Notes--The Times They Are A-Changin\u27: Literary Documentary Editing in an Electronic Post-Structuralist World

I began working as a literary textual editor in the summer of 1968, my second year of graduate school at Northwestern University. At that time Northwestern housed The Writings of Herman Melville and I was taken on board as a trainee. I will always remember the shining moment when I realized that I had mastered the Hinman Collator and that a great future awaited me because of it. I spent the next three years working there, and in the next decade got up to speed on my own. I served as a vettor for the Center for Editions of American Authors, which, incidentally, sealed over one hundred volumes between 1966 and 1976, which gives you an idea of how exciting things were at this time in the editorial field. Later, I began work on my own editions of Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller. Let us now go back, briefly, to those glorious years, when there was truly a textual moment

Two Unrecorded Notices of Whitman in 1888

Identifies and prints an essay about Whitman for children, written by Charlotte French, and a poetic tribute to Whitman, written by Coates Kinney

Walt Whitman and the Trimbles: New Zealand, the First Concordance of Leaves of Grass, and the Dunedin Public Library

Recounts the history of the Trimble family (William, his wife Henrietta, his daughter Dorothy, and his second wife Annie) in New Zealand and their involvement in collecting Whitman books and undertaking (in 1903 or 1904) the first concordance of Whitman\u27s work; tracks how the Trimble Whitman collection came to be housed at the Dunedin Public Library

Crick and Alman Brought Up to Date

A Guide to Manuscripts Relating to America in Great Britain and Ireland, revised edition, ed. John W. Raimo (Westpon, Conn.: Meckler Books, 1979; 467pp., $79.50), replaces the earlier volume by Bernard Crick and Miriam Alman published in 1961

Past trauma and future choices: Differences in discounting in low-income, urban African Americans

AbstractBackgroundExposure to traumatic events is surprisingly common, yet little is known about its effect on decision making beyond the fact that those with post-traumatic stress disorder are more likely to have substance-abuse problems. We examined the effects of exposure to severe trauma on decision making in low-income, urban African Americans, a group especially likely to have had such traumatic experiences.MethodParticipants completed three decision-making tasks that assessed the subjective value of delayed monetary rewards and payments and of probabilistic rewards. Trauma-exposed cases and controls were propensity-matched on demographic measures, treatment for psychological problems, and substance dependence.ResultsTrauma-exposed cases discounted the value of delayed rewards and delayed payments, but not probabilistic rewards, more steeply than controls. Surprisingly, given previous findings that suggested women are more affected by trauma when female and male participants’ data were analyzed separately, only the male cases showed steeper delay discounting. Compared with nonalcoholic males who were not exposed to trauma, both severe trauma and alcohol-dependence produced significantly steeper discounting of delayed rewards.ConclusionsThe current study shows that exposure to severe trauma selectively affects fundamental decision-making processes. Only males were affected, and effects were observed only on discounting delayed outcomes (i.e. intertemporal choice) and not on discounting probabilistic outcomes (i.e. risky choice). These findings are the first to show significant differences in the effects of trauma on men's and women's decision making, and the selectivity of these effects has potentially important implications for treatment and also provides clues as to underlying mechanisms.</jats:sec

On the Scaling Interpretation of Exponents in Hyperboloid Models of Delay and Probability Discounting

Previously, we (McKerchar et al., 2009) showed that two-parameter hyperboloid models (Green and Myerson, 2004; Rachlin, 2006) provide significantly better fits to delay discounting data than simple, one-parameter hyperbolic and exponential models. Here, we extend this effort by comparing fits of the two-parameter hyperboloid models to data from a larger sample of participants (N= 171) who discounted probabilistic as well as delayed rewards. In particular, we examined the effects of amount on the exponents in the two hyperboloid models of delay and probability discounting in order to evaluate key theoretical predictions of the standard psychophysical scaling interpretation of these exponents. Both the Rachlin model and the Green and Myerson model provided very good fits to delay and probability discounting of both small and large amounts at both the group and individual levels (all R2s \u3e .97 at the group level; all median R2s \u3e .92 at the individual level). For delay discounting, the exponent in both models did not vary as a function of delayed amount, consistent with the psychophysical scaling interpretation. For probability discounting, however, the exponent in both models increased as the probabilistic amount increased—a finding inconsistent with the scaling interpretatio

Examining delay of gratification in healthy aging

Delay of gratification (DofG) refers to the capacity to forego an immediate reward in order to receive a more desirable reward later. As a core executive function, it might be expected that DofG would follow the standard pattern of age-related decline observed in older adults for other executive tasks. However, there actually have been few studies of aging and DofG, and even these have shown mixed results, suggesting the need for further investigation and new approaches. The present study tested a novel reward-based decision-making paradigm enabling examination of age-related DofG effects in adult humans. Results showed that older adults earned fewer overall rewards than young adults, both before and after instruction regarding the optimal DofG strategy. Prior to instruction, learning this strategy was challenging for all participants, regardless of age. The finding of age-related impairments even after strategy instruction indicated that these impairments were not due to a failure to understand the task or follow the optimal strategy, but instead were related to self-reported difficulty in waiting for delayed rewards. These results suggest the presence of age-related changes in DofG capacity and highlight the advantages of this new experimental paradigm for use in future investigations, including both behavioral and neuroimaging studies

A Comparison of Four Models of Delay Discounting in Humans

The present study compared four prominent models of delay discounting: a one-parameter exponential decay, a one-parameter hyperbola (Mazur, 1987), a two-parameter hyperboloid in which the denominator is raised to a power (Green and Myerson, 2004), and a two-parameter hyperbola in which delay is raised to a power (Rachlin, 2006). Sixty-four college undergraduates made choices between hypothetical monetary rewards, one immediate and one delayed, and the fit of the four models to their data was assessed. All four equations accounted for a large proportion of the variance at both the group and the individual levels, but the exponents of both two-parameter models were significantly less than 1.0 at the group level, and frequently so at the individual level. Taken together, these results strongly suggest that more than one parameter is needed to accurately describe delay discounting by humans. Notably, both the Rachlin and the Green and Myerson models accounted for more than 99% of the variance at the group level and for 96% of the variance in the median individual. Because both models provide such good descriptions of the data, model selection will need to be based on other grounds