An Interview with Phil Klay

Phil Klay is a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War and the author of the short story collection Redeployment, which won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction. A graduate of the Hunter College MFA program, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and the Brookings Institution’s Brookings Essay series. His essays often focus on the problematic experiences of veterans returning home, and on civilian points of view regarding military service. For R..

How to describe and measure phenology? An investigation on the diversity of metrics using phenology of births in large herbivores

Proposed in 1849 by Charles Morren to depict periodical phenomena governed by seasons, the term ‘phenology' has spread in many fields of biology. With the wide adoption of the concept of phenology flourished a large number of metrics with different meaning and interpretation. Here, we first a priori classified 52 previously published metrics used to characterise the phenology of births in large herbivores according to four biological characteristics of interest: timing, synchrony, rhythmicity and regularity of births. We then applied each metric retrieved on simulation data, considering normal and non-normal distributions of births, and varying distributions of births in time. We then evaluated the ability of each metric to capture the variation of the four phenology characteristics via a sensitivity analysis. Finally, we scored each metric according to eight criteria we considered important to describe phenology correctly. The high correlation we found among the many metrics we retrieved suggests that such diversity of metrics is unnecessary. We further show that the best metrics are not the most commonly used, and that simpler is often better. Circular statistics with the mean vector orientation and mean vector length seems, respectively, particularly suitable to describe the timing and synchrony of births in a wide range of phenology patterns. Tests designed to compare statistical distributions, like Mood and Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests, allow a first and easy quantification of rhythmicity and regularity of birth phenology respectively. By identifying the most relevant metrics our study should facilitate comparative studies of phenology of births or of any other life-history event. For instance, comparative studies of the phenology of mating or migration dates are particularly important in the context of climate change.The ‘Ministère Français de l'Enseignement Supérieur, de la Recherche et de l'Innovation' through the ‘Ecole Doctorale E2M2' of the ‘Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1'.http://www.oikosjournal.orghj2023Mammal Research InstituteZoology and Entomolog

Veterans in Ruins: The Soldier’s Impossible Homecoming in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

The notion of homecoming is the focal point of Tim O’Brien’s short story “Speaking of Courage,” which presents an irreconcilable scission between the present and the soldier’s past self and life, before the war. This cleavage is mainly embodied in the landscape of the story: the city that was once familiar seems remote after his homecoming. The way in which the protagonist looks at his hometown while driving around the lake that constitutes its center point allows the gradual (re)appearance of Vietnam landscapes and events in the descriptions, until memories from the past and visions of the present superimpose completely—thereby blurring the boundaries between war and peace, between suburban America and Vietnam battlegrounds. The bedimming of differences between the structural polarities of the “here” and the “elsewhere” enables the emergence of paradoxical esthetics based on the notions of conflation and reversal, which thwart the prospect of ever returning home by rendering the very notion of return nonsensical and unachievable. Through writing, O’Brien thus puts into question the very possibility and completeness of the soldier’s homecoming by collapsing together different spatiotemporal realities

