Shakespeare and the Landscape of Death: Crossing the Boundaries of Life and the Afterlife

This essay explores how denying or ignoring the meanings of the spaces scripted for the dead, or “deathscapes” as anthropologist Lily Kong calls them, can lead Shakespeare’s characters to a spiritual death as well as a bodily one. I examine the cultural meanings of deathscapes in the early modern era--specifically the grave, graveyard and church--through the lens of the schism of Christianity caused by separation of Protestantism and Catholicism. When Hamlet, for example, makes the mistake of treating the spaces of the dead in ways that speak more to how Catholics define and use them, he puts himself in deadly peril. I argue, however, that this in no way makes Hamlet a “Catholic play,” as some critics have in the past claimed. Instead, I show how Shakespeare reinforces the tenets and ideas of Protestantism by punishing Hamlet’s lapses with such a thorough and unavoidable harshness that Hamlet’s anti-Protestant actions and behaviours serve as a warning to audience members. The fact that Hamlet appears to treat the deathscape with more than a nod to the medieval notion of le danse macabre reinforces his weak and unstable nature, and leaves the audience in some doubt as to his chances of meeting with a favourable outcome in the afterlife

Playing God: The Landscape of Resurrection in Romeo and Juliet

"Playing God" explores Shakespeare's use--or rather, misuse--of specific landscapes from the perspective of the transgression of morality through oppositional representations, actions, and beliefs that result in moral and physical destruction. That is, when his characters attempt to recreate the miracle of reincarnation upon those spaces scripted solely for the dead, they are punished not only for their inability to recognize the culturally acceptable meanings of the landscape but are also mirroring Satan’s sin by taking upon themselves the power of resurrection, which is meant for divine application only. By having his protagonists “playing God,” as it were, Shakespeare adds layers of both tragedy and flaw to their characters. Through his use of interior and exterior spaces, physical objects, and metaphysical understandings of religion and the religious canon, Shakespeare distances the concept of resurrection from the more accepted Christian meanings of redemption and rebirth, and redefines it through the use of what early modern Protestants would term witchcraft and black magic, forms of supernatural power against which the early modern English playgoer was vigorously indoctrinated. Characters such as Friar Lawrence, Romeo, and Juliet, then, are placed in both physical and metaphysical danger as they overreach their strictly human abilities and attempt to access the powers of the divine. It is possible, Shakespeare shows us, that we can misuse landscape in terms of both the dead and those who are seemingly brought back to life

“Thou Map of Woe”: Mapping the Feminine in Titus Andronicus and King Lear

In this article, I claim that Shakespeare moves beyond the archetypal early modern definitions of land, and the maps that represent it, as benefitting from masculine intervention and argue that he envisions unnecessary masculine interventions regarding the performativity of the feminine in terms of landscape and cartography to be harmful to both the perpetrator and object of the intervention. He acknowledges that there is a connection between how his male characters—specifically, fathers—define their nations and their daughters, but warns that demonstrating a lack of trust or understanding in the agency of women and attempting to overwrite them the way boundaries are changed on a map results in tragedy for all involved. I use Judith Butler’s concept of the performativity of gender to demonstrate that such masculine interventions often cannot differentiate between normative and subversive acts, which compounds the dangers of such interferences. Using both his early and later plays, specifically Titus Andronicus and The Tragedy of King Lear, I show that Shakespeare portrays the desire to treat women as territories or blank maps and to deny his female characters the ability to make their own choices as problematic and dangerous

Straddling Genres: McKillp and the Landscape of the Female Hero-Identity

This is a discussion of Patricia McKillip's "Fool's Run" using a feminist critique

On the importance of meteorological parameters in processes affecting the chemical composition of the tropsphere

