Competing Life Narratives: Portraits of Vita Sackville-West

This article sets out to examine the fraught, often contested relationship between multiple and competing life narratives, taking as its focus the case of Vita Sackville-West and her infamous love affair with Violet Trefusis. Vita wrote her account of this relationship in a short, autobiographical fragment (1920–21), and this text now forms the basis of nearly all subsequent accounts of her life. By examining how Vita's confession has been appropriated and revised by successive generations of the Nicolson family—in Nigel Nicolson's biography of his parents, Portrait of a Marriage (1973) and Adam Nicolson's recent television documentary, Sissinghurst (2009)—this article will identify the relational structures that exist between texts and across different life-writing genres and media. Contemporary studies of life writing and relationality have emphasised the intratextual connections between subjects. By contrast, the example of Vita Sackville-West highlights the importance of intertextuality. This article explores how intertextual relations—the construction of lives in response to extant accounts; the repetition, revision and accumulation of life narratives—has served to sustain an open-ended industry of life writing

Is NGC 3108 transforming itself from an early to late type galaxy -- an astronomical hermaphrodite?

A common feature of hierarchical galaxy formation models is the process of "inverse" morphological transformation: a bulge dominated galaxy accretes a gas disk, dramatically reducing the system's bulge-to-disk mass ratio. During their formation, present day galaxies may execute many such cycles across the Hubble diagram. A good candidate for such a "hermaphrodite" galaxy is NGC 3108: a dust-lane early-type galaxy which has a large amount of HI gas distributed in a large scale disk. We present narrow band H_alpha and R-band imaging, and compare the results with the HI distribution. The emission is in two components: a nuclear bar and an extended disk component which coincides with the HI distribution. This suggests that a stellar disk is currently being formed out of the HI gas. The spatial distributions of the H_alpha and HI emission and the HII regions are consistent with a barred spiral structure, extending some 20 kpc in radius. We measure an extinction- corrected SFR of 0.42 Msun/yr. The luminosity function of the HII regions is similar to other spiral galaxies, with a power law index of -2.1, suggesting that the star formation mechanism is similar to other spiral galaxies. We measured the current disk mass and find that it is too massive to have been formed by the current SFR over the last few Gyr. It is likely that the SFR in NGC 3108 was higher in the past. With the current SFR, the disk in NGC 3108 will grow to be ~6.2x10^9 Msun in stellar mass within the next 5.5 Gyr. While this is substantial, the disk will be insignificant compared with the large bulge mass: the final stellar mass disk-to-bulge ratio will be ~0.02. NGC 3108 will fail to transform into anything resembling a spiral without a boost in the SFR and additional supply of gas.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

SNAPSHOT USA 2019 : a coordinated national camera trap survey of the United States

This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.With the accelerating pace of global change, it is imperative that we obtain rapid inventories of the status and distribution of wildlife for ecological inferences and conservation planning. To address this challenge, we launched the SNAPSHOT USA project, a collaborative survey of terrestrial wildlife populations using camera traps across the United States. For our first annual survey, we compiled data across all 50 states during a 14-week period (17 August - 24 November of 2019). We sampled wildlife at 1509 camera trap sites from 110 camera trap arrays covering 12 different ecoregions across four development zones. This effort resulted in 166,036 unique detections of 83 species of mammals and 17 species of birds. All images were processed through the Smithsonian's eMammal camera trap data repository and included an expert review phase to ensure taxonomic accuracy of data, resulting in each picture being reviewed at least twice. The results represent a timely and standardized camera trap survey of the USA. All of the 2019 survey data are made available herein. We are currently repeating surveys in fall 2020, opening up the opportunity to other institutions and cooperators to expand coverage of all the urban-wild gradients and ecophysiographic regions of the country. Future data will be available as the database is updated at eMammal.si.edu/snapshot-usa, as well as future data paper submissions. These data will be useful for local and macroecological research including the examination of community assembly, effects of environmental and anthropogenic landscape variables, effects of fragmentation and extinction debt dynamics, as well as species-specific population dynamics and conservation action plans. There are no copyright restrictions; please cite this paper when using the data for publication.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The origins and development of media education in Scotland

