bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Complex refractive indices of Saharan dust samples at visible and near UV wavelengths: a laboratory study
Authors: Wagner R. , Ajtai T. , Kandler K. , Lieke K. , Linke C. , Müller T. , Schnaiter M. , Vragel M.
Published: March 2012

Abstract. We have retrieved the wavelength-dependent imaginary parts of the complex refractive index for five different Saharan dust aerosol particles of variable mineralogical composition at wavelengths between 305 and 955 nm. The dust particles were generated by dispersing soil samples into a laboratory aerosol chamber, typically yielding particle sizes with mean diameters ranging from 0.3 to 0.4 μm and maximum diameters from 2 to 4 μm. The extinction and absorption coefficients as well as the number size distribution of the dust particles were simultaneously measured by various established techniques. An inversion scheme based on a spheroidal dust model was employed to deduce the refractive indices. The retrieved imaginary parts of the complex refractive index were in the range from 0.003 to 0.005, 0.005 to 0.011, and 0.016 to 0.050 at the wavelengths 955, 505, and 305 nm. The hematite content of the dust particles was determined by electron-microscopical single particle analysis. Hematite volume fractions in the range from 1.1 to 2.7% were found for the different dusts, a range typical for atmospheric mineral dust. We have performed a sensitivity study to assess how accurately the retrieved imaginary refractive indices could be reproduced by calculations with mixing rule approximations using the experimentally determined hematite contents as input.
Aerosol optical depth and fine-mode fraction retrieval over East Asia using multi-angular total and polarized remote sensing
Authors: Cheng T. , Gu X. , Xie D. , Li Z. , Yu T. , Chen H.
Published: March 2012

Abstract. A new aerosol retrieval algorithm using multi-angular total and polarized measurements is presented. The algorithm retrieves aerosol optical depth (AOD), fine-mode fraction (FMF) for studying the impact of aerosol on climate change. The retrieval algorithm is based on a lookup table (LUT) method, which assumes that one fine and one coarse lognormal aerosol modes can be combined with proper weightings to represent the ambient aerosol properties. To reduce the ambiguity in retrieval algorithm, the key characteristics of aerosol model over East Asia are constrained using the cluster analysis technique based on the AERONET sun-photometer observation over East Asia, and the fine and coarse modes are not fixed but can vary. A mixing model of bare soil and green vegetation spectra and the Nadal and Breon model for the bidirectional polarized reflectance factor (BPDF) were used to simulate total and polarized surface reflectance of East Asia. By applying the present algorithm to POLDER measurements, three different aerosol cases of clear, polluted and dust are analyzed to test the algorithm. The comparison of retrieved aerosol optical depth (AOD) and fine-mode fraction (FMF) with those of AERONET sun-photometer observations show reliable results. Preliminary validation is encouraging. Using the new aerosol retrieval algorithm for multi-angular total and polarized measurements, the spatial and temporal variability of anthropogenic aerosol optical properties over East Asia, which were observed during a heavy polluted event, were analyzed. Exceptionally high values of aerosol optical depth contributed by fine mode of up to 0.5 (at 0.865 μm), and high values of fine-mode fraction of up to 0.9, were observed in this case study.
Comparison of OH concentration measurements by DOAS and LIF during SAPHIR chamber experiments at high OH reactivity and low NO concentration
Authors: Fuchs H. , Dorn H.-P. , Bachner M. , Bohn B. , Brauers T. , Gomm S. , Hofzumahaus A. , Holland F. , Nehr S. , Rohrer F. , Tillmann R. , Wahner A.
Published: March 2012

Abstract. During recent field campaigns, hydroxyl radical (OH) concentrations that were measured by laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) were up to a factor of ten larger than predicted by current chemical models for conditions of high OH reactivity and low NO concentration. These discrepancies, which were observed in forests and urban-influenced rural environments, are so far not entirely understood. In summer 2011, a series of experiments was carried out in the atmosphere simulation chamber SAPHIR in Jülich, Germany, in order to investigate the photochemical degradation of isoprene, methyl-vinyl ketone (MVK), methacrolein (MACR) and aromatic compounds by OH. Conditions were similar to those experienced during the PRIDE-PRD2006 campaign in the Pearl River Delta (PRD), China, in 2006, where a large difference between OH measurements and model predictions was found. During experiments in SAPHIR, OH was simultaneously detected by two independent instruments: LIF and differential optical absorption spectroscopy (DOAS). Because DOAS is an inherently calibration-free technique, DOAS measurements are regarded as a reference standard. The comparison of the two techniques was used to investigate potential artifacts in the LIF measurements for PRD-like conditions of OH reactivities of 10 to 30 s−1 and NO mixing ratios of 0.1 to 0.3 ppbv. The analysis of twenty experiment days shows good agreement. The linear regression of the combined data set (averaged to the DOAS time resolution, 2495 data points) yields a slope of 1.02 ± 0.01 with an intercept of (0.10 ± 0.03) ×106 cm−3 and a linear correlation coefficient of R2=0.86. This indicates that the sensitivity of the LIF instrument is well-defined by its calibration procedure. No hints for artifacts are observed for isoprene, MACR, and different aromatic compounds. LIF measurements were approximately 30–40% (median) larger than those by DOAS after MVK and toluene had been added. However, this discrepancy has a large uncertainty and requires further laboratory investigation. Observed differences between LIF and DOAS measurements are far too small to explain the unexpected high OH concentrations during the PRIDE-PRD2006 campaign.
On-line determination of ammonia at low pptv mixing ratios in the CLOUD chamber
Authors: Bianchi F. , Dommen J. , Mathot S. , Baltensperger U.
Published: March 2012

