Melted honey: sax and sex

[Abstract]: This paper deals with multisensory processes of engaging and disengaging with a musical world through the body. It is based on ethnographic research with an Australian Police band. Band members make a strict distinction between rehearsal and performance. For band members, rehearsals are characterised by a multi-sensual disengagement with instrument. During rehearsals, which entail a close multi-sensory focussing in on the points at which instrument body and musician body met, the senses of touch, sight and hearing are engaged in the process of surveillance. Such surveillance is undertaken in order that the musicians can identify faulted touches to instruments that result in faulted sounds. Touch to the instrument body is ‘watched’, not only with the eye, but in and through touch and hearing senses. These sensual combinations serve to separate person and instrument. In contrast, performances are characterised by a multisensual embodiment of the instrument, to the point that band members understand themselves to be constructed of instruments, and that instruments are constructed of them. In performances, instruments and performers come to phenomenologically complete one another’s bodies. Band members discuss the sensually experienced distinction between rehearsal and performance by means of a distinction between fucking (which they understood as similar to rehearsal) and making love (which they understood to be similar to performance experience). Band members also drew on food/music metaphors, including the difference between constructing a musical dish from a recipe (the written music) and tasting the melted honey of performed sax sounds. They used this metaphor to describe the sensual difference between making sound in rehearsal, and the corporeally penetrative act of inviting a sax into the body in musical performance. Using the distinction between rehearsal and performance, and the penetrative metaphors that band members used to describe it, I draw on and extend the critiques that Michel Serres made of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology to analyse rehearsal and performance moments as, respectively, multisensory processes of surveillance and anti-surveillance

Multi-Modal Effects of the Repellent Deet Across Protostomia

DEET (N, N-diethyl-m-toluamide) is the most broadly effective and widely used personal repellent available, yet we do not understand what makes it so effective. Even in well-studied species like Drosophila melanogaster flies and Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, many mysteries remain as to how DEET can affect behavior in these species. For example, Ae. aegypti mosquitoes are attracted to human arms. When an arm is covered in DEET, wild-type mosquitoes are not attracted to the arm, while mutant mosquitoes that lack the odorant receptor co-receptor (orco), approach the arm, but rarely bite. We investigated this orco-independent DEET repellency in Ae. aegypti and found that these mosquitoes can sense DEET with their tarsi as well as their proboscis. The tarsi are required for mosquitoes to be repelled after contact with a DEET-treated arm. The proboscis is required for the rejection of DEET-laced liquid food. These results suggest that DEET acts on multiple sensory modalities to repel insects. Both this work and most prior literature has focused on studying how DEET affects Arthropods, yet one of the major open questions in the field is how DEET can be effective across so many different species. To identify genes and neurons required for DEET-sensitivity outside of Arthropoda, we turned to the nematode C. elegans. Here, we demonstrated that DEET affects chemotaxis to some odors but not others. We used this behavior as the basis for a forward genetic screen, and identified two genes as candidates required for complete DEET-sensitivity. We identified a natural isolate of C. elegans that was also resistant to DEET, and found that it contains a large deletion in one of the hits from our screen, the G protein-coupled receptor str-217. This gene is required for DEET-sensitivity in both wild-type and wild isolate strains. str-217 is expressed in a single pair of chemosensory neurons called ADL, which are required for complete DEET sensitivity, and respond to DEET as assayed by calcium imaging. Although we identified additional sensory neurons that respond to DEET, their behavioral contributions are unknown. Both ADL and str-217 are required for a specific, DEET-induced behavior during chemotaxis and exploration: an increase in average pause duration. Through optogenetic stimulation of ADL, we demonstrated that ADL activity alone is sufficient to increase average pause duration. Taken together, these experiments provide insights into the genetic and neural mechanisms underlying DEET-sensitivity in C. elegans, and allow for comparisons across Protostomes. We also establish C. elegans as a model non-Arthropod species for further investigation into the effects of DEET

Dilemmas of audience and alienation in the fiction of Olive Schreiner

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN016149 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Land Tenure and the Management of Land Resources in Trinidad and Tobago

