Wide Lens Research Articles

Constructing information experience: a grounded theory portrait of academic information management

PurposeThis paper aims to discuss what it means to consider the information experience of academic information management from a constructivist grounded theory perspective. Using a doctoral study in progress as a case illustration, the authors demonstrate how information experience research applies a wide lens to achieve a holistic view of information management phenomena. By unifying a range of elements, and understanding information and its management to be inseparable from the totality of human experience, an information experience perspective offers a fresh approach to answering today's research questions.Design/methodology/approachThe case illustration is a constructivist grounded theory study using interactive interviews, an original form of semi-structured qualitative interviews combined with card-sorting exercises (Conrad and Tucker, 2019), to deepen reflections by participants and externalize their information experiences. The constructivist variant of grounded theory offers an inductive, exploratory approach to address the highly contextualized information experiences of student-researchers in managing academic information.FindingsPreliminary results are reported in the form of three interpretative categories that outline the key aspects of the information experience for student-researchers. By presenting these initial results, the study demonstrates how the constructivist grounded theory methodology can illuminate multiple truths and bring a focus on interpretive practices to the understanding of information management experiences.Research limitations/implicationsThis new approach offers holistic insights into academic information management phenomena as contextual, fluid and informed by meaning-making and adaptive practices. Limitations include the small sample size customary to qualitative research, within one situated perspective on the academic information management experience.Originality/valueThe study demonstrates the theoretical and methodological contributions of the constructivist information experience research to illuminate information management in an academic setting.

Uji Akurasi Beberapa Indeks Vegetasi dalam Mengestimasi Kerapatan Hutan Mangrove dengan Citra Sentinel-2A di Taman Nasional Bali Barat

Vegetation Indices is one of the remote sensing parameters that can be used to estimate the mangrove forest density. The purpose of this study is to determine the vegetation index with the best accuracy to estimate the condition of mangrove density, as well as determine the spatial distribution of mangrove density in the TNBB area. This study uses Sentinel-2A satellite imagery data and five different vegetation indices, namely NDVI, NNIR, EVI, mRE-SR, and vegetation index developed in this study. The method of determining samples in the field uses stratified random and proportional sampling. Data collection of canopy density used hemispherical photography method, which is taking vertical photos with a 180o angle of view using a camera with a Fish Eye or Wide lens. Data analysis used in this study is regression analysis, coefficient of determination test, model validation test, and paired t test. From statistical tests conducted on several vegetation indices, the mRE-SR vegetation index value shows the best results on all the accuracy parameters tested. The R2 value was generated by the mRE-SR vegetation index from the relationship between mangrove density results from field measurements with the vegetation index value and the estimated density results shows that the highest values, namely 0.909 and 0.935. These results show that the mRE-SR vegetation index is the best vegetation index in explaining the variation of mangrove density in the field. The mRE-SR vegetation index also has the lowest deviation of the estimated value, with the resulting SE values in the two linear relationships of 1,592 and 0,999. In addition, the mRE-SR vegetation index has a P (T <= t) two-tail value greater than the significance level (0.05), the results means that two values of the tested variables are not significant different. The calculation results show that the total area of mangroves in TNBB is 409.21 ha. From the percentage of density obtained, the mangrove density class was only distributed in the medium and solid density classes.

The Effect Of Family Therapy Toward Prevention Of Violent Behavior In Child: A Literature Review

Family is lasting a social group based on marriage and blood relations. The family plays an important role in the inheritance of the noble values of life for future generations. A healthy family will contribute to the development of a healthy society. This aims to find out the effect of the education system of family therapy on the prevention of violence in children. This research uses relevant Literature review which is reviewed following the search from 3 databases. They are ProQuest, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar. The search year is limited to the last 5 years from 2014-2019 to ensure the latest included research, using the keyword "therapy family AND Communication AND violent behavior AND child”. This review identifies 6 articles based on inclusion criteria. The article uses a Quasi-experimental design which is 1 article, 3 systematic reviews, and integrative review, 1 quantitative, 1 qualitative, randomized controlled trial. Of the 6 articles selected, 3 articles focus on violent behavior in children and adolescents and 3 articles focus on family communication towards children. Family therapy is the family to learn how to keep a healthy family relationship, communicate effectively with family members, and work cooperatively to solve family problems. This type of therapy is unique because the problem is seen through a wider lens and as part of a complex family system. Communication in the family becomes better when each family member can express what they don’t like and their desires to other family members and then find a solution together