Abstract. A new instrument for the on-line determination of ammonia was developed. Since ammonia is a rather sticky compound sampling losses were minimized with a new sampling device where the ammonia was transferred to the liquid phase only 5 mm after the inlet tip. The liquid phase is then analyzed by long path absorption spectrophotometry using the Berthelot reaction with phenol and hypochlorite as reagents. The measurements were made during the CLOUD3 campaign at CERN where the influence of ammonia on the nucleation rate was studied. At stable conditions the detection limit reached with this instrument was 35 pptv (air flow of 2 l min−1, liquid flow of 0.3 ml min−1), although occasionally the instrument was affected by background problems. The range of mixing ratios during this campaign was from the background contamination (<35 pptv) up to around 2 ppbv. The measured ammonia concentration was correlated with the rate of ammonia injected into the chamber, however, with a response time of several hours, due to the high tendency of ammonia to adsorb to or to desorb from surfaces. Since it was found that ammonia strongly increases the nucleation rate already at the lowest measured concentration future work will focus on further decreasing the detection limit of the instrument.
Multiplicative cascade models for fine spatial downscaling of rainfall: parameterization with rain gauge data
Authors: Rupp D. E. , Licznar P. , Adamowski W. , Leśniewski M.
Published: March 2012

Abstract. Capturing the spatial distribution of high-intensity rainfall over short-time intervals is critical for accurately assessing the efficacy of urban stormwater drainage systems. In a stochastic simulation framework, one method of generating realistic rainfall fields is by multiplicative random cascade (MRC) models. Estimation of MRC model parameters has typically relied on radar imagery or, less frequently, rainfall fields interpolated from dense rain gauge networks. However, such data are not always available. Furthermore, the literature is lacking estimation procedures for spatially incomplete datasets. Therefore, we proposed a simple method of calibrating an MRC model when only data from a moderately dense network of rain gauges is available, rather than from the full rainfall field. The number of gauges needs only be sufficient to adequately estimate the variance in the ratio of the rain rate at the rain gauges to the areal average rain rate across the entire spatial domain. In our example for Warsaw, Poland, we used 25 gauges over an area of approximately 1600 km2. MRC models calibrated using the proposed method were used to downscale 15-min rainfall rates from a 20 by 20 km area to the scale of the rain gauge capture area. Frequency distributions of observed and simulated 15-min rainfall at the gauge scale were very similar. Moreover, the spatial covariance structure of rainfall rates, as characterized by the semivariogram, was reproduced after allowing the probability density function of the random cascade generator to vary with spatial scale.
The underlying model for defect parameters in materials of geophysical interest and Seismic Electric Signals
Authors: Dologlou E.
Published: March 2012

Abstract. Here, we investigate whether the bulk or the shear is the appropriate modulus for the defect parameters in different materials by focusing on those of geophysical interest. We show that the self-diffusion process and just also the bulk modulus should be related to defect parameters. It is this interrelation which accounts for the emission of electric signals before fracture, and is thus in accordance with the physical basis of the Seismic Electric Signal prior to earthquakes in Greece.
Permafrost distribution in the European Alps: calculation and evaluation of an index map and summary statistics
Authors: Boeckli L. , Brenning A. , Gruber S. , Noetzli J.
Published: March 2012

Abstract. The objective of this study is the production of an Alpine Permafrost Index Map (APIM) covering the entire European Alps. A unified statistical model that is based on Alpine-wide permafrost observations is used for debris and bedrock surfaces across the entire Alps. The explanatory variables of the model are mean annual air temperatures, potential incoming solar radiation and precipitation. Offset terms were applied to make model predictions for topographic and geomorphic conditions that differ from the terrain features used for model fitting. These offsets are based on literature review and involve some degree of subjective choice during model building. The assessment of the APIM is challenging because limited independent test data are available for comparison and these observations represent point information in a spatially highly variable topography. The APIM provides an index that describes the spatial distribution of permafrost and comes together with an interpretation key that helps to assess map uncertainties and to relate map contents to their actual expression in terrain. The map can be used as a first resource to estimate permafrost conditions at any given location in the European Alps in a variety of contexts such as research and spatial planning. Results show that Switzerland likely is the country with the largest permafrost area in the Alps, followed by Italy, Austria, France and Germany. Slovenia and Liechtenstein may have marginal permafrost areas. In all countries the permafrost area is expected to be larger than the glacier-covered area. The permafrost index map with an approximate grid spacing of 30 m is available at the webpage of the Department of Geography, University of Zurich.
Charles Bonnet plus syndrome: apropos of a case
Authors: Serrador-García Mercedes , Santos-Bueso Enrique , Sáenz-Francés Federico , Díaz-Valle David , Martínez-De-La-Casa-Borrelia José M. , García-Feijóo Julián
Published: March 2012

