The past that was differs little from the past that was not: Pictographs and Petroglyphs in Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West

This literary analysis expands the scholarly canon concerning Cormac McCarthy’s regional writing by identifying the purpose of pictographs and petroglyphs in Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West (1985). Not only do pictographs and petroglyphs tie the narrative to place, but they create a commentary regarding the erasure of Native American histories in the United States. These images record Native American memory and presence in the landscape, and by referencing them, McCarthy confronts concepts of exposure and shame, which facilitates conversations concerning Native American genocide. A close analysis of character interaction with and scene placement of these images supports this argument. I trace the shift of medium used to record pictographs and petroglyphs with emphasis on Plains Indian adornment, ledger drawings, and rock images, and I give particular attention to Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, and Shoshone actors in the United States’ national drama of land acquisition, otherwise known as Manifest Destiny

Firms Beware! Your Response Matters

On April 9, 2017, security personnel dragged a doctor off United Airlines Flight #3411 when he refused to give up his seat on an overbooked flight. Another passenger videotaped the entire incident, sharing it on social media. The video went viral on Twitter with over 87,000 shares and more than 6.8 million views in less than 24 hours. The following day, the CEO of the company responded to the public’s criticism in a statement and internal email to the company (that later went public). His remarks included an apology, but he also attempted to justify how the encounter was handled, casting blame on the disruptive and belligerent actions of the doctor. However, video proof and other passengers disputed these accusations. This failed service experience and poor firm response damaged United Airlines’ reputation, in addition to causing a 4% drop in the company’s stock price. United Airlines also reached a confidential settlement of an unknown amount with the doctor. Finally, the company instituted policy changes offering passengers up to $10,000 as an incentive for changing flights. At the end of this saga, were people ultimately satisfied with the firm’s response? Did the service failure and initial poor firm response affect future purchase intent from those who learned of this incident via social media? The ability for consumers to quickly share service failures electronically to the masses is an ongoing concern for brands and firms alike. What affects whether people decide to share service failure via electronic word-of-mouth? What affects satisfaction with the firm’s response to the service failure, after it has been shared electronically? This paper proposes a conceptual model comprised of three major constructs: service failure, negative eWOM, and firm response. Research propositions are offered that examine the relationships between and among these three constructs

Responding to a Democratic Deficit: Limiting the Powers and the Term of the Chief Justice of the United States

This essay questions the wisdom and the constitutionality of the packet of powers now held by the Chief Justice of the United States. Many of the current attributes of the position are relatively recent additions, generated during the twentieth century through the interaction of a sequence of congressional decisions and the leadership of Chief Justices William Howard Taft, Earl Warren, Warren Burger, and William Rehnquist. These jurists responded to new demands as national law grew in importance in the American polity, and they introduced new ideas that gave the federal judiciary the capacity to function as a programmatic, agenda-setting agency. The reconfiguring of judicial power and structure within the federal system took place as, more generally, democratic mandates were reinterpreted to insist both that women and men of all colors had rights enforceable by courts and that the judiciary ought to include individuals diverse enough to capture an expanding class of litigants. Further, as concerns emerged about how, through popular electoral processes, individuals could entrench their authority for unduly long periods of time, American democracy revisited its institutions of electoral politics in the hopes (not yet well realized) of imposing constraints on the power of elected officials to entrench their own or their parties\u27 power. It is the interaction among these factors—the developing democratic principles, the long-held commitments to separation of powers and independent adjudication, and the new range of tasks accruing to the Chief Justice—that makes troubling the range of powers now possessed by the chief justiceship. One individual can serve for decades as a life-tenured administrator-adjudicator. With such tenure in office, one person has a unique opportunity to forward positions through two channels: by building a body of doctrine in case law and by building a set of policies in administrative directives. When an individual is asked to be instrumental on behalf of the billion-dollar agency called The Federal Courts (with some two thousand judges, thirty thousand in staff, and hundreds of facilities) and also to be successful jurisprudentially as a disinterested adjudicator, one role cannot help but bleed into the other. Each role amplifies the power of distracts from, and imposes costs on the other. Such conflation undermines democratic principles and the legitimacy of adjudication by giving the few individuals who hold the chief justiceship a disproportionate impact on American law. The history of the developments of the twentieth century makes plain the plasticity of the packet of activities associated with the chief justiceship. Because the powers are artifacts of custom and statute rather than the Constitution, Congress as well as the Chief Justice can and should revisit these powers to revise the charter of that role

