Scripting silence: the expanded screenplay as present-traumatic language

This research orbits the ‘auto’, a personal and critiqued experience of psychiatric and psychoanalytical treatments: on the one hand a pathologised fixing of speech, on the other the possibilities of new and fluid approaches of speaking and listening to trauma. My practice artefact, Instructions from Light, employs a constellation of methods that turn on an expanded translation and critical examination of the French filmmaker Louis Delluc’s screenplay for his impressionist film LE SILENCE (1920). Instructions from Light manifests as a collage of hybrid writing and found / reworked image and also embeds my translation of LE SILENCE, the first into English. Through uncoupling the idea of ‘screenplay’ from a fixed and finished endpoint of film, working with this form that maps and narrates in the present tense, I reject ideas of the post-traumatic and formulate a new concept, the presenttraumatic. I refigure screenwriting as resistant, metaphorical, and mobile. Although currently on the page, Instructions from Light emerges from processes of speaking and listening—rehearsal, performance, discussion, and symposia—an actual and metaphorical polyphony. I follow Audre Lorde in asking ‘What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say?’1 Employing metaphor as ‘meta-methodology’ I offer a new approach for working critically across disciplines—screenwriting, translation, psychology, language practices, and a politicised autotheory. Translation as method is used as an embodiment of struggle—I deliberately chose LE SILENCE as my ‘practice-centre’ because it is written in a language I could not, at the outset of the research, understand. This research is not interdisciplinary, but transdisciplinary, demanding a new approach in producing a neologism—presenttraumatic— that is more than the sum of the disciplines I inhabit. Present-traumatic is a critical concept through which silence can speak and interrogate hierarchies of communication.

Movements and habitat use of native and invasive piscivorous fishes in a temperate and channelized lowland river

Lowland temperate rivers provide important habitats for piscivorous fishes, but with their year-round spatial and temporal habitat use is often poorly understood, including their use of off-channel habitats. Here, the movements and habitat use of the piscivorous native Northern pike Esox lucius and invasive pikeperch Sander lucioperca were investigated using acoustic telemetry in the highly regulated (through impoundment) lower River Severn, Western England over a 12-month period, where off-channel habitat availability was limited to a single boat marina. The movements of both species varied with season and temperature, with both species moving greater distances in spring. Increasing water temperatures up to 15 °C resulted in a higher frequency of movements of both species, but movements then decreased at temperatures higher than this. Northern pike detections in the river increased in periods of lower river discharge and warmer temperatures, with the off-channel refuge providing an important habitat all year round (78% of detections occurred there). While 63% of pikeperch detections also occurred in the marina, 89% of these detections occurred between December and April. These results thus emphasise the importance of this limited off-channel habitat as potential spawning locations for invasive pikeperch and foraging areas for native Northern pike

Trajectories of multiple adolescent health risk behaviors in a low-income African American population

This study examined interdependent trajectories of sexual risk, substance use, and conduct problems among 12–18 year-old African American youth who were followed annually as part of the Mobile Youth Study (MYS). We used growth-mixture modeling (GMM) to model the development of these three outcomes in the 1406 participants who met the inclusion criteria. Results indicate that there were four distinct classes: normative low risk (74.3% of sample); increasing high risk takers (11.9%); adolescent-limited conduct problems and drug risk with high risky sex (8.0%); and early experimenters (5.8%) The higher risk classes had higher rates of pregnancy and Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI) diagnoses than the normative sample at each of the ages we examined. Differing somewhat from our hypothesis, all of the non-normative classes exhibited high sexual risk behavior. While prevention efforts should be focused on addressing all three risk behaviors, the high rate of risky sexual behavior in the 25% of the sample that fall into the three non-normative classes, underscores an urgent need for improved sex education, including teen pregnancy and HIV/STI prevention, in this community

Circulating 250HD, dietary vitamin D, PTH, and calcium associations with incident cardiovascular disease and mortality: The MIDSPAN Family Study

<p>Context: Observational studies relating circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25OHD) and dietary vitamin D intake to cardiovascular disease (CVD) have reported conflicting results.</p> <p>Objective: Our objective was to investigate the association of 25OHD, dietary vitamin D, PTH, and adjusted calcium with CVD and mortality in a Scottish cohort.</p> <p>Design and Setting: TheMIDSPAN Family Study is a prospective study of 1040 men and 1298 women from the West of Scotland recruited in 1996 and followed up for a median 14.4 yr. Participants: Locally resident adult offspring of a general population cohort were recruited from 1972–1976.</p> <p>Main Outcome Measures: CVD events (n = 416) and all-cause mortality (n=100) were evaluated.</p> <p>Results: 25OHD was measured using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry in available plasma (n=2081). Median plasma 25OHD was 18.6 ng/ml, and median vitamin D intake was 3.2 µ g/d (128 IU/d). Vitamin D deficiency (25OHD<15 ng/ml) was present in 689 participants (33.1%). There was no evidence that dietary vitamin D intake, PTH, or adjusted calcium were associated with CVD events or with mortality. Vitamin D deficiency was not associated with CVD (fully adjusted hazard ratio=1.00; 95% confidence interval=0.77–1.31). Results were similar after excluding patients who reported an activity-limiting longstanding illness at baseline (18.8%) and those taking any vitamin supplements (21.7%). However, there was some evidence vitamin D deficiency was associated with all-cause mortality (fully adjusted hazard ratio=2.02; 95% confidence interval=1.17–3.51).</p> <p>Conclusion: Vitamin D deficiency was not associated with risk of CVD in this cohort with very low 25OHD. Future trials of vitamin D supplementation in middle-aged cohorts should be powered to detect differences inmortality outcomes as well as CVD.(J Clin EndocrinolMetab97: 0000 –0000, 2012)</p&gt

A novel method for identifying coded tags recorded on aquatic acoustic monitoring systems.

Aquatic biotelemetry increasingly relies on using acoustic transmitters ('tags') that enable passive detection of tagged animals using fixed or mobile receivers. Both tracking methods are resource-limited, restricting the spatial area in which movements of highly mobile animals can be measured using proprietary detection systems. Transmissions from tags are recorded by underwater noise monitoring systems designed for other purposes, such as cetacean monitoring devices, which have been widely deployed in the marine environment; however, no tools currently exist to decode these detections, and thus valuable additional information on animal movements may be missed. Here, we describe simple hybrid methods, with potentially wide application, for obtaining information from otherwise unused data sources. The methods were developed using data from moored, acoustic cetacean detectors (C-PODs) and towed passive receiver arrays, often deployed to monitor the vocalisations of cetaceans, but any similarly formatted data source could be used. The method was applied to decode tag detections that were found to have come from two highly mobile fish species, bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) and Twaite shad (Alosa fallax), that had been tagged in other studies. Decoding results were validated using test tags; range testing data were used to demonstrate the relative efficiency of these receiver methods in detecting tags. This approach broadens the range of equipment from which acoustic tag detections can be decoded. Novel detections derived from the method could add significant value to past and present tracking studies at little additional cost, by providing new insights into the movement of mobile animals at sea

The Desire for Haiku : reading Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel

For two years we have been reading The Preparation of the Novel by Roland Barthes, the collection of the series of lectures he gave at the Collège de France between 1978 and 1980, completed shortly before his death in 1981. He declared his intention to write a novel, and in this pedagogical experiment, explores the trial of novel writing. Our haikus are Barthes’s haikus, or rather, our haikus are constructed only of his words, extracted from the chapter entitled ‘The Desire for Haiku’, one from (or even for) each page

Trajectories of multiple adolescent health risk behaviors in a low-income African American population

This study examined interdependent trajectories of sexual risk, substance use, and conduct problems among 12–18 year-old African American youth who were followed annually as part of the Mobile Youth Study (MYS). We used growth-mixture modeling (GMM) to model the development of these three outcomes in the 1406 participants who met the inclusion criteria. Results indicate that there were four distinct classes: normative low risk (74.3% of sample); increasing high risk takers (11.9%); adolescent-limited conduct problems and drug risk with high risky sex (8.0%); and early experimenters (5.8%) The higher risk classes had higher rates of pregnancy and Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI) diagnoses than the normative sample at each of the ages we examined. Differing somewhat from our hypothesis, all of the non-normative classes exhibited high sexual risk behavior. While prevention efforts should be focused on addressing all three risk behaviors, the high rate of risky sexual behavior in the 25% of the sample that fall into the three non-normative classes, underscores an urgent need for improved sex education, including teen pregnancy and HIV/STI prevention, in this community

Roland Barthes's Party

The Roland Barthes Reading Group is Emma Bolland, Julia Calver, Daniela Cascella, Helen Clarke, Louise Finney, Susannah Gent, Sharon Kivland, Debbie Michaels, Hestia Peppé, Rachel Smith. For four years we have been reading The Preparation of the Novel by Roland Barthes, the collection of the series of lectures he gave at the Collège de France between 1978 and 1980, completed shortly before his death in 1981. He declared his intention to write a novel, and in this pedagogical experiment, explores the trial of novel writing. In this book the authors riff on a tiny remark Barthes makes: a. Example (from personal experience) –> I want to narrate a party: as a rule, anecdotal material: people I’d not met before, particular characters, conversations, rituals, etc. But when I set about telling the story, I find myself weighed down by the ‘necessary’ details (necessary for the logic of the narrative) that I personally find it too tiresome to recount. I only need ‘retain’ two notations from the party: the yellow dress worn by the hostess (a kaftan) and the sleepiness of the host’s eyes, the droopiness of his eyelids, sorts of realistic haiku that exhaust the saying and don’t belong to narrative discourse (at least not my practice of it) because they’re: not functional. b. Conversely, I can find something in a story that jumps out at me, like a film jumping, a sliver flying off, something that has all the spirit of haiku but is in fact no way related to the story: something that sets a bell ringing, that brings with it all the particular features of haiku I’ve tried to articulate [...] The Short Form is its own necessity and suffices in itself: it can’t be stretched. Roland Barthes, Session of March 3, 197