Courtly Love in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Modern Reflections

In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written by the Pearl Poet, courtly love is not at the center of the poem, as one would expect it to be given the time period it was written in. Yet, the underlying critique of courtly love plays a crucial role in understanding the ancient medieval ideas of love and knighthood. Despite its well-known reputation, the text itself has not been scrutinized as closely for the theme of courtly love, especially when compared to the French romances. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight uses humor in order to critique the ancient tradition of courtly love, therefore illustrating how courtly love evolved over time into the modern conception of marriage. Today, the attitudes of many people in society differ from the attitudes of those that lived during ancient medieval times. However, modern society praises the idealization of a sustainable relationship, as seen in reality, the media, and literature, showing that the same concerns associated with love still remain in the twentieth-century. Despite society\u27s familiarity with the concept of romantic love, a word that can be used interchangeably with courtly love, we often mistake it as a universal phenomenon because we fail to look at its historical background. Courtly love is referred to a relationship that was between two lovers, not necessarily a husband and wife. Today, romantic love is a term that is usually associated with a relationship that is between a husband and a wife. Many famous scholars have offered their individual interpretations of courtly love, but the word itself does not currently have nor has ever had a common meaning worldwide. Courtly love does, however, have a common set of characteristics that are consistently used when referring to the term. When exploring the famous works of Andreas Capellanus, Gaston Paris, and C.S Lewis, there are similar trends to be seen between these scholars\u27 interpretations of courtly love, such as the themes of class distinction, adultery, and attraction. These trends will be used to create an in-depth definition of the meaning of courtly love, which will be used when comparing ancient and modern interpretations of courtly love and its existence today, using Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as an example

When do autistic children exhibit a shape bias? : Investigating the impact of methodology on novel noun generalisation in autism and typical development

From ~24 months old, typically developing (TD) children often generalise names for solid objects to novel examples that are the same shape. This ‘shape bias’ can facilitate word learning by providing an attentional short-cut, allowing children to accurately generalise novel nouns. Autistic children often experience delays in language acquisition, and difficulty exploiting the shape bias may be a contributing factor. However, extant research findings are highly inconsistent, with autistic children exhibiting a shape bias in certain tasks but not others. Thus, the current research investigated whether variability in autistic children’s shape bias can be explained by methodological differences. Autistic children (aged 4 to 9 years) and TD children matched on receptive vocabulary (aged 30 months to 4 years) participated in five experiments measuring shape bias in both ‘forced-choice’ and ‘yes or no’ variants of a novel noun generalisation task (NNG). Each task included an ‘online’ condition, where children were asked to generalise a label from a visible standard item to a target, and an ‘offline’ condition where the standard was absent at test, and generalisation had to be completed from memory. Experiment 1 investigated whether the visibility of the standard affected autistic children’s shape bias in a forced-choice task with high contrast stimuli. We found that both autistic and TD groups generalised by shape regardless of standard visibility. Experiment 2 investigated whether shape was still preferred in a yes/no task, where children had the freedom to include any of the stimuli in the category rather than just the best example. In this task, autistic children were more likely to accept the differently shaped distractors than the TD group. Experiments 3 and 4 used the same tasks with low contrast stimuli to investigate whether the requirement to remember the standard had an impact when object shapes were more similar. Both groups again exhibited a shape bias in the forced-choice task, however in the yes/no version only the TD group generalised by shape. Finally, Experiment 5 investigated whether an attentional preference for small details could account for shape bias differences in autism in a yes/no task. We found that both autistic and TD children generalised based on global shape rather than a salient local feature. Overall, our results suggest that methodological variations can explain discrepancies in previous findings regarding shape bias in autism. Autistic children exhibited a strong shape bias in forced-choice tasks, whereas the bias appeared reduced or absent in yes/no tasks requiring children to categorise items individually. This suggests that differences may lie in autistic children’s use of the shape bias as a tool for category exclusion decisions, rather than inclusion decisions, raising questions about the role of the shape bias in word and category learning for all children. There may be multiple routes through which attention to shape can contribute to learning and, by identifying which routes are most accessible for autistic children, we can inform teaching methods that work in harmony with their strengths

