Laughter Vesus Sympathy in Romola and Felix Holt

I want to start with a useful rather than a funny question posed by the critic Hilary M. Schor: \u27What acts of information-organization do we perform on the Eliot career?\u27! The answer is possibly a succession of familiar base-touchings: Eliot\u27s Warwickshire childhood and family life, the loss of her evangelical faith, her London journalism and reviewing, the development of her artistic values through engagement with European art and literature - the works of Baruch Spinoza, Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, and Auguste Comte - and, of course, her partnership with George Henry Lewes. Other notable Eliot \u27themes\u27 might include science, religion, history, natural history, gender, music, and Darwinism. In this endless list of possible configurations, a category we\u27re most unlikely to come up with is Eliot and laughter. The ideological shaping of Eliot\u27s career talks to a wider bourgeois preference in the mid-Victorian period - and beyond - for lachrymose respectability, one that publicly, at least, occluded laughing or gelastic narratives, even when these were enjoyed in camera. While George Henry Lewes, for example, famously professed to admiring Eliot\u27s \u27fun\u27 in her first work of fiction, \u27The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton\u27 (1858), it was her \u27pathos\u27 that he ultimately plumped for.\u27 Both Eliot and Lewes \u27cried together\u27 over the scenes of Milly Barton\u27s deathbed, a marital act of affective communion that is tacitly invoked when Eliot published the story in Scenes of Clerical Life, in 1858. Her narrator directly addresses her readers with the words, \u27I wish to stir your sympathy with commonplace troubles - to win your tears for real sorrow. The emphasis on \u27real sorrow\u27 connotes sympathy\u27s peculiar grammar of affect, a generic predisposition for crying following from reading novels and letters that interfaces shared sympathies and weeping in a transactional exchange of ink for tears. Yet despite this, Eliot participated in increasingly widespread debates about the ideological and aesthetic place of laughter in Victorian society, begun by writers like William Hazlitt, Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, George Meredith, and continued by scientists and philosophers, Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, James Sully and later Sigmund Freud. In 1856, writing anonymously for the Westminster Review in \u27German Wit: Heinrich Heine\u27, she quotes Goethe\u27s comment that \u27nothing is more significant of man\u27s character than what they find laughable\u27 Eliot, however, adds a notable modification: \u27The truth of the observation would be more apparent if Goethe had said culture [my emphasis] instead of character. What is remarkable here, considering Eliot\u27s enduring status as a canonically serious author, is her stridency about laughter\u27s irreducible significance in the public realm

On the "Poisson Trick" and its Extensions for Fitting Multinomial Regression Models

This article is concerned with the fitting of multinomial regression models using the so-called "Poisson Trick". The work is motivated by Chen & Kuo (2001) and Malchow-M{\o}ller & Svarer (2003) which have been criticized for being computationally inefficient and sometimes producing nonsense results. We first discuss the case of independent data and offer a parsimonious fitting strategy when all covariates are categorical. We then propose a new approach for modelling correlated responses based on an extension of the Gamma-Poisson model, where the likelihood can be expressed in closed-form. The parameters are estimated via an Expectation/Conditional Maximization (ECM) algorithm, which can be implemented using functions for fitting generalized linear models readily available in standard statistical software packages. Compared to existing methods, our approach avoids the need to approximate the intractable integrals and thus the inference is exact with respect to the approximating Gamma-Poisson model. The proposed method is illustrated via a reanalysis of the yogurt data discussed by Chen & Kuo (2001)

Retrofitting large, multi-format technical documents for the World Wide Web

This document looks at some of the theoretical connections between communications theory and hypertext theory using an actual case study in conversion of a multi-format technical document from print to hypertext delivery. By focusing on issues of author control, readability, and cohesion, the process of retrofitting documents from print to hypertext is explored to reveal areas where conflict between mediums might occur and where hypertext offers new ways to construct a discourse

Genetic trend and selection practiced in the registered Holstein cattle population

Pedigrees of 440,702 males and 526,956 females born during 1960 through 1979 and registered in the herdbook of the Holstein-Friesian Association of America were examined. Annual trends in genetic merit of sires, dams, maternal grandsires, and maternal granddams were determined from estimated transmitting estimates (ETA) contained in the pedigrees. The increase in the rate of change in genetic merit of parents was associated with the introduction of more accurate procedures for estimating transmitting ability of males and females in 1967. Annual genetic change (g) in the male and female populations was estimated as the sum of annual change in average ETA of sires plus the annual change in average ETA of dams. From 1971 to 1979, g\u27s for females were 120.5 lb milk, 3.31 lb fat, and -.0072 milk fat percent. Corresponding g\u27s for males were 152.2 lb milk, 4.38 lb milk fat, and -.0076 milk fat percent. Additional genetic gain in milk yield was possible but not attained due to excessive selection pressure put on other traits such as body conformation;Bulls in artificial insemination (AI) organizations were superior to bulls in non-AI use. Approximately one-third of the females in the study were sired by non-AI bulls. The number of young bulls progeny-tested in AI steadily increased across birth years. Breeder-proven bulls that entered AI were genetically equal, on the average, to AI progeny-test bulls returned to active AI service. Approximately 40 breeder-proven bulls entered AI organizations each year;Pedigree information was used to investigate its effectiveness in predicting ETA\u27s of males (sons). Regression of coefficients for ETA\u27s of ancestors were computed within birth year of sons. When ETA\u27s for milk yield of sires, dams, maternal grandsires and maternal granddams were used individually to predict ETA for milk yield of sons, no significant differences were observed among regression coefficients within birth years. Significant differences between regression coefficients were obtained among birth years in similar prediction equations for ETA of milk fat percent of sons. ETA\u27s of sire, dam and MGS were the best combination of information for son ETA prediction equations. Addition of MGD information did not appreciably increase the accuracy of prediction. ETA\u27s of sires and dams also could be used to predict ETA of milk and milk fat percent of sons with little loss in accuracy

Caspofungin Treatment of Aspergillus fumigatus Results in ChsG-Dependent Upregulation of Chitin Synthesis and the Formation of Chitin-Rich Microcolonies

Date of Acceptance: 23/07/2015 We thank Gillian Milne for help with electron microscopy, Sophie M. Schäfer for pilot experiments, and Emilia Mellado for strains. All authors acknowledge financial support of Gilead Sciences through Ph.D. studentships for L.A.W. and K.K.L. We also acknowledge research grants from the Wellcome Trust (080088, 086827, 075470, 099215, and 097377) and the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy.Peer reviewedPublisher PD