Motivational connections in language classrooms: A research agenda

AbstractWith roots in social psychology, second language (L2) motivation has largely been investigated using self-report techniques. Studies drawing on observational data gathered in contexts where learning takes place are rare, and understandings of how motivation evolves in classroom interactions remain limited (Boo, Dörnyei, & Ryan, 2015). In a position paper in Language Teaching, Ushioda (2016) maps out an agenda for qualitative research examining motivation that emerges in language classrooms. With a focus on psycholinguistic processes, and with the aim of understanding how motivation ‘connects with specific aspects of second language acquisition [and] particular features of linguistic development’, Ushioda makes the case for researching L2 motivation ‘through a small lens’ (p. 564). Furthering this agenda, I make proposals for research with a relational focus where, through a somewhat wider lens, motivation and engagement generated through connections created by teachers in their classroom practice can be investigated. To frame these proposals, I use the concept of connective instruction (Martin & Dowson, 2009). Connective instruction holds that motivation and engagement increase when students can connect with the teacher as a person, with content that the teacher enables them to get involved with, and with the working methods that the teacher promotes.

A planetary health perspective on COVID-19: a call for papers

It is natural during the unfolding coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic to focus on emergency response planning, including containment, treatment procedures, and vaccine development, and nobody would doubt the need for these measures. However, an emergency can also open a window of opportunity for reflection and learning. We live in increasingly global, interdependent, and environmentally constrained societies and the COVID-19 pandemic exemplifies these aspects of our world. We would therefore be wise to take a broad integrated perspective on this disease, the impacts of which are already spilling over into the realms of economics, international trade, politics, and inequality. Resilience planning needs to cope with these cascading impacts, and prevention efforts require a similarly wide lens to encompass ecosystems, wild animal disease surveillance, agricultural practices, eating habits, and cultural traditions and contexts. In other words, we need a planetary health perspective that cuts across traditional domains of knowledge, governance, and economic sectors to properly address the challenge posed by COVID-19. We welcome submissions on all aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic across the Lancet titles, but here we are calling for submissions to The Lancet and The Lancet Planetary Health. We particularly welcome interdisciplinary research that integrates across important knowledge domains to provide a fuller understanding of the causes and socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19, as well as public understanding and responses, the efficacy of management and prevention interventions, and approaches for the identification and prevention of future such events within the wider context of the Sustainable Development Goals. Submit your paper through our respective online systems and please mention in your cover letter that your submission is in response to this call for papers. We declare no competing interests.

Crime victims’ rights commissioners: public interest entities in a regulatory regime

ABSTRACT The legal force of crime victims’ rights is ambiguous: are they service standards or legal rights? This question has created confusion about the nature of compliance and bifurcates the enforcement mechanism as administrative or legal. Regulatory analysis creates a wider lens to this debate. In this article, we conceive victims’ rights charters as part of a regulatory regime designed to influence the conduct of state agencies in discharging their functions. Rights compliance and enforcement as a regulatory challenge provides a framework for systematic analysis of regulatory instruments, tools and strategies chosen by key actors. We use a case study of statutory crime victims' rights commissioners in Australia to illustrate the implications of these choices. We suggest that clearer articulation of the techniques of compliance show the coexistence of administrative and legal sanctioning. Our argument turns attention to the duties imposed on public institutions of criminal justice and their accountability.

To Sin No More: Franciscans and Conversion in the Hispanic World, 1683–1830

To Sin No More: Franciscans and Conversion in the Hispanic World, 1683–1830

A wide angle multiple beam lens for convex conformal arrays

A wide angle multiple beam lens for convex conformal arrays

Before Exclusivism: Was the Early Modern an Axial Age?

