The Doppelgänger in Wilhelmine cinema (1895-1914) : modernity, audiences and identity in turn-of-the-century Germany

The Doppelganger is a celebrated motif of German silent cinema that has been seen by art and literary historians as a filmic descendant of German Romanticism, and by psychoanalysts as a concretisation of human beings' fears regarding their own potentially fragmentary nature and mortality. This research builds on such interpretations by suggesting that - in the case of German cinema before World War One, at least - the Doppelganger can be read as a signifier of modernity as it was experienced by members of various social groupings. Returning to primary sources, some 203 films are identified that featured a Doppelganger and were released in Germany between 1895 and 1914. This corpus is broken down both by genre (into detective films, comedies and art films), and in terms of the polarities of identity about which the figure of the Doppelganger is constructed (high yersus low class, female versus male, and black versus white). From here, individual chapters address the Doppelganger as a fantastic representation of shifting class, gender, sexual and ethnic identities in Wilhelmine society. Each chapter draws in particular on contemporary sources relating to the various frames of identity under discussion, and suggests possible readings available to Wilhelmine spectators of the Doppelganger in individual films and genres. In this way, meaning is located at the intersection of the filmic text and contemporary discourse, and the 'Doppelganger film' can be regarded as a conduit for exploring issues of shifting identity within modernity, with particular regard to perceived new identities constructed 'between' supposedly stable binary oppositions of class, gender, and so on. These include the 'new woman' (perceived as a female incursion into the male sphere), the nouveau riche (moving between low and high class identity), the 'sexual intermediate' (constructed between male and female sexuality), and so forth

Galectin-1 as an oncotarget in gliomas and melanomas

Altogether, these findings clearly point to the fact that decreasing galectin-1 expression ( e.g. using monoclonal antibodies or siRNAs ) in melanomas and gliomas may weaken the defenses of these two types of cancers against radiotherapy, chemotherapy and immunotherapy/vaccine therapy; may reinforce antiangiogenic therapies; and may weaken both the invasive capacities of these cancers towards neighboring tissues (such as the brain parenchyma for gliomas) and (in the case of melanomas) their metastatic rates.Journal ArticleSCOPUS: no.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Jobseekers’ Beliefs about Comparative Advantage and (Mis)Directed Search

Worker sorting into tasks and occupations has long been recognized as an important feature of labor markets. But this sorting may be inefficient if jobseekers have inaccurate beliefs about their skills and therefore apply to jobs that do not match their skills. To test this idea, we measure young South African jobseekers’ communication and numeracy skills and their beliefs about their skill levels. Many jobseekers believe they are better at the skill in which they score lower, relative to other jobseekers. These beliefs predict the skill requirements of jobs where they apply. In two field experiments, giving jobseekers their skill assessment results shifts their beliefs toward their assessment results. It also redirects their search toward jobs that value the skill in which they score relatively higher—using measures from administrative, incentivized task, and survey data—but does not increase total search effort. It also raises earnings and job quality, consistent with inefficient sorting due to limited information

Predation of a Barren-ground Caribou, Rangifer tarandus groenlandicus, by a Single Gray Wolf, Canis lupus, in Northern Manitoba, Canada

A single Gray Wolf (Canis lupus) was observed successfully trapping and predating a Barren-ground Caribou (Rangifer tarandus groenlandicus) in a small section of open water

THE DAUGHTER OF SLAVIA

The study deals with one of the central motifs of Ján Kollár’s work Slávy dcera, namely with the history of the figure of Complaining Slavia. Kollár derives the motif from Velius’s epistle entitled Querela Austriae (1527). The motif entered Hungary’s Latin-language literature becoming an important topos in Late Humanist and Baroque writing. With the Querela Hungariae topos other content elements became associated: description of the country’s riches (‘fertilitas Hungariae’) and comparison of the happiness of earlier times with the misery of conditions in Kollár’s own day. The literariness of Kollár was rooted deeply in Hungary’s Latin-language and Slavic-language cultures. His Latin-language didactic poem Deploratio praesentis status Hungariae proves that the author was familiar with the Querela Hungariae topos from his secondary-school years onwards. At the same time, in the Prologue to his Slávy dcera and in many of his sonnets, Kollár reinterpreted the topos according to the ideological requirements of the national movements of his time, changing Complaining Hungary into Complaining Slavia. In his Prologue to Slávy dcera, Kollár retained the metrical form of Latin didactic poetry (elegiac couplets), but at the same time refashioned it in accordance with the aesthetic demands of Classicism and Romanticism. There are in early 19th-century literature some areas that attempt to depict a nation emblematically. Of these, emblematic geography, ethnography, zoography, and phytography are investigated in this study. Through his works, in which famous mountain ranges (the Tatras, the Giant Mountains, the Urals), waters (the Danube, the Elbe, the Baltic Sea), cities (Prague, Moscow), and so forth are invested with surplus meaning, Kollár contributed to the depiction of the Slav (Czech and Slovak) nations. Together with their connotations, these places became parts of modern national mythology. This occurred during a several-decades-long canonisation process, at the end of which a given geographical place-name could lay claim to the status of ‘Slavic holy place’. It was in his 1821 volume entitled Básně (‘Verses’) that Kollár first pointed out geographical locations of importance from the national point of view, although these were at that time still at a rather low level of sacrality. Works published by Kollár in the mid-1820s – Čítanka (‘A Reader’) and the 1824 edition of Slávy dcera – were like maps from the Age of Discovery on which the coastlines of newly discovered continents already featured but where the land within still featured as white space. In the 1832 edition of Slávy dcera and in the Explanations (Vysvětlivky) he wrote for this work, Kollár ‘populated’ the three continents where Slavs lived. With the help of emblematic national topography, he created an imaginary Slavic country which ignored the status quo then prevailing in Europe. Kollár reached his highest degree of sacralisation of the nation with two songs published in his 1832 edition of Slávy dcera. In these, which presented a Slavic Heaven and a Slavic Purgatory, he enriched the emblematic national geography with the dimension of the life to come. In his Cestopis (‘Travelogue’), he launched a linguistic, historical and cultural crusade for the re-conquest of Northern Italy as a Slavic Holy Land

Evidence for Low-Dimensional Chaos in Semiregular Variable Stars

An analysis of the photometric observations of the light curves of the five large amplitude, irregularly pulsating stars R UMi, RS Cyg, V CVn, UX Dra and SX Her is presented. First, multi-periodicity is eliminated for these pulsations, i.e. they are not caused by the excitation of a small number of pulsation modes with constant amplitudes. Next, on the basis of energetics we also eliminate stochasticity as a cause, leaving low dimensional chaos as the only alternative. We then use a global flow reconstruction technique in an attempt to extract quantitative information from the light curves, and to uncover common physical features in this class of irregular variable stars that straddle the RV Tau to the Mira variables. Evidence is presented that the pulsational behavior of R UMi, RS Cyg, V CVn and UX Dra takes place in a 4-dimensional dynamical phase space, suggesting that two vibrational modes are involved in the pulsation. A linear stability analysis of the fixed points of the maps further indicates the existence of a two-mode resonance, similar to the one we had uncovered earlier in R Sct: The irregular pulsations are the result of a continual energy exchange between two strongly nonadiabatic modes, a lower frequency pulsation mode and an overtone that are in a close 2:1 resonance. The evidence is particularly convincing for R UMi, RS Cyg and V CVn, but much weaker for UX Dra. In contrast, the pulsations of SX Her appear to be more complex and may require a 6D space.Comment: 20 pages, 14 figures, accepted in ApJ - paper with clearer figures is available at http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~buchler/publications/u12.ps.gz (1Mb