Saying Goodbye to Mariposa: Robertson Davies’s Deptford and the Small-Town Convention

In Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), Stephen Leacock’s Mariposa is paradigmatic of a type of small-town fiction with which many subsequent texts such as Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business (1970) are in conversation. Davies’s Deptford is simultaneously a product and a rejection of Mariposa’s influence. Through a process of escape and self-discovery, Dunstan Ramsay must negotiate the residue of his Deptford past with his evolving present, and this process helps to reveal how the small-town convention emerges. An initial focus on Dunstan’s sincere attempts at accurately rendering his village enables an exploration of the broader connotations of his explicit knowledge of, temporary reliance on, and eventual abandonment of a small-town archetype epitomized by Mariposa. If Leacock’s town is read as a home place of Canadian fiction and cultural identity, then Fifth Business draws attention to the mode of memory responsible for that type of exegesis. If Mariposa is the past perfect, then Deptford is the past progressive

Metabolic-Cost Comparison of Running on an Aquatic Treadmill With Water-Jets and Land Treadmill With Incline

Purpose: This study investigated whether running on a land treadmill (TM) at specific inclines corresponded to an equivalent metabolic cost (MC, oxygen consumption, VO2) using water-jets on an aquatic treadmill (ATM) at equivalent running speeds. Methods: Sixteen participants completed two trials on separate days on a TM and ATM. For each trial subjects performed eighteen, 3-4 min submaximal runs at three self selected speeds (slow, medium, and fast) with either water-jet resistances of 0-100% of maximum jet flow capacity in 20% increments during ATM or inclines of 0-10% in 2% increments during TM. Trials were separated by at least 48 hours. Oxygen consumption (VO2), heart rate (HR), and rating of perceived exertion (RPE) were recorded during each trial. Regression and 2x6 ANOVA analysis was employed to evaluate TM and ATM running speed x jet resistance/incline relationship. Results: When running at similar speeds with no resistance (jets or incline), ATM yielded lower VO2 than TM. Adding 40% jets during ATM matched MC during TM at 0% incline. At 60% jets ATM MC simulated TM MC while running on a 4% incline. Comparable MC was observed during ATM 80% jets and 8% TM incline, while ATM 100% jets yielded greater MC than TM 10% incline. While TM yields a linear increase in MC with increasing incline, ATM yielded a non-linear, cubic, in MC with increased jet resistance. Conclusion: The relationship between MC and resistance settings in ATM is quite different than TM incline and may be a result of non-linear application of drag forces on the torso created by the water velocities of the water jets

THEORY AND APPLICATION OF HELIUM AND HELIUM-LIKE IONS IN ASTROPHYSICAL ENVIRONMENTS

A complete model of helium-like line and continuum emission in astrophysical plasmas has been incorporated into the plasma simulation code CLOUDY. All elements between He and Zn are treated, any number of levels can be considered, and a full treatment of radiative and collisional processes is included. This includes photoionization from all levels, line transfer including continuum pumping and destruction by background opacities, scattering, and collisional processes. The model is calculated self-consistently with the ionization and thermal structure of the surrounding nebula. The result is a complete line and continuum spectrum of the nebula. The model helium atom is described and compared to a second standalone helium atom in the low-density case. The effects of the mixing of singlet and triplet terms, the truncation of the physical system, and the convergence of the predicted line intensities as a function of the number of quantum levels explicitly included are considered. New Case-B emissivities are calculated for the helium atom at a range of electron temperatures and densities common in planetary nebulae. Observations of the Orion Nebula are analyzed and compared with predictions of the model helium atom. Observations of low-metallicity extragalactic objects by other authors are analyzed. The methods and details of the model helium-like ions are described. The standard X-ray diagnostics of these ions are revisited and augmented with semi-analytical and numerical calculations of ultraviolet line diagnostics. Finally, a new interface between CLOUDY and the X-ray spectral analysis tool XSPEC is discussed

Effects of External Radiation Fields on Line Emission - Application to Star-forming Regions

A variety of astronomical environments contain clouds irradiated by a combination of isotropic and beamed radiation fields. For example, molecular clouds may be irradiated by the isotropic cosmic microwave background (CMB), as well as by a nearby active galactic nucleus (AGN). These radiation fields excite atoms and molecules and produce emission in different ways. We revisit the escape probability theorem and derive a novel expression that accounts for the presence of external radiation fields. We show that when the field is isotropic the escape probability is reduced relative to that in the absence of external radiation. This is in agreement with previous results obtained under ad hoc assumptions or with the two-level system, but can be applied to complex many-level models of atoms or molecules. This treatment is in the development version of the spectral synthesis code Cloudy. We examine the spectrum of a Spitzer cloud embedded in the local interstellar radiation field, and show that about 60 percent of its emission lines are sensitive to background subtraction. We argue that this geometric approach could provide an additional tool toward understanding the complex radiation fields of starburst galaxies.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication to Ap

Having a father incarcerated can increase an adolescent’s destructive and violent criminal behavior.

Despite the slowdown in incarceration rates that has occurred in recent years, more than one child in every 50 has a parent in prison in the U.S. today. In new research that samples more than 12,000 children and young adults, Lauren C. Porter and Ryan D. King find that children whose father was incarcerated were likely to have a level of violent or destructive crime 23 percent greater than their peers

Can Manipulators Mislead Prediction Market Observers?

We study experimental markets where privately informed traders exchange simple assets, and where uninformed third parties are asked to forecast the values of these assets, guided only by market prices. Although prices only partially aggregate information, they significantly improve the forecasts of third parties. In a second treatment, a portion of traders are given preferences over the forecasts made by observers. Although we find evidence that these traders attempt to manipulate prices in order to influence the beliefs of observers, we find no evidence that observers make less accurate forecasts as a result.