This study combines analytical and narrative modes of historical enquiry with educational policy sociology to construct a history of media in education in Scotland. It uses the development trajectory of a single case, media education in Scotland's statutory education sector, to deconstruct and reconstruct a history of the institutional relationship between the Scottish Film Council (SFC) and the Scottish Education Department (SED) that stretches back to the 1930s. Existing literature describes media education in Scotland as a phenomenon located in the 1970s and 1980s. This study disaggregates media education discourse and dissolves chronological boundaries to make connections with earlier attempts to introduce media into Scottish education in the context of Scotland's constitutional relations within the UK. It employs historical and socio-cultural methods to analyse the intersections between actors and events taking place over six decades. The analysis and interpretation of the data is located in three time periods. Chapter 3 covers the period from 1929 until 1974 when, on the cusp of the emergence of the new texts and technologies of film, the SFC was established to promote and protect Scottish film culture and audio-visual technologies. During this time, the interdependence of teachers, the film trade and the educational policy-making community led to the production, distribution and exhibition of new and popular forms of text to national and international acclaim. By juxtaposing public and private documents circulating on the margins of statutory education, this chapter generates a new understanding of the importance of film and its technologies in Scotland in the pursuit of a more culturally relevant and contemporary model of education. It also describes how constraints upon Scotland’s cultural production infrastructure limited its capacity to effect significant educational change. In the 1970s, cultural, political and educational ferment in pre-devolution Scotland, created a discursive shift that gave rise first to media education and then to Media Studies. Articulating documents with wider discourses of educational and cultural change and interviews with key players, Chapter 4 describes a counter-narrative gaining momentum. The constraints of the practices of traditional subjects and pedagogies combined with the constraints on Scottish cultural production gave shape and form to the media education movement. Significantly for this study, the movement included influential members of Scottish education’s leadership class. Between 1983 to 1986, the innovative Media Education Development Project (MEDP) aimed to place media education at the centre of teaching and learning in Scottish education. This was fully funded by the SED, managed by the Scottish Council for Educational Technology (SCET) and the SFC and implemented by the Association for Media Education in Scotland (AMES). The MEDP overlapped briefly with another initiative in SCET, the Scottish Microelectronics Development Project (SMDP). During this period, Media Studies enjoyed rapid success as a popular non-advanced qualification in the upper secondary and further education sectors. Media education, however, did not. Chapter 5 explores the links between the MEDP and the SMDP through the agency of three central actors: SCET, the SFC and AMES in the context of a second term of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. This study concludes that between 1934 and 1964, the SFC was a key educational bureaucracy in Scottish education. The SFC’s role as an agent of change represented the recognition of a link between relevant and contemporary Scottish cultural production and the transformation of statutory education. Between 1929 and 1982 three iterations for media and education in Scotland can be discerned. In 1983, the MEDP began a fourth but its progress faltered. The study suggests that if a new iteration for media and education in Scotland in the twenty-first century is to emerge, an institutional link between media culture, technology and educational transformation requires to be restored.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Differential Habitat Use of Reef Fishes on a Shelf-edge Reef off La Parguera, Puerto Rico

The biotic community at a shelf-edge reef, which abruptly delineates a continuous fringing reef from the adjacent mesophotic reef off southwestern Puerto Rico, USA, was used to identify patterns of differential habitat use in reef fishes. Our study used multivariate analyses to identify groupings within the fish community associated with this area. These groups were suggestive of differential habitat use by the fish community, in particular with respect to the reef-terrace vs slope locations. The benthic composition among these two location stratifications differed while remaining surprisingly consistent within each location strata (i.e., reef-terrace vs slope). The variability in both the fish and benthic communities was best explained in our model by the location stratifications within each site as opposed to the physical position of the site itself along the shelf edge. Food resources, structure (i.e., habitat complexity), or both may contribute to differential habitat use within the reef-fish communities observed. A lesser division was apparent within the reef-terrace locations that grouped the western samples separately from the eastern. The results presented in the present study suggest that the fish communities along the shelf-edge reef adjacent to La Parguera, Puerto Rico, are divided by habitat type and location as determined by food and shelter availability. Here, we present an analysis whereby community structure can be identified at varying spatial scales within a single depth zone to inform managers prior to strategy implementation

Tuberculous iliac artery aneurysm in a pediatric patient

Vascular complications of tuberculous infections are rare and occur even less frequently in the pediatric population. Tuberculous pseudoaneurysms can occur either as a result of contiguous spread from a neighboring focus—invariably infected lymph nodes—or by hematogenous spread and seeding of acid-fast bacilli that lodge in the adventitia or media via the vasa vasorum. We report a case of turberculous right common iliac artery pseudoaneurysm in a 12-year-old and review the relevant literature