Communicative competence scale. Outcomes measurement tool: employment & skills – communication skills & interpersonal skills.

Good communication is an important skill for the workplace. The communication competence scale measures different aspects of communication. Interpersonal skills play an important role in the workplace and are valued by employers. The CCS is used to assess another person's communicative competence by responding to 36 items using Likert scales that range from strongly agree (5) to strongly disagree (1). The scale takes less than 5 minutes to complete. Some researchers have adapted the other-report format to self-report and partner-report

Enzymatic conversion of β-mannans: Analysing, evaluating and modifying transglycosylation properties of glycoside hydrolases

Retaining glycoside hydrolases are enzymes that catalyse the breakdown down of glycans through hydrolysis. Due to the double-replacement mechanism of the retaining glycoside hydrolases (GHs), which form an intermediate with part of the glycan covalently attached to the enzyme, some GHs are able to catalyse synthesis reactions called transglycosylation. In transglycosylation reactions a hydroxyl-containing molecule (acceptor), other than water, acts as a nucleophile which releases the glycan moiety from the covalent intermediate while forming a new glycoside (transglycosylation product). The transglycosylation reaction can be used to transform renewable starting materials such as plant hemicellulose to valuable products, which is discussed in the thesis. The work presented in the thesis have explored how GHs interact with glycans and how different aspects of transglycosylation reactions affect the final yield of transglycosylation products. The presented work explores how the open active site structure of two GH26 β-mannanases have made them well adapted to act on heavily galactosylated hemicellulosic β-mannan polysaccharides (Paper I and II). In addition Paper I and II explore how substitutions of amino acids in glycan interacting subsites can lead to changes in catalytic properties and how the two GH26 β-mannanases productively interacts with oligosaccharides. The work also examines how variants of GHs can have improved transglycosylation capacity compared to their wildtype counterparts (Paper III and V). It investigates how the elimination of saccharide interactions in the +2 subsites can lead to improved transglycosylation capacity in a variant of the GH5 β-mannanase TrMan5A (PaperIII). The TrMan5A variant displayed greatly improved transglycosylation capacity at the early timepoints. Observed secondary (product) hydrolysis at later times highlighted the importance of analysing prolonged reaction times to determine suitable reaction termination. Paper III also demonstrated how enzyme synergy can lead to increased transglycosylation yields, when TrMan5A and a guar α-galactosidase was used in co-incubations where a galactomannan was used as the glycosyl donor. α-Galactosidases were further studied in Paper IV, where thetransglycosylation capacity of two different α-galactosidases were explored with different glycosyl donors and acceptor molecules. The study showed that the guar α-galactosidase was able to utilise a wide variety of acceptor molecules and glycosyl donors, further expanding potential transglycosylation products that may be produced with the enzyme. Paper IV further highlights the negative effects secondary hydrolysis may have on transglycosylation yields. The presented work also shows how targeting highly conserved residues within a glycoside hydrolase family can be used to quickly generate GH variants with improved transglycosylation capacity compared to the wild type GH (Paper V). The method relies on protein sequence data and does not require structural knowledge of the target enzyme. Furthermore, the method generates few variants (evolution (100s to 1000s) while it appears to be generally applicable as it was successfully applied to six different GH families covering varying specificities. Improvements was, in part, indicated to be associated with reduced secondary hydrolysis in several of the six GH families in the study. The results presented in the thesis have expanded the knowledge of different factors that affects and can be manipulated in order to improve the transglycosylation capacity in retaining glycoside hydrolases. The work presented in the thesis will help further enzymatic synthesis approaches utilising renewable raw-materials

Optimal Categorical Instrumental Variables

This paper discusses estimation with a categorical instrumental variable in settings with potentially few observations per category. The proposed categorical instrumental variable estimator (CIV) leverages a regularization assumption that implies existence of a latent categorical variable with fixed finite support achieving the same first stage fit as the observed instrument. In asymptotic regimes that allow the number of observations per category to grow at arbitrary small polynomial rate with the sample size, I show that when the cardinality of the support of the optimal instrument is known, CIV is root-n asymptotically normal, achieves the same asymptotic variance as the oracle IV estimator that presumes knowledge of the optimal instrument, and is semiparametrically efficient under homoskedasticity. Under-specifying the number of support points reduces efficiency but maintains asymptotic normality

'I don't really notice where I live' : Philip Larkin's literary nationalities

[Introduction:]With the journalist’s playfulness John Haffenden implicitly accuses Philip Larkin of “narrow-mindedness” and “cultural chauvinism” in his well-documented interview from 1981. Philip Larkin replies with two counter-questions: “But honestly, how far can one really assimilate literature in another language? In the sense that you can read your own?” If it was impossible to read, understand and emotionally react to literature in a foreign language as opposed to literary works composed in one’s native language, the foreign Larkin scholar would arrive at a dead-end before he or she has even crossed the Channel to England. The appeal of Larkin’s poetry would be restricted to a relatively small English target group. Is it this specific group Larkin has in mind when he says that “you write for everybody. Or anybody who will listen”? A look at the standard works of Larkin criticism almost makes this likely; most Larkin critics are either comfortably sharing Larkin’s own nationality or are at least Irish, Scottish, Welsh, American or Canadian native speakers of English. Thus, we hardly seem to be in a position to judge safely whether Larkin’s own poetry can be assimilated elsewhere.It is thus that Larkin’s oeuvre - prompted, to a large extent, by the poet’s own gruff assertion of comfortable insularity - is all too often perceived on narrowly English terms. Larkin’s cultural and national identity is taken for granted; his disparaging comments about abroad (“I hate being abroad. Generally speaking, the further one gets from home the greater the misery.”) are taken at face value.Perhaps it takes the perspective of a foreign European and non-native speaker of English to crack open dated perceptions.Indeed, Larkin’s engagement with cultural Otherness is profound. Tim Trengrove-Jones notes that “Larkin’s aesthetic took root and found its mature expression through specific moments of contact with the German, the French, and the Dutch” only to conclude paradoxically that these points of contact with the European Other cement Larkin’s position of English insularity. Larkin’s cultural identity will remain firmly English; his poetic engagement with cultural Otherness between Europe and America, however, transcends notions of petty insularity by a long stretch. His engagement with Ireland, France, America and Germany is so obviously premeditated that we can speak of literary nationalities. Jean-François Bayart’s comment that “we identify ourselves less with respect to membership in a community or a culture than with respect to the communities and cultures with which we have relations” is of particular significance in this context. Furthermore, Larkin’s negotiations of literary nationalities constantly exhibit points of contact with Marc Augé’s theory of non-place. It is against this background that the theory of the universality - as opposed to an assumed Englishness - of Larkin’s poetry is developed.In the context of political and sociological theories of nation and cultural identity I will argue that Larkin’s identity in his poetry is expressed through an awareness of common humanity as opposed to cultural exclusiveness. Introducing the ancient Stoics’ idea of cultural identity as concentric circles that denote self, family, city, nation and so on, I will argue that the universal appeal of Larkin’s poetry lies in the fact that he is always as intimately conscious in his writing of the outermost circle of ‘common humanity’ as he is of narrower more socially, politically or geographically limited self-definitions. In this he differs from Betjeman and Hughes who remain more English than Larkin because they define themselves within the categories of the inner circles: class, nation, economic group. It is Augé’s non-place in its familiarity that enhances the impression of universality in Larkin’s work.When Larkin mourns the loss of the “fields and farms” and “the meadows, the lanes” in “Going, Going”, elaborates on the “wind-muscled wheatfields” and the “[t]all church-towers” of “Howden and Beverley, Hedon and Patrington” in “Bridge for the Living” he negotiates not only the markers of English culture but also the (English) poetic tradition of pastoral. If Larkin’s non-place in its universal particularity comes at the Stoics’ concentric circles from the outside and touches on common humanity first, then Larkin’s version of provincialism perhaps entails sculpting the province in its particular universality as the smallest recognizable fragment within the circles of cultural identity. It is the less-deceived quality of Larkin’s approach to the poetic tradition that paradoxically makes a poem like “Here” a full-blooded pastoral.“The Importance of Elsewhere” has often been discussed in the context of its confrontation of two national identities, English and Irish, and the poet’s evasion of his own national identity in the liminal space between them. The chapter on Ireland will explore how different Larkin’s negotiation of nationality is from, say, that of Seamus Heaney, who never seems to stop digging, constantly looks downwards and backwards and seems to remain safely within the parameters of Irish national identity. Terry Whalen states that Larkin’s “best poems written in Ireland were not necessarily about Ireland at all” thus underlining Larkin’s immunity against “that Irish impulse to name and fix”.A reading of Patrick Kavanagh’s “My Room” against Larkin’s “Poetry of Departures” emphasises the fatality of assumed historico-political contexts to poetical works.The strong influence of Jules Laforgue on Larkin is the cutting edge of a larger set of influences from France. Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and the Symbolistes all leave more or less visible marks on different phases of his poetry, and feed one of the main strands of his poetic style. Larkin is often seen to arrive at Laforgue via Eliot, but this chapter explores how differently both poets assimilate the French poet’s influence. Larkin’s ‘Dutch’ poem “The Card-Players” is a striking negotiation of Laforgue with one of Larkin’s very few realisations of anthropological, chthonic place.Larkin’s English identity is clarified most effectively perhaps in juxtaposition with the familiar big brother, or brash cousin Otherness of America. Larkin’s loud confrontation with the American, or ‘international’ Modernism of ‘the mad lads’ who followed Pound perhaps distorts the picture. His work frequently echoes that of Eliot, and contains many modernist elements. From his early youth the States were a vivid country of his mind, black American jazz providing an essential element in his sensibility, and affected his poetry in subtle ways which are not always immediately evident. Larkin’s ‘jazz-poetry’ sets him in a context with the Beat poets, particularly Allen Ginsberg. However, jazz is not the sole point of contact with the USA. Indeed, Larkin engages with the poetry of the confessional poets and exhibits some striking intertextual relations with the poetry of Sylvia Plath.Larkin’s encounters with Germany were in terms of actual visits early in his life, rather than a profound literary influence. Nevertheless it is significant that both Jill and A Girl in Winter, miss out on the opportunity to swear allegiance to England in time of war. This chapter will build on the evidence that, though ‘foreign’ rather than of any specific nationality, Katherine in A Girl in Winter is the imaginative product of Larkin’s experience of Germany. Furthermore, the allegedly German Katherine functions as the fully realized prototype for the alienated speakers in Larkin’s mature poetry.Larkin’s almost proverbial exclamation “Foreign poetry? No!” is thus exposed as one of his characteristic masks. Indeed, the negotiation of and engagement with foreign poetry allows him to try on different literary nationalities without having to leave his cultural comfort zone. It is thus that Larkin’s poetry becomes universal

