Total Strangers Research Articles

Puppies, Babies, Broken Bones, and the Fine Art of Storytelling

<H4>EXCERPT</H4> <P>What do puppies, babies, and broken bones have in common? They all have the uncanny ability to evoke attention from, and then interaction with, total strangers. I had not made this observation and connection until I recently broke my wrist and was wearing a cast. </P>

Overview: Mature Field Revitalization (January 2006)

The challenge. It has always been before us, but it is now asked of us by family members, neighbors, and total strangers once they find out we work in the petroleum industry: "Can the oil and gas industry meet world demand over the next few years?" I think the answer can be found in the papers selected for this feature and in other quality technical presentations on this subject. Projects around the globe are discussed, which have been implemented to maximize the use of existing infrastructure and improve recovery by revitalizing mature fields. Paper presentations and displays on the exhibit floor at the SPE 2005 Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition in early October also served as a solid indicator that the industry is poised to meet the challenge successfully. Individual companies continually strive toward ensuring that the energy supply meets demand; replacing reserves is a high-profile key performance indicator. SPE plays a vital role in aiding the effort. The technology, techniques, and talent shared in the various SPE venues are sometimes applied directly in another field, but more often, improvements in these three areas are made with subsequent applications. Innovation flourishes as applications that worked in one mature asset are modified to fit the specific requirements for another mature asset. The specifics cannot always be applied directly, but the process of studying about production improvements, having a service company representative explain details of a tool with the help of a cut-away model, or witnessing the enthusiasm during a well-prepared paper presentation can lead to the derivation of new approaches to revitalizing mature fields. So, when you have finished reading the summaries of the selections, and perhaps downloaded the full-length papers as well as some of the other technical references, I hope you arrive at the same answer to the question that I did. We will meet the challenge. Mature Field Revitalization additional reading available at the SPE eLibrary: www.spe.org SPE 93697 "Integration Tools To Streamline Reservoir Management and Field-Development Workflows for Mature Fields in South Oman," by M.A. Naguib, SPE, Petroleum Development Oman, et al. [See JPT (October 2005) 56.] SPE 94360 "Significant Production Enhancement in Uzen Field, Kazakhstan, Through Surface and Subsurface Optimization," by S.J. Sparke, SPE, Gaffney, Cline & Assocs., et al.

Cross-national Study of Fighting and Weapon Carrying as Determinants of Adolescent Injury

We sought to (1) compare estimates of the prevalence of fighting and weapon carrying among adolescent boys and girls in North American and European countries and (2) assess in adolescents from a subgroup of these countries comparative rates of weapon carrying and characteristics of fighting and injury outcomes, with a determination of the association between these indicators of violence and the occurrence of medically treated injury. Cross-sectional self-report surveys using 120 questions were obtained from nationally representative samples of 161082 students in 35 countries. In addition, optional factors were assessed within individual countries: characteristics of fighting (9 countries); characteristics of weapon carrying (7 countries); and medically treated injury (8 countries). Participants included all consenting students in sampled classrooms (average age: 11-15 years). The primary measures assessed included involvement in physical fights and the types of people involved; frequency and types of weapon carrying; and frequency and types of medically treated injury. Involvement in fighting varied across countries, ranging from 37% to 69% of the boys and 13% to 32% of the girls. Adolescents most often reported fighting with friends or relatives. Among adolescents reporting fights, fighting with total strangers varied from 16% to 53% of the boys and 5% to 16% of the girls. Involvement in weapon carrying ranged from 10% to 21% of the boys and 2% to 5% of the girls. Among youth reporting weapon carrying, those carrying handguns or other firearms ranged from 7% to 22% of the boys and 3% to 11% of the girls. In nearly all reporting countries, both physical fighting and weapon carrying were significantly associated with elevated risks for medically treated, multiple, and hospitalized injury events. Fighting and weapon carrying are 2 common indicators of physical violence that are experienced by young people. Associations of fighting and weapon carrying with injury-related health outcomes are remarkably similar across countries. Violence is an important issue affecting the health of adolescents internationally.

