Themparks: Alternative Play in Contemporary Australian Poetry

Themparks is a creative and critical thesis consisting of a book of poems—The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau—and two experimental essays that illuminate the praxis behind the book of poems, not by auto-critique, but via a study of other contemporary Australian poets whose poetry involves similar compositional approaches. The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau hijacks the prose poems of Arthur Rimbaud’s famously incomplete manuscript Illuminations and re-verses their content—a “Down Under conceit”—to create “inversions”, radically new poems that are ludic and multiple in form, that complicate authorial subjectivity by employing various methods of (mis)translation and appropriation, and whose subject matter reflects and refracts political and personal fragmentation in twenty-first century Australia. “Themparks”, the first critical essay, is a divagation into thempark by contemporary Australian poet Michael Farrell, the poems of which transpose/depose the structures of poems by John Ashbery; “Themparks” also analyses John Ashbery’s translations of the Illuminations of Arthur Rimbaud via a re-reading of Rimbaud’s famous formulation, “I is an other” (Je est an autre). “Aussi/Or”, the second critical essay, is a disquisition on Stéphane Mallarmé’s late innovative poem Un Coup de dés and its various antipodean versions and (mis)translations written by Christopher Brennan (in 1897), Chris Edwards and John Tranter (both in 2006). Both essays/assays explore the (anti)genre of poetic rewritings of previous poems; both trace certain homosocial poetic lineages from self-consciously “experimental” contemporary Australian poets back through American and Australian postmodernists to early modernist French poets; both raise/raze issues of translation, appropriation, plagiarism, and reproduction while employing—metonymically—some parallel theoretical tropes from psychoanalysis, linguistics, philosophy, and science. The guiding thread—the fil conducteur latent in Mallarmé—between the creative and critical components of this thesis is a poetics of the pun. The pun’s promiscuity highlights the highly libinal nature of language-tampering while working to both associate and dissociate parataxis and parapraxis

A systematic review of randomised controlled trials in rheumatoid arthritis: the reporting and handling of missing data in composite outcomes.

BACKGROUND: Most reported outcome measures in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) trials are composite, whose components comprise single measures that are combined into one outcome. The aims of this review were to assess the range of missing data rates in primary composite outcomes and to document the current practice for handling and reporting missing data in published RA trials compared to the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) recommendations. METHODS: A systematic search for randomised controlled trials was conducted for RA trials published between 2008 and 2013 in four rheumatology and four high impact general medical journals. RESULTS: A total of 51 trials with a composite primary outcome were identified, of which 38 (75 %) used the binary American College of Rheumatology responder index and 13 (25 %) used the Disease Activity Score for 28 joints (DAS28). Forty-four trials (86 %) reported on an intention-to-treat analysis population, while 7 trials (14 %) analysed according to a modified intention-to-treat population. Missing data rates for the primary composite outcome ranged from 2-53 % and were above 30 % in 9 trials, 20-30 % in 11 trials, 10-20 % in 18 trials and below 10 % in 13 trials. Thirty-eight trials (75 %) used non-responder imputation and 10 (20 %) used last observation carried forward to impute missing composite outcome data at the primary time point. The rate of dropout was on average 61 % times higher in the placebo group compared to the treatment group in the 34 placebo controlled trials (relative rate 1.61, 95 % CI: 1.29, 2.02). Thirty-seven trials (73 %) did not report the use of sensitivity analyses to assess the handling of missing data in the primary analysis as recommended by CONSORT guidelines. CONCLUSIONS: This review highlights an improvement in rheumatology trial practice since the revision of CONSORT guidelines, in terms of power calculation and participant's flow diagram. However, there is a need to improve the handling and reporting of missing composite outcome data and their components in RA trials. In particular, sensitivity analyses need to be more widely used in RA trials because imputation is widespread and generally uses single imputation methods, and in this area the missing data rates are commonly differentially higher in the placebo group

Neural encoding of socially adjusted value during competitive and hazardous foraging

In group foraging organisms, optimizing the conflicting demands of competitive food loss and safety is critical. We demonstrate that humans select competition avoidant and risk diluting strategies during foraging depending on socially adjusted value. We formulate a mathematically grounded quantification of socially adjusted value in foraging environments and show using multivariate fMRI analyses that socially adjusted value is encoded by mid-cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortices, regions that integrate value and action signals

Strong Ferromagnetic Exchange Coupling Mediated by a Bridging Tetrazine Radical in a Dinuclear Nickel Complex.

The radical bridged compound [(Ni- (TPMA))2-μ-bmtz•−](BF4)3·3CH3CN (bmtz = 3,6-bis- (2′-pyrimidyl)-1,2,4,5-tetrazine, TPMA = tris(2- pyridylmethyl)amine) exhibits strong ferromagnetic exchange between the S = 1 NiII centers and the bridging S = 1/2 bmtz radical with J = 96 ± 5 cm−1 (−2JNi‑radSNiSrad). DFT calculations support the existence of strong ferromagnetic exchange.Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Fellowship, Instituto de Ciencia y Tecnología del Distrito Federal (ICyTDF) National Science Foundation (CHE-1310574) and the Robert A. Welch Foundation (A-1449)