The Change of Total Anthocyanins in Blueberries and Their Antioxidant Effect After Drying and Freezing

This study examined the effects of freezing, storage, and cabinet drying on the anthocyanin content and antioxidant activity of blueberries (Vaccinium corymbosum L). Fresh samples were stored for two weeks at 5(°)C while frozen samples were kept for up to three months at −20(°)C. There were two drying treatments, one including osmotic pretreatment followed by cabinet drying and the other involving only cabinet drying. Total anthocyanins found in fresh blueberries were 7.2 ± 0.5 mg/g dry matter, expressed as cyanidin 3-rutinoside equivalents. In comparison with fresh samples, total anthocyanins in untreated and pretreated dried blueberries were significantly reduced to 4.3 ± 0.1 mg/g solid content, 41% loss, and 3.7 ± 0.2 mg/g solid content, 49% loss, respectively. Osmotic treatment followed by a thermal treatment had a greater effect on anthocyanin loss than the thermal treatment alone. In contrast, the frozen samples did not show any significant decrease in anthocyanin level during three months of storage. Measurement of the antioxidant activity of anthocyanin extracts from blueberries showed there was no significant difference between fresh, dried, and frozen blueberries

A study of the ion exchange behaviour of plutonium in aqueous nitric acid solutions

Imperial Users onl

Lying Down or Standing Up for Music: Hearing and Listening in Vernon Lee’s Music and its Lovers

My childhood experience of learning musical instruments was characterized by severity. Formal, impersonal teachers and a limited repertoire were the norm in 1970s and ’80s music teaching, based, as it was, on passing the Associated Board exams. Frivolity was not encouraged, for I was meant to be producing what was then (and is now, to an extent) called ‘serious’ music.             ‘Seriousness’ began with the body. When playing the piano one was told to sit upright, to be attentive to the music and to hold oneself throughout a performance with a posture that paid a certain homage. The standard manuals for learning the piano in those days, Dame Fanny Waterman and Marian Harewood’s three-volume series Piano Lessons, gave posture a moral imperative. An illustration at the beginning of the first book showed three different pianists. The first was hunched and looking at his fingers on the keyboard. ‘This is a bad pupil’, said a caption. The second sat erect. ‘This is a good pupil’, said another. The third, however, was said to be a ‘great pianist’. With an outwardly curved back and dramatically-held fingers as if submitting to but also commanding the music like a magician, this pianist was at one with his art. This practical but moral necessity was also applied to my other instruments, including the violin and the bassoon. Granted it is hard to hunch with the latter, but the bassoon’s almost comically prodigious appearance, which suggests far more than it ever seems to give, always had to be transcended through the seriousness with which one related to and clutched the instrument

Adjoint sensitivity analysis of chaotic systems using cumulant truncation

We describe a simple and systematic method for obtaining approximate sensitivity information from a chaotic dynamical system using a hierarchy of cumulant equations. The resulting forward and adjoint systems yield information about gradients of functionals of the system and do not suffer from the convergence issues that are associated with the tangent linear representation of the original chaotic system. The functionals on which we focus are ensemble-averaged quantities, whose dynamics are not necessarily chaotic; hence we analyse the system’s statistical state dynamics, rather than individual trajectories. The approach is designed for extracting parameter sensitivity information from the detailed statistics that can be obtained from direct numerical simulation or experiments. We advocate a data-driven approach that incorporates observations of a system’s cumulants to determine an optimal closure for a hierarchy of cumulants that does not require the specification of model parameters. Whilst the sensitivity information from the resulting surrogate model is approximate, the approach is designed to be used in the analysis of turbulence, whose degrees of freedom and complexity currently prohibits the use of more accurate techniques. Here we apply the method to obtain functional gradients from low-dimensional representations of Rayleigh-Bénard convection

An analysis of human adaptation to prismatically displaced vision

Experiments were undertaken on prism adaptation in humans. Two treatment conditions were used. The restricted, where only localising movements of the arm were allowed and the free situation, where the subject was free to walk about. In the first situation: a) Adaptation takes place in effect at the level of the position sensors of the used joint. This is a change in felt limb position. b) Movement of the joint is a prerequisite condition. c) The sensory channel feeding in the error information is a passive instrument. d) Adaptation does not affect automatic movements: these take place without using information about joint position. In the second situation: a) Adaptation takes place in the positioning system of the eye; i.e., a change in the appreciated eye position. b) This form of adaptation takes place when the limbs are inspected, with or without repeated voluntary positioning movements of the eye. Immobility of the limbs favours this type of adaptation, but it will occur when gross limb movements are taking place

Review: Jeremy Coleman, Richard Wagner in Paris: Translation, Identity, Modernity (The Boydell Press, 2019)