Before Exclusivism: Was the Early Modern an Axial Age? Douglas A. Howard (bio) Keywords Axial Period, Early Modern, Ottoman Empire Periodization schemes emerge from and serve specific perspectives on world history. Religion has played no small part in discussions of the early modern era, to the extent that the twentieth anniversary issue of a flagship journal featured a study of its own articles on religion.1 Yet there is hesitation to take an overall view, one encompassing the whole of Afro-Eurasia or the globe and defining the early modern by its religious sensibility. From the perspective of the world history of religion, if we are to speak of an early modern it would seem to be that period preceding the present regimes of theological and national exclusivisms. The early modern was that era in which pluralism was presupposed, in which the same historical dynamics generated both pluralism and pushback against pluralism. As such, perhaps the Ottoman experience of the early modern might be taken as paradigmatic. Walter Andrews and Mehmed Kalpaklı’s “Age of Beloveds” notion hints at this,2 but I would like to suggest a slightly different formulation. I wonder whether there might be, in the early modern, something analogous to Karl Jaspers’s concept of the axial period. In his 1949 classic, The Origin and Goal of History (English translation, 1953) Jaspers argued that the centuries around 500 BCE form an axial period, “the most deepcut dividing line in history,” in which humanity as we know it “came into being” in a great “break-through.” In the context of imperial consolidation in China, India, and “the West,” a “spiritualization” occurred, [End Page 45] marked by the parallel lives of the great spiritual figures and the emergence of traditions that shaped life for the next two thousand years, down to the modern technical age. Confucius and Laozi in China, the Buddha and authors of the Upanishads in India, and, in “the West,” the Hebrew Prophets, the pre-Socratics, and Zoroaster all lived during this era. Interest in Jaspers’s concept among historians has gone in two directions. In one direction, some have engaged more deeply in comparative history of this axial period. In the other, some have adapted the term “axial period” to describe other ages when parallel religious developments can be identified. Jaspers himself considered certain other such “strange synchronisms” in world history, including the similarities between the teachings of Japanese True Pure Land Buddhism and Protestantism, but rejected them, arguing that only in the axial period as he defined it did such synchronisms become “historically all-embracing.” I would like to argue, first, that in the case of the early modern the “strange synchronisms” go well beyond those mentioned by Jaspers, and second, that if the light of Jaspers’s axis period still reaches us in our technological age, it is as refracted through the prism of the early modern. Several major traditions of today, while having roots in the axial period, are not understandable without awareness of their redefinition in the early modern era, and the Reformation paradigm within a Western Civilization meta-narrative has obscured larger Afro-Eurasian trends which become more fully visible with a wider lens. The task is complicated by our reductionist definition of religion in Anglo-American and related societies, itself a consequence of the very cultural shifts we are talking about. Yet we want to avoid making religion seem to be an epiphenomenon, or a mystification of economic or social or political life. The pluralism of the early modern, heralded in the Mongol era, spread throughout Afro-Eurasia with imperial consolidations after 1450. Persistent Ottoman efforts to capture Constantinople (1396, 1421, 1453), which coincided with the Ming court’s several naval excursions into the Indian Ocean (1405–33), point to strong intention to transcend classical boundaries in a new era of intercultural encounter. The Ottoman conquests of 1453–1540 unified the commerce of southwestern Eurasia and northeastern Africa, overlapping with similar integrations (Ming in East Asia and Songhai in the Sahara) and conquests (Kızılbaş in Tabriz, Timurids in Hindustan). These events reconfigured commerce across Afro-Eurasia and created the social conditions in which the reality...

