 2003, you saw it. James Geraghty, the magazine’s art editor from 1939 to 1973, once told him, “It would probably not be too extravagant to surmise that in all the history of graphic expressiveness your genius is unsurpassed: for sensitivity and comic perception of the human plight; for loveliness of line, for constant renewal, constant freshness.” His world was peopled with bulbous-nosed grandpas and impish paperboys, carnival barkers touting bikini-clad broads to the knickerbocker set, kids reveling in a summer thunderstorm. The joyful impishness of Steig’s simple drawings, the uneven presence of the nib in his wooly lines, the vivid colors—always precise, never as simple as the lurid primaries of so many books for children—marries his illustrations to his idiosyncratic, perfectly timed prose. The same immediacy that distinguished his drawings he carried over into his books for children. The physical connection of hand to pen to paper springs from the page, with almost a sense of slapdashery if the expression of Steig’s figures weren’t so damn precise. His shadings bleed the lines—as does the watercolor in his children’s books—and the inked lines have a whiskery quality that makes them feel fuzzy and alive. His children have hamhock faces and petulant underbites, his upper-crust adults barrel chests, long noses, and tapering legs, but his regular Joes possess the delicacy of a Bruegel peasant. As the New York Times’ arts and culture critic Sarah Boxer put it, “His squiggly line seems to knot itself spontaneously into the faces of angst or glee.” With Steig, the whole vastly exceeds the sum of its parts. Steig returned again and again to transmogrification—magical metamorphoses—with the pleasing lack of explanation that very small children expect from stories. In Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, the titular young donkey finds a stone that grants all his wishes, but while rushing home to his parents he encounters a lion and wishes himself a rock, with disastrous result. In Solomon the Rusty Nail (1985), a young bunny [End Page 524] discovers that if he wiggles his ears just so, he turns into (you guessed it) a rusty nail. Mishaps ensue. The Amazing Bone...

Review: Gries (2009) Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R. London and New York: Routledge

There are many teachers and scholars who value corpus analysis, but do not yet do their own programming for teaching and research. Many have been considering making the leap from using only pre-packaged concordancing software to writing our own programs, and Gries’s Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R may be the resource that helps many of us to make the transition. It may be difficult, however, to see the advantages of doing one’s own programming until one has conducted corpus research using only concordancers and developed a sense of their limitations. First, I will allow that concordancers are very useful when the focus of the research is on very specific, pre-determined words or phrases, or other top-down sorts of research questions. Concordancers are a good way to introduce students to the concept of corpus-informed language learning and they demonstrate the way that near-synonymous lexical items vary in their functions. These uses have been garnering increasing attention in the wider fields of Applied Linguistics and even Theoretical Linguistics, and we can thank concordancing software for making corpora more accessible and opening up the tool of corpus analysis to an increasing number of students, teachers and researchers. However, when one starts to ask deeper questions about patterns of language use, and we desire a more bottom-up approach to linguistic analysis that is not dependent on pre-determined lexical or grammatical items, the limitations of concordancers quickly become apparent. To limit our linguistic inquiry only to questions that can be investigated through pre-packaged software is akin to limiting our study of syntax to items that can be identified by the green squiggly line of the grammar checker in our word processor. We are at the mercy of the software developers in terms of the analytical features included and the price to purchase or upgrade these tools.

Reading the Forms of Sir Thopas

Chaucer’s Sir Thopas has always been read in terms of its forms: the tail-rhyme that creates the poem’s laughable music, the affiliation with romance that grounds its parody in the forms we call genre. Nor are these forms of Sir Thopas inconsequential. Christopher Cannon has recently argued that it was precisely in the forms of romance that textual objects in the thirteenth century rose above the vagaries of matter and became literary essence: through King Horn, Havelok the Dane, and the other texts that Sir Thopas spoofs, “the spirit of English romance became the spirit of English literature.”1 But if Chaucer registers this apotheosis of the literary through a knowing de-materialization of his own text, Cannon’s study of early Middle English literature asks us to return to the matter that grounds that spirit. Similarly, the material forms of Sir Thopas raise questions about how to understand the poem’s essence—that is to say, how the tail-rhyme meter or the layout of a manuscript page might be invested with literary significance. In different ways, both New Criticism and textual materialism have made it commonplace to assert that form shapes meaning, but I am equally interested here in the ways in which it fails to do so. For the material forms of Sir Thopas, specifically its manuscript layout, bear a problematic relation to its immaterial

Trixie Ten by Sarah Massini (review)

