Stasis and Energy. Danish Paradox or European Issue?

In examining Carl Nielsen’s expressive intentions and formal strategies in an interdisciplinary and historical context, this article shows how closely Nielsen’s aspirations and practice parallel those of his European contemporaries. One strand of this interrelationship between art and its social context is manifest in the recognition by philosophers, Kierkegaard perhaps the first amongst them, of the value and significance of right-brained thought, the experience of life, as a legitimate object for consideration and understanding, where previously only leftbrained, objective thought had been considered worthy of the philosopher’s attention. Tracing Nielsen’s developing interest in the embodiment of experience and feeling in the form and substance of his art, not just in its narrative content, it is argued that traditional linear analysis is inadequate to describe Nielsen’s symphonic writing, and that a ‘three-dimensional’ model that can also account for the expressive meaning and value of relative levels of activity, ‘stasis and energy’, is required. By contrast with Nielsen’s success in developing musical forms that embody these ‘concerns of the time’, Danish ballet, one of the great achievements of the Golden Age, faded from sight during the same period. The article asserts Nielsen’s place within the broad range of European cultural life by contrasting it with the uniquely Danish survival of a form whose particular expressive character led to its disappearance or transformation nearly everywhere else

Carl Nielsen and the Danish Tradition of Story-Telling

The author explains Carl Nielsen’s sixth symphony, ‘ semplice ’, as ‘eventyr’, ‘fantasy-adventure’, setting it in the context of works by Golden Age authors like Adam Oehlenschlager, Hans Christian Andersen, August Bournonville and Soren Kierkegaard, and Nielsen’s own friend, the painter Vilhelm Hammershoi. Colin Roth reads Sinfonia semplice as a direct address to Nielsen’s own audience, its ironised, disruptive selfconsciousness blending autobiographical elements with musical ones in order to heighten the symphony’s narrative and expressive power

Optical Photon Reassignment Microscopy (OPRA)

To enhance the resolution of a confocal laser scanning microscope the additional information of a pinhole plane image taken at every excitation scan position can be used [C. J. R. Sheppard, Super-resolution in confocal imaging, Optik 80, 5354 (1988)]. This photon reassignment principle is based on the fact that the most probable position of an emitter is at half way between the nominal focus of the excitation laser and the position corresponding to the (off centre) detection position. Therefore, by reassigning the detected photons to this place, an image with enhanced detection efficiency and resolution is obtained. Here we present optical photon reassignment microscopy (OPRA) which realises this concept in an all-optical way obviating the need for image-processing. With the help of an additional intermediate optical beam expansion between descanning and a further rescanning of the detected light, an image with the advantages of photon reassignment can be acquired. Due to its simplicity and flexibility this method has the potential to enhance the performance of nearly every laser scanning microscope and is therefore expected to play an important role in future systems.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

“Wilderness” Revisited: Is Canadian Park Management Moving Beyond the “Wilderness” Ethic?

This paper questions whether the rescaling of conservation practice in Canada to include local and Indigenous communities, NGOs, and private market-based actors represents a move away from wilderness-thinking in conservation, and what implications this might have for the future of conservation in Canada. We explore the links between Cronon\u27s “wilderness” ethic and coloniality, racism/sexism/classism, and political economy, and the extent to which recent trends in conservation practice, such as co-management arrangements, private tourism proposals, and a shift in programming to attract a diverse public to parks, help us to move beyond the limited vision for conservation and environmentalism that the wilderness ethic provides. We interrogate the ways in which the concept of wilderness is being employed, resisted, and transformed by a multitude of actors in three parks and conservation areas across Canada. We argue that although recent developments in conservation practice help to redress some of the worrisome aspects of wilderness-thinking in parks, they also reinforce and re-emphasize problematic lines of thinking and praxis. While the wilderness character of Canadian parks has shifted a great deal since the turn of the 20th century, the wilderness ethic remains deeply embedded within conservation discourse and practice

Interpretation of the optical transfer function: Significance for image scanning microscopy

The optical transfer function (OTF) is widely used to compare the performance of different optical systems. Conventionally, the OTF is normalized to unity for zero spatial frequency, but in some cases it is better to consider the unnormalized OTF, which gives the absolute value of the image signal. Examples are in confocal microscopy and image scanning microscopy, where the signal level increases with pinhole or array size. Comparison of the respective unnormalized OTFs gives useful insight into their relative performance. The significance of other properties of the general OTF is discussed

Dolores Keane in concert (poster)

Poster for the concert held on Saturday 27 February 1999 at Wembley Conference Centre, organised by The Irish Chaplaincy

Quantal response and nonequilibrium beliefs explain overbidding in maximum-value auctions

We report new experimental data on a simple common value auction to investigate the extent to which bidding can be explained by logit QRE, in combination with different models about bidder beliefs: cursed equilibrium, level-k, and cognitive hierarchy. There is a close correspondence between the predicted bidding patterns in those models and the distribution of observed bids. The pattern of median bids in the data consists of a combination of overbidding with low signals, and near-value-bidding with higher signals. Logit QRE with heterogeneous bidders approximates this pattern. Combining QRE with any of the other models of belief formation leads to a closer match with the data. All the estimated models predict only small treatment effects across different versions of the game, consistent with the data. We also reanalyze an earlier dataset for the same game (Ivanov et al., 2010), which exhibited much more overbidding, and reach similar qualitative conclusions

A Chemical Genomics Approach to Drug Reprofiling in Oncology: Antipsychotic Drug Risperidone as a Potential Adenocarcinoma Treatment

Drug reprofiling is emerging as an effective paradigm for discovery of cancer treatments. Herein, an antipsychotic drug is immobilised using the Magic Tag® chemical genomics tool and screened against a T7 bacteriophage displayed library of polypeptides from Drosophila melanogaster, as a whole genome model, to uncover an interaction with a section of 17-β-HSD10, a proposed prostate cancer target. A computational study and enzyme inhibition assay with full length human 17-β-HSD10 identifies risperidone as a drug reprofiling candidate. When formulated with rumenic acid, risperidone slows proliferation of PC3 prostate cancer cells in vitro and retards PC3 prostate cancer tumour growth in vivo in xenografts in mice, presenting an opportunity to reprofile risperidone as a cancer treatment