When is the now in the here and there? Trans-diegetic music in Hal Ashby’s Coming Home

While it would be a stretch to classify Hal Ashby as a postmodernist filmmaker (with that term’s many attendant ambiguities), his films of the 1970s regularly evince post-Classical stylistic and narrative strategies, including non-linear time structures, inter-textual self-references, open endings, and nuanced subversions of the fourth wall. Ashby’s most consistently playful approach to form comes by way of his integration and development of trans-diegetic musical sequences within his body of work. Music in Ashby films creates a lively sense of unpredictability, and each of his seven films of the 1970s employs this strategy at least once. Moreover, trans-diegetic music in Ashby’s films becomes a device that allows the director to elide moments in time. It functions as an editing tool, creating a bridge between often disparate events. However, it is also a narrative device that both compresses and stretches time, allowing for an on-screen confluence of events that at first appear to take place simultaneously or sequentially, but which actually occur over different moments or lengths of time. Yet while Ashby is not alone as a Hollywood director interested in exploring the formal possibilities that trans-diegesis might bring to his movies, film studies has begun only relatively recently to explore and analyse this technique. After briefly discussing the current critical discussion of trans-diegetic music and explicating patterns of its use in Ashby’s career, this paper explores an extended display of the strategy in the film Coming Home (1978). By interrogating its use as both narrative device and formal convention in this instance, the paper attempts both to understand trans-diegesis as a key component of Ashby’s filmmaking style and also to forge ahead in expanding the discussion of trans-diegesis within film studies

Limiting Cases for Spectrum Closure Results

The spectrum of a first-order sentence is the set of cardinalities of its finite models. Given a spectrum S and a function f, it is not always clear whether or not the image of S under f is also a spectrum. In this paper, we consider questions of this form for functions that increase very quickly and for functions that increase very slowly. Roughly speaking, we prove that the class of all spectra is closed under functions that increase arbitrarily quickly, but it is not closed under some natural slowly increasing functions

The discovery of <i>Isocrinus</i> cf. <i>robustus</i> from the Lias Group (Lower Jurassic) near Dunrobin Castle, Sutherland, Scotland

A single stem section (pluricolumnal) belonging to a post-Palaeozoic crinoid (sea lily) is reported from a small outcrop of Lower Jurassic Lias Group strata exposed in low cliff near Dunrobin Castle. This is the first Jurassic crinoid recorded from Eastern Scotland and the small fragment has enough diagnostic characters to be assigned to the species Isocrinus cf. robustus; a crinoid found commonly in the Lower Jurassic of England. The Scottish form collected has unusual morphology that is atypical of the genus

Trust-sensitive belief revision

Belief revision is concerned with incorporating new information into a pre-existing set of beliefs. When the new information comes from another agent, we must first determine if that agent should be trusted. In this paper, we define trust as a pre-processing step before revision. We emphasize that trust in an agent is often restricted to a particular domain of expertise. We demonstrate that this form of trust can be captured by associating a state partition with each agent, then relativizing all reports to this partition before revising. We position the resulting family of trust-sensitive revision operators within the class of selective revision operators of Fermé and Hansson, and we examine its properties. In particular, we show how trust-sensitive revision is manipulable, in the sense that agents can sometimes have incentive to pass on misleading information. When multiple reporting agents are involved, we use a distance function over states to represent differing degrees of trust; this ensures that the most trusted reports will be believed

Trust as a precursor to belief revision

Belief revision is concerned with incorporating new information into a pre-existing set of beliefs. When the new information comes from another agent, we must first determine if that agent should be trusted. In this paper, we define trust as a pre-processing step before revision. We emphasize that trust in an agent is often restricted to a particular domain of expertise. We demonstrate that this form of trust can be captured by associating a state partition with each agent, then relativizing all reports to this partition before revising. We position the resulting family of trust-sensitive revision operators within the class of selective revision operators of Ferme and Hansson, and we prove a representation result that characterizes the class of trust-sensitive revision operators in terms of a set of postulates. We also show that trust-sensitive revision is manipulable, in the sense that agents can sometimes have incentive to pass on misleading information

Comparison of Hop Derived Humulone Constituents in Beer Using UV-Vis, HPLC, and LC-MS

Lupulones and humulones are two families of compounds derived from the hop flower (Humulus lupulus), utilized in brewing beer. Isohumulones are produced during the boiling process by isomerization reactions of humulones and are the primary bittering compounds in beer. The concentration in parts per million (ppm) of isohumulone is reported as IBU (International Bittering Units). Measurement of these compounds is valuable to brewers, but is confounded by other constituents in beer which may also absorb at the 275nm wavelength in UV-Vis spectrometry, the industry standard method. 25 samples were measured using UV-Vis, then analyzed by High Precision Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and HPLC-Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS). Results were varied with respect to reported IBU. Of note, a sample containing an adjunct had much higher 275nm absorbance than expected, absent when eluted through HPLC, suggesting a falsely higher reading than actual due to interference by the adjunct

Evolutionary rate depends on number of protein-protein interactions independently of gene expression level

BACKGROUND: Whether or not a protein's number of physical interactions with other proteins plays a role in determining its rate of evolution has been a contentious issue. A recent analysis suggested that the observed correlation between number of interactions and evolutionary rate may be due to experimental biases in high-throughput protein interaction data sets. DISCUSSION: The number of interactions per protein, as measured by some protein interaction data sets, shows no correlation with evolutionary rate. Other data sets, however, do reveal a relationship. Furthermore, even when experimental biases of these data sets are taken into account, a real correlation between number of interactions and evolutionary rate appears to exist. SUMMARY: A strong and significant correlation between a protein's number of interactions and evolutionary rate is apparent for interaction data from some studies. The extremely low agreement between different protein interaction data sets indicates that interaction data are still of low coverage and/or quality. These limitations may explain why some data sets reveal no correlation with evolutionary rates