Purpose

Charles Bonnet syndrome plus is an exceedingly rare variant of this disorder. The variant has been described in patients with sight impairment and severe hypoacusis, and is usually characterized by complex visual and auditory—musical—hallucinations that the patients recognize as unreal.

Methods

Case report.

Results

A 75-year-old woman diagnosed with Usher syndrome presented with visual acuity of light perception in both eyes, which did not improve with the use of a pinhole occluder. She also had coptosis in right ear and severe hypoacusis in left ear, confirmed through audiometry. Audiometric tests were normal once the implant and the hearing aid were connected. The patient was referred to the Neuro-Ophthalmology Unit after recounting experiencing complex visual hallucinations, as well as auditory (musical) ones at night after disconnecting the hearing aid. She described the latter as a nightly occurrence of hearing “cabaret music.” Nevertheless, she was aware of reality and of her sensory impairments. The patient was diagnosed at the interdisciplinary Neuro-Ophthalmology Unit, and began pharmacologic treatment with clear improvement.

Conclusions

Knowledge of Charles Bonnet syndrome and in particular of Charles Bonnet syndrome plus—due to its infrequency—on the part of ophthalmologists is fundamental to adequately diagnose and treat this rare disorder.
Gómez-López-Hernández syndrome: another consideration in corneal neurotrophic ulcers
Authors: Pastor-Idoate Salvador , Carreño Ester , Tesón Marisa , Herreras José M.
Published: March 2012

Purpose

To report a case of a Gómez-López-Hernández syndrome (GLHS) variant with corneal neurotrophic ulcer.

Methods

Case report and review of the literature.

Results

A 6-year-old child presented with watering in the right eye for 3 days without ocular inflammation or pain. He had a peculiar facial phenotype and scalp alopecia in the right side. Slit-lamp examination showed an epithelial defect in the right eye and a corneal scar around the defect. Belmonte noncontact esthesiometry showed reduced corneal mechanosensory and thermal sensitivity. In vivo confocal microscopy revealed the absence of innervation in the right cornea. There was also an evident insensitivity in the alopecic region. Despite normal magnetic resonance imaging, the phenotypic manifestations along with ocular features suggested the diagnosis of a GLHS variant.

Conclusions

Patients with GLHS remain asymptomatic even when they develop a corneal ulcer. Parents should be advised regarding the susceptibility of an affected child to the development of corneal lesions and the importance of regular follow-up and prompt treatment to prevent vision-threatening abnormalities.
Optic disc morphology in porencephaly
Authors: O'Gallagher Michael K. , McLoone Eibhlin M.
Published: March 2012

Purpose

To report a porencephalic cyst in a child with large optic disc cup but normal-sized discs.

Methods

Case report with figures.

Results

Clinical findings of a patient with porencephaly presenting with large cups in normal-sized optic discs are discussed.

Conclusions

Optic disc morphology is not a reliable indicator of the timing of ischemic brain injury. Intracranial pathology should be suspected in children with disc cupping but no other features of glaucoma.
Use of RNA isolated from feces as a promising tool for the early detection of colorectal cancer
Authors: Bernal Giuliano
Published: March 2012

Colorectal cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer worldwide. Early detection would allow patients to be treated surgically and halt the progression of the disease; however, the current methods of early detection are invasive (colonoscopy and sigmoidoscopy) or have low sensitivity (fecal occult blood test). The altered expression of genes in stool samples of patients with colorectal cancer can be determined by RT-PCR. This is a noninvasive and highly sensitive technique for colorectal cancer screening. According to information gathered in this review and our own experience, the use of fecal RNA to determine early alterations in gene expression due to malignancy appears to be a promising alternative to the current detection methods and owing to its low cost could be implemented in public health services.
Combined mutational analysis of KRAS, NRAS and BRAF genes in Indian patients with colorectal carcinoma
Authors: Bagadi Sarita B. , Sanghvi Meera , Nair Sudish B. , Das Bibhu R.
Published: March 2012

The epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) is an excellent candidate for targeted therapy in colorectal cancer. Recent studies have demonstrated that apart from wild-type KRAS, a wild-type BRAF and NRAS genotype is required for response to anti-EGFR therapy. This suggests that NRAS and BRAF genotype criteria should be used together with KRAS genotype to select patients who will likely benefit from anti-EGFR therapy. We investigated the prevalence of mutations in the KRAS, BRAF and NRAS genes and its correlation with demographic characteristics, tumor location and stage in 100 colorectal carcinoma patients from India. The frequency of KRAS, BRAF and NRAS mutations was found to be 23%, 17% and 2.0%, respectively. There was no significant difference in KRAS, NRAS and BRAF mutation with respect to gender, age, tumor location (colon vs rectum) and clinicopathological stage. In addition, we found a novel point variant (T20I) of unknown significance in NRAS exon 1 in addition to a KRAS codon 12 mutation in one of the rectal carcinoma patients. In the present study, combined evaluation of genetic biomarkers (KRAS, NRAS and BRAF) was able to classify 42% of colorectal cancer patients as likely non-responders to anti-EGFR therapy.
What is Happening in the World of Vascular Access? Research and Innovations are Flowing Through
Authors: Chemla Eric S.
Published: March 2012

Vascular access perfectly reproduces myointimal hyperplasia that can be found in coronary or peripheral arteries and has a major advantage that these other sites cannot match: it is quite superficial and not close to a major vital organ and also affects a population that will attend the hospital for dialysis on a very regular basis. It therefore appears obvious to try and develop a tool that will mitigate myointimal hyperplasia and that could later be tested on coronary or peripheral arteries. Over the past few years several trials have been organized and we are now at a stage where some results have become available.
Multilingual London and its Literatures
Authors: Salverda Reiner
Published: March 2012

It is almost commonplace to say that London today is ‘the multilingual capital of the world’ (The Independent, 29 March 1999), the ‘most ethnically diverse city’ (Evening Standard, 2 December 2003), perhaps even ‘the most cosmopolitan city in the world’ (The Guardian, 21 January 2005). What interests me here, and what I want to explore in this essay, is how this multilingual and multicultural character of contemporary London affects the domain of literature. What literatures are being produced here today, and in what languages? What can we say about the character of these literatures, their genres, forms of expression and representations? And what about the themes and concerns that shape and define them?
Building Bridges and Breaking Boundaries: Modernity and Agoraphobia
Authors: Holmes Joshua
Published: March 2012

The material function of a bridge is to facilitate movement – of vehicles, goods and services, military hardware and people. Symbolically, the bridge is a connector and therefore a triumphant emblem of modernity. But the converse of connection is the breaking, or even transgressing, of boundaries. The bridge is a boundary breaker; an intrusion into bounded space. This paper argues that inherent in modernity is the breaking and remaking of boundaries. This can lead to psychological strain, of which agoraphobia is a manifestation. For the makers and celebrators of modernity the bridge was a symbol of progress, but for critics it represented the inhumanity of ‘progress’, and for individual agoraphobics, terror.
Dividing Hedging and Gambling: Legal Implications of Derivative Instruments
Authors: Chen Chaeo-hung
Published: March 2012

The past three decades have seen the emergence in the market of many different types of “derivative instruments”, ranging from futures, forwards, options, and swaps 1 to some other hybrid instruments 2 or synthetic transactions 3 . Along with insurance, derivative instruments help market participants not only to hedge various types of risks but also to engage in market speculation. A derivative transaction could serve the purpose of avoiding large losses (i.e. hedging) as well as earning a windfall (i.e. speculation). As such, one question arises: Is there any difference between gambling and derivative trading?
Chadors and Graffiti, EU Flags and Iconic Bodies: Four Contemporary Visual Artists
Authors: Petrides Maria
Published: March 2012

Contemporary art stretches beyond the boundaries of an individual medium and of a single national border. With this encouragement of diversity, fluidity and mobility, art becomes a form of social empowerment by the very surrender of singularity. Reviewing the work of four artists - the Turkish-Cypriot fashion designer and installation/video artist Hussein Chalayan; the British graffiti artist known as Banksy; the New York installation artist Spencer Tunick; and the New York-based multimedia artist Anna Lascari - this piece of commentary aims to show how, in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst century, certain art expresses its resistance through various media: whether it be social or political resistance, or resistance to any type of ‘conformity’ which may restrict the potential found in mobility and hybridity.
The Forgotten Rights - the Case for the Legal Enforcement of Socio-Economic Rights in the UK National Law
Authors: James Asha
Published: March 2012

Socio-economic rights relate to an individual’s social, economic and cultural entitlements. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1966 enumerates the following socio-economic rights: Right to work; Right to Social Security and social insurance; Right to an adequate standard of living including adequate food, clothing, housing and to continuous improvement of the standard of living; Right to health; and Right to education. In contrast, The International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights enumerates the individual entitlements in the political and civil sphere of life – entitlement to respect for life; fair trial; private and family life; freedom of thought, conscience and religion; freedom of expression among others; many of which have been incorporated in the Human Rights Act in the United Kingdom.
The Word of the Father / the Body of the Mother: Dimensions of Gender in Tarkovsky's Mirror
Authors: Gavin Alice
Published: March 2012