Reviewed by: Trixie Ten by Sarah Massini Jeannette Hulick Massini, Sarah . Trixie Ten; written and illus. by Sarah Massini. Holt, 2013. [32p]. ISBN 978-0-8050-9520-3 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R 4-6 yrs. Trixie TEN, a scribbly-haired, fuchsia thumbprint of a girl, is the youngest of ten very noisy siblings. The constant commotion wears on Trixie, and she finally decides to hit the road in search of a bit of peace and quiet. A nearby stream proves too lively, though, as it is filled with a family of ten "babbling fish," and a meadow is likewise too busy, inhabited by one hundred rabbit siblings. When she finally does find "a big, empty, quiet place," the silence and solitude are so unfamiliar that she soon finds herself wishing for her siblings. Upon her return home, "It is just as noisy as usual. 'But that's the way we are,' thinks Trixie. And she drifts happily off to sleep." While the plot is predictable, the need for peaceful alone time will [End Page 386] resonate with quieter kids from large families or with those overwhelmed by noisy classrooms. Trixie, her siblings, and the fish and rabbits are all crafted from colorful fingerprints with simple dots and straight and squiggly lines for facial features, hair, and appendages. The digital illustrations are stylish, and the jelly-bean-esque figures show up well against clear white or mostly neutral-toned backgrounds. Kids will enjoy the "I could do that" element of the fingerprint-based art, and, in fact, this title would be a great excuse to haul out the Ed Emberley fingerprint books and some ink pads for a DIY art session. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Visual Diagnosis

1. Laurene M. Fleischer, MD* 2. Rosa Cataldo, DO* 3. Salma S. Syed, DO* 1. *Department of Pediatrics, State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY A 10-year-old boy presents with the chief complaint of an itchy rash of his left foot. The pruritic area, localized to the plantar surface, began 2 weeks ago, with symptoms progressively worsening. One week ago, the boy noticed a small raised lesion over the itchy area. Over the next few days, the lesion increased in size and started to look like “a squiggly line.” Various preparations, such as topical hydrocortisone, calamine lotion, antifungal spray, and oral antihistamines, failed to provide relief. His mother denies any change in laundry detergent, soaps, or lotions. He has no fever, weight loss, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, cough, or chronic or severe illnesses. His immunizations are up to date, and he takes no medications other than those mentioned. The family spent a recent vacation in Cancun, Mexico, where the children played in a sand box and swam in the ocean. On additional questioning, the family recalls seeing feral cats in the same sandbox. Physical examination reveals a well-nourished, well-appearing boy. His temperature is 98.4°F (36.9°C), pulse is 81 beats/min, respiratory rate is 20 breaths/min, and blood pressure is 125/64 mm Hg. His head and neck examinations reveal no findings of interest. His heart sounds are normal; there are no murmurs, rubs, or gallops. His lungs are clear to auscultation without wheezing, rales, or rhonchi. His abdomen is soft, nondistended, and nontender. There is no lymphadenopathy. On the plantar surface of his left foot is a 3.5-cm raised, nontender, erythematous, serpiginous lesion (Fig. 1). There is no drainage from the area, interdigital rash, or excoriation. There are no other skin manifestations. Figure 1. A 3.5-cm …

Using SeisMac to Turn Your Laptop into a Seismograph for Teaching

You probably are familiar with the situation. You're trying to explain the arrival of seismic waves to your class. Or maybe it is your spouse (or child, grandparent, parole officer, whatever). You are excited and enthusiastic, talking about frequencies and wavelengths, dispersion, Hilbert transforms, and so on, and all you get in return is blank stares. They don't get it. The problem is that you are showing them a static black-and-white image of squiggly lines, and you just can't get them to see the dynamic motions and transfers of energy involved. You wish you had an actual seismometer to whip out and use to demonstrate your points. Well, your wish has been granted! In fact, you very well may have access to it already. SeisMac is a free Mac OS X application that runs on a MacBook or MacBook Pro and turns built-in accelerometers into a three-component seismograph. These Mac laptops are installed with a sudden-motion sensor, similar to automobile air-bag accelerometers, that is designed to lock up your hard drive if your laptop falls to the ground. It works. Trust us (or, rather, trust the dents in our laptops). Early on, Mac users discovered this feature and were using it to do things like turn their laptops into Star Wars light sabers (complete with sound effects). However, freelance programmer Daniel Griscom realized the potential and created SeisMac (which he wrote about in Electronic Seismologist for SRL volume 77, issue 6 (November/December 2006) pp. 731–733). With some seed funding and guidance from the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS), SeisMac was honed into a real seismograph. Yes, of course, you could achieve the same results by purchasing a separate three-component accelerometer and developing a graphical user interface (GUI) that could display the signal in a user-friendly manner. But most likely, …

