Bridging the gap: Why the library is a necessary mediator in academic reading list provision

The reading list project at Southampton Solent University provides students with readings required for their course, fully embedded in their Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) unit page and in the correct referencing style according to their chosen subject of study

A leap of faith: Abbott, Bellamy, Morris, Wells and the fin-de-siècle route to utopia

In the great surge of utopian writing that was produced during the fin de siècle, Edward Bellamy, William Morris and H. G. Wells among others imagined utopias that were global in scale and located in the future. They made a radical shift in utopian thinking by drawing a historical trajectory between their own time and that of utopia. A contemporaneous text that might seem to have little in common with these “historical utopias” is E. A. Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884). This article shows how closely its ideas can bring into focus those of the specifically utopian texts being written alongside it. Flatland breaks the conventions of utopian narrative by removing the reader from the narrative plane and situating us instead in the “impossible” third dimension. The “leap of faith” necessary for scientific or religious revelation is simultaneously invoked as the route to utopia

The Two Felixes: Narrational Irony and the Questions of Radicalism in Felix Holt and \u27Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt\u27

In this characterization of Dorothea by the narrator of Middlemarch (1871-2), the \u27Great\u27 Reform Act of 1832 is posited as a dividing line between two phases of history, so distinct as to have separate spheres of interest and judgements of normality. George Eliot flatters her mid-Victorian reader by insinuating that only the \u27modem\u27 mind of their shared present could understand the zeal of a humanistic \u27exalted enthusiasm\u27 that took its source of energy from within. In this passage, therefore, \u27reform\u27 seems to be the key to historical, social and personal change. The issue of reform - of society, of institution and of self - looms equally large in Felix Holt (1866), where it is channelled through a double consciousness. Although Felix Holt describes and discusses the issues attendant on the Reform Act of 1832, Eliot is conscious of evoking in its readers echoes of its later counterpart, what would become the 1867 Reform Act, which was being debated in Parliament while Felix Holt was written and published. The worlds of the novel and of the initial readership are, therefore, bracketed and deeply embedded in a culture of reform. I argue that Eliot\u27s stance on reform in Felix Holt, so often equated with Matthew Arnold\u27s, has been oversimplified due to a questionable elision of the author with her eponymous hero, and of two distinct embodiments of \u27Felix Holt\u27 in two different publications. In part because of the profusion of apparently authoritative pearls of wisdom scattered through her texts, it is all too easy to elide \u27George Eliot\u27, himself an authorial construct, with the sentiments expressed in his/her novels. I argue that Eliot\u27s extensive use of free indirect discourse, irony, and the double time-frame, makes this a futile and limiting task. In these multiple contexts, Felix Holt and its paratext \u27Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt\u27 (1867), which have often been dismissed as narrowly conservative, emerge as notably dynamic and polyphonic texts

Review of Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past: Memory, History, Fiction

The nineteenth century saw a number of ways in which amateurs and professional historians and novelists approached the presentation of history, especially histories of the recent past. Eminent, professional historians at universities, and those aspiring to join them, increasingly avoided commenting on periods within living memory on the grounds that one could quickly lose credibility debating subjects not yet fully digested. Kingstone clearly illustrates the point in chapter 9, Conclusions: writing \u27both before and after the United Kingdom\u27s 2016 referendum decision to leave the European Union, I am aware that any arc I try to draw, any judgment I try to make about the impact of national peace or upheaval, is likely to have a very short shelf life\u27 (213). Another reason for Victorian professional historians to shy away from contemporary histories and instead to focus on periods in the distant past was that existing contemporary histories often blurred their subjects with journalism and literature. Some contemporary history was actually written by journalists, and some prominent writers of fiction - Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde - were also prolific in journalistic pursuits, which often dealt with recent events. When in the late nineteenth century journalism came under close scrutiny and gained a reputation for intrusiveness and prurience, there appeared \u27a deep rift between journalism and history […] exacerbat[ing] the dangerous liminality of contemporary history, leaving it in no man\u27s land\u27 (38-9)

Dating in Dharamsala The Tibetan Exile Dating experience

By studying the younger generation’s dating culture in the Tibetan exile community of Dharamsala, I hoped to glean a deeper insight into how cultural values effected interpersonal relationships in an everyday context, and in doing so hoped to find a bit about the unique qualities of Tibetan culture. I came in with many ideas of different themes, from Buddhist values and their effect on the dating culture, to the effect of assimilation on imported Tibetan ideas about dating and relationships. What I ultimately found had very little to do with Buddhist ideas and had far larger implications about the effects of life in exile. To conduct my research, I conducted a total of 15 formal interviews, and about twice as many informal conversations with young Tibetans actively a part of or recently having exited the dating scene