The potential of the agricultural sector in Trinidad and Tobago has not been realized in recent decades. The more productive land resources of the country are underutilized, while many of the more fragile ecosystems are in danger. This threatens to deny the country potential income from ecotourism as well as deprive future generations of a stable land, forest, and water base. The optimal use of the country's land resources requires a stable and secure tenure system defining land rights. The Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago contracted the Land Tenure Center to carry out land rationalization studies, which are intended to assist in the preparation of an action plan to deal with the problems of the land tenure system. The result was the preparation of twenty-one studies, which have been organized into two LTC research papers. This first paper explores the nature and extent of tenure insecurities in both urban and rural contexts, with a focus on agricultural land tenure problems. Several hypotheses are advanced concerning the possible constraints that legal and social insecurity of tenure pose for the future development of the country. Also explored are the environmental problems that past tenure regimes have helped generate, and what might comprise a strategy for protecting fragile ecosystems. A second paper (LTC Research Paper 116) will dig more deeply into the institutional and historical roots of the tenure insecurity problems. A final report presented to the government in August 1992 described a Land Rationalization and Development Programme, which was derived from the twenty-one studies carried out by LTC.Land Economics/Use,

PPE unmasked: why health-care workers in Australia are inadequately protected against coronavirus

In Victoria, more than 1,100 health-care workers have now been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Some 11% of active cases are workers in the health-care sector. Health-care workers are reported to be among those fighting for life in Victorian intensive care units

Attention or Appreciation? The Impact of Feedback on Online Volunteering

We examine how different types of feedback influence online volunteer contributions in the context of online consultations for college entrance applications, which requires the volunteer counselor and the person receiving help (the counselee) to be online at the same time. We investigate the impact of two types of feedback on volunteers’ participation: 1) appreciation, as reflected in the number of positive ratings received by a counselor from counselees; and 2) attention, as reflected in the readership of a counselor’s profile page. We find that appreciation encourages the volunteer to engage in more helping behavior, likely because it can activate the volunteer’s altruistic motivation. In contrast, attention discourages volunteers to offer more help, possibly because they feel they have accomplished enough or because they feel passed over when they receive a lot of attention but few requests for consultations. The findings suggest that platform designers should encourage appreciation from those helped and provide more nuanced feedback about attention

Chunking and redintegration in verbal short-term memory.

Memory for verbal material improves when words form familiar chunks. But how does the improvement due to chunking come about? Two possible explanations are that the input might be actively recoded into chunks, each of which takes up less memory capacity than items not forming part of a chunk (a form of data compression), or that chunking is based on redintegration. If chunking is achieved by redintegration, representations of chunks exist only in long-term memory (LTM) and help to reconstructing degraded traces in short-term memory (STM). In 6 experiments using 2-alternative forced choice recognition and immediate serial recall we find that when chunks are small (2 words) they display a pattern suggestive of redintegration, whereas larger chunks (3 words), show a pattern consistent with data compression. This concurs with previous data showing that there is a cost involved in recoding material into chunks in STM. With smaller chunks this cost seems to outweigh the benefits of recoding words into chunks. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

The Tangled Web: Studying Online Fake News

Fake news has become a ubiquitous and extremely worrying phenomenon, capturing the attention of academics, governments, businesses, media, and the general public. Despite this notoriety, many questions remain to be answered about the generation, diffusion, consumption, and impacts of fake news that are spread through social media and online communities. A nascent body of IS research is emerging that addresses some of these questions. In this panel, we aim to motivate further IS research and produce an agenda by highlighting some of the important issues that need to be discussed with regard to fake news. We examine how IS scholarship can address these issues by drawing on its existing body of knowledge as well as considering less-studied but potentially fruitful areas of research

Learning nonwords: the Hebb repetition effect as a model of word learning.

Page and Norris [(2008). Is there a common mechanism underlying word-form learning and the Hebb repetition effect? Experimental data and a modelling framework. In A. Thorn & M. P. A. Page (Eds.), Interactions between short-term and long-term memory in the verbal domain; (2009). A model linking immediate serial recall, the Hebb repetition effect and the learning of phonological word forms. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1536), 3737-3753. doi:10.1098/rstb.2009.0173] have suggested that the Hebb [(1961). Distinctive features of learning in the higher animal. In J. F. Delafresnaye (Ed.), Brain mechanisms and learning (pp. 37-46). Oxford: Blackwell] repetition paradigm can be considered as a laboratory analogue of word learning. In Hebb learning experiments, the lists of items to be learned are presented as discrete sequences. In contrast, novel words are, by definition, always heard as a single coarticulated whole. Might this undermine the claim that Hebb learning can shed light on word learning? Here we report an experiment comparing learning sequences of isolated syllables with learning the same sequences spoken as a single coarticulated nonword. The pattern of learning was similar in the two cases, suggesting that the Hebb repetition paradigm can indeed provide valuable insights into the way novel word forms are learned