Supposed to occur between the ages of six and eighteen months – but at the same time seen as seeping into the ongoing identity formation of the subject – Lacan’s theory of the ‘Mirror Stage’ involves the successful identification of one’s body as one’s own. Yet the wholeness of the body with which the infant identifies is a mirage; experienced as an exterior image, its unity does not correspond with the infant’s as yet underdeveloped physical coordination. Further, the moment of self-identification is, simultaneously, the moment in which the subject is irreducibly split, since the sense of a singular, self-contained self can only be produced by its doubling in some reflective object: the ‘I’ is thus established as dependent on an ‘other’. This article explores Tarkovsky’s Mirror – as a film overtly concerned with the idea of a problematic sense of self – in light of Lacan’s theory. Mixing childhood memories of the director’s mother with the poetry of his father, Arsennii Tarkovsky, the film presents the attempts of a middle-aged, apparently ill man – the film’s narrator – to come to terms with his past. In particular, it is interested in the part played by the mother in that past. Though the father is himself largely absent, his word, in the form of his poetry, still appears to structure the son’s sense of self; the narrator’s relation to his mother, on the other hand, is more ‘visible’, but nonetheless troublesome. Moreover, her significance as the son’s ‘other’ – an essential yet repressed figure in the formation of his identity – is underscored in the film by the association of her image with the motif of mirrors.
Scopic Regime and Organised Walking - a Typological Study on the Modern Museum
Authors: Huang Hsu
Published: March 2012

Over the past two decades, a rich literature has emerged on the museum as a distinctive social phenomenon in modern society. The ideas and writings of social theorists Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu have been highly influential on writers such as Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Tony Bennett and Carol Duncan who have tried to focus on the social function of changes in museum design . Hooper-Greenhill’s 1992 study ‘Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge’ analysed several European museums using Foucault’s concept of epistemes, and the way the epistemes have shaped knowledge.
Anti-Bardolatry Through the Ages - or, Why Voltaire, Tolstoy, Shaw and Wittgenstein Didn't Like Shakespeare
Authors: Sullivan Erin
Published: March 2012

Long before today’s debates about English literary heritage, compulsory school readings, and whether or not England’s national poet, William Shakespeare, should remain safe from the national curriculum’s axe, members of the European public passionately debated the value of Shakespeare’s plays and their place in an increasingly modern world. Indeed, more than one hundred and fifty years before Harold Bloom declared that Shakespeare invented the human, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge similarly promised in him a ‘wisdom deeper even than our consciousness’ and characterised his talents as god-like. In his public lectures, Coleridge assured his audiences that Shakespeare’s art was of such majesty that every line was instantly recognisable – ‘not a sentence could be read without its being discovered if it were Shakespeare’ – and, furthermore, that it was so noble as to be morally impeccable, ‘keeping at all times the high road of life’ and making its ‘readers better as well as wiser’. Notes from Coleridge’s lectures, writings, and conversations reveal his unequivocal devotion to Shakespeare, expressed to its full extent in his discussion of the playwright’s rhythm: ‘He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere; yet, when the creation in its outline is once perfect, then he seems to rest from his labour, and to smile upon his work, and tell himself that it is very good’.1 In his version of Genesis, Coleridge envisioned Shakespeare as a divine Creator, shaping form out of chaos as he dashed off a few hundred lines of his sublime iambic pentameter. The effort was minimal, the result ‘very good’, and the appropriate response on the part of the reader humble veneration.
The Future of You
Authors: Cheng Amanda
Published: March 2012

The actress Billie Burke once said, “Age is of no importance, unless you are cheese”. How true is this in the U.K, and what does this mean for the elderly of the future? This article highlights current issues on employment and isolation, explores current standards of care, and considers an ever-increasing trend towards inadequately met health and social needs for the future generation of geriatrics. It will also look at recent policies introduced to acknowledge such problems, and strategies aimed at improving matters for the elderly population
It Takes Two to Tango: How Moscow's Influence on the United Nations was Shaped by Washington
Authors: Destrooper Tine
Published: March 2012

To get a more profound insight into Gorbachev’s motivations for introducing the New Political Thinking, a better insight into the political situation of the U.S.S.R. is crucial. In 1985, the U.S.S.R. had been involved in the dead-end war in Afghanistan; in Eastern Europe, there was a significant politicaleconomic stagnation and the relations with the West were depressing (Sakwa, 1990). Foreign policy lacked all direction after four years of inaction, and the prestige of the U.S.S.R. was quickly eroding.
The Shaking Palsy - Advances in Our Understanding of Parkinson's Disease
Authors: Dunn Laura , Lewis Patrick
Published: March 2012

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a debilitating movement disorder that affects over 100,000 people in the United Kingdom. Using a combination of genetic analysis, epidemiology and molecular biology, our knowledge of how this disease occurs and of the mechanisms that lead to cell death in the brain, has increased greatly over the last two decades. In spite of this knowledge, a cure for the disease remains out of our reach. Here, we review the advances that have aided the quest for a cure and the role that UCL has played in this research - whilst looking forward to what the future holds for patients with PD.
Challenging the Republic: Interpreting the 2005 Urban Violence in French Suburbs
Authors: Moran Matthew
Published: March 2012

