The Old French and Chaucerian fabliaux : a study of their comic climax

Includes index.Bibliography: pages 201-213.This study is about the comic structure of the fabliaux. The survival of approximately 160 Old French fabliaux, some in several versions and in different manuscripts, attests to their widespread popularity in the Middle Ages. Chaucer's fabliaux are essentially the same genre as the Old French fabliaux, and hence their humor is essentially the same. Our own enjoyment of them is in its own way quite refined and even analogous to certain spiritual experiences. In focusing on the comic climax of the fabliaux, I necessarily talk about their structure, which has its own function within the story regardless of what influenced it or caused it to be there and regardless of what it reflects.Introduction -- Preparation for the climax: The showing -- Preparation for the climax The telling -- The comic climax -- Humor in the fabliaux -- Chaucer's fabliaux -- Conclusion.Digitized at the University of Missouri--Columbia MU Libraries Digitization Lab in 2012. Digitized at 600 dpi with Zeutschel, OS 15000 scanner. Access copy, available in MOspace, is 400 dpi, grayscale

The Lawn Hill annulus: An Ordovician meteorite impact into water-saturated dolomite

The Lawn Hill Impact Structure (LHIS) is located 250 km N of Mt Isa in NW Queensland, Australia, and is marked by a highly deformed dolomite annulus with an outer diameter of ~18 km, overlying low metamorphic grade siltstone, sandstone, and shale, along the NE margin of the Georgina Basin. This study provides detailed field observations from sections of the Lawn Hill annulus and adjacent areas that demonstrate a clear link between the deformation of the dolomite and the Lawn Hill impact. 40Ar-39Ar dating of impact-related melt particles provides a time of impact in the Ordovician (472 ± 8 Ma) when the Georgina Basin was an active depocenter. The timing and stratigraphic thickness of the dolomite sequence in the annulus suggest that there was possibly up to 300 m of additional sedimentary rocks on top of the currently exposed Thorntonia Limestone at the time of impact. The exposed annulus is remarkably well preserved, with preservation attributed to postimpact sedimentation. The LHIS has an atypical crater morphology with no central uplift. The heterogeneous target materials at Lawn Hill were probably low-strength, porous, and water-saturated, with all three properties affecting the crater morphology. The water-saturated nature of the carbonate unit at the time of impact is thought to have influenced the highly brecciated nature of the annulus, and restricted melt production. The impact timing raises the possibility that the Lawn Hill structure may be a member of a group of impacts resulting from an asteroid breakup that occurred in the mid-Ordovician (470 ± 6 Ma)

Modelling the Development of Research Data

There are a whole host of challenges that face researchers as they attempt to manage their data: clarifying intellectual property rights issues, determining the optimal formats and standards to use, forecasting expenditure on preparing data for archiving, and so on. Among these challenges, one that is sometimes overlooked is that of simply keeping track of all the data that need to be managed. In some cases, no measures at all are put in place to track the data, meaning that researchers must rely on their memory to make sense of the files they generate in the course of their research. In others, directory and file naming conventions may be used, according to a researcher's own scheme or one set out by the research group or department. Still other researchers may keep written records of which data arose from which processes. These techniques each present a different trade-off between investment and return in terms of a researcher's effort to document and understand the data, respectively. They also provide third parties - curators, consumers - with different amounts of contextual information with which to understand the data, though this is in turn affected by the quality of the documentation of the technique in use. The ERIM Project is devising an alternative technique for keeping track of data, with the aim of being: intuitive for researchers when recording progress, and for both researchers and third parties when trying to understand the data records; applicable to a wide variety of data types and disciplines (though developed in the context of engineering research); compatible with existing local practices; amenable to automation, at both the writing and the reading stages. This technique, Research Activity Information Development (RAID) modelling, provides a formalism for describing how data records - and conceivably individual data - relate to one another. The RAID models may be represented as diagrams or as XML. Underlying RAID modelling is an ontology for data, their states and the processes that relate them

Combined genome-wide linkage and targeted association analysis of head circumference in autism spectrum disorder families

Background: It has long been recognized that there is an association between enlarged head circumference (HC) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but the genetics of HC in ASD is not well understood. In order to investigate the genetic underpinning of HC in ASD, we undertook a genome-wide linkage study of HC followed by linkage signal targeted association among a sample of 67 extended pedigrees with ASD. Methods: HC measurements on members of 67 multiplex ASD extended pedigrees were used as a quantitative trait in a genome-wide linkage analysis. The Illumina 6K SNP linkage panel was used, and analyses were carried out using the SOLAR implemented variance components model. Loci identified in this way formed the target for subsequent association analysis using the Illumina OmniExpress chip and imputed genotypes. A modification of the qTDT was used as implemented in SOLAR. Results: We identified a linkage signal spanning 6p21.31 to 6p22.2 (maximum LOD = 3.4). Although targeted association did not find evidence of association with any SNP overall, in one family with the strongest evidence of linkage, there was evidence for association (rs17586672, p = 1.72E-07). Conclusions: Although this region does not overlap with ASD linkage signals in these same samples, it has been associated with other psychiatric risk, including ADHD, developmental dyslexia, schizophrenia, specific language impairment, and juvenile bipolar disorder. The genome-wide significant linkage signal represents the first reported observation of a potential quantitative trait locus for HC in ASD and may be relevant in the context of complex multivariate risk likely leading to ASD