It Seemed a Lucky Thing: The Self as Art in the Work of Sylvia Plath

“It Seemed a Lucky Thing” centers a discussion of author and self around the works of Sylvia Plath, primarily using her novel The Bell Jar and two of her Ariel works, “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy”. Blending together various ideas of self-construction, ranging from Kierkegaard’s aesthetics to Foucault’s “What is an Author?” to issues of psychiatry as a method of social control, the work defines its principle term “self-authorship” as the purposeful construction of self-image inherent in both decisions within a lived life and in the process of creating written art. Self-authorship and its complications are addressed both in context of Esther Greenwood, the main character of The Bell Jar, and in context of Sylvia Plath herself. Her poetry is intensely analyzed, revealing difficult and at times confounding questions. What is “honest experience”? How far can we fabricate our experience? What lies within the satire and irony of The Bell Jar’s multi-layered narrative? Why and how does Plath force the reader to see both fiction and non-fiction, to question intention and meaning, and create friction in separating and combining the two? What does this reveal about the nature of a poem and of a novel? While ultimately much of what is revealed with self-authorship and Plath is somewhat paradoxical and practically unanswerable, the work, at the very least, addresses interesting questions around the nature of creation, both of art and of self

Volcans de la Chaîne des Puys (Massif Central, France) : point sur la chronologie Vasset-Kilian-Pariou-Chopine

ThermoluminescenceInternational audienceLa compilation des datations radiocarbone de bois carbonisés par leurs déferlantes basales, complétée par des observations téphrochronologiques, permet d'avancer que le puy Chopine, il y a environ 9700 ans, a précédé le Vasset et le Kilian, tous deux péné-contemporains, vers 9400-9300 ans. Les produits du Nouveau Pariou sont recouverts par ceux d'un volcan trachytique, probablement le Kilian. Sous les produits explosifs initiaux du Nouveau Pariou (faciès "Traversin"), les trachytes à amphibole qui avaient été attribués au Kilian, sont vraisemblablement une forme méconnue des trachytes de la phase acide du Pariou lui-même. L'ordre chronologique des éruptions serait donc : Chopine/Pariou/?Vasset?/Kilian, la position du Vasset, hypothétique, restant à confirme

Police Crime Arrests in the United States, 2011

Purpose – The purpose of the study is to provide empirical data on cases of police crime arrests during the year 2011. The study identifies and describes incidents in which nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers were arrested for one or more criminal offenses. Research Design & Method – The study is a quantitative content analysis of news articles identified through the Google News search engine using 48 automated Google Alerts queries. The unit of analysis in this study is criminal arrest case (not individual arrested officer). Intercoder Reliability – The Krippendorf’s alpha coefficient is strong (Krippendorf’s α = .9153) across the variables in the study. The overall level of simple percentage of agreement between coders across all of the variables (97.7%) also established a high degree of reliability. Research limitations/implications – The data are limited to cases that involve an official arrest. The data are also the result of a filtering process that includes the exercise of media discretion as to types of news stories reported and content devoted to particular news stories. Practical Implications – The study demonstrates that an annual report on police crime arrests can provide empirical data to better understand this neglected area of research. Originality/value – The study augments the few existing studies on the topic and is the only one known to describe the phenomenon in an annual report of police crime arrests as it occurs within law enforcement agencies nationwide

Projection of snowfall extremes in the French Alps as a function of elevation and global warming level

Following the projected increase in extreme precipitation, an increase in extreme snowfall may be expected in cold regions, e.g. for high latitudes or at high elevations. By contrast, in low/medium elevation areas, the probability to experience rainfall instead of snowfall is generally projected to increase due to warming conditions. In mountainous areas, despite the likely existence of these contrasted trends according to elevation, changes in extreme snowfall with warming remain poorly quantified. This paper assesses projected changes in heavy and extreme snowfall, i.e. in mean annual maxima and 100-year return levels, in the French Alps as a function of elevation and global warming level using a recent methodology based on non-stationary extreme value models. This methodology is applied to an ensemble of 20 adjusted GCM-RCM pairs from the EURO-CORDEX experiment under the scenario RCP8.5. available for each of the 23 massifs of the French Alps from 1951 to 2100, and every 300 m of elevations. Results are provided as relative or absolute changes computed w.r.t. current climate conditions, at the massif scale and averaged over all available massifs. Overall, mean annual maxima are projected to decrease below 3000 m and increase above 3600 m, while 100-year return levels are projected to decrease below 2400 m and increase above 3300 m. At elevations in between, values are on average projected to increase until +3 &deg;C of global warming, and then decrease. At +4 &deg;C, average relative changes in mean annual maxima and 100-year return levels respectively vary from &minus;26 % (&minus;7 kg m&minus;2) and &minus;15 % (&minus;11 kg m&minus;2) at 900 m, to +3 % (+3 kg m&minus;2) and +8 % (+13 kg m&minus;2) at 3600 m. Finally, for each global warming level, we compute the elevation threshold that separates contrasted trends, i.e. where the average relative change equals zero. This elevation threshold is projected to rise between +1.5 &deg;C and +4 &deg;C: from 3000 m to 3350 m for mean annual maxima, and from 2600 m to 3000 m for 100-year return levels. These results have implications for the management of risks related to extreme snowfall.</p