Too Poor for Debt: Deleuze’s First-World Problems

Deleuze launches his description/prediction of the emergence and imminent consolidation of the society of control as a postscript. The text thus announces itself as an afterthought, a supplement appended to some complete larger textual body, from which it is, however, unmoored as it is launched as an independent self-standing text that, moreover, does not indicate to what it is an addendum but instead, on what it speaks. By this token, the Postscript unhinges the conventional notion according to which a supplement signals “the addition of something to an already complete entity” (Attridge 1992: 77). By marking his text as the adjunct to an absent main body, Deleuze appears to concede and at the same time emphatically embrace the necessary incompleteness of this short précis on the post-disciplinary regime. My argument in the following will be that the supplementary status of the Postscript does not so much signal some subversive or dissident gesture in the name of the minor or the molecular (even though it does that, too); instead, it primarily serves to keep at bay and contain an exteriority that it aims to ‘confine by exclusion’1; and that exteriority, I will argue, is the Third World

Mikromorphologische Untersuchungen zu syn- und postsedimentären Veränderungen sowie Auflassungsprozessen an Schichtsequenzen in prähistorischen Seeufersiedlungen

Die Analyse und Interpretation von Schichtbildungsprozessen kann für jede Untersuchung einer Seeufersiedlung oder einer anderen Fundstellen im Feuchtbodenbereich als von entscheidender Bedeutung angesehen werden. Dies liegt hauptsächlich an der oft sehr spezifischen und komplexen Art und Weise, wie sich die Ablagerungen in diesem Bereich gebildet und im Laufe der Zeit verändert haben. Insbesondere in Fällen mit einer guten Kulturschichterhaltung kann die makroskopische Beurteilung der zuvor genannten Phänomene nicht ausreichen. Hier erscheint vor allem die mikromorphologische Analyse mit der Fähigkeit, auch kleinste Ereignisse innerhalb einer Stratigraphie erfassen zu können, als die Methode der Wahl. Während ein besseres Verständnis der allgemeinen Schichtbildungsprozesse bereits vor kurzem erreicht worden ist (Ismail-Meyer et al. 2013), müssen insbesondere die syn- und postsedimentären Prozesse sowie Auflassung einer Siedlung als schwer zu fassen gelten. Zur Lösung dieses Problems wurde eine detaillierte Studie an einem diachron aufgebauten Probenspektrum aus verschiedenen Fundstellen und mit einer grossen Anzahl an Proben aus der Grabung Zürich-Opéra, wo eine Fläche von etwa 3000 Quadratmetern mit mehreren neolithischen Pfahlbausiedlungen untersucht werden konnte, unter Verwendung der Mikromorphologie als primäre Untersuchungsmethode durchgeführt. Dabei wurde angenommen, dass nur durch eine mikroskopische Untersuchung von Stratigraphien der verschiedenen Pfahlbausiedlungen die fraglichen Prozesse erfasst und mit natürlichen oder kulturellen Phänomenen verknüpft werden können. Die untersuchten Proben wurden aus Pfahlbauten vom Neolithikum bis zu Bronzezeit am Zürichsee, Greifensee, Zugersee (alle Schweiz) und dem Lago di Viverone (Italien) gesammelt. Sie wurden mit Epoxidharz eingegossen, zu Dünnschliffen weiterverarbeitet und mit Hilfe eines Polarisationsmikroskops analysiert. Mit etwa 38 untersuchten Proben und mehr als 400 detaillierten Schichtbeschreibungen - integriert in einer individuell gestalteten Datenbank – wurde eine aussergewöhnlich grosse Menge an Daten erhoben, so dass eine akribische Rekonstruktion der Schichtbildungsprozesse in jedem Profil möglich war. Insgesamt konnten 20 Profile plus vier experimentelle Proben sowie der Inhalt eines Keramikgefässes, das vollständig in einer der Kulturschichten von Zürich-Opéra eingebettet war, analysiert werden. Die dabei festgestellten grossen Unterschiede innerhalb von Proben einer einzigen Fundstelle sind bemerkenswert und bedürfen einer Erklärung. Mit 28 analysierten Proben über die ca. 3000 Quadratmeter grosse Grabungsfläche von Zürich-Opéra war es möglich, eine intra site-Analyse durchzuführen. Es kann durchaus festgehalten werden, dass es sich hier um eine der am intensivsten mikromorphologisch untersuchten Pfahlbausiedlung in Bezug auf die Fläche und die Anzahl der Profile handelt. Vor allem dank dieser detaillierten Analyse konnten mehrere Arten von Ablagerung, Erosion und sonstigen Veränderungen festgestellt werden, die zum Verständnis der verändernden und zerstörenden Prozesse in Pfahlbauten beitragen. Leider stand von den anderen Fundstellen weit weniger Probenmaterial zur Verfügung. Dennoch boten sie eine wichtige diachrone Perspektive und erlauben, die in Zürich-Opéra identifizierten und analysierten Prozesse in einen grösseren zeitlichen Rahmen zu stellen. Die Ergebnisse führen zu dem Schluss, dass die Bewohner einer Seeufersiedlung sich mit verändernden Umweltbedingungen beschäftigen mussten und dazu auch durchaus in der Lage waren. So wird offensichtlich, dass der Grund für die endgültige Aufgabe der Pfahlbauten nicht alleine in einer schweren Überschwemmung aufgrund einer Klimaverschlechterung gesehen werden kann. Andere denkbare Variablen, wie zum Beispiel die Verlagerung von Handelsrouten, müssen ebenso beachtet werden. Es wurde deutlich, dass die Analyse der Taphonomie von Pfahlbauten mittels Mikromorphologie ein enormes Potenzial zur Gewinnung eines vollständigeren Bildes von Verhaltensmustern der Siedler ergibt. Das vorhandene Wissen über Schichtbildungsprozesse in Seeufersiedlungen konnte mit einem besonderen Fokus auf verändernde und zerstörende Prozesse erweitert werden, die eine Fundstelle vor und nach ihrer Aufgabe betreffen können