Coisas para o povo nóo fazer: Carnaval em Porto Alegre (1870–1915)

Carnival in Porto Alegre? Tourists and historians alike might be surprised to find the two linked, given that Rio Grande do Sul is generally best known for more rustic entertainments. Alexandre Lazzari’s book offers a valuable look at the development of Carnival in what was still a small town of roughly 40,000, in the era when it began to be a national institution. Brazil’s southernmost state and its capital have made more important contributions to Brazilian economic and political history than they have to cultural history, but this revised master’s thesis is more than just a helpful reminder of how national cultural phenomena took on local manifestations prior to the development of radio. It is also a useful corrective to the notion that in the history of Carnival, long-term popularization was always the dominant trend. Historians will profit by using its insights in problematizing the historical development of Rio-centered “national” cultures and identities.Lazzari examines the important role that young men of the middle and upper classes played in creating the Esmeralda and Venezianos Carnival societies in the 1870s. While nationalists at roughly the same time tried to eliminate bullfighting in Cuba, these Brazilian founding brothers hoped to modernize Porto Alegre by eliminating another symbol of backwardness—the traditional Luso-Brazilian practice of entrudo. Moralizing reformist critics associated the practice of spraying friends, family, and total strangers with fair and foul liquids with both the decline of patriarchal authority and the spread of germs. Spontaneity, variety, and social disorder (according to the “progressive youth”) were to be replaced by elaborate planning and elegant justifications of hierarchy in allegorical floats. Lazzari makes clear that the Golden Age of Carnival remembered at the turn of the twentieth century was quite short-lived and that the attempt to replace entrudo with Carnival had begun to fail already by the 1880s. The popular classes resisted this assault on their favored means of diversion. Carnival society members themselves were guilty of holding onto old practices while ostensibly exemplifying new ones. Indeed, entrudo survived among rich and poor alike, while the societies themselves soon suffered from internal disputes and a general loss of direction before dying out.Lazzari also examines how involvement in Carnival by German immigrants and their descendants, as well as those of African descent, helped these groups assert their own citizenship identities. As elite Carnival declined, popular variations became more visible, varied, and “shameless”—and, therefore, a renewed target of journalistic complaint. Other people’s habits continued to need reforming, to paraphrase Mark Twain. Dominant groups were concerned with the loss of direct control over people of color that had accompanied abolition. To counter these trends, societies displaying more dignified, tamer subjects, and idealized female images were revived in an attempt to regain control of the unruly streets.Like many works of this type, this book is often more a study of attitudes regarding Carnival than of cultural practices themselves, and one is not always convinced that the newspaper columnists cited are necessarily representative (and of what). It is somewhat puzzling that the author did not make more of the fact that the vast majority (23 of 28 identified out of 30) of those involved in creating the Esmeralda society were public functionaries, agents of a centralizing monarchical state. Even though residents of the Court were obviously themselves trying to imitate foreign models, those in Brazil’s southernmost province had no doubts that to be modern meant to be more like Rio. Lazzari also could have done more with the changing political and ideological contexts in a state that endured more unrest than any other in the transition from monarchy to republic, and in which positivism flourished.One is tempted to suggest that the virtual invisibility of Porto Alegre’s Carnival in more recent years is due to the unfortunate success of the elite’s attempts to reassert control. Despite all of the changes that have taken place in Rio’s Carnival over the past century, there is no doubt that the creative center remains in the city’s favelas. Porto Alegre’s elites succeeded all too well in making Carnival something “for the people not to do,” as Lazzari suggests, and it is now of limited interest to most of the city’s inhabitants. Why the elite were so successful in a state known in recent years for the strength of the Partido dos Trabalhadores is a question for others to address.