In autumn 2005, the French ‘quartiers sensibles’ exploded into violence. The deaths of Bouna Traoré and Zyed Benna, two young inhabitants of the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis, proved to be the spark that ignited the profound underlying ‘malaise’ of these problem suburbs. For three weeks the attention of French, and indeed world media, was focused on the infamous ‘banlieues’ as cars burned (up to 1400 cars were set alight in a single night at the height of the violence), buildings were attacked, and inhabitants of the suburbs clashed with the forces of order. This paper will use the 2005 riots as a means of exploring the sociocultural situation in the ‘quartiers sensibles’; and, on a larger scale, the challenge posed by these areas to the ideological concept of French republicanism and the historically-rooted notion of the ‘one and indivisible French Republic’.
From Forger to Author: William Henry Ireland's Shakespeare Papers
Authors: Ridpath John
Published: March 2012

It took over one hundred years for William Shakespeare to gain the literary pre-eminence familiar to contemporary readers. A renewed interest in the author’s work during the eighteenth century was marked by theatrical revivals, new editions of the plays and renowned Shakespearean performances by famed actor David Garrick. But with this resurgence in popularity, some readers began to call attention to perceived gaps in the bard’s biography. In the mid- 1790s, these gaps were briefly filled with ‘newly discovered’ letters, deeds and occasional poetry, exhibited to the public and finally published in 1796. Forged by William Henry Ireland, these documents refashioned Shakespeare to the tastes of his age. The forger went on to make larger creative impositions upon the life and work of the dramatist, writing himself into the playwright’s life and adapting his plays to meet eighteenth-century standards of decorum. And by the 1790s, literary forgery itself ‘bordered on a literary genre with its own kinds of rules and aspirations’. Enthralled by the notoriety of other literary forgers, Ireland created his own literature under a Shakespearean guise. Whilst his forgeries were quickly exposed, they ultimately served Ireland in establishing a literary identity of his own.
Letter: Juggling Career and Children
Authors: Frith Uta
Published: March 2012

Since I received the RCUK Award for Women of Outstanding Achievement in Science, Engineering, and Technology earlier this year, I have been frequently asked about my views on combining a scientific career with having a life. Perhaps I might take this opportunity to address those among your readers who may have the same question.
The Ergonomics of Reading
Authors: Rink Sarah
Published: March 2012

The last ten to fifteen years have presented one of the most challenging periods for the printing industry. In less than 10 years, the way people consume news has changed faster and more radically than ever in the history of news. The influence of the internet, and the spread of new gadgets such as palmtops, multifunctional mobile phones and ever-shrinking laptops, has drawn a large question mark on the future of the printed daily. Clearly, the TV and the radio still play an important role in the way that people absorb information. However, newspapers are no longer the sole providers of written news, and increasingly face stronger, faster and more modern competitors under the big umbrella of the Internet.
The Austerian Master Code - Paul Auster: Travels in the Scriptorium
Authors: Sorensen Eli
Published: March 2012

Although one of the big motifs in Paul Auster’s oeuvre is the nature of chance, there is a distinct familiarity, even to some extent predictability, about the tone, phrases, choice of settings, techniques, narrative solutions, and characters in all of his novels – a style unmistakably ‘Austerian’, like the unchangeable pattern of a story that is retold over and over again in an infinite number of variants.
David Booy, Ed., The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618-1654: A Selection
Authors: Sullivan Erin
Published: March 2012

Over the course of thirty-five years, Nehemiah Wallington wrote more than 20,000 pages about his experiences as a Puritan artisan in seventeenth-century London. In his papers, which filled fifty notebooks, he explored his thoughts concerning both his own life and the public events he lived through, including plague outbreaks, local fires, and England’s Civil War. For a historical period in which few personal accounts of daily life survive, and virtually none written by a member of the working classes, Wallington’s notebooks offer rare and valuable insight into the private world of one seventeenth-century turner.
It's All About the Money? Issues for the Regulation of Genetic Testing
Authors: Buch Rachit
Published: March 2012

Whether talking about football or schools, in Britain or abroad, it has become commonplace to say, ‘It’s all about the money’. One area that has recently been attracting comment of this nature is healthcare, due to an increase in the influence of economic principles and analysis over policy decisions. This trend spans many countries, and with healthcare being such a crucial sector of society, this widespread development demands critical analysis. Research must address whether evidence exists to support such a trend. If it does, then is it having a positive or negative impact on healthcare governance? If negative, what directions can be taken in the coming years to improve on the current situation?
Alienation and the City, or, How to Find and Lose Yourself in Berlin and Kars
Authors: Fysh William
Published: March 2012