Testimonies of war in American literature

Cette thèse s’intéresse aux diverses façons dont les auteurs de littérature américaine témoignent d’une expérience intime de la guerre. À travers l’analyse de témoignages littéraires allant de la guerre de Sécession à la guerre en Irak (Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, Tim O’Brien et Phil Klay), ce travail montre comment la violence extrême et la nature hors du commun de l’expérience de la guerre mettent l’écriture au défi et l’entraînent à se renouveler. En effet, les auteurs ont recours à divers procédés afin de contourner les notions d’« indicible » et d’« irreprésentable ». Grâce à des modalités discursives qui sapent la crédibilité de la figure du narrateur et invitent le lecteur à remettre en question la véracité de son récit, les auteurs soulignent une difficulté inhérente à l’acte testimonial : celle de raconter, sans la trahir, une vérité subjective. En outre, cette étude met en avant les modalités d’écriture auxquelles recourent les auteurs afin de s’éloigner des modes de représentation officiels de l’Histoire. Le recours à la fiction leur permet en effet de nuancer l’historiographie en révélant sa dimension éminemment subjective : en donnant à lire les impressions intimes du témoin, mais aussi les traces visibles à la surface de son corps, le témoignage de guerre met en lumière un versant « oublié » de l’Histoire : celui de l’expérience sensible. Grâce aux descriptions paysagères, les auteurs élaborent également une véritable poétique du témoignage et donnent à éprouver l’expérience du soldat par le biais de ce qui lui est fondamentalement extérieur. En effet, les émotions du témoin sont parfois inscrites au sein d’un paysage de guerre lisible, déchiffrable. Toutefois, lorsque le champ de bataille est redevenu un paysage banal, le paysage montre aussi, à travers ses vides et ses absences, l’inéluctable passage du temps et l’engloutissement des vestiges du passé. Pourtant, en creux, le paysage devenu ordinaire témoigne d’une permanence de l’Histoire : bien après l’effacement de ses traces, la guerre demeure dans la mémoire des vétérans, et au-delà de la surface du paysage, dans les profondeurs de la terre.This study examines how the authors of American literature testify to intimate experiences of war. By analyzing literary testimonies that range from the Civil War to the Iraq war (Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, Tim O’Brien and Phil Klay), this dissertation reveals how extreme violence and the out-of-the-ordinary nature of the war experience challenge and renew writing itself. The authors resort to various literary processes in order to circumvent the notions of the “inexpressible” and the “irrepresentable”. Through discursive modalities that undermine the credibility of the narrator and invite the reader to question the truthfulness of his story, the authors present a difficulty inherent to the act of testifying: narrating a subjective truth without falsifying or altering it. This study underlines the literary devices allowing the authors to draw away from the official modes of historical representation. Fiction indeed brings nuances to historiography by revealing its eminently subjective dimension. As they explore the intimate perceptions of the witness and decipher the visible traces on the surface of his body, war testimonies shed light upon the forgotten side of History: sensory experience. Through the description of landscapes, the authors thus elaborate the poetics of testimony and recreate the soldier’s experience through what is essentially external to him. Indeed, the witness’s emotions are sometimes inscribed in a readable, decipherable war landscape. However, when the battlefield has become an unremarkable place again, its emptiness and banality expose the inevitable passing of time and the engulfment of all vestiges of war by nature. Still, implicitly, common landscapes testify to the permanence of History: long after all traces of battles have disappeared, war remains in the memory of veterans, and underneath the surface of the landscape, deep within the earth

Journées d’étude « War Ruins: The City in the American War Narratives »

Le vendredi 26 janvier 2018 et le vendredi 25 janvier 2019 se sont tenues à la Maison de la Recherche de l’Université Toulouse 2 – Jean Jaurès deux journées d’étude internationales intitulées « War Ruins, The City in American War Narratives », organisées par Nathalie Cochoy et David Roche, dans le cadre des manifestations scientifiques de « Poéthiques » (CAS, Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes, EA 801). Les intervenants étaient invités à s’interroger sur la manière dont l’événement de la guerre (ou sa r..

How to describe and measure phenology? An investigation on the diversity of metrics using phenology of births in large herbivores

International audienceProposed in 1849 by Charles Morren to depict periodical phenomena governed by seasons, the term ‘phenology' has spread in many fields of biology. With the wide adoption of the concept of phenology flourished a large number of metrics with different meaning and interpretation. Here, we first a priori classified 52 previously published metrics used to characterise the phenology of births in large herbivores according to four biological characteristics of interest: timing, synchrony, rhythmicity and regularity of births. We then applied each metric retrieved on simulation data, considering normal and non-normal distributions of births, and varying distributions of births in time. We then evaluated the ability of each metric to capture the variation of the four phenology characteristics via a sensitivity analysis. Finally, we scored each metric according to eight criteria we considered important to describe phenology correctly. The high correlation we found among the many metrics we retrieved suggests that such diversity of metrics is unnecessary. We further show that the best metrics are not the most commonly used, and that simpler is often better. Circular statistics with the mean vector orientation and mean vector length seems, respectively, particularly suitable to describe the timing and synchrony of births in a wide range of phenology patterns. Tests designed to compare statistical distributions, like Mood and Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests, allow a first and easy quantification of rhythmicity and regularity of birth phenology respectively. By identifying the most relevant metrics our study should facilitate comparative studies of phenology of births or of any other life-history event. For instance, comparative studies of the phenology of mating or migration dates are particularly important in the context of climate change

Does timing of birth affect juvenile and mare survival in wild plains zebra?

