Derek Mahon's Seascapes Mediated through Greece: Antiquity in Modernity, Nature in Abstraction.

The article investigates various approaches to seascape in selected poems of the contemporary Irish poet, Derek Mahon, set against the background of references to Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney or Odysseus Elytis. The sea provides a perspective that cannot be overestimated in trying to get an insight into the communication and the clash between the culture of the South and the North. The two nations have often glimpsed at their reflection in the mirror of the surrounding seas, their history and mentality determined by their geographical position and largely insular experience. Elements such as the isolation from the mainland; the perception of the sea as a personification of the force ruling over life and death, as a threat and a promise; or the focus on some characteristic natural phenomena such as light or surface dominate the seascape imagery both in Greek and Irish literature. The sea often constitutes a border of antagonistic and complementary worlds: dream and reality, light and darkness, male and female, the real world and the underworld – and the vantage point of the poet changes accordingly. Some poems under discussion also explore a series of myths linked with the sea, the best known of which, the Odyssey, has remained a frame of reference for numerous contemporary Greek and Irish poets. Elytis's Cyclades or Longley's Mayo provide us with examples of 'private homelands'. As Longley once observed, “his part of Mayo” reminds him of Ithaca (sandy and remote) and of Greece in general: “I’ve often thought that that part of Ireland . . . looks like Greece. Or Greece looks like a dust-bowl version of Ireland,” which triggers further deliberations on seascape as the common ground for the two countries. Just as Elytis's Cyclades or Longley's Mayo, Mahon’s Cyclades provide us with examples of 'private homelands'. The focus of this article is Derek Mahon’s seascapes: purely Greek (‘Aphrodite’s Pool’), Irish seen through the prism of the Greek ones (‘Achill’) and purely Irish (‘Recalling Aran’). The level of abstraction in the last category is compared with Odysseus Elytis’s imagery of the Cyclades, while the first poem demystifies a practice which I termed as ‘myth trading’, one of consumerist tourism techniques

Peer Relationship Experiences Of Deaf And Hard-Of-Hearing Adolescents

Deaf and hard-of-hearing adolescents (DHH) experience more peer problems and lower levels of friendships than their hearing peers. This study used a qualitative approach to identify their experiences of peer problems and factors influencing them. A sample of 30, 13–19 year-old DHH adolescents with a moderate to profound hearing loss, drawn from a population-based cohort study in which their receptive language and social–emotional skills had been assessed, underwent semi-structured interviews. Interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis. Participants reported that, overall, they had developed positive and rewarding relationships with their peers, notwithstanding their earlier experience of being bullied. Conflicts and infrequency of interaction in their friendships were mainly reported by girls. Adolescents with moderate hearing loss were identified as facing the same or even more barriers than adolescents with severe to profound hearing loss in making new friends. Implications for educational practice are discussed

Dairy bioactives and functional ingredients with skin health benefits

The potential of whey from Italian cheese productions to support skin health and anti-ageing mechanism was studied. The effect of whey on dermal and epidermal cells was evaluated. Whey inhibited the activity of elastase and tyrosinase enzymes by 60% and 32%, respectively. Whey cytotoxicity against tested skin cell lines, human fibroblasts (HDFa) and keratinocytes (HaCaT) was not observed. Moreover, the antioxidant activity of the samples was noted, after treatment with whey intracellular ROS level was decreased by 87% in comparison with the hydrogen peroxide-treated cells. Fibroblasts produced a significant amount of extracellular matrix molecules, collagen I, elastin and glycosaminoglycans as a result of treatment with tested whey. In addition, the ability of samples to improve the cell barrier integrity of keratinocytes was proven. The obtained results indicate that pure whey supports skin health and shows potential to be used by the cosmetic industry

Learning intrinsic excitability in medium spiny neurons

We present an unsupervised, local activation-dependent learning rule for intrinsic plasticity (IP) which affects the composition of ion channel conductances for single neurons in a use-dependent way. We use a single-compartment conductance-based model for medium spiny striatal neurons in order to show the effects of parametrization of individual ion channels on the neuronal activation function. We show that parameter changes within the physiological ranges are sufficient to create an ensemble of neurons with significantly different activation functions. We emphasize that the effects of intrinsic neuronal variability on spiking behavior require a distributed mode of synaptic input and can be eliminated by strongly correlated input. We show how variability and adaptivity in ion channel conductances can be utilized to store patterns without an additional contribution by synaptic plasticity (SP). The adaptation of the spike response may result in either "positive" or "negative" pattern learning. However, read-out of stored information depends on a distributed pattern of synaptic activity to let intrinsic variability determine spike response. We briefly discuss the implications of this conditional memory on learning and addiction.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure

The impact of universal newborn hearing screening on long-term literacy outcomes: a prospective cohort study

Objective: To determine whether the benefits of universal newborn hearing screening (UNHS) seen at age 8 years persist through the second decade. Design: Prospective cohort study of a population sample of children with permanent childhood hearing impairment (PCHI) followed up for 17 years since birth in periods with (or without) UNHS. Setting: Birth cohort of 100 000 in southern England. Participants: 114 teenagers aged 13–19 years, 76 with PCHI and 38 with normal hearing. All had previously their reading assessed aged 6–10 years. Interventions: Birth in periods with and without UNHS; confirmation of PCHI before and after age 9 months. Main outcome measure: Reading comprehension ability. Regression modelling took account of severity of hearing loss, non-verbal ability, maternal education and main language. Results: Confirmation of PCHI by age 9 months was associated with significantly higher mean z-scores for reading comprehension (adjusted mean difference 1.17, 95% CI 0.36 to 1.97) although birth during periods with UNHS was not (adjusted mean difference 0.15, 95% CI−0.75 to 1.06). The gap between the reading comprehension z-scores of teenagers with early compared with late confirmed PCHI had widened at an adjusted mean rate of 0.06 per year (95% CI−0.02 to 0.13) during the 9.2-year mean interval since the previous assessment. Conclusions: The benefit to reading comprehension of confirmation of PCHI by age 9 months increases during the teenage years. This strengthens the case for UNHS programmes that lead to early confirmation of permanent hearing loss

One- and two-proton transfer reactions with vibrational Nuclei

We extend a semiclassical model of transfer reactions to the case in which one of the collision partners is a vibrational nucleus. The model is applied to one- and two-proton stripping reactions in the 37Cl + 98Mo system, for which a rapid transition from normal to anomalous slope in the two proton transfer reaction at energies around the Coulomb barrier is experimentally observed. This behavior is satisfactorily reproduced by the present extension of the model.Comment: LaTeX, 10 pages, 1 figure (PostScript

Advance telephone calls ahead of reminder questionnaires increase response rate in non-responders compared to questionnaire reminders only : The RECORD phone trial

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Chaos and Noise in a Truncated Toda Potential

Results are reported from a numerical investigation of orbits in a truncated Toda potential which is perturbed by weak friction and noise. Two significant conclusions are shown to emerge: (1) Despite other nontrivial behaviour, configuration, velocity, and energy space moments associated with these perturbations exhibit a simple scaling in the amplitude of the friction and noise. (2) Even very weak friction and noise can induce an extrinsic diffusion through cantori on a time scale much shorter than that associated with intrinsic diffusion in the unperturbed system.Comment: 10 pages uuencoded PostScript (figures included), (A trivial mathematical error leading to an erroneous conclusion is corrected