Nucleon-Deuteron Scattering from an Effective Field Theory

We use an effective field theory to compute low-energy nucleon-deuteron scattering. We obtain the quartet scattering length using low energy constants entirely determined from low-energy nucleon-nucleon scattering. We find $a_{th}=6.33$ fm, to be compared to $a_{exp}=6.35\pm 0.02$ fm.Comment: 8 pages, Latex, epsfig, figures include

Untersuchungen zur Flora der epiphytischen Moose der südlichen Drakensberge (Südafrika)

Im März 1996 wurde in den südlichen Drakensbergen eine Bestandsaufnahme der epiphytischen Moose durchgeführt. Dabei wurden 38 Moosarten, 12 Leber- und 26 Laubmoosarten, nachgewiesen. Die höchsten Artenzahlen wurden in einem Podocarpus-Wald gefunden, was auf ein feuchteres Bestandsklima und Schutz vor Feuer zurückgeführt wird. Eine Auswertung der Arealtypenspektren ergab, daß die Moosepiphyten aller untersuchten Waldtypen als auch ihre Trägerbäume nähere phytogeographische Bezüge zur afromontanen Vegetation haben, wohingegen in der gesamten Phanerogamen-Flora der Drakensberge das südafrikanische Florenelement überwiegt.In March 1996 an inventory of the epiphytic bryophytes was made in the Drakensberge in South Africa. Thirty-eight bryophyte species, 12 species of hepatics and 26 species of mosses, were found. The highest numbers of species were found in a Podocarpus forest, which presumably depends on a higher humidity and protection against fire. A phytogeographical analysis revealed that the epiphytic bryophytes as well as the host trees show closer relationships to the afromontane flora, whereas the total phanerogamic flora of the Drakensberge shows closer relationships to the Cape flora

Ein Beitrag zur Moosflora von Benin

Benin ist eines der bryologisch am wenigsten erforschten Gebiete Afrikas. Anläßlich einer Inventarisierung des Forstreservats von Lama wurden 11 Arten von Laubmoosen und 12 Arten von Lebermoosen festgestellt, von denen 7 Laubmoosarten und alle Lebermoosarten Neunachweise für Benin sind.Benin is bryologically one of the least known African countries. An inventory of the Lama forest reserve revealed 11 species of mosses and 12 species of hepatics, of which 7 species of mosses and all species of hepatics are new to Benin

Schwarzafrika: Weißer Fleck auf dem Nachrichtenglobus. Die Berichterstattung über Afrika südlich der Sahara in der überregionalen deutschen Presse. Eine lnhaltsanalyse