Teaching Reading and Writing to Students with Visual Impairments: Who is Responsible

Teaching and writing to students with visual impairments--Whose job is it? is a very complex question. I am tempted to change the question a bit. Instead, I would like to ask, is responsible? in which case, I could discuss the responsibilities of school administrators (at the school and district level), state departments and provincial ministries of education, and the federal government and the responsibilities they have to recognize and appropriately fund services for students who are visually impaired. I could talk about the responsibility of teachers to put into place appropriate instructional plans and set up effective educational teams, as well as the responsibility of parents for advocating and supporting their child's literacy development during early childhood and throughout school. When considering the central question of this Perspectives column, we need to examine what is meant by reading instruction. In this context, instruction and are interchangeable terms, so the question can be answered based on what I believe about who should teach to students who are visually impaired. The answer might be different for students who are visually impaired and read than for those who are visually impaired and read braille. There are several techniques that can be categorized as teaching methods, and direct instruction is one of them. Also included in the list of methods are discussions, simulations, experiments, field trips, practice, and role-play activities. Some, or all, of these methods could be used in the course of instruction, but the central question of this column is: Who provides direct instruction in to students with visual impairments? Can we separate the braille code from the of for children who are learning beginning in braille? We cannot and should not make such a separation. Yet, even in schools for blind students, there are distinctions between the teacher who teaches and the teacher who teaches braille. Are these distinctions made because most educators learned braille as a code after knowing how to read in print? Is because we overemphasize the braille code because is different and unique? The squiggly lines, straight lines, and circles that make up letters also constitute a code for representing spoken language, but sighted educators are so familiar with that code that seems ridiculous to refer to as a code. Although much work is done in the early years by children who are sighted in letter identification and production, would be very strange to put these children in a print class that was separate from a and writing class. DOES IT TAKE A VILLAGE? I am also tempted to take the easy road (and, frankly, the correct road) and say that instruction is not just the job of one person, that the development of (and writing) skills takes a team. First and foremost, the parents of a child with visual impairment play an early and ongoing role in their child about books, and reading, and loving reading. Second, the child's classroom teacher is a key participant in a child to read and write. Third, the child's teacher of students with visual impairments has an important role to play. But, answering the question, Whose job is it? from the perspective of the it takes a village model makes me feel quite uncomfortable, because this answer begs other questions, such as takes primary responsibility for making sure that the team works effectively together? Or is accountable? or is in charge of the village? These are legitimate questions that speak to the very crux of the matter of Whose job is it? My answer is that instruction for students with visual impairments is the job of a person who possesses all of the following characteristics: * Creativity, flexibility, and other personal characteristics of a good teacher. …

33-Year-Old Woman With Marked Eosinophilia

33-Year-Old Woman With Marked Eosinophilia

Raisin and Grape (review)

Reviewed by: Raisin and Grape Deborah Stevenson Amico, Tom Raisin and Grape; by Tom Amico and James Proimos; illus. by Andy Snair. Dial, 200632p ISBN 0-8037-3091-8$12.99 R Gr. 1-3 The grape and raisin of the title are a plump young fruit and his companionable and wizened grandfather, who has "a lot of wrinkles." Grandpa is currently visiting, which means the grape gets a trip to the park, jam-jars of Grandpa stories, and some vintage grandparental advice about life. That's all the plot there is, but that's a fair amount of action for perishable foodstuffs, and the warm yet clever text effectively blends humorous grape viewpoints ("You know how they make grape juice? . . . They just let some grapes cross the street without holding their grandpa's hand") with familiar human dynamics ("Grandpa tells long stories on the way to the park. I can only listen short. But I like the parts I do listen to"). Snair spins the grapey chartreuse and violet tones into a retro palette that complements the viticulture with rusty orange, buttery gold, and muted teal; the thick, squiggly lines, approximately indicating the limits of figures rather than actually edging them, and the background elements in shades of the same tone similarly evoke a late mid-century graphic sensibility that's just ripe for the ridiculously touched domesticity of its scenes. Listeners will also appreciate the delicious oddity of this family story, while novice readers just coming to grapes—er, grips—with narrative will find this a flavorful alternative to sweeter tales. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois