Strategies of Sound and Stringing in Ebenezer Pocock’s West–East Verse

In an effort to capture how Orientalist translations, imitations and criticism of Asian poetry came to inform the idealization of lyric as a universal genre, this paper focuses on the practice of poetic metre in the nineteenth century. How did Victorian conceptions of recitational communities, bounded by shared ‘national’ metres, square against the wealth of translated works that were a major component of Victorian print culture? The amateur Orientalist Ebenezer Pocock explained various metres and musical practices associated with ‘Persian lyrics’ in his book Flowers of the East (1833) and offered equivalent metres in English before replicating these shared English/Persian metres in his own imitative poem ‘The Khanjgaruh: A Fragment’. This article sketches how Pocock's casting of this hybrid material in metres that would already have been recognizable to his English readers seems to have the intended effect of both orienting his work towards his domestic audience and grounding such a flexible approach within the Persian tradition itself. Pocock's poem sits amongst a range of accompanying materials including translations of Sa‘dī and scholarly essays on comparative philology and Persian literary history. Each of these different pieces supports the collection's greater effort – best encapsulated by ‘The Khanjgaruh’ – to both remember and imagine the shared poetic history between Asia and Europe. Pocock's writing thus emblemizes how the nineteenth-century ‘West–East lyric’ was a product of both historical and philological recovering as well as the willed creation of poets and poetry enthusiasts. As a category, lyric performs a binding function in Pocock's work to pull together a linguistically and professionally diverse community of writers

Do non-profit hospitals provide more charity care when faced with a mandatory minimum standard? Evidence from Texas

Policymakers often question whether not-for-profit (NFP) hospitals provide enough charity care to justify tax advantages. In 1993, Texas enacted legislation requiring NFP hospitals to provide certain community benefits at levels set forth in specific criteria to retain tax-exempt status; this paper focuses on the effect of the legislation's requirement that NFP hospitals spend a minimum of 4% of net patient revenue on charity care. We also study a modification of the law passed in 1995, which allows the deduction of bad debts expense when calculating net patient revenue. This change effectively lowers required charity care spending, and our study considers whether Texas hospitals responded by reducing charity care spending. We test the Texas laws' effect on hospital charity care spending using financial data for 1992 through 1997. As anticipated, results show that, on average, NFP hospitals spending below the 4% threshold increased their charity care spending to meet this threshold. Surprisingly, NFP hospitals spending above the threshold experienced a marginally significant decrease in spending. After the 1995 law change, hospitals with higher total margins decreased charity care spending, an unintended consequence of the legislation. Overall, the Texas law changes did not, on average, lead to increased charity care spending by NFP hospitals. While spending increased by NFPs providing too little charity care prior to the law, this group represents less than 20% of our sample. These findings are particularly important given the increase in Texas uninsurance rates during the sample period. Seventeen states have followed Texas' lead by enacting legislation regarding the charity care spending by NFPs, thus an empirical investigation into the impact of this precedent-setting legislation is critical for evaluating the effectiveness of specific charity care requirements.Charity care Not-for-profit hospitals Texas legislation

PCBs and DDT in the serum of juvenile California sea lions: associations with vitamins A and E and thyroid hormones.

Top-trophic predators like California sea lions bioaccumulate high levels of persistent fat-soluble pollutants that may provoke physiological impairments such as endocrine or vitamins A and E disruption. We measured circulating levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) in 12 healthy juvenile California sea lions captured on Año Nuevo Island, California, in 2002. We investigated the relationship between the contamination by PCBs and DDT and the circulating levels of vitamins A and E and thyroid hormones (thyroxine, T4 and triiodothyronine, T3). Serum concentrations of total PCBs (sigmaPCBs) and total DDT were 14 +/- 9 mg/kg and 28 +/- 19 mg/kg lipid weight, respectively. PCB toxic equivalents (sigmaPCB TEQs) were 320 +/- 170 ng/kg lipid weight. Concentrations of sigmaPCBs and sigmaPCB TEQs in serum lipids were negatively correlated (p 0.1). As juvenile California sea lions are useful sentinels of coastal contamination, the high levels encountered in their serum is cause for concern about the ecosystem health of the area