Maize research and development

A research paper on maize production trends in Zimbabwe.Maize (Zea mays L.) ranks first in terms of the number of producers, area grown and total cereal production in Zimbabwe. Maize is the staple food crop of the nation and is also an important cash crop. About 64 per cent of Grain Marketing Board maize sales is used for human consumption, 22 per cent is used for livestock and poultry feed and 14 per cent is used for other industrial purposes. During good production periods, surplus maize is exported, earning much- needed foreign exchange. Domestic consumers prefer white maize for their requirements although under emergencies, such as the droughts of 1966, 1992/1993 and 2001/2, people have had to change to eating yellow maize. Yellow maize is grown in Zimbabwe mainly for livestock feed and maize stover is an important source of livestock feed during the dry winter months. Therefore maize is a strategic crop for Zimbabwe and throughout eastern and southern Africa (Byerlee and Eicher, 1997). This chapter will first discuss the maize production trends in Zimbabwe and then examine the factors that have contributed to successful maize production in the different agricultural sectors. The chapter also explores the challenges for maize production in the new millennium

Information Flow Between the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange: A Transfer Entropy Approach

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether there was information flow between the stock markets of Zimbabwe and South Africa during the time the Zimbabwean economy was dollarized. The author used econophysics-based Shannonian and Rényian transfer entropy estimates to establish the flow of information between the markets in tranquil periods as well as at the tails of return distributions. The only significant Shannonian transfer entropy estimate was from Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) resources index to Zimbabwe Stock Exchange (ZSE) mining index. The findings show that the only significant tail dependence was between JSE All Share Index (JALSH) and ZSE Mining on the one hand, and between JSE Resources and ZSE Mining on the other hand. However, the magnitudes of the effective transfer entropy values are relatively low, showing that there are weak linkages between the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The lack of significant information flows between the exchanges of the two countries offer opportunities to fund managers for portfolio diversification. From a government point of view, it is imperative that the tempo of economic and political reform be accelerated so that integration between the markets can be fast-tracked. Integrated markets will benefit Zimbabwe as this will reduce the cost of equity and accelerate economic growth

The time course of attentional and oculomotor capture reveals a common cause

Eye movements are often misdirected toward a distractor when it appears abruptly, an effect known as oculomotor capture. Fundamental differences between eye movements and attention have led to questions about the relationship of oculomotor capture to the more general effect of sudden onsets on performance, known as attentional capture. This study explores that issue by examining the time course of eye movements and manual localization responses to targets in the presence of sudden-onset distractors. The results demonstrate that for both response types, the proportion of trials on which responses are erroneously directed to sudden onsets reflects the quality of information about the visual display at a given point in time. Oculomotor capture appears to be a specific instance of a more general attentional capture effect. Differences and similarities between the two types of capture can be explained by the critical idea that the quality of information about a visual display changes over time and that different response systems tend to access this information at different moments in time

Are fixations in static natural scenes a useful predictor of attention in the real world?

Research investigating scene perception normally involves laboratory experiments using static images. Much has been learned about how observers look at pictures of the real world and the attentional mechanisms underlying this behaviour. However, the use of static, isolated pictures as a proxy for studying everyday attention in real environments has led to the criticism that such experiments are artificial. We report a new study that tests the extent to which the real world can be reduced to simpler laboratory stimuli. We recorded the gaze of participants walking on a university campus with a mobile eye tracker, and then showed static frames from this walk to new participants, in either a random or sequential order. The aim was to compare the gaze of participants walking in the real environment with fixations on pictures of the same scene. The data show that picture order affects interobserver fixation consistency and changes looking patterns. Critically, while fixations on the static images overlapped significantly with the actual real-world eye movements, they did so no more than a model that assumed a general bias to the centre. Remarkably, a model that simply takes into account where the eyes are normally positioned in the head-independent of what is actually in the scene-does far better than any other model. These data reveal that viewing patterns to static scenes are a relatively poor proxy for predicting real world eye movement behaviour, while raising intriguing possibilities for how to best measure attention in everyday life