Personalistic politics on Prince Edward Island : towards a subnational approach to personalism and democracy

This paper engages with the scholarly discourse on the effects of size on democracy by exploring the applicability of small state personalism theory to subnational jurisdictions. Using Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province, as a case study, this research attempts to determine whether personalism is strictly a feature of small states and whether it might also apply to small polities more generally. The study, which relies on secondary literature and some primary sources, shows that personalism works well to describe politics in the province. Implications of these findings are reviewed, including the effect of subnationality on personalism, the potential of personalism theory for other subnational jurisdictions, and a brief exploration of the potential effect of the stage of development and maturity of political institutions. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of possible future research directions.peer-reviewe

Words like fire: prophecy, apocalypse, and the avant-garde in Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Pound

The early twentieth-century avant-garde has cast a long shadow over the popular imagination as producers of manifestos, public scandals, and some of the most enduring art and literature of the last century. In this study, I examine the works of three poets who are not only considered leading avant-gardists, but who are foundational to how both popular consciousness and academic scholarship have understood the avant-garde’s theory and practice: Guillaume Apollinaire, F. T. Marinetti, and Ezra Pound. In particular, this study focuses on the recurring themes of prophecy and apocalypse in their work. These themes occur through reference to prophetic and apocalyptic literary or mythical figures, but also through stylistic innovations such as the use of literary personae or the attempt to synthesise diverse artistic forms. Focusing on these themes allows this study to re-engage the question of how these poets, and the avant-garde more broadly, regarded their practice as a social act. Using a comparative methodology in this thesis, prophecy is viewed not simply as a declamatory literary style that foretells the future, but as a particular kind of social relationship to an audience that is at turns mutually supportive and antagonistic. Similarly, apocalyptic thought is presented not merely as an expectation or belief in the end of the world, but as a specific method of imagining a new world that is, in spite of itself, dependent upon the social world of the present. Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Pound were major figures in the so-called ‘Pre-war Avant-Garde’ having established their reputations in the decade prior to World War I. While they each began formulating and proclaiming their views on aesthetics prior to the war, the experience of war had a profound impact on all three. Accordingly, this thesis examines a number of poems from Apollinaire’s two major collections: Alcools (1913) and Calligrammes (1918), the latter containing significant reflections on avant-gardism and war. Marinetti acted as a journalist in the Italo-Turkish war of 1911-1912, which inspired the work central to this study: his Futurist novel-in-verse Le Monoplan du Pape (1912). Pound, unlike Apollinaire and Marinetti, did not participate in World War I, and this study explores his sequence Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), a long rumination on art, war, and his engagement with Imagism and Vorticism, but also analyses poems from his collections Personae (1908), Ripostes (1912), and Lustra (1916). This study examines how the acute crisis of the war pressed each of these poets to reconsider their view of the poet-as-prophet in society. In doing so it explores the ethical or political implications of avant-garde aesthetics influenced by and as a response to war. This study also closely compares these poets’ works to the biblical literature from which they frequently derived prophetic and apocalyptic themes. Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Pound’s relationship to religion, particularly Christianity, spanned from ambivalence to hostility, but they each engage biblical literature in unique and unorthodox ways. While these poets all sought to be identifiably modern, this study demonstrates the ways in which they attempted to recover values from biblical literature that each felt was necessary to establish the independence and autonomy of contemporary art and literature. Therefore, this study’s comparative framework is intended to engage the conversation over the spiritual, religious, or transcendent values to which avant-garde art aspired. And drawing significantly from the social theories of art, religion, and culture developed by Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu, this thesis contributes to the study of avant-gardism as a social, as well as aesthetic, phenomenon

Study of video quality assessment for telesurgery

elemedicine provides a transformative practice for access to and delivery of timely and high quality healthcare in resource-poor settings. In a typical scenario of telesurgery, surgical tasks are performed with one surgeon situated at the patient’s side and one expert surgeon from a remote site. In order to make telesurgery practice realistic and secure, reliable transmission of medical videos over large distances is essential. However, telesurgery videos that are communicated remotely in real time are vulnerable to distortions in signals due to data compression and transmission. Depending on the system and its applications, visual content received by the surgeons differs in perceived quality, which may incur implications for the performance of telesurgery tasks. To rigorously study the assessment of the quality of telesurgery videos, we performed both qualitative and quantitative research, consisting of semi-structured interviews and video quality scoring with human subjects. Statistical analyses are conducted and results show that compression artifacts and transmission errors significantly affect the perceived quality; and the effects tend to depend on the specific surgical procedure, visual content, frame rate, and the degree of distortion. The findings of the study are readily applicable to improving telesurgery systems

Picosecond polarized supercontinuum generation controlled by intermodal four-wave mixing for fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy

International audienceWe present the generation of a picosecond polarized supercontinuum in highly birefringent multimodal microstructured fiber. The initial steps of the spectral broadening are dominated by intermodal four-wave mixing controlled by the specific fiber design. Using a low repetition rate ultra-stable solid state laser, a pulse train well-suited for versatile time-domain fluorescence lifetime imaging applications is obtaine

Transport de charges libres efficace et isotrope dans des semiconducteurs organiques

Physiqu

Photovoltaïque Organique: Etat de l'art et futurs développements.

International audienceOrganic photovoltaics has many advantages over other photovoltaic technologies to become a major player in sustainable electricity production worldwide. The specificities of organic photovoltaics are presented as well as the operating principles of this technology, from the materials used to the devices. The state of the art and the obstacles to be overcome in order for this technology of the future to reach full maturity are also discussed.Le photovoltaïque organique présente de nombreux avantages par rapport aux autres technologies photovoltaïques pour devenir un acteur majeur de la production durable d’électricité partout dans le monde. Les spécificités du photovoltaïque organique sont exposés de même que les principes de fonctionnement de cette technologie, depuis les matériaux employés jusqu’aux dispositifs. L’état de l’art et les verrous à lever pour que cette technologie d’avenir arrive à sa pleine maturité sont également évoqués

Photovoltaïque Organique: Etat de l'art et futurs développements.

International audienceOrganic photovoltaics has many advantages over other photovoltaic technologies to become a major player in sustainable electricity production worldwide. The specificities of organic photovoltaics are presented as well as the operating principles of this technology, from the materials used to the devices. The state of the art and the obstacles to be overcome in order for this technology of the future to reach full maturity are also discussed.Le photovoltaïque organique présente de nombreux avantages par rapport aux autres technologies photovoltaïques pour devenir un acteur majeur de la production durable d’électricité partout dans le monde. Les spécificités du photovoltaïque organique sont exposés de même que les principes de fonctionnement de cette technologie, depuis les matériaux employés jusqu’aux dispositifs. L’état de l’art et les verrous à lever pour que cette technologie d’avenir arrive à sa pleine maturité sont également évoqués

Influence du toucher rectal dans le diagnostic et la prise en charge de la prostatite bactérienne aiguë en médecine générale

STRASBOURG-Medecine (674822101) / SudocSudocFranceF