Investigating the interaction of meteorology and chemistry in the troposphere is important for the identification of the processes which drive the evolution of tropospheric composition in a changing climate. It does not only improve the scientific understanding of the troposphere, which plays multiple roles in the Earth’s climate. But these investigations also help to advance our predictions of air quality. Accounting for even more realistic meteorological influences on Surface-Atmosphere interactions becomes more desirable in Earth System modelling because global warming leads to more frequent and intense weather extremes. Chemistry-Climate models deliver an essential contribution to this research as they allow covering a wide range of interacting processes whose parametrisations vary in complexity. Thereby, the investigation of tropospheric ozone (O3) is central, since enhanced O3 exposure harms humans as well as vegetation. Also, it accounts for a relevant fraction of the radiative forcing. Most importantly, O3 plays a key role in tropospheric chemistry involving radicals, nitrogen oxides (NOx=NO+NO2) and volatile organic compounds (VOC). Its evolution in the troposphere, especially at ground level, also depends significantly on exchange processes with vegetation. Despite decades of research in this area, Chemistry-Climate models significantly overestimate tropospheric O3 in the Northern Hemisphere (NH). However, these models generally have an incomplete representation of the O3 formation and removal processes which are modulated by weather. The atmospheric chemistry model ECHAM5/MESSy (EMAC) used in this study is no exception. This thesis assesses how the inclusion of meteorological dependencies affects tropospheric chemistry and surface exchanges of O3 and its precursors and ultimately changes the model prediction of tropospheric O3 in EMAC. First, dry deposition as a significant sink of trace gases, especially O3, is considered here. The study focuses on the uptake of trace gases by vegetation, which happens to a considerable extent via the plant’s pores (stomata). A roughly equally important uptake pathway has been proposed to be deposition to the wax covering of the leaves (cuticle). The default parameterisation for dry deposition in EMAC is hardly sensitive to local meteorological conditions (e.g., humidity) and barely represent nonstomatal deposition. In this study, a dry deposition scheme including these missing features is developed in EMAC, having an effect on O3 and its precursors. The new scheme predicts a significant enhancement of trace gas’ dry deposition, whose variation with local meteorology generally show more realistic results when compared to site measurements. However, the analysis also identifies the representation of local meteorology as a remaining significant source of uncertainty in dry deposition modelling. Additional model simulations focus on the accurate representation of tropospheric chemistry by enabling a more complex chemical mechanism and advanced biogenic VOC emissions. This investigation additionally demonstrates the importance of enhanced dry deposition of oxygenated VOCs which are sufficiently soluble to be efficiently taken up by wet surfaces. This additional non-stomatal uptake lowers the burden of many trace gases, ultimately leading to a reduction of the surface O3 model bias towards measurements. Second, the impact of water vapour forming complexes with peroxy radicals on the O3 chemistry is explored. The formation of stable complexes affects the reaction kinetics, generally leading to a weaker radical propagation. To assess its global importance, the available kinetic data for three reactions, central to O3 chemistry, is included in EMAC. Among the modified kinetics, the newly added formation channel of nitric acid (HNO3) dominates, significantly decreasing NOx and thus the formation of tropospheric O3. Accounting for water-radical complexes overall lowers the tropospheric O3 burden by 47 Tg a-1 (12 %) and the discrepancy of EMAC towards observations is significantly reduced. Third, the model representation of isoprene emissions, an important O3 precursor, is extended with a currently missing dependency on soil moisture. Accounting for the drought stress on isoprene emissions confers a higher model sensitivity to meteorology. Globally, this yields a reduction of the annual emissions by 22 % leading to a decreased O3 production. Overall, the thesis demonstrates how the inclusion of sensitivities to meteorology improve the model representation of various processes and the simulation of tropospheric O3

Lehren und Lernen mit digitalen Medien unter Berücksichtigung der Zusammenhänge zwischen relevanten Professionswissensdomänen und Persönlichkeitsmerkmalen von Lehramtsstudierenden

Die vorliegende Dissertation soll einen relevanten Beitrag zur Verbesserung der universitären Ausbildung angehender Lehrkräfte leisten. Einführend wird der Fokus auf relevante Professionswissensdomänen unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von digitalen Fähigkeiten gelegt. Letztere werden darüber hinaus im Hinblick auf die durch die COVID-19-Pandemie bedingten Herausforderungen im Distanzlernen spezifiziert. Hieran anschließend werden Chancen und Herausforderungen digitaler Medien für den naturwissenschaftlichen Unterricht skizziert. Unter exemplarischer Betrachtung des Fachs Biologiedidaktik widmet sich ein erstes Forschungsprojekt den Zusammenhängen zwischen Persönlichkeitsmerkmalen und der Innovationsfähigkeit Lehramtsstudierender. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass ähnliche Zusammenhänge bestehen, die zuvor in Studien aus der Unternehmenswelt berichtet wurden. Im Rahmen eines zweiten Forschungsprojekts konnte aufgezeigt werden, dass sich die Werte auf den Dimensionen des Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge- und des Big Five-Persönlichkeitsmodells bei Lehramtsstudierenden vor und nach der Umstellung auf das COVID-19-bedingte Distanzlernen voneinander unterscheiden. Im Rahmen eines dritten Forschungsprojekts wurde schließlich gezielt auf die Lernförderlichkeit digitaler Unterrichtselemente fokussiert, indem eine Gruppe Lehramtsstudierender, die die Bestimmungsübung Botanik mit einer App absolviert hat, mit einer zweiten Gruppe verglichen wurde, die die Lerninhalte auf traditionellem Wege erarbeitet hatte. Es zeigten sich keine signifikanten Unterschiede zwischen den Gruppen bezüglich des Wissenserwerbs, wohl aber bezüglich der akkuraten Einschätzung der eigenen Fähigkeiten, wenn man die Korrelationen zwischen Botanik-CK-Selbstkonzept und tatsächlich gezeigter Leistung im Wissenstest betrachtet. Zum Abschluss werden die Ergebnisse dieser drei Forschungsarbeiten im Hinblick auf ihre praktische Relevanz kritisch diskutiert und zukünftige Perspektiven herausgearbeitet

