Make Love, Not War?: The Role of the Chorus in Kokoschka’s “Murderer Hope of Women”

In the summer of 1909, two one-acts by the twenty-three-year-old painter Oskar Kokoschka premiered in Vienna in an outdoor theatre built in the garden adjacent to the art museum as part of the second Kunstschau exhibit. The two Kunstschauen (of 1908 and 1909) were organized by Gustav Klimt and his friends in order “to expose the Viennese public to the most shocking and revolutionary forces in contemporary art,” and Kokoschka exhibited in both. The showing of Oskar Kokoschka’s art and his plays cemented his reputation as the most prominent enfant terrible of his day. These exhibitions helped ensure that, by the time he moved to Berlin in 1910, his works would become some of the key contributions to the seminal expressionist journal Der Sturm, gaining Kokoschka a place in the canon of European expressionism

In-situ EPR Studies of Reaction Pathways in Titania Photocatalyst-Promoted Alkylation of Alkenes

Acknowledgments This work was supported by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Grant EP/I00372X/1. The EPR spectrometer was purchased under EPSRC Grant EP/F032560/1. We thank Andrew Mills for use of the spectroradiometric measurement system.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Susan F. Russell, Associate Professor of Theatre Arts

In this new Next Page column, Susan F. Russell, Associate Professor of Theatre Arts, shares plays she recommends for anyone interested in reading plays for the first time and where Amish romance novels fit into her reading repertoire

Modulational-instability-free pulse compression in anti-resonant hollow-core photonic crystal fiber

Gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (PCF) is used for efficient nonlinear temporal compression of femtosecond laser pulses, two main schemes being direct soliton-effect self-compression, and spectral broadening followed by phase compensation. To obtain stable compressed pulses, it is crucial to avoid decoherence through modulational instability (MI) during spectral broadening. Here we show that changes in dispersion due to spectral anti-crossings between the fundamental core mode and core wall resonances in anti-resonant-guiding hollow-core PCF can strongly alter the MI gain spectrum, enabling MI-free pulse compression for optimized fiber designs. In addition, higher-order dispersion can introduce MI even when the pump pulses lie in the normal dispersion region

Molecular collisions 21: Semiclassical approximation to atom-symmetric top rotational excitation

A distorted wave approximation to the T matrix for atom-symmetric top scattering was developed. The approximation is correct to first order in the part of the interaction potential responsible for transitions in the component of rotational angular momentum along the symmetry axis of the top. A semiclassical expression for this T matrix is derived by assuming large values of orbital and rotational angular momentum quantum numbers

Experimental evidence for kin-biased helping in a cooperatively breeding vertebrate

The widespread belief that kin selection is necessary for the evolution of cooperative breeding in vertebrates has recently been questioned. These doubts have primarily arisen because of the paucity of unequivocal evidence for kin preferences in cooperative behaviour. Using the cooperative breeding system of long-tailed tits (Aegithalos caudatus) in which kin and non-kin breed within each social unit and helpers are failed breeders, we investigated whether helpers preferentially direct their care towards kin following breeding failure. First, using observational data, we show that not all failed breeders actually become helpers, but that those that do help usually do so at the nest of a close relative. Second, we confirm the importance of kinship for helping in this species by conducting a choice experiment. We show that potential helpers do not become helpers in the absence of close kin and, when given a choice between helping equidistant broods belonging to kin and non-kin within the same social unit, virtually all helped at the nest of kin. This study provides strong evidence that kinship plays an essential role in the maintenance of cooperative breeding in this species

Baryon Magnetic Moments in Alternate 1/N_c Expansions

Recent work shows not only the necessity of a 1/N_c expansion to explain the observed mass spectrum of the lightest baryons, but also that at least two distinct large N_c expansions, in which quarks transform under either the color fundamental or the two-index antisymmetric representation of SU(N_c), work comparably well. Here we show that the baryon magnetic moments do not support this ambivalence; they strongly prefer the color-fundamental 1/N_c expansion, providing experimental evidence that nature decisively distinguishes among 1/N_c expansions for this observable.Comment: 18 pages, ReVTe

Forecasting Transaction Rates: The Autoregressive Conditional Duration Model

This paper will propose a new statistical model for the analysis of data that does not arrive in equal time intervals such as financial transactions data, telephone calls, or sales data on commodities that are tracked electronically. In contrast to fixed interval analysis, the model treats the time between observation arrivals as a stochastic time varying process and therefore is in the spirit of the models of time deformation initially proposed by Tauchen and Pitts (1983), Clark (1973) and more recently discussed by Stock (1988), Lamoureux and Lastrapes (1992), Muller et al. (1990) and Ghysels and Jasiak (1994) but does not require auxiliary data or assumptions on the causes of time flow. Strong evidence is provided for duration clustering beyond a deterministic component for the financial transactions data analyzed. We will show that a very simple version of the model can successfully account for the significant autocorrelations in the observed durations between trades of IBM stock on the consolidated market. A simple transformation of the duration data allows us to include volume in the model.

Do Fixed Exchange Rates Fetter Monetary Policy? A Credit View

The Bernanke-Blinder credit-view model is expanded to encompass a small, open economy with fixed exchange rates. In contrast to conventional wisdom and traditional models, monetary policy is resurrected as a stabilization tool. We show that various financial sector shocks have real aggregate demand effects. Further, we demonstrate that independent monetary policy actions can have substantive impacts on aggregate demand despite perfect capital mobility in bond markets and adherence to a fixed exchange rate regime as long as bank loans are imperfectly mobile.