"Innerhalb eines Jahrzehnts ist Afrika sowohl von der politischen wie auch von der publizistischen Landkarte verschwunden", urteilte Udo Ulfkotte, Kommentator und Afrika-Experte bei der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung, im Sommer 1998. Dabei überschlugen sich Ende der 1980er und Anfang der 1990er Jahre in Afrika die Ereignisse. In Madagaskar gingen hunderttausende Menschen wochenlang für Demokratie auf die Straße. In anderen Ländern, zum Beispiel in Benin, fanden sich alle gesellschaftlichen Gruppen zu einer nationalen Verfassungskonferenz ein. Einparteiensysteme und Militärregierungen, die in Afrika bis dato die Regel waren, wurden von diesem "Wind of Change" hinweggefegt. Diktatoren wie Kenneth Kaunda in Sambia mußten in freien Mehrheitswahlen die Macht an oppositionelle Wahlsieger abgeben. Trotz Rückschlägen wie Wahlbetrug und Menschenrechtsverletzungen ist die demokratische Bilanz auf dem schwarzafrikanischen Kontinent, dessen Einwohner jahrhundertelang Unterdrückung ausgesetzt waren, beeindruckend. Von diesen guten Nachrichten aus Afrika ist in Deutschland wenig angekommen. Das Afrika dieses Jahrzehnts in deutschen Köpfen ist geprägt durch Bilder von den Flüchtlingslagern Ruandas und in Ostzaire, von massakrierten Menschen in Somalia und Kindern mit Hungerbäuchen im Sudan. (...) EnglishUte Dilg: Subsaharan Africa: Lacking in media reporting. Analysis of the information policy on subsaharan Africa in the nation-wide German press Wars and refugee-camps, people dying of hunger and diseases are the dominating features of Subsaharan Africa in the 1990th that are put forward by media broadcasting in Germany. But Africa consists of a great variety of cultures, peoples and languages. Who knows about the normal life of millions of Africans in the peaceful states of Subsaharan Africa? Who has heard about many Africans fighting for democracy, human rights and better living conditions? The author pointsout that the negative image of the African continent dates back many centuries. Knowing this she analyses the coverage of Subsaharan Africa in the nation-wide German papers and news magazines. Additionally she questioned their correspondents in Africa to find out about their problems in obtaining information and about their role as Europeans in Africa and the cultural gap they are facing in everyday life. Despite a certain political correctness in the news coverage the results of the analysis shows that the reporting lacks in-depth information about many aspects of the life in Africa. This forsters existing stereotypes and is a great hindrance for real communication among cultures

Disambiguating Temporal Connectors into TimeML relations

The project is about learning temporal relations from unannotated text. This effort builds on the work of Lapata M. and Lascarides, A. (2006): Learning sentence-internal temporal relations, who developed a system that uses temporal connectors (after, before, while, when, as, once, until and since) in unannotated text to build a system to determine intra-sentential temporal relations. In an extension of this approach, they used their system to determine TimeML relations (before, includes, begins, ends and simultaneous) between events. Since temporal connectors do not translate one-to-one to TimeML relations, the main focus of this project is on disambiguating the temporal connectors into TimeML relations to preprocess the training data and use the system to directly learn the TimeML relations. This is done using a rule-based system and evaluated on the TimeBank corpus

The role of HIRA in Cardiovascular Development

HIRA was originally identified in the group of Peter Scambler as a candidate gene for DiGeorge syndrome and was later identified to deposit the histone variant H3.3. Constitutively null Hira embryos all die between embryonic day (E) 6.5 and 10.5, with some mutants presenting with heart defects. A conditional allele was therefore employed to examine the role of HIRA during heart development. Conditional ablation in the cardiogenic mesoderm (Mesp1Cre) led to surface oedema, ventricular septum defects (VSD) and embryonic lethality. More specific Cre drivers have shown that HIRA is essential in cardiomyocytes (Nkx2.5Cre) but is not in endothelial cells (Tie2Cre). RNAseq analysis and in situ hybridization were used to detect an upregulation of the troponins Tnni2 and Tnnt3 and a decreased expression of Epha3, a gene necessary for fusion of the interventricular septum with the endocardial cushions. In addition, immunostaining of Troponin C (TnC) emphasised a disorganisation of the contracting meshwork of myofibril. ChIPseq experiment revealed that HIRA binds to GAGA rich DNA sequence in the embryonic heart and is enriched at the common enhancer of Tnni2/Tnnt3 (TLT). Furthermore, in vitro and in vivo co-immunoprecipitations revealed that HIRA interacts with WHSC1 a protein thought to play a major role in Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome, as well as BRG1, a chromatin remodelling complex required for cardiogenesis. WHSC1 also interacts with NKX2.5, a major cardiac transcription factor that binds the same regulatory TLT site as HIRA. Altogether, this work gives evidence for a specific requirement of HIRA in mesodermal cardiac progenitors during heart development. HIRA influences contractility, troponins expression and the endothelial to mesenchymal transition in the cardiac cushions