The Voice of Those Who Sing

Carlos looks like he was dipped in ink. Twenty-four years old, just days out of Corcoran State Prison, his arms are covered with tattoos. His neck is blackened by designations of his gang. Head shaved, it is filled with tattooed threats and ominous markings. Most prominent, though, are two pronounced devil's horns situated alarmingly on his forehead. "You know," he says, "I'm having a hard time finding a job." I suggest that we put our heads together on this one, and gently guide him toward our tattoo removal program. I run the largest gang intervention program in the country. For nearly two decades, many thousands of felons, gang members and those recently released from detention facilities have found jobs, counseling, and community service opportunities through Homeboy Industries, based in the Boyle Heights section of East Los Angeles. In addition to our job referral program, we currently have five businesses and a tattoo removal program. "I've been locked up now since I was fourteen," Carlos continues. "I've never had a job in my life." This was a Monday afternoon, and I tell him, "You begin work tomorrow." I give him directions to our Homeboy Silkscreen factory and wish him luck. On Wednesday, I call the Silkscreen plant and have the receptionist bring the new-hire to the phone. I ask Carlos how working makes him feel. "It feels proper. I'm holdin' my head up high. In fact, I'm like that vato on the commercial, you know the one. The guy who walks up to total strangers and says, 'I lowered my cholesterol'—well, that's me." He loses me here. "I mean," he explains, "yesterday, after work, I'm tired and on the bus—and I just couldn't help myself. I kept turning to total strangers and telling'em, "I'm just coming back from my first day at work. Just got off—my first day on the job." My mind races to see the folks on the bus. Maybe people smile and greet the news warmly. Perhaps mothers clutch their kids more closely to themselves. Maybe, someone thinks: "Who the hell would hire this guy?" After all, a second chance for the once-felon is often seen as a waste of our collective time. The prophet Isaiah writes, "In this place of which you say, it is a waste, there will be heard again the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voices of those who sing." Carlos, of the "lowered cholesterol," finds his voice in the dignity of work and in the sure promise of belonging. [End Page 79] Mother Theresa diagnosed correctly, I think, the ills of our modern world—"Our problem," she says, "is that we've just forgotten that we belong to each other." The kingdom of God, it seems to me, is less about membership or card-carrying elitism than it is an invitation to kinship and belonging. Jesus announces his formal ministry in Luke by echoing the words of the prophet and signals liberation for the oppressed, sight for the blind, and freedom for the prisoner. He promises the poor that their voice of "mirth and gladness" will be heard again. On top of it all, he declares that "today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing." His audience is impressed. Yet before you know it, he's being given the bum's rush to the edge of a cliff and the mob nearly hurls him over it. Their opposition was fueled, I suspect, not by the prospects of liberation, sight, freedom or good news. Who could be against that? I think the difficulty people have with Jesus is not rooted in his call to liberation, but in his preposterous insistence that kinship be the starting point. Click for larger view Figure 1 Tattoo Removal. © Homeboy Industries.

Soft approach to the hard sell

PurposeTo provide a concise briefing on the most topical issues and relevant implications from the top 400 management publications in the world.Design/methodology/approachThis briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the argument in context.FindingsStephen Brown reports on how marketers are constantly thinking of new ways to keep one step ahead of customers who have become wise to, and increasingly wary and cynical of, the advertiser's message. His entertaining article pokes fun at the marketing business to underline a serious and well‐constructed message that new approaches have to be adopted to attract marketing‐literate consumers. Typical quote: “The ultimate aim is to get marketing‐savvy consumers talking about the savvy marketing campaign and the marketing‐savvy talking about being talked about by marketing‐savvy media”. Andy Cohen describes how the senior vice‐president of strategic marketing and new media for Samsung Electronics America oversees more than 150 product launches every year and more than 40 new online marketing campaigns each month – and how he uses the internet to “superaccelerate” the company's marketing plans. A perceptive insight into a workaholic boss's vision for delivering a constant stream of information about what the company has on offer. Andrew and Jack Kaikati take a similar theme to Stephen Brown, chronicling the sometimes‐bizarre methods marketers are using to replace more traditional forms of advertising that are losing their effectiveness among consumers. Methods such as paying actors to go into trendy bars, music stores or tourist hot‐spots and convince total strangers that their cell phone CD or video game is a “must have” product. This enjoyable essay considers the pros and cons of such “advertising by stealth” and touches on the ethical, and possibly legal, pitfalls such an increasingly popular phenomenon might hold in store for the future.Originality/valueProvides implementable strategies and practical thinking that has influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The company of strangers: a natural history of economic life

The Company of Strangers shows us the remarkable strangeness, and fragility, of our everyday lives. This completely revised and updated edition includes a new chapter analyzing how the rise and fall of social trust explain the unsustainable boom in the global economy over the past decade and the financial crisis that succeeded it.Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, history, psychology, and literature, Paul Seabright explores how our evolved ability of abstract reasoning has allowed institutions like money, markets, cities, and the banking system to provide the foundations of social trust that we need in our everyday lives. Even the simple acts of buying food and clothing depend on an astonishing web of interaction that spans the globe. How did humans develop the ability to trust total strangers with providing our most basic needs?

