Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir, by Robert Miklitsch

Unsettlingly ambiguous, oft-times nonlinear narratives; dialogue-driven actions announcing acts of violence among a barrage of stark, angular shadows; isolating metropolises, beautiful and scheming women, and their ensuing battles against all odds—if not to rise above, then to survive until sunrise: whether in unison or discord, these elements both inscribe and orchestrate the very measures through which a unique body of films (and their literary antecedents) are interpreted. It is hardly surprising, then, that American film noir retains a popularity today wholly reminiscent of that in its heyday, well over half a century ago

“Feeling my Sister’s Pain”: Perceived Victim Suffering Moderates the Impact of Sexualized Music Videos on Fijian Women’s Responses to Men’s Intimate Partner Violence against Women

To better understand how sexualized music videos affect women’s responses to intimate partner violence (IPV), we examined the role of individual variability in perceived victim pain and perceived victim culpability in moderating and mediating (respectively) the priming effects of sexual music videos on women. Female Fijian college students (n = 243) were randomly assigned to one of three viewing conditions: stereotyped sexual music videos, non-stereotyped/non-sexual music videos, or neutral videos. All participants then read a portrayal of a male-toward-female IPV episode and their perceptions of the female victim and male perpetrator were assessed. Only women who minimized the victim’s pain were adversely affected by exposure to the stereotyped sexual videos. Specifically, for women who perceived low victim pain, those in the stereotyped video condition perceived the victim as more culpable and reported greater perpetrator-directed favorable responding than those in the other two conditions. For these women who perceived low victim pain, perceptions of victim culpability mediated the impact of video type on perpetrator-favorable responding. The findings help us better understand susceptibility to the negative impact of stereotypical sexual videos and highlight areas, such as emphasizing the suffering of victims and reducing myths about victim culpability, which may be worthy of particular emphasis in interventions

The language of self, power, meaning: Japanese literature and the cultural boundaries of ideology

To understand the idioms used in representing literary selfhood as enactments and rhetorical assertions is to observe their contextual construction within shifting fields of power and meaning inseparable from the specific and discernible situations, culturally specific conventions affecting their narration, in short, the specificity of historical moment. In the Japanese context, identity is clearly not the unified essence implied by the Cartesian premise, but it can be the presentation or performance of a spatiotemporal locatedness of contradiction and disunity, a nexus wherein multiple discourses temporarily coincide in remarkable and discernible ways we apprehend in the abstracted self. But it is not enough that we as readers celebrate in the particularity of these performance as expressions of what is often dismissed as "local knowledge." Rather, we must question what social institutions--be they alien or indigenous--these performances address. What conventions did they oppose? What apparatus of power does the dialectic of the gaze set itself in opposition? For only by questioning the strategies that erected the facade of boundedness in general and one in particular that created the illusions of insulating the self from the play of power relations in specific works of fictional self-representation can we hope to force a larger reconsideration of selves and their pathways to emergence. In many ways, my task as a member of a particular reading audience has been and will always be to visualize the overall impact of cultural forces on patterns of fictional self-representation and to accept that identity is negotiated, open, shifting, ambiguous, the result of culturally available meanings and the open-ended, power-laden enactments of these meanings in everyday situations

An Unconventional Reading of China's Foreign Economic Policy: A Phase of Fluidity and Transformation

This article applies Marxist analytical tools to analyse the competing debates about the BRI’s historic origins, deployment, and integration. The article contends that Marxist notions of subnational regions and spatial fixes have the potential to inform analysis of the BRI’s transnational connectivity extensions and present it in different terms than is usually allowed in conventional readings of China’s foreign economic policy. Adopting such a perspective is particularly apposite given that China’s government has subscribed to such a worldview since assuming power in 1949. Marxist approaches to international relations, political economy, and geoeconomics deepened with Gramscian approaches to political and cultural hegemonic discourse and practice. Analysis of the historical determinants and contemporary trajectory of BRI deployment considered Giovanni Arrighi’s works and his use of Braudel’s la long dureé to contextualise the analysis

GEOGRAPHIC PROFILE OF HEALTHCARE NEEDS AND NON-ACUTE HEALTHCARE SUPPLY IN IRELAND. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 90 JULY 2019

This report provides evidence on the supply of and need for non-acute primary, community and long-term care across geographic areas in Ireland in 2014. This is the first report to be published from the Health Research Board-funded project ‘An inter-sectoral analysis by geographic area of the need for and the supply and utilisation of health services in Ireland’. This report provides the most comprehensive evidence on the geographic distribution of primary, community and long-term care supply to have been published for Ireland to date. Overall, the report finds significant inequalities in the supply of primary, community and longterm care services across counties in Ireland.1 The findings have important implications for future planning of the Irish health system. The overall objective of the project is to provide evidence to inform policymakers about the shift of care, where appropriate, from the acute hospital setting to nonacute care settings. This project is undertaken in the context of significant system reforms in recent years that aimed to, among other things, achieve greater integration in the Irish healthcare system via shifting care, where appropriate, from acute to non-acute settings and building capacity in primary, community and longterm care. The project sets out to provide detailed evidence on supply of services in the non-acute sector, compares supply across regions to identify where nonacute care supply is particularly scarce, and provides evidence on how acute and non-acute services interact, and substitute, within the Irish health and social care system. Evidence generated from this project is of particular relevance in the context of the current Sláintecare strategy (Houses of the Oireachtas Committee on the Future of Healthcare, 2017), a cross-party plan aimed at delivering sustainable and equitable health and social care services in Ireland

Real-Time Detection of Optical Transients with RAPTOR

Fast variability of optical objects is an interesting though poorly explored subject in modern astronomy. Real-time data processing and identification of transient celestial events in the images is very important for such study as it allows rapid follow-up with more sensitive instruments. We discuss an approach which we have developed for the RAPTOR project, a pioneering closed-loop system combining real-time transient detection with rapid follow-up. RAPTOR's data processing pipeline is able to identify and localize an optical transient within seconds after the observation. The testing we performed so far have been confirming the effectiveness of our method for the optical transient detection. The software pipeline we have developed for RAPTOR can easily be applied to the data from other experiments.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, to appear in SPIE proceedings vol. 484

PROJECTIONS OF DEMAND FOR HEALTHCARE IN IRELAND, 2015-2030: FIRST REPORT FROM THE HIPPOCRATES MODEL. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 67 OCTOBER 2017

This report provides baseline estimates and projections of public and private healthcare demand for Irish health and social care services for the years 2015–2030. This is the first report to be published applying the Hippocrates projection model of Irish healthcare demand and expenditure which has been developed at the ESRI in a programme of research funded by the Department of Health. Development of the model has required a very detailed analysis of the services used in Irish health and social care in 2015. This is the most comprehensive mapping of both public and private activity in the Irish healthcare system to have been published for Ireland