Together We’ll Make Magic: Exploring the Relationship Between Empathy and Literature Using Ruth Ozeki’s “A Tale for the Time Being”

My project is devoted to untangling the often-misunderstood and misapplied subject of empathy, particularly as it relates to the reading process. I begin with a brief background of the term’s history and the debate surrounding its use by researchers in the fields of both Psychology and Philosophy of Mind. I then apply this critical understanding of a commonly invoked term to a close reading of contemporary novel A Tale for The Time Being by Japanese-American novelist Ruth Ozeki. Dedicated primarily to the fictional story of Nao Yasutani, a teenage girl struggling with her recent move back to Japan after a childhood spent living in America, this text is unique for its use of a character functioning as a “mediating reader”: Nao’s story is told not in ordinary first-person prose, but in the form of entries in a diary which has been discovered and read by a Japanese-American novelist happening to share the name and much of the identity of Ruth Ozeki herself. By examining the role played by empathy in the lives of both Nao and Ruth as characters sharing a relationship entirely mediated by narrative text, I reach an understanding of the reading process as an inherently empathetic act, and an understanding of readerly empathy as the key to seeing beyond the binary implied by the phrase “reader-author relations”

Comparison of advanced gravitational-wave detectors

We compare two advanced designs for gravitational-wave antennas in terms of their ability to detect two possible gravitational wave sources. Spherical, resonant mass antennas and interferometers incorporating resonant sideband extraction (RSE) were modeled using experimentally measurable parameters. The signal-to-noise ratio of each detector for a binary neutron star system and a rapidly rotating stellar core were calculated. For a range of plausible parameters we found that the advanced LIGO interferometer incorporating RSE gave higher signal-to-noise ratios than a spherical detector resonant at the same frequency for both sources. Spheres were found to be sensitive to these sources at distances beyond our galaxy. Interferometers were sensitive to these sources at far enough distances that several events per year would be expected

Gravitational Radiation from Rotational Instabilities in Compact Stellar Cores with Stiff Equations of State

We carry out 3-D numerical simulations of the dynamical instability in rapidly rotating stars initially modeled as polytropes with n = 1.5, 1.0, and 0.5. The calculations are done with a SPH code using Newtonian gravity, and the gravitational radiation is calculated in the quadrupole limit. All models develop the global m=2 bar mode, with mass and angular momentum being shed from the ends of the bar in two trailing spiral arms. The models then undergo successive episodes of core recontraction and spiral arm ejection, with the number of these episodes increasing as n decreases: this results in longer-lived gravitational wave signals for stiffer models. This instability may operate in a stellar core that has expended its nuclear fuel and is prevented from further collapse due to centrifugal forces. The actual values of the gravitational radiation amplitudes and frequencies depend sensitively on the radius of the star R_{eq} at which the instability develops.Comment: 39 pages, uses Latex 2.09. To be published in the Dec. 15, 1996 issue of Physical Review D. 21 figures (bitmapped). Originals available in compressed Postscript format at ftp://zonker.drexel.edu/papers/bars

The Web Archives Workbench (WAW) Tool Suite: Taking an Archival Approach to the Preservation of Web Content

The ECHO DEPository (also known as ECHO DEP, an abbreviation for Exploring Collaborations to Harvest Objects in a Digital Environment for Preservation) is an NDIIPP-partner project led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in collaboration with OCLC and a consortium of partners, including five state libraries and archives. A core deliverable of the project???s first phase was OCLC???s development of the Web Archives Workbench (WAW), an opensource suite of Web archiving tools for identifying, describing, and harvesting Web-based content for ingestion into an external digital repository. Released in October 2007, the suite is designed to bridge the gap between manual selection and automated capture based on the ???Arizona Model,??? which applies a traditional aggregate-based archival approach to Web archiving. Aggregate-based archiving refers to archiving items by group or in series, rather than individually. Core functionality of the suite includes the ability to identify Web content of potential interest through crawls of ???seed??? URLs and the domains they link to; tools for creating and managing metadata for association with harvested objects; website structural analysis and visualization to aid human content selection decisions; and packaging using a PREMIS-based METS profile developed by the ECHO DEPository to support easier ingestion into multiple repositories. This article provides background on the Arizona Model; an overview of how the tools work and their technical implementation; and a brief summary of user feedback from testing and implementing the tools.published or submitted for publicatio

Validity and interrater reliability of the moline-roberts pharmacologic sedation scale

Purpose: The objective of this study was to determine validity and reliability of the Moline-Roberts Pharmacologic Sedation Scale. Design: A multidisciplinary expert panel was used to establish content validity. Reliability was determined by a prospective, randomized, psychometric evaluation of sedation assignment made by 2 nurse research assistants. Setting: The study was conducted in a 260-bed nonprofit community hospital. Sample: Eighty-six subjects were enrolled in the study. Inclusion criteria were as follows: receiving opioids, benzodiazepines, or anesthetic agents; ability to understand English; and normal or near-normal hearing. Methods: Two bachelor of science in nursing-prepared nurses observed each subject and independently documented sedation levels at 3 or 4 points in time for each patient. Findings: Content validity resulted in 100% agreement that the sedation scale reflected the concept of pharmacologic sedation. Internal reliability as measured by Cronbach α was .983 to .996. For each of the scale\u27s components, interrater reliability using Cohen κ ranged from 76.4% to 97.4%. The Cohen κ P value for all components at all points in time was statistically significant at P \u3c .001. Conclusion: The Moline-Roberts Pharmacologic Sedation Scale demonstrated content validity and strong reliability. Implications: The sedation scale has clinical value in providing a standardized assessment and quantitative assignment of pharmacologically induced sedation that is reflective of the continuum of sedation. Information obtained regarding the patient\u27s sedation should be documented, trended, and incorporated into the decision-making process regarding additional administration of agents that produce or potentiate sedation. Further research is needed in populations not included in this study. Copyright © 2012 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited