Looking Back at the Audience: The RSC & The Wooster Group’s Troilus and Cressida (2012)

The controversy around the RSC & The Wooster Group’s Troilus and Cressida (Stratford-upon-Avon 2012) among the spectators and critics in Britain revealed significant differences between the UK and the US patterns of staging, spectating, and reviewing Shakespeare. The production has also exposed the gap between mainstream and avant-garde performance practices in terms of artists’ assumptions and audiences’ expectations. Reviews and blog entries written by scholars, critics, practitioners, and anonymous theatre goers were particularly disapproving of The Wooster Group’s experimentation with language, non-psychological acting, the appropriation of Native American customs, and the overall approach to the play and the very process of stage production. These points of criticism have suggested a clear perception of a successful Shakespeare production in the mainstream British theatre: a staging that approaches the text as an autonomous universe guided by realistic rules, psychological principles, and immediate political concerns. If we assume, however, that Troilus and Cressida as a play relies on the dramaturgy of cultural differences and that it consciously reflects on the notion of spectatorship, the production’s transgression of mainstream patterns of staging and spectating brings it surprisingly close to the Shakespearean source

Traps of the trade. Gender and mistranslation in five polish translations of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

The article touches upon gender translation problems, which arise on the level of grammar, culture and imagery. The problem is signaled with reference to five Polish translations of the opening passage of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). The analysis concerns the following translations: Czesław Miłosz’s Jałowa ziemia (1946), Krzysztof Boczkowski’s Ziemia jałowa (two translations – from 1990 and 2001), Andrzej Piotrowski’s Ziemia jałowa (1996) and Jerzy Niemojowski’s Kraj Spustoszony (1978). Eliot’s poem introduces an axiological paradox: spring appears as life-giving and cruel at the same time, while winter seems protective, because it encourages immobility and sleep. In this model, the seasons are attributed female qualities and roles. The Polish translations are not always successful in rendering the gender aspect of the English original with adequacy, as grammatical and cultural habits of target readers differ from those of the original audience. Thus, the category of gender constitutes a perilous trap for the translators of the poem – it cannot be escaped; however, its danger might be neutralised thanks to the sensitivity to the imagery of the original poem. When you are citing the document, use the following link http://essuir.sumdu.edu.ua/handle/123456789/1102

SEA LEVEL RISE DRIVEN GROUNDWATER INUNDATION: EFFECTS OF ISLAND HYDROGEOLOGY ON FRESHWATER LENS DYNAMICS

Groundwater inundation due to sea level rise poses a threat to fresh groundwater availability in coastal areas, and small islands are particularly vulnerable. On an island, when sea level rises, the freshwater lens also rises due to the difference in density between the salt and fresh groundwater. As the water table rises above the land surface it forms a lake and the water is exposed to additional evaporative losses, reducing the amount of fresh water available. This work aims to improve our understanding of groundwater inundation due to sea level rise and the impact of different hydrogeologic settings and phenomena on lake salinity and the freshwater lens. We showcase using the Lake Transport package, a groundwater modeling tool for MODFLOW 6, to model groundwater inundation in a more physically accurate and computationally efficient way compared to past methods. We used these methods to investigate a common hydrogeologic setting where an upper low hydraulic conductivity layer is underlain by a high hydraulic conductivity layer in order to understand the impact of groundwater inundation of the layered system compared to a homogeneous one. Ultimately, the initial condition, regardless of other factors, was most significant in determining the impact of groundwater inundation on the freshwater lens. We also explored a particular phenomenon called density driven instability or fingering events (DF events), where a higher density fluid overlies and intrudes into a less density fluid below it. This can occur between a lake formed by groundwater inundation and the underlying aquifer. The onset of a DF event and the impacts of an event on the freshwater lens are a function of five factors: changes in land surface recharge, upconing, evapoconcentration, the upward movement of the freshwater lens from SLR, and connection/isolation between the lake and aquifer

CRNAs and Sugammadex Use: A Qualitative Analysis

Background: The availability of Sugammadex has increased options for Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists’ (CRNAs) and their choice of neuromuscular reversal agents, however administration is impacted by a variety of provider and institutional factors. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to examine and describe the personal and institutional factors impacting the use of Sugammadex in Illinois by CRNAs. Method: A qualitative study design using an open-ended survey yielded 209 responses. The three main themes that emerged were 1) Why CRNAs choose to use or avoid Sugammadex 2) How CRNAs dose Sugammadex and 3) Practice variations existing within the clinical setting. Results: The most commonly reported subthemes included depth of blockade/dosing of paralytic, underlying disease pathology, size of the patient, and cost considerations or availability at their institution. Conclusion: Based upon these main themes and subthemes, it is recommended that institution wide policies be created to reduce variability in provider administration practices if Sugammadex is not widely accepted as standard reversal. Keywords: anesthesia, Sugammadex, neuromuscular blockade reversal, nurse anesthetis

Investigating the Impact of Seawater Intrusion on the Operation Cost of Groundwater Supply in Island Aquifers

Managing fragile island freshwater resources requires identifying pumping strategies that trade off the financial cost of groundwater supply against controlling the seawater intrusion (SWI) associated with aquifer pumping. In this work, these tradeoffs are investigated through a sensitivity analysis conducted in the context of an optimization formulation of the groundwater management problem, which aims at minimizing the groundwater supply operation cost associated with groundwater pumping and desalination treatment, subject to constraints on SWI control, as quantified by the water table drawdown over the well (∆s), the reduction in freshwater volume (∆FV) in the aquifer, or the salt mass increase (∆SM) in the aquifer. This study focuses on a simplified two-dimensional model of the San Salvador Island aquifer (Bahamas). Pumping strategies are characterized by the distance of the pumping system from the shoreline (WL), the abstraction screen depth (D) and overall pumping rate (Q), constituting the decision variables of the optimization problem. We investigate the impacts of pumping strategies on the operation cost, ∆s, ∆FV and ∆SM. Findings indicate increasing D or decreasing WL reduces ∆s, ∆FV and ∆SM, thus preserving the aquifer hydrogeologic stability, but also leads to extracting saltier groundwater, thus increasing the water treatment requirements, which have a strong impact on the overall groundwater supply cost. From a financial perspective, groundwater abstraction near the island center and at shallow depths seems the most convenient strategy. However, the analysis of the optimization constraints reveals that strategies where the pumping system approaches the island center tend to cause more severe SWI, highlighting the need to trade off groundwater supply cost against SWI control

Insight into the Binding and Hydrolytic Preferences of hNudt16 Based on Nucleotide Diphosphate Substrates

Nudt16 is a member of the NUDIX family of hydrolases that show specificity towards substrates consisting of a ucleoside diphosphate linked to another moiety X. Several substrates for hNudt16 and various possible biological functions have been reported. However, some of these reports contradict each other and studies comparing the substrate specificity of the hNudt16 protein are limited. Therefore, we quantitatively compared the affinity of hNudt16 towards a set of previously published substrates, as well as identified novel potential substrates. Here, we show that hNudt16 has the highest affinity towards IDP and GppG, with Kd below 100 nM. Other tested ligands exhibited a weaker affinity of several orders of magnitude. Among the investigated compounds, only IDP, GppG, m7GppG, AppA, dpCoA, and NADH were hydrolyzed by hNudt16 with a strong substrate preference for inosine or guanosine containing compounds. A new identified substrate for hNudt16, GppG, which binds the enzyme with an affinity comparable to that of IDP, suggests another potential regulatory role of this protein. Molecular docking of hNudt16-ligand binding inside the hNudt16 pocket revealed two binding modes for representative substrates. Nucleobase stabilization by Π stacking interactions with His24 has been associated with strong binding of hNudt16 substrates