Being Taught Something World-Sized:‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ and the Work of World Literature

This paper reads ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith’s story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient’s openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith’s account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading

Lasting Marks: The Legacy of Robin Cassacinamon and the Survival of the Mashantucket Pequot Nation

My dissertation is a political and cultural history of seventeenth-century Anglo-Algonquian New England. Between the Pequot War of 1637 and King Philips War in 1675-76, a covalent Anglo-Algonquian society existed in New England. This created conditions which allowed the Pequots to reconstitute their communities after the devastation of the Pequot War. Robin Cassacinamon was instrumental in this process. His skills as an interpreter, diplomat, intermediary, and community leader connected Cassacinamon to the surviving Pequots and to important regional Algonquian and Puritan figures of the time. Cassacinamon became Pequot sachem, leading his people until his death in 1692. His work provided the Pequots with essential tools needed for long-term survival as an identifiable people: a land-base and the ability to form and maintain Pequot communities. Cassacinamon and the Mashantucket Pequots navigated this conflicting political climate to pursue their own agenda. The period between the Pequot War and King Philip\u27s war provided a finite window of opportunity by which Cassacinamon could exploit the seventeenth-century Native strategies outlined in Eric Spencer Johnson\u27s work. These strategies included alliances, marriages, settlement patterns, coercion, and others. Cassacinamon\u27s deep ties to the Pequots and other Algonquian groups, as well as with the Winthrop family and other colonial leaders, let him exploit various political and social tools. Cassacinamon\u27s skills made him an essential part of regional negotiations between these Algonquian and English polities. By operating in the gaps and intersections where these polities met, Cassacinamon and the Pequots carved out a place for themselves within the regional social and political power structure. By focusing on Cassacinamon\u27s story, a greater understanding of how the Pequots survived after the Pequot War is reached. Cassacinamon\u27s biography also broadens our understanding of this seventeenth Anglo-Algonquian society, as well as what happened when the Anglo-Algonquian frontier shifted to an Anglo-Iroquoian frontier after King Philip\u27s War. Thus, my dissertation is not just a biography; it is a political and cultural study of New England, with broader Atlantic World elements. It provides insight as to how an indigenous North American population exploited overlapping political and social systems and tactics to survive in a changing colonial world

Making Memory by Dissociating the Past from the Present: Narratives of Movement Intellectuals of the Post-Fukushima Protest Cycle in Japan

The impact of collective memory on mobilisation processes is an emerging research field in social movement studies. Adopting the perspective of "memory in activism", which tackles the question of how memories of previous struggles shape present social movements (as proposed by Ann Rigney), this research note provides a first idea of the eff ect of the collective memory of the violent 1960s "New Left" protest cycle in Japan on the most recent protest cycle triggered by the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. At their peak, these protests drew up to 200,000 participants during the summer of 2012 - a fact often downplayed in Western media coverage. As an access point to the study of the memory work pursued by and within the movement, this research note analyses written narratives of two activist intellectuals of the post-Fukushima protest cycle. The analysis shows a clear dissociation from the violent legacy of the 1960s that emphasises the distinctively peaceful character of the present protests and claims for them an equally important status in history

Being Taught Something World-Sized:‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ and the Work of World Literature

This paper reads ‘The Detainee’s Tale as told to Ali Smith’ (2016) as an exemplary demonstration of the work of world literature. Smith’s story articulates an ethics of reading that is grounded in the recipient’s openness to the singular, unpredictable, and unverifiable text of the other. More specifically, Smith’s account enables the very event that it painstakingly stages: the encounter with alterity and newness, which is both the theme of the narrative and the effect of the text on the reader. At the same time, however, the text urges to move from an ethics of literature understood as the responsible reception of the other by an individual reader to a more explicitly convivial and political ethics of commitment beyond the scene of reading