In Konvolut M of the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin comments instructively on the duality of the city as experienced by the flâneur. He writes: ‘the city splits for him into dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room’ (Benjamin, trans. Eiland and McLaughlin, 1999, 417). The implications of this are several. The dialectical poles are on the one hand spatial - indicators of the flexibility of self-location in the city. However, they are also metaphysical and meta-poetic. The city offers the possibility for a blending of personal and collective memories; for an opening of the mind to a ‘landscape’ of social interaction or a retreat of the soul into its own isolated ‘room’; for the injection of a creative impulse or the projection of psychological and experiential stagnation. This study examines the impact of these dialectical poles on ideas of selfhood, loss and memory in Cees Nooteboom’s All Souls’ Day and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow.
Post Apartheid South Africa; Evaluating South Africa's Institutional Design
Authors: Hopper Robert
Published: March 2012

In this paper, I aim to evaluate whether increasing or decreasing the level of consociationalism in South Africa would be beneficial for the country's stability. Analysing South Africa's political structure since the implementation of free and fair elections, I review the effects of its current degree of consociationalism and debate the arguments of those who contest South Africa's current institutional framework and its capacity to govern.
The Reliability of the Narrator in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Gabriel Garcia Marguez's One Hundred Years of Solitude
Authors: McFadden Ronan
Published: March 2012

In the simultaneously fantastic and earthly world of the magical-realist novel, where telepathic powers are discovered through the clearing of snot, or where girls ascend to heaven while hanging out the laundry, how do the narrators of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children attempt to convince the reader of the narratives’ reliability? Can the reader really rely on the truth of such fantastic narratives? If not, what precisely are García Márquez and Rushdie trying to tell us about the nature of supposedly reliable narrative and the truths it purports to contain?
'We Have Your Medical Record on File': Researching Unpopular Government Policy
Authors: Greenhalgh Trisha
Published: March 2012

The English Department of Health recently introduced the Internet-accessible Summary Care Record (SCR), a summary of personal medical data intended for emergency use and drawn from the GP-held record of NHS patients. The SCR is the most controversial component of the £12 billion NHS IT project. If it goes to plan, around 40 million medical records will be uploaded, and up to a million staff in ten thousand organisations will have access to them. Countless megabytes of sensitive personal data will be available to staff who can claim a ‘legitimaterelationship’ to the patient (and, say critics, to nosey receptionists and hackers).
Life-Cycles of Men and Trees in Sonatorrek
Authors: Bintley Michael
Published: March 2012

According to Snorri Sturluson’s Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, the warrior poet Egill Skallagrímsson composed Sonatorrek (‘On the Loss of Sons’) in response to the death by drowning of his son Böðvarr (c.960), who was shipwrecked off the coast of Iceland during a sudden storm. Egill found Böðvarr’s lifeless body washed up on the shores of Iceland, and bore it to be buried within the mound where his own father Skallagrímr lay at rest.1 Two strophes of the poem are devoted to another of Egill’s sons, Gunnarr, who had fallen victim to a sóttar brími (‘burning sea-fever’, Sonatorrek 20; Nordal 1933, 246-56) a little while before. In Sonatorrek, Egill appears to make a subtle allusion to an enigmatic tradition also preserved in the Old Norse Völuspá, in which wooden figures are found upon the seashore and brought to life through the endowment of human gifts.
I Wanted to See All the News from Today
Authors: Callanan Martin , Smith Greg
Published: March 2012

I wanted to See all the news from Todayhttp://allnews.greyisgood.eu/Martin John CallananMarshall McLuhan once quipped that people don’t read newspapers so much as submerge into them. The patron saint of digital culture likened this action, a veritable ‘sinking’ into disparate streams of information, as something an individual would approach as casually as they’d slip into a warm bath. Martin John Callanan’s I wanted to See all the news from Today provides a similar immersive media experience by aggregating the front page of hundreds of newspapers from around the world and displaying these images within the screen space of a single web page. Launched in 2007, the piece mines more than 600 papers originating in seven continents, continuously scraping data from these sources every day without pause. These pages are organized to form a massive grid that references the familiar ‘image gallery’ and ‘array of thumbnails’ that are associated with managing digital information assets, but subverts these organizational frameworks towards different ends.
The Bloomsbury Project
Authors: Ashton Rosemary
Published: March 2012

For a century, Bloomsbury has been celebrated as the home of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ of writers and artists in the early decades of the twentieth century. The UCL Leverhulme-funded Bloomsbury Project, ‘Bloomsbury and Reform in the Nineteenth Century’, is dedicated to the study of the area before this group settled there. A striking number of pioneering nineteenthcentury institutions are to be found in the space bounded by Tottenham Court Road in the west, Euston Road to the north, Gray’s Inn Road to the east, and New Oxford Street to the south. Why and how so many centres of learning emerged in the immediate area of the British Museum (founded in 1753 but much extended in the nineteenth century), turning Bloomsbury into an intellectual powerhouse, are questions the project addresses. The beginning and end dates are 1800, when Francis Russell, fifth Duke of Bedford, obtained two acts of Parliament to develop his Bloomsbury estate, and 1904, when Virginia Stephen, later Woolf, moved into the area after the death of her father Leslie Stephen, so beginning the ‘Bloomsbury Group’.
The Place of Bloomsbury in the Novels of George Gissing
Authors: Dennis Richard
Published: March 2012

