100 ways to make a Japanese house

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Scenes of children making dollhouses are something of a leitmotif in Rumer Godden’s celebrated doll stories. Her first children’s novel, The Dolls’ House (1947), has sisters Charlotte and Emily Dane refurbishing a Victorian dollhouse, while in 1956’s The Fairy Doll, the young protagonist Elizabeth fashions a more unassuming home for her doll. Of course, Charlotte, Emily, and Elizabeth are not alone in these pursuits, and Godden is not the only mid-twentieth-century children’s writer to detail them. One of Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School heroines, Tom Gay, creates many dollhouses in her time at the school, selling these at the end-of-school sales; the first appears in Tom Tackles the Chalet School (serialized in 1947 and 1948 before being released as a single volume in 1955). The Five Dolls series by Helen Clare is likewise full of improvised dollhouse objects and craft activities; in Five Dolls in a House (1953), for example, heroine Elizabeth converts her child-sized blue velvet ribbon into a dolls’ staircase carpet, blithely saying, “we’ll pin it on with drawing-pins as I haven’t any stair rods” (58). However, what is an ancillary, if significant, motif in Brent-Dyer, Clare, and even The Dolls’ House or The Fairy Doll becomes the defining narrative preoccupation in two of Godden’s lesser-known works, her 1961 children’s novel Miss Happiness and Miss Flower and its sequel Little Plum (1963)

Wonderful accidents

Everyone’s a critic. While I found Quentin Blake’s pen-and-ink and monochrome wash illustration of Willy Wonka charming—a blend of manic whimsy and wild-eyed threat which is just right for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)—a fellow gallery-goer at the exhibition ‘Picture This: Children’s Illustrated Classics’, currently on show in the Folio Society Gallery at the British Library, loudly pronounced it ‘something you’d find in the New Yorker magazine, not a children’s book’. It is a remark that reflects the proprietorial feelings which children’s literature often induces (not to mention the sense that even if not everyone could write or illustrate a children’s book, then anyone can assess the merits of one)

‘Only Brooks of Sheffield’: conversation, crossover writing, and child and adult perspectives in David Copperfield and its juvenile adaptations

This article examines the role that conversations between children and adults play in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century adaptations of it for a child audience. First, I show conversation as an important vector in Dickens’s exploration of child and adult knowledge in the original novel. The rules of conversation are suspended in mixed-age companies, as is most powerfully expressed in my titular example: an adult joke turning on the child David’s non-comprehension of a remark by Mr Murdstone. Nonetheless, other conversations show sensitive adults mitigating power differentials between child and adult, and present the child David as unusually perspicacious (in line with his overall characterization). Second, I turn to juvenile adaptations of David Copperfield by writers including Dickens’s granddaughter Mary Angela Dickens. I argue that these works minimize not just the number of conversations in direct speech, but also the process by which David makes conversational inferences; the (now third-person) narrator often fills conversational gaps for the child reader. In the final section, I argue that the relative unimportance of conversation in the adaptations, as opposed to Dickens’s novel, cannot be attributed to concerns with suitability or intelligibility alone. Instead, Dickens’s preoccupation with conversations between adults and children relates to David Copperfield’s original status as a crossover or cross-written text that would have been read by a mixed-age audience. Once this dual address is removed in the adaptations, age-levelled knowledge positions are of much less concern. As such, conversation in David Copperfield metaphorizes the labour (and ethical responsibilities) of the cross-writer

Amateur hours: the visual interpretation of Tennyson’s poetry in two manuscript albums