Assessment of abdominal fat compartments using DXA in premenopausal women from anorexia nervosa to morbid obesity

Objective: The purpose of this study was to test a newly developed DXA method for abdominal fat depot quantification in subjects with AN, normal weight, and obesity using CT as a gold standard. Design and Methods 135 premenopausal women (overweight/obese: n=89, normal-weight: n=27, AN: n=19); abdominal visceral adipose tissue (VAT), subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT), and total adipose tissue (TAT) areas determined on CT and DXA. Results: There were strong correlations between DXA and CT measurements of abdominal fat compartments in all groups with the strongest correlation coefficients in the normal-weight and overweight/obese groups. Correlations of DXA and CT VAT measurements were strongest in the obese group and weakest in the AN group. DXA abdominal fat depots were higher in all groups compared to CT, with the largest % mean difference in the AN group and smallest in the obese group. Conclusions: A new DXA technique is able to assess abdominal fat compartments including VAT in premenopausal women across a large weight spectrum However, DXA measurements of abdominal fat were higher than CT, and this percent bias was most pronounced in the AN subjects and decreased with increasing weight, suggesting that this technique may be more useful in obese individuals

Second Nature: Hamilton College and the Natural Environment

The following histories explore the boundaries between the human and natural environment on Hamilton College’s campus. They were written for the Environmental Studies course “Interpreting the American Environment” and incorporated site visits and consultations of the historical record in order to better understand familiar places on Hamilton’s campus. Through this research, the contributors identified the human imprint on natural places and located nature in the built environment.https://digitalcommons.hamilton.edu/books/1012/thumbnail.jp

Oculopalatal tremor explained by a model of inferior olivary hypertrophy and cerebellar plasticity

The inferior olivary nuclei clearly play a role in creating oculopalatal tremor, but the exact mechanism is unknown. Oculopalatal tremor develops some time after a lesion in the brain that interrupts inhibition of the inferior olive by the deep cerebellar nuclei. Over time the inferior olive gradually becomes hypertrophic and its neurons enlarge developing abnormal soma-somatic gap junctions. However, results from several experimental studies have confounded the issue because they seem inconsistent with a role for the inferior olive in oculopalatal tremor, or because they ascribe the tremor to other brain areas. Here we look at 3D binocular eye movements in 15 oculopalatal tremor patients and compare their behaviour to the output of our recent mathematical model of oculopalatal tremor. This model has two mechanisms that interact to create oculopalatal tremor: an oscillator in the inferior olive and a modulator in the cerebellum. Here we show that this dual mechanism model can reproduce the basic features of oculopalatal tremor and plausibly refute the confounding experimental results. Oscillations in all patients and simulations were aperiodic, with a complicated frequency spectrum showing dominant components from 1 to 3 Hz. The model’s synchronized inferior olive output was too small to induce noticeable ocular oscillations, requiring amplification by the cerebellar cortex. Simulations show that reducing the influence of the cerebellar cortex on the oculomotor pathway reduces the amplitude of ocular tremor, makes it more periodic and pulse-like, but leaves its frequency unchanged. Reducing the coupling among cells in the inferior olive decreases the oscillation’s amplitude until they stop (at ∼20% of full coupling strength), but does not change their frequency. The dual-mechanism model accounts for many of the properties of oculopalatal tremor. Simulations suggest that drug therapies designed to reduce electrotonic coupling within the inferior olive or reduce the disinhibition of the cerebellar cortex on the deep cerebellar nuclei could treat oculopalatal tremor. We conclude that oculopalatal tremor oscillations originate in the hypertrophic inferior olive and are amplified by learning in the cerebellum

Social and emotional outcomes of Australian children from Indigenous and culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds

Objectives: 1) profile the living environments and 2) examine the social and emotional outcomes of Australian children from Indigenous and cultural and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds at school entry. Method: Secondary analysis of cross- sectional data collected in Wave 1 of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (n=4,735). Child mental-health outcomes were measured using parent report of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). Results: Significant differences in family and neighbourhood characteristics, including parental income, maternal education, maternal parenting quality and neighbourhood safety, were found in children of Indigenous and CALD backgrounds compared to the reference group of Australian-born, English-speaking children. After controlling for family and neighbourhood characteristics, significant differences in parent-reported SDQ total difficulties were found for Indigenous children. Significant differences in emotional difficulties and peer problems subscales were found for children with overseas-born mothers regardless of English proficiency. Conclusions: Children from Indigenous and CALD backgrounds experience poorer mental health outcomes at school entry than their Australian-born English- speaking peers. They are also more likely to be exposed to risk factors for poor child mental-health outcomes within their family and neighbourhood environments

Genetic mechanisms of critical illness in COVID-19.

Host-mediated lung inflammation is present1, and drives mortality2, in the critical illness caused by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Host genetic variants associated with critical illness may identify mechanistic targets for therapeutic development3. Here we report the results of the GenOMICC (Genetics Of Mortality In Critical Care) genome-wide association study in 2,244 critically ill patients with COVID-19 from 208 UK intensive care units. We have identified and replicated the following new genome-wide significant associations: on chromosome 12q24.13 (rs10735079, P = 1.65 × 10-8) in a gene cluster that encodes antiviral restriction enzyme activators (OAS1, OAS2 and OAS3); on chromosome 19p13.2 (rs74956615, P = 2.3 × 10-8) near the gene that encodes tyrosine kinase 2 (TYK2); on chromosome 19p13.3 (rs2109069, P = 3.98 ×  10-12) within the gene that encodes dipeptidyl peptidase 9 (DPP9); and on chromosome 21q22.1 (rs2236757, P = 4.99 × 10-8) in the interferon receptor gene IFNAR2. We identified potential targets for repurposing of licensed medications: using Mendelian randomization, we found evidence that low expression of IFNAR2, or high expression of TYK2, are associated with life-threatening disease; and transcriptome-wide association in lung tissue revealed that high expression of the monocyte-macrophage chemotactic receptor CCR2 is associated with severe COVID-19. Our results identify robust genetic signals relating to key host antiviral defence mechanisms and mediators of inflammatory organ damage in COVID-19. Both mechanisms may be amenable to targeted treatment with existing drugs. However, large-scale randomized clinical trials will be essential before any change to clinical practice

Whole-genome sequencing reveals host factors underlying critical COVID-19

Critical COVID-19 is caused by immune-mediated inflammatory lung injury. Host genetic variation influences the development of illness requiring critical care1 or hospitalization2–4 after infection with SARS-CoV-2. The GenOMICC (Genetics of Mortality in Critical Care) study enables the comparison of genomes from individuals who are critically ill with those of population controls to find underlying disease mechanisms. Here we use whole-genome sequencing in 7,491 critically ill individuals compared with 48,400 controls to discover and replicate 23 independent variants that significantly predispose to critical COVID-19. We identify 16 new independent associations, including variants within genes that are involved in interferon signalling (IL10RB and PLSCR1), leucocyte differentiation (BCL11A) and blood-type antigen secretor status (FUT2). Using transcriptome-wide association and colocalization to infer the effect of gene expression on disease severity, we find evidence that implicates multiple genes—including reduced expression of a membrane flippase (ATP11A), and increased expression of a mucin (MUC1)—in critical disease. Mendelian randomization provides evidence in support of causal roles for myeloid cell adhesion molecules (SELE, ICAM5 and CD209) and the coagulation factor F8, all of which are potentially druggable targets. Our results are broadly consistent with a multi-component model of COVID-19 pathophysiology, in which at least two distinct mechanisms can predispose to life-threatening disease: failure to control viral replication; or an enhanced tendency towards pulmonary inflammation and intravascular coagulation. We show that comparison between cases of critical illness and population controls is highly efficient for the detection of therapeutically relevant mechanisms of disease