The Victorian novelist, George Gissing, is not often associated with Bloomsbury. Yet among his twenty-three novels published between 1880 and 1905, at least nine contain scenes set in the area between Oxford Street and Euston Road, Tottenham Court Road and Gray’s Inn Road. We do not need a novelist to tell us about the topography of Victorian London or even to describe the conditions in which Londoners lived: there are more than enough social surveys, tourist guides and journalistic ‘explorations’ of ‘how the poor live’. But novels are invaluable in showing how the spaces of the city were perceived and used and how the city was ‘performed’ in everyday practice. So in this paper I am interested in how Gissing made use of the area’s geography and how his characters moved through Bloomsbury and the wider metropolis at a variety of scales.
The Italian Experience at its Periphery: Change and Continuity in the Psychiatric Hospitals of Teramo
Authors: Di Giminiani Piergiorgio
Published: March 2012

Franco Basaglia holds a special place in the memory of all psychiatric workers in Italy. Nonetheless, recollections of the radical and successful experiment of Trieste, the Northern town where Democratic Psychiatric was born, strikingly differ from the history of deinstitutionalization in other areas of Italy. This paper will explore how the Basaglian model, which implied a radical restructuring of Italian society, was articulated in localized domains, especially in relation to the restructuring of the social function of psychiatry.
Pushing, Pulling, Twisting, Stretching: the Power of Light under the Microscope
Authors: Jones Philip
Published: March 2012

Of the many uses we have for light such as illumination or digital communication, perhaps the most surprising is physical manipulation of matter. Holding and moving objects without touching them may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but a profound understanding of the interaction between light and matter can make this a reality, at least on the microscopic scale. Since its invention, the technique of ‘optical trapping’ has evolved into a tool with applications beyond the narrow scope of physics, and in particular, has enabled remarkable discoveries in biology and medicine.
Think Twice Before You 'Boo' Your Sports Competitor
Authors: Kurniawan Irma
Published: March 2012

Next time you watch a heavy weight lifting tournament, tell the person next to you not to boo the person that he doesn’t want to win. A study recently published shows that modifying someone’s arousal level can influence their force production. Arousal refers to a physiological or psychological state of excitability, which in this study was enhanced by eliciting either negative or positive moods. The research was led by Liane Schmidt and Mathias Pessiglione and aimed to investigate if motivation to exert vigour can be changed by changing the person’s mood. The study was inspired by major sporting events such as the Olympics, where cheering spectators and cameras follow the athlete’s performance closely. Activities such as the ones involving physical force (e.g., heavy weight lifting) can be influenced by particular surrounding environment. The research team asked if having a positive, neutral, or negative mood changes maximal force production. During the investigation, participants were asked to squeeze a hand device as hard as they could to mimic the challenge of a heavy weight-lifting competition. To change their mood, participants were presented with emotional and neutral pictures taken from a widely-validated database of images, the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang, Bradley & Cuthbert, 2005). These pictures were presented for several seconds right before participants voluntarily produced their maximal force. The images were either negative (a picture of a gun), neutral (a picture of a piece of furniture), or positive (a picture of a baby smiling). Presenting pictures in this manner is a robust way of eliciting mood changes.
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker
Authors: Meteyard Lotte
Published: March 2012

The Stuff of Thought (2007) is Steven Pinker’s fifth popular science book, designed to complete two different trilogies that explore language, the mind and human nature. All his books have, in some way, explored the nature-nurture debate: are we primarily products of our genes or products of our environment? In his first popular science book, The Language Instinct (1994), Pinker made the case for an innate language capacity: language is not learned in its entirety, much of it (particularly grammar) is already present in the determined structure of our mind/brain. In Words and Rules (1999), the regular (‘bake – baked’) and irregular (‘buy – bought’) forms of the past tense were used to explore how language might be represented in the mind; Pinker presents a middle way between the rationalists (who state that ‘the mind has innate concepts’) and the empiricists (‘the mind is a blank slate’), with regular forms created by the application of an innate rule (rationalism) and irregular forms created through memorization (empiricism). These books were the first two in the ‘language and the mind’ trilogy. The other trilogy, beginning with the two books How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2000), deals with human nature. In both books, Pinker argues for innate cognitive abilities that are common across all human beings, and offers a psycho-evolutionary definition of human nature. Reviews of Pinker’s books are always mixed, reflecting the fact that there is still disagreement in popular culture and in the scientific community on the nature-nurture debate (aside from the common understanding that human nature is some mixture of the two). Pinker’s position represents an ideological attachment to nature and evolutionary design, and it often has a teleological narrative in which humans fulfil their impressive biological potential in the (somewhat under-described) world.