This article seeks to gauge Victorian readers’ responses by looking not at how readers wrote about their experience of texts, but at how they responded to their reading visually. To this end, the article presents a case study of two Victorian manuscript albums from the Tennyson Research Collection in Lincoln, in which Tennyson’s poetry has been transcribed alongside amateur illustrations. While these items improve our understanding of nineteenth-century manuscript culture in a similar way to commonplace books or scrapbooks, their sustained attention to individual texts is distinctive. The private nature of amateur illustration, and the fact that the amateur illustrator’s interpretations remain implicit, can encode responses to texts that are less articulable in other media. The first album, which contains Tennyson’s ‘The Day-Dream’, sheds new light on the problems of signification posed by the poem’s multiple endings; the album shows a reader who uses amateur illustration to create the ‘meaning suited to his mind’ that is mentioned and then dismissed by Tennyson’s narrator. In the second album, a talented group of sisters, including the amateur artist Ella Taylor, illustrated the 1859 Idylls of the King. The sisters’ pairings of word and image interpret the original four-poem Idylls in significant ways, for example, mitigating Guinevere’s guilt through the editing of extracts, and tacitly revelling in Vivien’s triumph over Merlin via an arresting illustration of Vivien in motion. As such, the album intervenes in Victorian debates surrounding female character, as the Taylor sisters sympathize even with the villainesses of the Idylls

Applying Lessons from Maine’s Educational Opportunity Tax Credit to the Student Loan Repayment Tax Credit

In 2008, Maine implemented the Educational pportunity Tax Credit (EOTC), a tax credit available to eligible recent college graduates with student debt. The share of eligible filers who apply for and receive the EOTC has been relatively low, however, likely driven by a lack of awareness about the program and its complicated application processes and eligibility criteria. In April 2022, the legislature created the Student Loan Repayment Tax Credit (SLRTC), which simplifies some of these processes. Meeting the legislature’s goals for this program, however, may require expanding awareness of the SLRTC and ensuring that the application process is simple. This article provides information and analysis about implementation of the EOTC with comparisons to the SLRTC

Returning Citizens: A quiet revolution in prisoner reintegration

(First paragraph) THIS ARTICLE offers a brief overview of a desistance-oriented approach to supporting community reintegration in the state of Tasmania, Australia. While community service is typically discussed in terms of ‘payback' as a form of punishment, it can be harnessed in creative ways to support prisoner reintegration and desistance processes. Compelling contributions from desistance scholars (see, for example, McNeill and Weaver, 2010; Schinkel, 2014) advance the recognition that people with offending histories benefit from multi-faceted supports over time to change their lives, living conditions and life chances. Through this lens, the remit of supporting reintegration extends from a traditional blinkered focus on securing essential items to aid survival post-release, to include pursuit of identity change, relationships and resources which enable sustained desistance and human flourishing

Efficacy of computational predictions of the functional effect of idiosyncratic pharmacogenetic variants

BACKGROUND: Pharmacogenetic variation is important to drug responses through diverse and complex mechanisms. Predictions of the functional impact of missense pharmacogenetic variants primarily rely on the degree of sequence conservation between species as a primary discriminator. However, idiosyncratic or off-target drug-variant interactions sometimes involve effects that are peripheral or accessory to the central systems in which a gene functions. Given the importance of sequence conservation to functional prediction tools—these idiosyncratic pharmacogenetic variants may violate the assumptions of predictive software commonly used to infer their effect. METHODS: Here we exhaustively assess the effectiveness of eleven missense mutation functional inference tools on all known pharmacogenetic missense variants contained in the Pharmacogenomics Knowledgebase (PharmGKB) repository. We categorize PharmGKB entries into sub-classes to catalog likely off-target interactions, such that we may compare predictions across different variant annotations. RESULTS: As previously demonstrated, functional inference tools perform variably across the complete set of PharmGKB variants, with large numbers of variants incorrectly classified as ‘benign’. However, we find substantial differences amongst PharmGKB variant sub-classes, particularly in variants known to cause off-target, type B adverse drug reactions, that are largely unrelated to the main pharmacological action of the drug. Specifically, variants associated with off-target effects (hence referred to as off-target variants) were most often incorrectly classified as ‘benign’. These results highlight the importance of understanding the underlying mechanism of pharmacogenetic variants and how variants associated with off-target effects will ultimately require new predictive algorithms. CONCLUSION: In this work we demonstrate that functional inference tools perform poorly on pharmacogenetic variants, particularly on subsets enriched for variants causing off-target, type B adverse drug reactions. We describe how to identify variants associated with off-target effects within PharmGKB in order to generate a training set of variants that is needed to develop new algorithms specifically for this class of variant. Development of such tools will lead to more accurate functional predictions and pave the way for the increased wide-spread adoption of pharmacogenetics in clinical practice