Complete and Unabridged

Complete and Unabridged Michelle Lekas (bio) AMERICAN PULP: HOW PAPERBACKS BROUGHT MODERNISM TO MAIN STREET BY PAULA RABINOWITZ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014 And so we come to what is really what we write what we write is really a crime story. —Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America This extended moment of print media digitization and retreading over what counts as cultural education while assigning pedagogical status to figures from Bill Gates to Brad Troemel and beyond welcomes Paula Rabinowitz’s acute materialist history of the American paperback book, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street. In American Pulp, Rabinowitz, a longtime English professor, political activist, and feminist-materialist historical theorist, picks up from memories of her mother’s bedside table heaped with paperback books from which she borrowed and devoured Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago to relieve an early summer’s boredom. She goes on to trace that sort of intimate reading experience into a story that templates reading practice onto a market revolution that annotated American social life from the Great Depression to postwar decentralization. In this journey that interlaces retail, marginalization, and aesthetics with Marshall McLuhan’s conception of “interface,”1 Rabinowitz wisely does not attempt a sweeping chronicle of American cultural change from 1939 to 1960. That project that would echo one of her [End Page 189] more ambitious best-selling paperback authors such as James Michener rather than the pulp subjects she revitalizes. Instead, she employs a strategy more resembling that used by Walter Benjamin in his classic work, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” which she cites throughout her text. She contextualizes pulp as material (inexpensive, grainy, “pulpy” paper) in keeping with her literary studies, such as Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America in particular. American Pulp’s reading thus functions to summon the pulp novel phenomenon as a revolutionary social form rather than as a series of documents demanding analysis. Rabinowitz’s wide lens allows her to frame her discussion in terms of what the paperback revolution helped to capacitate: the popularization of public reading, which allowed for flaneur-esque private subjectivity in public spaces. This demotizing of literacy agitated both the marketplace and the practices of everyday life. Here, books became cheap, but not always easy: they allowed an accessible forum for African American voices to discuss the toll of racism on everyday, not excluding sexual, life; they provided “survival literature” (187) and some relief to proto-lesbian or simply dissatisfied women; offered trenchant commentary on the Cold War and US policy; and pushed the limits of censorship. But possibly above but including all else, they brought people to books that they most likely would not have otherwise even considered reading and to people who lived far from libraries, bookstores, or schools: after all, every town has a drugstore. Rabinowitz’s reconception of the demotic as allowing reading in previously unread spaces and across class boundaries (parsed in her title’s coda, Modernism to Main Street), proves crucial to her rethinking of cultural education as a revolutionary force that exceeds academe. Following this last point, and as is appropriate both to this volume’s title and for a history that culminates with the first graduates who benefited from the GI Bill, American Pulp asserts a place for these “pocket books” as marketing sleaze and high modernist fiction on the same carousels and often packaged in the same lurid cover art (267). This observation, illustrated by sumptuous color cover reproduction plates, lends Rabinowitz’s text some genuine humor, as in her recounting of Robert Jonas’s B-movie-style cover art for the George Garnow’s physics text The Birth and Death of the Sun, John Faulkner’s bawdy cornpone pulps on the sale rack next to his brother William’s novels, [End Page 190] and the saucy covers of Emile Zola’s Nana and Nana’s Mother, all posed to appeal to horny servicemen. The story begins by tracing the popular dime-store novel’s story to two of the its primary market innovators: the English publishing executive Allen Lane, who founded Penguin Press in 1935, and the American Robert De Graff, who launched Pocket Books...

Complete and Unabridged

Complete and Unabridged Michelle Lekas (bio) AMERICAN PULP: HOW PAPERBACKS BROUGHT MODERNISM TO MAIN STREET BY PAULA RABINOWITZ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014 And so we come to what is really what we write what we write is really a crime story. —Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America This extended moment of print media digitization and retreading over what counts as cultural education while assigning pedagogical status to figures from Bill Gates to Brad Troemel and beyond welcomes Paula Rabinowitz’s acute materialist history of the American paperback book, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street. In American Pulp, Rabinowitz, a longtime English professor, political activist, and feminist-materialist historical theorist, picks up from memories of her mother’s bedside table heaped with paperback books from which she borrowed and devoured Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago to relieve an early summer’s boredom. She goes on to trace that sort of intimate reading experience into a story that templates reading practice onto a market revolution that annotated American social life from the Great Depression to postwar decentralization. In this journey that interlaces retail, marginalization, and aesthetics with Marshall McLuhan’s conception of “interface,”1 Rabinowitz wisely does not attempt a sweeping chronicle of American cultural change from 1939 to 1960. That project that would echo one of her [End Page 189] more ambitious best-selling paperback authors such as James Michener rather than the pulp subjects she revitalizes. Instead, she employs a strategy more resembling that used by Walter Benjamin in his classic work, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” which she cites throughout her text. She contextualizes pulp as material (inexpensive, grainy, “pulpy” paper) in keeping with her literary studies, such as Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America in particular. American Pulp’s reading thus functions to summon the pulp novel phenomenon as a revolutionary social form rather than as a series of documents demanding analysis. Rabinowitz’s wide lens allows her to frame her discussion in terms of what the paperback revolution helped to capacitate: the popularization of public reading, which allowed for flaneur-esque private subjectivity in public spaces. This demotizing of literacy agitated both the marketplace and the practices of everyday life. Here, books became cheap, but not always easy: they allowed an accessible forum for African American voices to discuss the toll of racism on everyday, not excluding sexual, life; they provided “survival literature” (187) and some relief to proto-lesbian or simply dissatisfied women; offered trenchant commentary on the Cold War and US policy; and pushed the limits of censorship. But possibly above but including all else, they brought people to books that they most likely would not have otherwise even considered reading and to people who lived far from libraries, bookstores, or schools: after all, every town has a drugstore. Rabinowitz’s reconception of the demotic as allowing reading in previously unread spaces and across class boundaries (parsed in her title’s coda, Modernism to Main Street), proves crucial to her rethinking of cultural education as a revolutionary force that exceeds academe. Following this last point, and as is appropriate both to this volume’s title and for a history that culminates with the first graduates who benefited from the GI Bill, American Pulp asserts a place for these “pocket books” as marketing sleaze and high modernist fiction on the same carousels and often packaged in the same lurid cover art (267). This observation, illustrated by sumptuous color cover reproduction plates, lends Rabinowitz’s text some genuine humor, as in her recounting of Robert Jonas’s B-movie-style cover art for the George Garnow’s physics text The Birth and Death of the Sun, John Faulkner’s bawdy cornpone pulps on the sale rack next to his brother William’s novels, [End Page 190] and the saucy covers of Emile Zola’s Nana and Nana’s Mother, all posed to appeal to horny servicemen. The story begins by tracing the popular dime-store novel’s story to two of the its primary market innovators: the English publishing executive Allen Lane, who founded Penguin Press in 1935, and the American Robert De Graff, who launched Pocket Books...

