My Many Selves

Wayne Booth, George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, was one of the most important literary critics and English scholars of recent times. His books included The Rhetoric of Fiction; Now Don\u27t Try to Reason with Me: Essays and Ironies for a Credulous Age; A Rhetoric of Irony; Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent; Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism; The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction; The Vocation of a Teacher; For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals; The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication; and others. Many of them became required reading in college classrooms. His memoir, My Many Selves, is both an incisive self-examination and a creative approach to retelling his life. Writing his autobiography became a quest to harmonize the diverse, discordant parts of his identity and resolve the conflicts in what he thought and believed. To see himself clearly and whole, he broke his self down, personified the fragments, uncovered their roots in his life, and engaged his multiple identities and experiences in dialogue. Basic to his story and to its lifelong concerns with ethics and rhetoric was his youth in rural Utah. He valued that background, while acknowledging its ambiguous influence on him, and continued to identify himself as Mormon, though he renounced most Latter-day Saint doctrines. Wayne Booth died in October 2005, soon after completing work on his autobiography.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1109/thumbnail.jp

Necessity for Compensation for Violation of a Restrictive Covenant in an Eminent Domain Proceeding

In eminent domain proceedings where the state or a repository of state power seeks to use land within a restricted residence area for a purpose not consistent with the restrictive covenants, recovery of compensation by adjacent owners in the subdivision for this violation seems dependent upon whether the interest created by the covenants in the adjacent owners is a property right . If it is a property right it can not under most state and the federal constitutions be taken by eminent domain unless compensation is made.\u27 On the other hand, if the interest be not property no compensation need be made for its removal or violation

Dlaczego krytyka etyczna nie może być łatwa?

WHY CAN’T ETHICAL CRITICISM BE EASY?The article attempts to defend ethical criticism against opponents who consider that textual analysis cannot take into consideration ethical issues, and makes an effort to prove that not all ways of speaking about ethics and literature have anything to do with ethical criticism. In spite of different approaches to the issue of ethical criticism, the existence of the “ethical power of art” is undeniable. Although the above fact is quite obvious and universally recognized, literature scholars in most cases do not wish to deal with this aspect of literature. As different genres and different types of literary texts incite to the formulation of ethical judgments, arguments and contentions concerning ethical issues may only be solved by critical pluralism

Far-infrared and sub-millimetre imaging of HD 76582's circumstellar disc

Debris discs, the tenuous rocky and icy remnants of planet formation, are believed to be evidence for planetary systems around other stars. The JCMT/SCUBA-2 debris disc legacy survey ‘SCUBA-2 Observations of Nearby Stars’ (SONS) observed 100 nearby stars, amongst them HD 76582, for evidence of such material. Here, we present imaging observations by JCMT/SCUBA-2 and Herschel/PACS at sub-millimetre and far-infrared wavelengths, respectively. We simultaneously model the ensemble of photometric and imaging data, spanning optical to sub-millimetre wavelengths, in a self-consistent manner. At far-infrared wavelengths, we find extended emission from the circumstellar disc providing a strong constraint on the dust spatial location in the outer system, although the angular resolution is too poor to constrain the interior of the system. In the sub-millimetre, photometry at 450 and 850 µm reveals a steep fall-off that we interpret as a disc dominated by moderately sized dust grains (amin = 36 µm), perhaps indicative of a non-steady-state collisional cascade within the disc. A disc architecture of three distinct annuli, comprising an unresolved component at 20 au and outer components at 80 and 270 au, along with a very steep particle size distribution (γ = 5), is proposed to match the observations

Shoujo versus Seinen? Address and reception in Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011)

This article uses the Japanese television anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011) as a case study through which to problematise the relationship between two prominent traditions within children’s literature criticism: narratology, with its vocabulary of implied readers and textual address; and reception studies, which typically gather data through empirical work with children. The figure of the “child reader” is claimed by both traditions, although in one case that reader is a textual construct and in the other a human being; yet this ambiguity is not typically addressed within studies of individual texts. Puella Magi Madoka Magica, a complex work that disrupts viewer expectations and genre assumptions, both destabilises its implied viewership and challenges conventional beliefs about the tastes and capacities of actual viewers, especially the extent to which those viewers can be categorised by age or gender. I argue that, by taking a sideways step from page to screen, and especially by analysing a non-Western work, it is possible to highlight the contingent and arbitrary nature of some of the assumptions that permeate literary critical discussion, and to help bring narratalogical and reception studies into a more productive relationship

Balancing act: exploring the tone of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

This paper provides an analysis of The Life Aquatic in the context of debates around tone, irony, the Smart Film, the New Sincerity and the Quirky. It argues that Anderson is one of a small but significant number of filmmakers to escape from the indiscriminate irony of fin de sie`cle cinema, and finds The Life Aquatic Aquatic a particularly interesting film in which to explore such matters because of its ready artifice, strong elements of pastiche and measuredly preposterous excesses. Offering a critical analysis, the paper balances an engagement with some of the systemic elements of the film’s tone with the detailed organisation of tonal elements in particular sequences

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

MscS-like mechanosensitive channels in plants and microbes

The challenge of osmotic stress is something all living organisms must face as a result of environmental dynamics. Over the past three decades, innovative research and cooperation across disciplines have irrefutably established that cells utilize mechanically gated ion channels to release osmolytes and prevent cell lysis during hypoosmotic stress. Early electrophysiological analysis of the inner membrane of Escherichia coli identified the presence of three distinct mechanosensitive activities. The subsequent discoveries of the genes responsible for two of these activities, the mechanosensitive channels of large (MscL) and small (MscS) conductance, led to the identification of two diverse families of mechanosensitive channels. The latter of these two families, the MscS family, consists of members from bacteria, archaea, fungi, and plants. Genetic and electrophysiological analysis of these family members has provided insight into how organisms use mechanosensitive channels for osmotic regulation in response to changing environmental and developmental circumstances. Furthermore, determining the crystal structure of E. coli MscS and several homologues in several conformational states has contributed to our understanding of the gating mechanisms of these channels. Here we summarize our current knowledge of MscS homologues from all three domains of life and address their structure, proposed physiological functions, electrophysiological behaviors, and topological diversity