Le statut des « Asiatiques » aux États-Unis

Asians were long treated by American law and society as total strangers who were, if not dangerous, at least undesirable. Case law, particularly in the Supreme Court, substantiates the systematic nature of this ostracism. Asian immigration was for a long time discouraged or even simply prohibited. Changes in immigration law and major rulings concerning minorities in the 1960s marked a crucial turning point. In the past few decades, Asians have on the contrary often been held up as the hard-working, successful model minority, thus more or less explicitly contrasted with Blacks, said not to share this ethic. Such social success (which in fact should be tempered) is thus supposed to prove that discrimination no longer plays a significant role in the prosperity of various racial groups and that only cultural values dune into play: a doubtful conclusion

The behavior analyst today: Achieving its mission but still a long way to go!

With the issue of BAT 2(4), we have successfully completed our second year. Publishing 3 (1), we begin our third year and indeed much has occurred to the world and our profession in that last year. Those of us who reside in the United States have witnessed a contested election, an ever broadening recession, and of course the vicious, unprovoked attack of September 11th. September 11th has bought the U.S. president has termed a new normalcy to this country. It is one that many abroad have become accustomed to: the idea of living with ever tightening security and the realization that at any moment, our lives can be determined by total strangers. On the issue of the recession, during this time it is critical for companies to increase productivity with fewer personnel then before. One way to accomplish this is through the use of performance pay systems. William Abernathy has provided us with a timely article on this subject matter and how to get started in the performance pay world. Calls for homeland defense have led us to ask over and over again, what is the role of behavior analysis in this new era? To this question, behavior analysts have much to offer. Indeed, we are planning a future issue for the Behavior Analyst Today to be devoted to Behavior Analysis and homeland defense. From the socialization of individuals with conduct disorders to ensuring that the 20% of gifted children who underachieve, receive the skills necessary to maximize their potential, behavior analysis has a say about change and about tolerance. On the tolerance issue, Skinner, Cautilli and Hantula offer a functionalist perspective on Ebonics and place the perspective in light of the changing culture of language studies. Even more locally in Pennsylvania, behavior analysis is still on the verge of adding its knowledge to redesigning the overly costly mental health system. Still many would oppose suggestions from behavior analysts in spite of the state's acknowledged claim that it wants to shift from a focus on service to a focus on treatment. As surveys of psychotherapists have taught us, the percentage of patients who receive behavioral (and even cognitive) treatments for anxiety disorders has decreased (Goisman, Rogers, Stekettee, Warshaw, Cuneo, & Keller, 1993; Plante, Andersen, & Boccaccini, 1999) in spite of the U.S. Surgeon General's (1999) report. We can think of no other area in medicine where the nation's leading doctor issue a list of interventions that are efficacious for particular problems and have such a general disregard by the health community to implement such suggestions. The explanations for the reasons behind this vary but one of the leading reasons is that practitioners are not trained in these techniques (Committee on Accreditation, 2000). Another is that clinicians are biased against using such practices (Addis & Krasnow, 2000; Sanderson, 1995). In Pennsylvania Best Practice Documents are listed on the Office of Medical Assistance and Substance Abuse Website, yet none of the documents list anything about functional assessment, contingency management or any of the other techniques that the Surgeon General has endorsed for the treatment of children. Part of this reason is that no one in Pennsylvania's Children and Adolescent Service System Provider Institute (CASSP Institute), the training wing for all mental health service providers, is certified in behavior analysis. They unfortunately see behavior analysis as only useful for developmental disabilities and have missed that the Surgeon General (1999, Chapter 3) has endorsed behavioral treatment techniques for childhood disorders as varied as anxiety (Goisman, Rogers, & Keller, 1999) and oppositional defiant disorder. Maybe readers should stop by the website and let them know otherwise. Behavior analysis has a place not only in the United States, but as the University re-opens in Kabul we need to think about we could provide to the Afghan people. …

Do health care professionals report sudden cardiac arrest better than laymen?

