Establishing and Maintaining Monocarpic Meconopsis in Livingi Collections

While the large blue-flowered Meconopsis (such as M. betonicifolia) are popular now, it was the large monocarpic species that attracted most attention up until the 1970’s. The reasons for the latter’s fall from popularity include the fact that they have to be raised from seed each year, the lack of authenticated material, hybridisation in cultivation, climate change and fashion. Ease of hybridisation in cultivation means that it is difficult to maintain authenticated, wildsource material in cultivation and this limits research potential. In this paper the 14 species of subsection Eupolychaetia are briefly described, followed by discussions on building a collection and collecting seeds in the wild. A short description on seed propagation and storage concludes the paper

Beyond Choice: 'Thick' Volunteering and the case of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution

This article problematizes the dominant assumption in the literature on volunteer work that it is undertaken primarily as a matter of individual choice. Using findings from a qualitative study of volunteers at the not-for-profit organization, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, it is shown that volunteering exists within a dense web of social relations, especially familial and communal relations, so that volunteering is recursively constituted by structure and agency. The concept of 'thick volunteering' is developed to denote how in some cases these social relations, especially when the work involved is dangerous, may make volunteering especially significant

History, gendered space and organizational identity:An archival study of a university building

How do buildings contribute to an organization’s sense of what it is? In this article, we present the findings of a major archival study of an iconic university building to answer this question. Founded in the 19th century as a college for women, the building is analysed as a gendered space that embodies meanings that are selectively deployed and adapted by the present-day, now co-educational, university. By bringing together concepts of space and history so as to examine ‘space in history’ we show how over long periods of time what buildings ‘say’ about an organization change so that the past is both a legacy and a resource for shifting organizational identity

History, gendered space and organizational identity:An archival study of a university building

How do buildings contribute to an organization’s sense of what it is? In this article, we present the findings of a major archival study of an iconic university building to answer this question. Founded in the 19th century as a college for women, the building is analysed as a gendered space that embodies meanings that are selectively deployed and adapted by the present-day, now co-educational, university. By bringing together concepts of space and history so as to examine ‘space in history’ we show how over long periods of time what buildings ‘say’ about an organization change so that the past is both a legacy and a resource for shifting organizational identity

Meconopsis grandis

The history of Meconopsis grandis is described and the species analysed in the light of collections made since George Taylor’s monograph of the genus in 1934. Two new subspecies, subsp. orientalis Grey-Wilson and subsp. jumlaensis Grey-Wilson, are described based on both morphological and geographical separation. Hybrids between M. grandis and the allied M. baileyi are assessed. Techniques for the cultivation of M. grandis are also given

A Theological Aesthetic Of Musical Beauty, Drawing On The Notion Of Poetic Knowledge In The Work Of Jacques Maritain (1882-1973)

This thesis is an interdisciplinary study in theological aesthetics, integrating philosophy and music. It addresses musical beauty ontologically, and in particular how the cognition of beauty relates to the genesis of a musical work. The French philosopher Jacques Maritain is neglected outside Catholic philosophical tradition, yet within his oeuvre is a well-developed, sophisticated theory of art that speaks to the same kind of questions, mostly as they relate to poetry and painting. As regards music, his theory is allusive. Maritain was the foremost champion of Saint Thomas Aquinas in the twentieth century, and Thomistic thought and method permeates his aesthetics. The epistemological divergence from post-enlightenment theories which this represents is underscored throughout the thesis. Following a short introductory essay, the study explores musical sound in selected writings from the mid-Patristic period; the Fathers of East and West providing an aesthetic benchmark for those that came after, including Aquinas. This is followed by an exposition of Maritain’s revolutionary Art and Scholasticism, in which all references to music are collated, and basic themes of a Thomistic philosophy of music are articulated. The first half of the thesis ends with a chapter proposing how the creation of a work might be construed in terms of existence and Being. The three chapters in the latter half of the thesis are a speculative interpretation of Maritain’s Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. They aim to construct the realist account of musical creation and apprehension which Maritain infers a musician should undertake. At its heart lies a form of knowing that is perceptual, congenial, and even non-conceptual. Poetic knowledge exemplifies the experience of musical beauty and it is the closest artistic analogate to theological knowing. The thesis draws extensively on the writing of composers and incorporates reflection and analyses of musical works

Support vector machine and parametric wavelet-based texture classification of stem cell images

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Operations Research Center, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 117-121).This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Stem (cell research is one of the most promising and cutting-edge fields i the miedical sciences. It is believed that this innovative research will lead to life-saving treatments in the coming years. As part of their work, stem cell researchers must first determine which of their stem cell colonies are of sufficiently high quality to be suitable for experimental studies and therapeutic treatments. Since colony texture is a major discriminating feature in determining quality. we introduce a non-invasive, semi-automated texture-based stem cell colony classification methodology to aid researchers in colony quality control. We first consider the general problem of textural image segmentation. In a new approach to this problem. we characterize image texture by the subband energies of the image's wavelet decomposition, and we employ a non-parametric support vector machine to perform the classification that yields the segmentation. We also adapt a parametric wavelet-based classifier that utilizes the Kullback-Leibler distance. We apply both methods to a set of benchmark textural images, report low segmentation error rates and comment on the applicability of and tradeoffs between the non-parametric and parametric segmentation methods.(cont.) We then apply the two classifiers to the segmentation of stem cell colony images into regions of varying quality. This provides stem cell researchers with a rich set of descriptive graphical representations of their colonies to aid in quality control. From these graphical representatiolns, we extract colony-wise textural features to which we add colony-wise border features. Taken together, these features characterize overall colony quality. Using these features as inputs to a multiclass support vector machine, we successfully categorize full stem cell colonies into several quality categories. This methodology provides stem cell researchers with a novel, non-invasive quantitative quality control tool.by Christopher G. Jeffreys.S.M