Art in the Trenches: Unofficial Art of the First World War

Abstract: Scholarship in recent decades focusing on soldier experiences of the First World War have largely ignored soldier-produced artworks as access points into the experience of modern warfare. Though there has been work on official war artists and post-war artworks of soldiers turned artists, artwork produced during service in a non-official capacity has only featured in art history, where the artwork and artists feature as subjects, rather than as sources for understanding their experiences that contextualize their work. This paper makes a historiographical case for exploring this source-base, while also analyzing several selected works from unofficial First World War artists

Aid Allocation Volatility to Small Island States

Aid is an important resource for developing countries. Many small island states (including those in the Pacific) are highly reliant on aid to supplement meagre government resources and other foreign capital inflows. This paper investigates the conditional volatility of aid (for bilateral aid disaggregated into sector aid and programme aid, and multilateral aid) to small island states using an econometric framework. In addition, year-on-year changes in aid allocation are also considered for both changes in aid allocations from major donors to the Pacific as well as for changes in aid receipts in 16 Pacific island countries. The entire sample of countries under consideration includes 44 aid-receiving (small island) states from the regions of ...aid volatility, small island states

After a Decadent Fashion: E. Pauline Johnson and the Staging of Indigeneity

At the peak of her popularity in the 1890s, the Mohawk and Canadian writer Emily Pauline Johnson (or Tekahionwake) was one of the most recognizable literary figures in North America – a reputation earned largely through dramatic recitals of her poetry and prose rather than on the printed page. The daughter of George Henry Martin Johnson, a hereditary chief of the Mohawks of the Six Nations reserve, and Emily Howells, an Englishwoman and relation of American novelist William Dean Howells, she garnered such public acclaim that in 1895 the critic Hector Charlesworth could proclaim without controversy that ‘[f]or the past five years, Miss Pauline Johnson has been the most popular figure in Canadian literature’. This popularity had much to do with Johnson’s performance of her own Indigeneity. A typical recital would begin with Johnson taking the stage in an elaborate buckskin dress; after the intermission, she would return in a Victorian gown. As a woman of mixed Mohawk and English descent with an overwhelmingly white settler audience, Johnson’s access to the literary marketplace was predicated on her ability to navigate a system of stereotypes, myths, and stock images that structured settler conceptions of Indigenous peoples. Thus, on page and stage alike, she felt compelled to enact an autoexoticizing performance of her own Indigeneity – a performance that was self-consciously stereotypical but that also ironized the audiences who consumed and propagated such stereotypes. Critics’ efforts to articulate more fully the agential or recuperative dimensions of these complicated acts of autoexoticism have been among the most fruitful strains in recent Johnson scholarship

Aid allocation volatility to small island states

Aid is an important resource for developing countries. Many small island states (including those in the Pacific) are highly reliant on aid to supplement meagre government resources and other foreign capital inflows. This paper investigates the conditional volatility of aid (for bilateral aid disaggregated into sector aid and programme aid, and multilateral aid) to small island states using an econometric framework. In addition, year-on-year changes in aid allocation are also considered for both changes in aid allocations from major donors to the Pacific as well as for changes in aid receipts in 16 Pacific island countries. The entire sample of countries under consideration includes 44 aid-receiving (small island) states from the regions of Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Americas over the period 1973 to 2004. This paper finds that past aid flows are correlated with present aid flows and that volatility on both sector and programme aid in the Americas and Asia-Pacific region are characterized by a higher degree of volatility than in the African region. An important result of the analysis is that shocks to bilateral aid result in the persistence of volatility for a number of years before stabilizing. This evidence of persistence in volatility, whereby the past levels of volatility influence the degree of volatility that can be expected in the future, implies a certain degree of predictability in the conditional volatility of bilateral aid. The paper also finds that on average multilateral aid is not only considerably more volatile than the bilateral aid, but it is also more unpredictable

Expressiveness and Completeness in Abstraction

We study two notions of expressiveness, which have appeared in abstraction theory for model checking, and find them incomparable in general. In particular, we show that according to the most widely used notion, the class of Kripke Modal Transition Systems is strictly less expressive than the class of Generalised Kripke Modal Transition Systems (a generalised variant of Kripke Modal Transition Systems equipped with hypertransitions). Furthermore, we investigate the ability of an abstraction framework to prove a formula with a finite abstract model, a property known as completeness. We address the issue of completeness from a general perspective: the way it depends on certain abstraction parameters, as well as its relationship with expressiveness.Comment: In Proceedings EXPRESS/SOS 2012, arXiv:1208.244

Tuning Electronic Structure To Control Manganese Nitride Activation

Investigation of a series of oxidized nitridomanganese(V) salen complexes with different para ring substituents (R = CF3, tBu, and NMe2) demonstrates that nitride activation is dictated by remote ligand electronics. For R = CF3 and tBu, oxidation affords a Mn(VI) species and nitride activation, with dinitrogen homocoupling accelerated by the more electron-withdrawing CF3 substituent. Employing an electron-donating substituent (R = NMe2) results in a localized ligand radical species that is resistant to N coupling of the nitrides and is stable in solution at both 195 and 298 K

The effect of non-pharmacological sleep interventions on depression symptoms: a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials

Poor sleep is a significant risk factor for depression across the lifespan and sleep problems have been hypothesised to contribute to the onset and maintenance of depression symptoms. However, sleep problems are usually not a direct target of interventions for depression. A range of non-pharmacological treatments can reduce sleep problems but it is unclear whether these interventions also reduce other depression symptoms. The aim of this review was to examine whether non-pharmacological interventions for sleep problems are effective in reducing symptoms of depression. We carried out a systematic search for randomised controlled trials of non-pharmacological sleep interventions that measured depression symptoms as an outcome. Forty-nine trials (n=5908) were included in a random effects meta-analysis. The pooled standardised mean difference for depression symptoms after treatment for sleep problems was -0.45 (95% CI: -0.55,-0.36). The size of the effect on depression symptoms was moderated by the size of the effect on subjective sleep quality. In studies of participants with mental health problems, sleep interventions had a large effect on depression symptoms (d=-0.81, 95% CI: -1.13,-0.49). The findings indicate that non-pharmacological sleep interventions are effective in reducing the severity of depression, particularly in clinical populations. This suggests that non-pharmacological sleep interventions could be offered as a treatment for depression, potentially improving access to treatment