Objective: To compare the emergency calls made by health care providers and by laymen reporting a non-traumatic cardiac arrest, and to evaluate the handling of these calls by dispatchers. Methods: The study was conducted prospectively over a 1-year period in 1996. The callers ( N=328) where divided in to three groups based on profession: I, doctors and nurses ( N=33); II, other health care providers ( N=19); and III, laymen ( N=276). Main outcome measures where the information given by the caller, use of the dispatching protocol, recognition of the cardiac arrest, and survival to hospital. Results: Doctors and nurses told the dispatcher spontaneously what had happened in 67% of the calls when total strangers to the patient told it in 72%. Group I gave no information about the vital signs in 24% of the calls, group II in 0% and group III in 6%. Of the 52 phone calls made by groups I and II, in six cases the patient was not in cardiac arrest, in four the patient had already irreversible signs of death and in four only transportation to another hospital was requested for a patient in cardiac arrest. Of the professionals calling, 49 (94%) were on duty at the time of the call. The cardiac arrest was recognized by the dispatcher in group I in 70%, in group II in 74% and in group III in 73%. There where no statistical differences between the groups. Conclusions: Our data do suggest that health care professionals, excluding those in emergency medicine, are not better than laymen in evaluating an emergency situation correctly, and when the caller is a doctor or a nurse the dispatcher seems to trust the evaluation of the situation to be correct and rarely asks any clarifying questions about vital signs of the patient.

Decisions to donate bone marrow: The role of attitudes and subjective norms across cultures

This paper reports the results of a field investigation of the determinants of decisions to donate bone marrow. Predictions are made on the basis of a modification of the theory of reasoned action wherein attitudes are operational-ized in separate affective and evaluative components. Boundary conditions of the theory of reasoned action are further explored by examining the effects of culture (Hong Kong Chinese, N= 190; American Chinese, N = 107; black Americans, N = 124; and white Americans N = 122) on decisions to donate for each of four targets: Immediate Family Members (TFM), Close Relatives (CR), Ethnic Strangers (ES), and Total Strangers (TS). For this life or death decision, the willingness to give is hypothesized to vary as a function of the so-called fitness value of the recipients (i.e., their capacity to contribute to the donor's inclusive fitness), as modified by cultural differences between group- versus independent-based cultures. Among other results, the following gradient was found in attitudes, subjective norms, and intentions for Chinese: IFM > CR > ES > TS; for Americans the pattern was IFM = CR > ES = TS. American Chinese showed stronger attitudes and felt norms, but not intentions, to give to close relatives than did Hong Kong Chinese, reflecting differential in-group/out-group pressures. Black and White Americans showed stronger attitudes, subjective norms, and intentions to donate to strangers than did Chinese.

Notes from a New York Diary©

9:20 A.M., September 11, 2001Fear, the rush of adrenaline, mounting hysteria. I open my door to an eerie sight: hundreds of people are standing in the middle of Washington Street, looking worried and lost. My neighbors, my friends, the maintenance workers who take care of my building, total strangers—all staring at the huge, ugly black clouds engulfing what once was the World Trade Center. There are those poised with their camcorders and cameras, ever ready to document any catastrophic event. I, too, stare at the smoke and flames, mesmerized by the awesome beauty of destruction. The sky is a hard, brilliant blue. It is the end of the world, yet the sun is blazing and it is a crisp, gorgeous morning. We are very much alive. All around me, eyewitness accounts are repeated like some gruesome mantra: Not one plane, but two. Not two, but four. Not accidentally, but on purpose. I saw the whole thing go down, bodies falling from the sky.

Anonymity on the Internet: ACLU of Georgia v. Miller

The Internet allows anyone with a computer and a telephone line to talk to total strangers anywhere in the world. In the pure democracy of the Internet, chat sessions can become virtual masquerade parties, where users can express their own personalities or create new ones, depending on the circumstances and their individual whims. This can all take place based on the anonymity that is intrinsic to the Internet.