Abstract In large herbivores, the timing of births is mainly driven by the seasonal availability of their food resource. Population dynamics is strongly influenced by juvenile survival and recruitment, which highly depend on whether individuals are born during a favourable period or not. If births often occur during the most suitable season in northern cyclical environments for many large herbivore species, zebra give birth year-round at Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe, a tropical bushland characterized by the succession of a favourable wet season and a less favourable dry season. We used capture-recapture models for analysing long term observation data collected between 2008 and 2019 in this zebra population. We investigated the effect of the season (as a categorical variable) and the time spent in dry season on three categories of juveniles (younger foals of less than six months old, older foals between six and twelve months old, and yearlings between one and two years old) and mares survival, according to their reproductive state. The season had no effect on any survival. Younger foals annual survival was not affected by the time spent in dry season, whereas older foals and yearlings annual survival decreased with an increasing exposure to the dry season. Mares annual survival also decreased with an increasing time spent in dry season, whatever the reproductive status, but to a large extend when non-reproducing. The timing of birth, by determining the external conditions experienced by the offspring and their mothers during critical phases of their life cycle, plays a determinant role in their survival. As climate change is expected to lead to more frequent droughts, longer and harsher dry seasons in tropical ecosystems, we hypothesize a detrimental effect on zebra population dynamics in the future

Can citizen science analysis of camera trap data be used to study reproduction? Lessons from Snapshot Serengeti program

International audienceEcologists increasingly rely on camera-trap data to estimate biological parameters such as population abundance. Because of the huge amount of data camera trap can generate, the assistance of non-scientists is often sought after, but an assessment of the data quality is necessary. We tested whether volunteers data from one of the largest citizen science projects – Snapshot Serengeti – could be used to study breeding phenology. We tested whether the presence of juveniles (less than one or 12 months old) of species of large herbivores in the Serengeti: topi, kongoni, Grant’s gazelle, could be reliably detected by the ‘naive’ volunteers versus trained observers. We expected a positive correlation between the proportion of volunteers identifying juveniles and their effective presence within photographs, assessed by the trained observers. The agreement between the trained observers was good (Fleiss’ κ > 0.61 for juveniles of less than one and 12 month(s) old), suggesting that morphological criteria can be used to determine age of juveniles. The relationship between the proportion of volunteers detecting juveniles less than a month old and their actual presence plateaued at 0.45 for Grant’s gazelle, reached 0.70 for topi and 0.56 for kongoni. The same relationships were much stronger for juveniles younger than 12 months, reaching 1 for topi and kongoni. The absence of individuals < one month and the presence of juveniles < 12 months could be reliably assumed, respectively, when no volunteer and when all volunteers reported a presence of a young. In contrast, the presence of very young individuals and the absence of juveniles appeared more difficult to ascertain from volunteers’ classification, given how the classification task was presented to them. Volunteers’ classification allows a moderately accurate but quick sorting of photograph with/without juveniles. We discuss the limitations of using citizen science camera-traps data to study breeding phenology, and the options to improve the detection of juveniles

Can citizen science analysis of camera trap data be used to study reproduction? Lessons from snapshot Serengeti program

Ecologists increasingly rely on camera-trap data to estimate biological parameters such as population abundance. Because of the huge amount of data camera trap can generate, the assistance of non-scientists is often sought after, but an assessment of the data quality is necessary. We tested whether volunteers data from one of the largest citizen science projects – Snapshot Serengeti – could be used to study breeding phenology. We tested whether the presence of juveniles (less than one or 12 months old) of species of large herbivores in the Serengeti: topi, kongoni, Grant’s gazelle, could be reliably detected by the ‘naive’ volunteers versus trained observers. We expected a positive correlation between the proportion of volunteers identifying juveniles and their effective presence within photographs, assessed by the trained observers. The agreement between the trained observers was good (Fleiss’ κ > 0.61 for juveniles of less than one and 12 month(s) old), suggesting that morphological criteria can be used to determine age of juveniles. The relationship between the proportion of volunteers detecting juveniles less than a month old and their actual presence plateaued at 0.45 for Grant’s gazelle, reached 0.70 for topi and 0.56 for kongoni. The same relationships were much stronger for juveniles younger than 12 months, reaching 1 for topi and kongoni. The absence of individuals < one month and the presence of juveniles < 12 months could be reliably assumed, respectively, when no volunteer and when all volunteers reported a presence of a young. In contrast, the presence of very young individuals and the absence of juveniles appeared more difficult to ascertain from volunteers’ classification, given how the classification task was presented to them. Volunteers’ classification allows a moderately accurate but quick sorting of photograph with/without juveniles. We discuss the limitations of using citizen science camera-traps data to study breeding phenology, and the options to improve the detection of juveniles.A PhD fellowship from the University Lyon 1.http://www.wildlifebiology.compm2022Mammal Research InstituteZoology and Entomolog