Low distortion wide working distance machine vision optical lens design

Low distortion wide working distance machine vision optical lens design

Hippies Living History

In the late 1960s and 1970s, living history flowered, with new developments in research and interpretation at sites like Plimoth Plantation and Old Sturbridge Village, and the establishment of many new living history farms and museums, alongside a new professional organization: the Association for Living History Farms and Museums. This article examines this shift and puts it into conversation with the concurrent countercultural and commune movement, which often resembled—both aesthetically and ideologically—new living history. Using this case study as a model, I argue that in order to fully understand and account for developments in public practice, we must not only look at public history in a wider lens, but also account for form alongside context.

Cypriot conflict through a wider lens.

Cypriot conflict through a wider lens.

Firm and regional economic outcomes associated with a new, broad measure of business innovation

ABSTRACTMost innovation-oriented studies use measures such as patent activity or research expenditures, likely ignoring the role of more home-grown upgrades or opportunity-recognizing activity common in businesses across the U.S. This study develops a broader ‘innovation index’ using a new survey of businesses that provides a wide lens for capturing innovative practices. The index is used in a series of regressions testing the relationship between innovation and both firm and regional-level economic outcomes. Results from the firm-level regressions show that the innovation index has a positive and significant relationship with wages paid to employees and product market growth. The regional analysis demonstrates that innovation is correlated with several regional economic variables, including median household income, and that spatial spillovers from innovation exist in some instances.

Corporate Law and the Myth of Efficient Market Control

In recent times, there has been an unprecedented shift in power from managers to shareholders, a shift that realizes the long-held theoretical aspiration of market control of the corporation. This Article subjects the market control paradigm to comprehensive economic examination and finds it wanting. The market control paradigm relies on a narrow economic model that focuses on one problem only, management agency costs. With the rise of shareholder power, we need a wider lens that also takes in market prices, investor incentives, and information asymmetries. General equilibrium theory (GE) provides that lens. Several lessons follow from reference to this higher-order economic theory. First, the presumption that markets can efficiently coordinate the economy is shown to be unfounded, unless one relies on heroic assumptions. Second, GE shows that shareholders suffer from misaligned incentives, undercutting any normative program grounded in shareholder empowerment. The third lesson is negative, as there are no economically-founded instructions for addressing the trade-offs between agency costs reduction and market inefficiency implied by the new shareholder corporation. Policy implications also follow. Given the lack of a clear normative template, only private ordering can be counted on to address each corporation’s specific tradeoffs between agency costs and market inefficiency. This conclusion leads to an endorsement of Delaware’s equitable adjudication system, the flexibility of which is well-suited to policing the bargaining process between managers and empowered shareholders.

Legal Education Beyond the Academy: The Neoliberal Reorientation of Public Legal Education

In order to re-make the world in its own image, neoliberal expansionism is predicated on the dominance of a particular regime of reason. The dominance of economic-juridical rationality relies in no small part on education to reproduce itself. In this sense, how and why a populace is educated in the law becomes a locus of struggle and of alternative and competing constructions of normative and political orders. Over the last decade the United Kingdom’s justice policy has become more attentive to the role of citizens’ knowledge of the law in the context of a reinvigorated drive toward competition in the legal services market. Reformism in legal services thereby emerges as a strategy geared toward the economisation of the state by propagating specific types of legal knowledge. This reorientation of legal education is considered through, on the one hand, the insights of recent theories of neoliberalism and, on the other, a wider lens relating the intersection of legal education to the juridical-political realm. Finally, the paper outlines alternative strategies of community-based educational practices rooted in resistance to legal and economic orthodoxies.