On the co-construction of counterfactual reasoning

Using Japanese data collected following the 1994 Northridge earthquake, I would like to suggest that counterfactual thinking is an essential necessity for human existence. Specifically, a novel account of co-construction presented here provides an important insight into the nature of counterfactual reasoning by ordinary people in everyday life. It will be demonstrated that Japanese speakers spontaneously co-construct the line of reasoning, ‘P [DESIRABLE], because if not P, then not Q [UNDESIRABLE]’, where P and Q stand for FACT (e.g., P = ‘the earthquake occurred at 4:30 a.m.’ and Q = ‘the casualties were very small’). These speakers were total strangers until they met at the data collection site to talk about their own earthquake experiences. By jointly and collaboratively producing elements of counterfactual reasoning, the pairs of speakers are congratulating themselves by conveying the message ‘We are lucky; it could've been so much worse’. There is a striking similarity between Fauconnier's (1985) made up examples in English and the Japanese authentic discourse data, which leads us now toward a universal hypothesis that this line of reasoning is not only a natural one for every human being, it also serves to demonstrate and express sympathy and mutual sharing.

Life must go on

We Celts are notorious for the exuberance of our emotions, and the Farrell clan is no exception. So you cry at weddings? That don't amount to a hill of beans. We cry at baptisms, birthdays, Christmas, Easter, St Paddy's Day, during sad songs, or just randomly—it's usually quite competitive to see who starts blubbering first. And funerals—we yield to none in our unabashed exhibitions of public grief. Distant relatives who haven't seen us for years stand back in amazement as apparently total strangers rend their hair and wail like demented wolverines. If I've had to forcibly restrain one grieving widow from throwing herself into …

Return: A Journey

Trains have a special meaning for me. I was born Jewish in Romania in 1941. My family was dismembered and uprooted by World War II. As a displaced person, I spent much of my early years in transit, watching landscape advance and recede through train windows, heading always toward some unknown destination On this first return journey, I wanted to reexperience that sensation of constant movement, a mixture of expectancy and panic produced in me by the rhythmic clanking of steel and plaintive whistles in the night, and the intimacy created among total strangers after a night of fitful dozing in a crowded compartment. In 1951, when we immigrated to the U.S., a door was closed on my early stage in life. It took perestroika and the opening of the Berlin Wall for me to glimpse again the child that was once me.

A Piece of My Mind: A Collection of Essays From The Journal of the American Medical Association

A Piece of My Mind is a collection of 80 offerings selected the weekly column of the same name that has animated the pages of JAMA and aroused its readers since 1980. The content of these diverse stories varies whimsical to profound, and they evoke feelings that span inspirational to hysterical. These narratives, however, are fused by their stark medical realism, and whether the setting is Vietnam, a pediatric emergency room, an ICU, or a doctor's office, it is apparent that the authors have labored the trenches of medicine. Their special experiences have engendered these stories. In poignant paragraphs, doctors share their search for the soul of medicine and, perhaps not surprisingly, discover it is prismatic. Where one physician finds meaning through running in a cloud of memories of failures, of lost lives and abandoned hopes, another doctor uncovers fulfillment from the sudden intimacies with total strangers.

The Impact of Child Sexual Abuse On Victims' Adjustment

Two hundred and forty sexual abuse victims under 18 years of age were compared to 57 nonabused children on indices reflecting school, social, and behavioral adjustment, sexual conduct, and family dynamics. The average victim age was 8.47 years; most were female (91%). The majority of perpetrators were family members (65%). Only 8.7 percent of child sexual abusers were total strangers. A 35% rise in behavioral symptomatology was noted for the sexually abused children following the onset of their abuse. Forty-nine percent of the abused children showed no evident sign of emotional or mental trauma on pediatric examination. However, the longer the duration of abuse, the greater the likelihood of negative effects in the form of emotional and behavioral trauma and school problems in the child victims. When the children were forced into adult, and perhaps intimate pseudo-romantic behavior, e.g., passionate kissing and vulvar or vaginal intercourse, the more likely a manifest problem would appear. Violence, in this study, played a minor role in predicting behavior problems. Implications for prevention of child abuse are discussed.