In his remarkable 1851 polemic, Opera and Drama, Richard Wagner characterized Paris as ever-hungry, impatient for the new, and as a city where an ambitious young artist might thrive; indeed, as the ‘great devourer of all artistic tendencies’. But such an image also suggests that the city might just as easily chew up and spit out a young composer. It is not surprising that Wagner, at this point living in Zurich, had such contradictory feelings about the French capital. Opera and Drama was written in the aftermath of what Jeremy Coleman, in his fine, detailed study of the composer’s fraught relationship with the city, characterizes as his ‘second assault’ on Paris. Having fled the aftermath of the Dresden Uprising of May 1849, in which he had been implicated, Wagner was now a political exile. Like Odysseus searching for Ithaca or perhaps condemned, like the tragic hero of his own 1843 opera, The Flying Dutchman, to journey the earth for eternity until the spirit of music finally redeems and releases him, Wagner needed a new home, and so it was that he heard the Sirens of Paris calling. While lodging with the composer Franz Liszt in Weimar, the pair plotted the city’s conquest, and, as Coleman describes, drew up plans for ‘nothing less than the future of art in the wake of political failure’

Model making and anti-competitive practices in the late eighteenth-century London sculpture trade

This article concerns the generation of anti-competitive practices, and the associated discontents, that rose to the fore in the London sculpture trade in the late eighteenth century (1770-1799). It charts the business strategies and technical procedures of the most economically successful practitioners, whose workshops had some of the characteristics of manufactories, and whose critics accused them of conducting a "monopoly" trade. Small-scale practitioners lost out in the competition for great public contracts on account of their design processes and their inability to represent any manifestation of "establishment". A combination of three factors increased the gap between a handful of powerful "manufacturers" and the rest of the trade: the foundation of the Royal Academy, shifts in the ways designs were evaluated, and a growing number of very lucrative contracts for public sculpture. I conclude that such were the discontents within the London trade that by the 1790s, there was a marked tendency for practitioners who were not manufacturers to be attracted to democratic political movements, to the Wilkite call for liberty and the rise of civic radicalism in the merchant population of London

The London trade in monumental sculpture and the development of imagery of the family in funerary monuments of the period 1720-1760

PhDThe thesis is concerned with the use of family imagery in monumental sculpture commissioned from the major London workshops in the mid-eighteenth century. It explores the interaction of the many factors which dictated the way in which the family might be represented in monumental sculpture. The interests of the competing London workshops in producing images which established their fame and increased their profits are studied in conjunction with the interests of the patronage in furthering personal and family reputations. The thesis evaluates the contribution that work upon the social history of the eighteenth century family can make to our understanding of the development of monumental imagery. I investigate the many levels of problems associated with using an art form as a source of "data" in the formulation of social history and the potential of the analysis of artistic images to question, or confirm, the validity of theories of family history. The central objective is to enquire into the reasons why the London market in monumental sculpture thrived and expanded in the first half of the eighteenth century. Much of the analysis is directed at revealing the fundamental reasons which caused patrons to order monuments. Changes in furierary culture are measured in terms of the proportion of monuments commissioned to mark, for instance, the elevation of a family to the peerage, or a bereaved husband's grief for his wife. I conclude that the great majority of monumental sculpture commissioned from London workshops throughout the period was concerned with matters of inheritance and property; marking the end of dynasties, the gratitude of those inheriting land, and the establishment of new families upon country estates. The demand for images marking the transfer of property and the passage of titles and honours is shown to have dominated the sculpture market in the first two decades of the period and, despite a strong cultural reaction against formal dynastic sculpture in the 1740s and 50s, continued to have a commanding role in the success of the London workshops

Women and violence: a feminist theological ethical study

By popular cultural assumption, women are less aggressive than men, and 'woman' can therefore be constructed as an image of peacefulness. This construction is a myth that needs to be questioned in the interests of proper attention to the varied experiences and circumstances of women's lives. Questioning this myth involves better description of a variety of ways in which women encounter violence - illustrated here by discussion of assaults against women in intimate relationships, women as members of military forces, women’s experiences of wartime, and discussion and campaigning by women on the subjects of war and peacemaking. This kind of description values women's discourse and experiences, the range of which is expressive of great differences among women. Feminist theological ethics is a suitable tool for evaluating these experiences, and for promoting the good of women and men in the face of violence. Feminist theological ethics emerges out of non-theological feminist ethics and feminist theology. This double root ensures that (from feminist theory) ethics is not seen as entirely separated from politics, particularly along a gendered public/private divide, and also that (from feminist theology) ethics is not separated from other areas of theological enquiry. Evaluation of women’s experiences out of feminist theological ethical concerns highlights a need for a modified universalism which will allow injustice to be challenged, and for the rebuilding of the relationship between theological conceptions of love and justice so that theological ethics can be more responsive to the context and material realities of human lives. Feminist theological ethics illuminates ways in which different forms of violence, in the so-called public or private spheres, interact and affect each other. One possible relation of women to military forces and to militarism can thereby be constructed, and a broadened discussion of war encouraged