Sustaining Places: Sensibility Models as Decision Support Tools for Messy Problems

Methods for passing on findings of ecological research are well established; methods for passing on what is learned in environmental management are much less institutionalized, and much less comprehensive. In particular, questions that are less disciplinable are less likely to be investigated and the learnings shared. A key challenge is that the orderliness of knowing-how is not nearly as systematic as science, law or ethics. It is shaped by practical exigencies, and so is profoundly historical-reflecting tradition and experience. Felt understanding, researched through disciplined reflective practice, provides a valuable empirical opportunity. It is the layer of knowing-how that practitioners rely on (consider, for example, the importance that feeling uncomfortable in a negotiation has). Secondly, it is a window on the field of possibilities practitioners are considering, so it offers a wider lens on know how than research that focuses on what practitioners are observed doing. Thirdly, it makes complex practice skills such as acting simultaneously as scientist, politician and manager researchable. Decision support tools built from explicating felt understanding therefore better support flexibility and openness, and are better suited to scaffolding expert practice than, for example, documenting repertoires of procedures. They are particularly well suited to sharing expertise related to ‘messy problems’ encountered by sustainability practitioners. The ‘sensibility model’ explicated here is a proof of concept of an alternative way of researching know how, and supporting reflective transfer amongst sustainability practitioners.

Painting Light Scientifically: Arkhip Kuindzhi's Intermedial Environment

In art historical scholarship, inasmuch as he is considered at all, the painter Arkhip Kuindzhi has long been viewed as a peculiar outlier. His landscapes, with their coloristic drama, light effects, and simplified forms, hardly fit the accounts of Russian nineteenth-century painting that focus on the development of the realist school. Questioning the artist's anomalous status, this essay discusses his canvases from the 1870s and 1880s within the broader framework of nineteenth-century popular visual amusements, discourses on realism, and the physiology of vision. Considered through this wider lens—beyond the institution of easel painting and beyond Russia—Kuindzhi is revealed to be an innovator whose approach to painting was profoundly modern and aligned with the aesthetic preoccupations of many west European artists. His painterly pursuits and exhibition practices, furthermore, force a reconsideration of the biases associated with the established narrative of modern art in the west.

Evolution of Eye Reduction and Loss in Trilobites and Some Related Fossil Arthropods

The fossil record of arthropod compound eyes reflects different modes and occasions of eye reduction and blindness. In the best-studied fossil examples, the trilobites [trilobites: extinct arthropods, dominant during the Palaeozoic], which have an excellent geological record, eyes are primary structures, and in all known genera which lack them, eye-loss is always secondary. Once the eyes were lost, they never were never re-established. The most striking examples occur in the Upper Devonian, when two unrelated major groups of trilobites, with different kinds of eyes, underwent eye reduction and even total loss of the eyes over the same time period, undoubtedly due to long-term environmental change. One reason is that a mud blanket spread over a vast area, there was no firm substrate, and many trilobites became small and many became endobenthic, reducing or losing their eyes in the process. Toxic environmental conditions may also have had an effect. Certain coeval forms remained, however, which still possess perfectly good compound eyes. Either they found vacant refuges where they could survive, or alternatively their visual systems were elaborate enough to adapt to the changing conditions. Another inducement for evolving small, reduced compound eyes is to become a tiny organism oneself, with simply not enough space to establish a regular and functional compound eye, and in such minaturised eyes special adaptations for capturing enough photons are necessary. Thus very small compound eyes often establish wide acceptance angles of their ommatidia, collecting light over large angular ranges of space and it is beneficial to have a wide rhabdom provided that it is short, has a wide lens diameter, and perhaps even possess highly sensitive receptor cells. We find such a miniaturised system in the first recorded planktonic trilobite. Another kind of reduction of a compound eye, or parts of it, also occurs, if selective pressure claims for a high specialisation of eyes that results in several facets fusing into a single functional unit. This probably can be found in phacopid trilobites, ~400 million years old. Here the enlarged aperture of a resulting large lens may allow vision under dim light conditions such as at greater depth. The fossil record gives relatively little evidence about parasites, which often have reduced eyes. Agnostida are blind relatives of trilobites which lived during the Cambrian and Ordovician. An early suggestion was that some of these were parasitic, but this was never commonly adopted. Finally penstastomids (Crustacea), worm-like parasitic organisms, already have been blind from the Cambrian (~487Ma).