W. H. Auden’s Progress Towards Personal Speech

W. H. A U D E N ’S P R O G R E S S T O W A R D S P E R S O N A L S P E E C H ER ICA RIGGS University of Toronto T h e cumulative self-portrait Auden offers in his Collected Poems is of a proud but lucky man. He pictures himself as having been an eccentric, forceful child who preferred “beautiful machines that never talked”1 to human beings who did. Machines delighted him, he explains, because their intricacy stimu­ lated his desire to understand. They did not intimidate him, as humans did, by demanding conforming reciprocity. He coped with humans by using his “pre­ cocious” (GP 95) verbal and imaginative talents to convince himself he could dominate them. Prospero, the poet character in “The Sea and the Mirror,” recalls his childhood thus: When I woke into my life, a sobbing dwarf Whom giants served only as they pleased, I was not what I seemed; Beyond their busy backs I made a magic T o . . . Usurp the popular earth and blot for ever The gross insult of being a mere one among many. (CP 312) The Auden we meet in the last poems has found and celebrates “friendship” (CP 657) in many manifestations. They flourish — he notes his luck — in spite of his still-virulent pride, the “verbalising I” that so readily “becomes a vicious despot, / lewd, incapable of love, / disdainful, status-hungry” (CP 673). Auden treats this portrait as a parable of the moral demands of life: at the root of his loneliness is the need to dominate, to be recognized by others as being in control of his circumstance and theirs, and at the root of sustaining friendship is his willingness to be vulnerable to the often painful demands of human community, to recognize others as “persons” who might love but might also chasten him.2“As persons,” he explains in Secondary Worlds, “ . .. we are called into being . . . by other persons, our parents, our siblings, our friends” (SW 104). This mutual calling, he continues, is generated through what he terms “personal speech” (SW 113). His concept of personal speech evolved in part from and eventually deter­ mined the relationship he aspired to with readers of his poems: “Poetry,” he E n g l i s h S t u d i e s i n C a n a d a , x v , 2, June 1989 asserts, “is personal speech in its purest form” (SW 113). Its model is the experience of Pentecost where “men were willing, in absolute fullness of heart, to speak and to listen not merely to their sort of person but to total strangers” (SW 122). His interest in this model prompted controversial changes in the way he wrote, particularly in his effort to reach a heterogeneous audience (he writes in The Dyer’s Hand) as “a single person to be read by other single persons”3 in voluntary reciprocity. His definition of speech alludes to the difficulties Auden faced as a young poet neurotically self-absorbed, as a re­ spected public figure tempted to write in a deceptively pleasing way, as an old man subject to crochety repetitions: In speech one unique person addresses another unique person and does so voluntarily: he could keep silent if he chose. We speak as persons because we desire to disclose ourselves to each other and to share our experiences, not because we need to share them, but because we enjoy sharing them. When we genuinely speak, we do not have the words ready to do our bidding; we have to find them, and we do not know exactly what we are going to say until we have said it, and we say and hear something new that has never been said or heard before. (SW 105) When one examines the progress of Auden’s work in the light of this passage one sees, not the radical turn-abouts that most of his critics emphasize, but a pattern of persistent adaptive struggle necessitated by Auden’s emphatically defined personality as it confronted a chaotic, “joyless world” (CP 612), so intolerant of individuality. He...

D.S.P.P.: a data security pipe protocol for PC's,large scale systems or networks

D.S.P.P.: Data Security Pipe Protocol is an original asymetric cryptographic time dependent public auto-key protocol applied to data security. This protocol has been designed for secrecy in data files or end-to-end data communications and to solve problems involving intruders in networks or locally and also to avoid cheating by contractors ... in other words to answer the question: Is it possible for Michael and François to communicate in perfect security without cheating each other and without interference from a 'third party' in the network ...even they are total strangers...? with respect with conviviality and simplicity for use !According to theoretical considerations on the most efficient methods of computing in multi-precision modular arithmetic, we use Mersenne primes of 521, 607 and potentially 1279 binary digits and a random generator of very large period claimed to be O (10 174 ) which presents good statistical proprieties and recently developed by Guinier D. (1986). Auto-public keys are single because they are message-signature-day-time-dependent and change their values at each computer tick I This protocol is applied to digital signatures, notarification, data integrity and confidentiality. The actual implementation in structured Fortran 77 works on a personal computer PC/AT and could be used as well on large scale systems as on networks. Encryption-decryption rate on PC's is O (1000 characters per second) and public or communication keys are generated from 3 seconds to some minutes depending on the key length in use (127, 521, 607 or 1279-bit).