Scrubbing up: multi-scale investigation of woody encroachment in a southern African savannah

Changes in the extent of woody vegetation represent a major conservation question in many savannah systems around the globe. To address the problem of the current lack of broad-scale cost-effective tools for land cover monitoring in complex savannah environments, we use a multi-scale approach to quantifying vegetation change in Kruger National Park (KNP), South Africa. We test whether medium spatial resolution satellite data (Landsat, existing back to the 1970s), which have pixel sizes larger than typical vegetation patches, can nevertheless capture the thematic detail required to detect woody encroachment in savannahs. We quantify vegetation change over a 13-year period in KNP, examine the changes that have occurred, assess the drivers of these changes, and compare appropriate remote sensing data sources for monitoring change. We generate land cover maps for three areas of southern KNP using very high resolution (VHR) and medium resolution satellite sensor imagery from February 2001 to 2014. Considerable land cover change has occurred, with large increases in shrubs replacing both trees and grassland. Examination of exclosure areas and potential environmental driver data suggests two mechanisms: elephant herbivory removing trees and at least one separate mechanism responsible for conversion of grassland to shrubs, theorised to be increasing atmospheric CO2. Thus, the combination of these mechanisms causes the novel two-directional shrub encroachment that we observe (tree loss and grassland conversion). Multi-scale comparison of classifications indicates that although spatial detail is lost when using medium resolution rather than VHR imagery for land cover classification (e.g., Landsat imagery cannot readily distinguish between tree and shrub classes, while VHR imagery can), the thematic detail contained within both VHR and medium resolution classifications is remarkably congruent. This suggests that medium resolution imagery contains sufficient thematic information for most broad-scale land cover monitoring requirements in heterogeneous savannahs, while having the benefits of being cost-free and providing a longer historical archive of data than VHR sources. We conclude that monitoring of broad-scale land cover change using remote sensing has considerable potential as a cost-effective tool for both better informing land management practitioners, and for monitoring the future landscape-scale impacts of management policies in savannahs

Iteration, Iteration, Iteration : How Restructuring Data Can Reveal Complex Relationships Between Chronic Illnesses and the Apps Intended to Support Them

This study intended to gain a broad understanding of how commercial apps may support people with chronic illness management, through the restructuring of data for analysis. The study formed an initial part of a larger PhD project looking into symptom tracking for people with chronic illnesses. The study included apps designed for people with Rheumatoid Arthritis, Crohn’s and Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), and Anxiety conditions (aggregated and including Bi-Polar Disorder, Generalised Anxiety Disorder and Panic Disorder) to give an overview of how apps might engage with different types of chronic illness, all of which feature fatigue as a main symptom. In this paper, we report on the process of creating and using an iterative process to rearrange the data collected in order to reveal more complex relationships between the chronic illnesses and the apps intended to support them

Farming with Nature 2021 event report

University of Cumbria’s Centre for National Parks and Protected Areas (CNPPA) hosted the online conference Farming with Nature in May 2021, with support from the Food, Farming & Countryside Commission. The event set out to explore two of the recommendations from Defra’s 2019 Landscapes Review, these being: (i) that our national landscapes should form the backbone of nature recovery networks and, (ii) that national landscapes should have a central place in forthcoming Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes. Contributions by guest speakers and the active participation of all attendees at the conference workshops provided substantial insight into the opportunities and challenges ahead. Attendees, mainly from a spread of geographical regions in England, held a range of job roles relevant to land management in protected landscapes. In the report, rich qualitative data arising from the conference sessions is analysed. Actions to facilitate ELM and to develop nature recovery networks in farmed landscapes are identified. Recordings of the conference sessions are available on the @CNPPA_UoC YouTube channel at https://bit.ly/3r4NHb