Profit-oriented disassembly-line balancing

As product and material recovery has gained importance, disassembly volumes have increased, justifying construction of disassembly lines similar to assembly lines. Recent research on disassembly lines has focused on complete disassembly. Unlike assembly, the current industry practice involves partial disassembly with profit-maximization or cost-minimization objectives. Another difference between assembly and disassembly is that disassembly involves additional precedence relations among tasks due to processing alternatives or physical restrictions. In this study, we define and solve the profit-oriented partial disassembly-line balancing problem. We first characterize different types of precedence relations in disassembly and propose a new representation scheme that encompasses all these types. We then develop the first mixed integer programming formulation for the partial disassembly-line balancing problem, which simultaneously determines (1) the parts whose demand is to be fulfilled to generate revenue, (2) the tasks that will release the selected parts under task and station costs, (3) the number of stations that will be opened, (4) the cycle time, and (5) the balance of the disassembly line, i.e. the feasible assignment of selected tasks to stations such that various types of precedence relations are satisfied. We propose a lower and upper-bounding scheme based on linear programming relaxation of the formulation. Computational results show that our approach provides near optimal solutions for small problems and is capable of solving larger problems with up to 320 disassembly tasks in reasonable time

Dental Shape Variation and Phylogenetic Signal in the Rattini Tribe Species of Mainland Southeast Asia

We would like to thank Pierre-Henri Fabre for providing the phylogeny for this study. The collection of specimens used was funded by the French ANR Biodiversity, grant ANR 07 BDIV 012 CERoPath project (www.ceropath.org), and by the French ANR CP&ES, grant ANR 11 CPEL 002 BiodivHealthSEA project (www.biodivhealthsea.org). We also thank Madoudou Garba and Gauthier Dobigny (CBGP-IRD) for providing additional specimens. We greatly thank all local communities and their leaders for permission and invaluable help during field trapping. Special thanks to the CERoPath and BiodivHealthSEA teams and the drivers for their invaluable help during fieldwork. We would also like to thank Maeve McMahon for help with manuscript editing and preparation.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Predicting head motion from prosodic and linguistic features

Hönemann A, Evin D, Hadad AJ, Mixdorff H, Fagel S. Predicting head motion from prosodic and linguistic features. In: Proceedings of AVSP 2013. 2013

Evolution of dependoparvoviruses across geological timescales – implications for design of AAV-based gene therapy vectors

Endogenous viral elements (EVEs) are genetic remnants of viruses that have integrated into host genomes millions of years ago and retained as heritable elements passed on to offspring until present-day. As a result, EVEs provide an opportunity to analyze the genomes of extinct viruses utilizing these genomic viral fossils to study evolution of viruses over large timescales. Analysis of sequences from near full-length EVEs of dependoparvoviral origin identified within three mammalian taxa, Whippomorpha (whales and hippos), Vespertillionade (smooth-nosed bats), and Lagomorpha (rabbits, hares, and pikas), indicates that distinct ancestral dependoparvovirus species integrated into these host genomes approximately 77-23 million years ago (MYA). These ancestral viruses are unique relative to modern adeno-associated viruses (AAVs), and distinct from extant species of genus Dependoparvovirus. These EVE sequences show characteristics previously unseen in modern, mammalian AAVs, but instead appear more similar to the more primitive, autonomously-replicating and pathogenic waterfowl dependoparvoviruses. Phylogeny reconstruction suggests that the whippomorph EVE orthologue derives from exogenous ancestors of autonomous and highly pathogenic dependoparvovirus lineages, believed to have uniquely co-evolved with waterfowl birds to present date. In contrast, ancestors of the two other mammalian orthologues (Lagomorpha and Vespertilionidae) likely shared the same lineage as all other known mammalian exogenous AAVs. Comparative in silico analysis of the EVE genomes revealed remarkable overall conservation of AAV rep and cap genes, despite millions of years of integration within the host germline. Modeling these proteins identified unexpected variety, even between orthologues, in previously defined capsid viral protein (VP) variable regions (VRs), especially in those related to the threefold and fivefold symmetry axes of the capsid. Moreover, the normally well-conserved phospholipase A2 (PLA2) domain of the predicted minor VP1 also exhibited a high degree of sequence variance. These findings may indicate unique biological properties for these virus “fossils” relative to extant dependoparvoviruses and suggest key regions to explore within capsid sequences that may confer novel properties for engineered gene therapy vectors based upon paleovirology data