A revised dry deposition scheme for land-atmosphere exchange of trace gases in ECHAM/MESSy v2.54

Dry deposition to vegetation is a major sink of ground-level ozone and is responsible for about 20 % of the total tropospheric ozone loss. Its parameterization in atmospheric chemistry models represents a significant source of uncertainty for the global tropospheric ozone budget and might account for the mismatch with observations. The model used in this study, the Modular Earth Submodel System version 2 (MESSy2) linked to the fifth-generation European Centre Hamburg general circulation model (ECHAM5) as an atmospheric circulation model (EMAC), is no exception. Like many global models, EMAC employs a "resistance in series" scheme with the major surface deposition via plant stomata which is hardly sensitive to meteorology, depending only on solar radiation. Unlike many global models, however, EMAC uses a simplified high resistance for nonstomatal deposition which makes this pathway negligible in the model. However, several studies have shown this process to be comparable in magnitude to the stomatal uptake, especially during the night over moist surfaces. Hence, we present here a revised dry deposition in EMAC including meteorological adjustment factors for stomatal closure and an explicit cuticular pathway. These modifications for the three stomatal stress functions have been included in the newly developed MESSy VERTEX submodel, i.e. a process model describing the vertical exchange in the atmospheric boundary layer, which will be evaluated for the first time here. The scheme is limited by a small number of different surface types and generalized parameters. The MESSy submodel describing the dry deposition of trace gases and aerosols (DDEP) has been revised accordingly. The comparison of the simulation results with measurement data at four sites shows that the new scheme enables a more realistic representation of dry deposition. However, the representation is strongly limited by the local meteorology. In total, the changes increase the dry deposition velocity of ozone up to a factor of 2 globally, whereby the highest impact arises from the inclusion of cuticular uptake, especially over moist surfaces. This corresponds to a 6 % increase of global annual dry deposition loss of ozone resulting globally in a slight decrease of ground-level ozone but a regional decrease of up to 25 %. The change of ozone dry deposition is also reasoned by the altered loss of ozone precursors. Thus, the revision of the process parameterization as documented here has, among others, the potential to significantly reduce the overestimation of tropospheric ozone in global models.Peer reviewe

Symmetry breaking and gap opening in two-dimensional hexagonal lattices

9 páginas, 3 figuras.-- et al.The inhibition in wave propagation at band gap energies plays a central role in many areas of technology such as electronics (electron gaps), nanophotonics (light gaps) and phononics (acoustic gaps), among others. Here we demonstrate that metal surfaces featuring free-electron-like bands may become semiconducting by periodic nanostructuration. We combine scanning tunneling spectroscopy and angle-resolved photoemisssion to accurately determine the energy-dependent local density of states and band structure of the Ag/Cu(111) noble metal interface patterned with an array of triangular dislocations, demonstrating the existence of a 25 meV band gap that extends over the entire surface Brillouin zone. We prove that this gap is a general consequence of symmetry reduction in close-packed metallic overlayers; in particular, we show that the gap opening is due to the symmetry lowering of the wave vector group at the K point from C3v to C3.This work was supported in part by the Spanish MICINN (MAT2007-66050, MAT2007-63083 and Consolider NanoLight.es), the EU (NMP4-SL-2008-213669-ENSEMBLE), the Basque Government (IT-257-07) and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).Peer reviewe

Intronic small nucleolar RNAs regulate host gene splicing through base pairing with their adjacent intronic sequences

Background Small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) are abundant noncoding RNAs best known for their involvement in ribosomal RNA maturation. In mammals, most expressed snoRNAs are embedded in introns of longer genes and produced through transcription and splicing of their host. Intronic snoRNAs were long viewed as inert passengers with little effect on host expression. However, a recent study reported a snoRNA influencing the splicing and ultimate output of its host gene. Overall, the general contribution of intronic snoRNAs to host expression remains unclear. Results Computational analysis of large-scale human RNA-RNA interaction datasets indicates that 30% of detected snoRNAs interact with their host transcripts. Many snoRNA-host duplexes are located near alternatively spliced exons and display high sequence conservation suggesting a possible role in splicing regulation. The study of the model SNORD2-EIF4A2 duplex indicates that the snoRNA interaction with the host intronic sequence conceals the branch point leading to decreased inclusion of the adjacent alternative exon. Extended SNORD2 sequence containing the interacting intronic region accumulates in sequencing datasets in a cell-type-specific manner. Antisense oligonucleotides and mutations that disrupt the formation of the snoRNA-intron structure promote the splicing of the alternative exon, shifting the EIF4A2 transcript ratio away from nonsense-mediated decay. Conclusions Many snoRNAs form RNA duplexes near alternative exons of their host transcripts, placing them in optimal positions to control host output as shown for the SNORD2-EIF4A2 model system. Overall, our study supports a more widespread role for intronic snoRNAs in the regulation of their host transcript maturation