A Proposal for Finite But Unbounded Human Lifetimes

Close analysis of an extensive data set combined with independent evidence prompts our proposal to view human lifetimes as individually finite but collectively unbounded. We formulate a model incorporating this idea whose predictions agree very well with the observed data. In the model, human lifetimes are theoretically unbounded, but the probability of an individual living to an extreme age is negligible, so lifetimes are effectively limited. Our model incorporates a mortality hazard rate plateau and a late-life mortality deceleration effect in conjunction with a newly observed advanced age mortality acceleration. This reconciles many previously observed effects. The model is temporally stable: consistent with observation, parameters do not change over time. As an application, assuming no major medical advances, we predict the emergence of many individuals living past 120, but due to accelerating mortality find it unlikely that any will subsequently survive to an age of 125.

Charitable Organizations in Singapore: From Clan Based to State Facilitated Endeavors

Singapore, with a five million population, has a vibrant charitable sector with over 2000 registered charities attracting approximately USD$2.18 billion in annual donations. How did Singapore’s charitable sector achieve its current level when it has been, in the past, segregated along mainly religious, race and clan-based communities? This paper explores this question by piecing together the current ecosystem, regulatory and tax infrastructure which facilitates the charitable sector in Singapore. Central to the development of the charitable sector has been the Singapore government’s role of being a gatekeeper, regulator and enabler of charities. In analysing the government’s role in the charitable sector, this paper locates Singapore’s charitable sector within the literature on government and nonprofit organization relations which has been described at times being cooperative, complementary, confrontational, and co-optive. These astute observations ring true with respect to the Singapore government’s relationship with the charitable sector. For organizations which pursue purposes consistent with state’s vision of public good, the state’s relationship with these charities has been largely cooperative and complementary. However, even within charities considered by the state to further public good, there is a strong element of co-optation where the state wields significant direct and indirect power over the charitable sector by way of provision of funding and board composition. In contrast, nonprofit organizations which engage in aims inconsistent with the state’s perceived public interest are, by law, unable to register itself as charities and enjoy corresponding fiscal benefits. Such nonprofit organizations also typically do not receive state funding. This demonstrates the confrontational nature of the state’s relationship with these nonprofit organizations. Through a close analysis of the laws, codes, media reports and academic literature on the charitable sector, the central thesis of this paper is that the charitable sector in Singapore is essentially a state facilitated endeavor.

Collective, unruly, and becoming

Online contexts offer an important source of information and emotional support for those facing involuntary childlessness. This article reports the results from an ethnographic exploration of TTC (trying-to-conceive) communication on Instagram. Through a new materialist approach that pays attention to the web of intraacting agencies in online communication, this article explores the question of what material-discursive bodies (constructs of embodiment and medical information) emerge in TTC communication as the result of shared images and narratives of bodies, symptoms, fertility treatments, and reproductive technologies. Drawing on a lengthy ethnographic immersion, observations of 394 Instagram accounts, and the close analysis of 100 posts, the study found that TTC communication produces collective, unruly, and becoming bodies. Collective bodies reflect collectively acquired, solidified, and contested medical knowledge and bodies produced in TTC communication. Unruly bodies are bodies that do not conform to standard medical narratives. Becoming bodies are marked by their shifting agency, such as pregnant or fetal bodies.

A Broader Relevance of Gullivers Suffering in the Context of Culture Shock

Purpose: This study analyzes Gulliver’s sufferings among his different hosts and his relevancy to today’s sojourners who travel abroad and suffer from the effects of culture shock. During his stay with four different hosts, Gulliver remains unable to adjust with them due to the impact of culture shock. He looks at his hosts from the cultural parameters of his native land that leads to multiplication his problems. Like him, most of the travelers who move abroad for various reasons undergo the effects of culture shock. If they fail to understand the internal and external aspects their hosts’ culture, they may respond as Gulliver does. Approach: Though critics have analyzed Gulliver’s character from different perspectives, none has studied him from the lens of culture shock. On close analysis of the text of Gulliver’s Travels, readers can easily observe Gulliver suffering from the effects of culture shock among his hosts. A fresh perspective has been adopted in this study by analyzing Gulliver’s character in the light of culture shock. Culture shock affects sojourners in multiple ways. Many students, migrants, and the diaspora go through this experience while living in a new culture among new people. Findings: This study shows that culture has been a common phenomenon for people who stay abroad for long or settle though they do not realize that several problems that they face are caused by culture shock. However, if someone consciously assimilates the effects of culture shock, it becomes a great experience to live a better life. Implications: Though Gulliver belongs to the eighteenth century England, yet he exists around and among us. It is Gulliver’s relevancy that adds to the meaningfulness of his character for the contemporary sojourners.

The Philosopher’s Diet in Porphyry’s De Abstinentia: Characterizing a Historical Legacy of Minimalism in Food Consumption

Historical legacy, as an important constituent for the evaluation of the extent to which the past influences the present, sheds much light on some of the broader issues of the relation between the past and the present. One of the components of historical legacy is human food consumption habits. The domain of food consumption habits, in traditional Greek and Roman culture, contains a fairly noticeable diversity as it fluctuates between what seems to be two wide poles of dietary practices such as a simple diet, with the focus on minimalism and health and a luxury diet, with the focus on excess and extravagance. These poles, upon close analysis, have determined the dietary customs of antiquity while also formed a gastronomic identity. The impact of this historical legacy seems to have not only flavored Porphyry’s discussion of the nature of the philosopher’s diet in On Abstinence from Killing Animals but has also served in characterizing an advanced stage of minimalism in Greek and Roman food consumption habits.

Vision of Victorian Ecological Disaster (based on the selected novels by Cindy Spencer Pape)

The problem of nature deterioration in the Anthropocene has become an important art concern, thus leading to analysis of ecological images in the texts of various genres. Our analysis of such imagery in a gaslight romance series is equally topical. The subject of the study is universe of the series of novels by Cindy Spencer Pape which centres around alternative nineteenth century London with highly developed steam engines and corresponding technology. Ecocritical approach is chosen as the research method of the study as the novels have powerful ecological imagery, which requires close analysis. The series covers a number of years, and so the ecological deterioration due to coal overuse can be traced through various London locales, which are described in different time frames, and the comparative reading of these descriptions provides the proof of ecological deterioration. It reveals the consistent ecological discourse within the series, its ties strengthened through steady layering of the images of nature, burdened with progressing pollution. There is social dimension to the issue, as the poorer urban residents are shown to be more effected by this problem due to their jobs, work and living conditions. The paper aims to reveal these numerous aspects of ecological imagery in the texts. The results. Close text analysis of various levels allows us to decipher the multi-layered ecological images and dwell on the message they bear. As the environment degradation takes place in the past, the series allows us to describe its results as facts and compress its progress in time and space within the span of the novels setting. This intensifies the image of the catastrophe, makes it feel more immediate and pressing, thus becoming a powerful plot tool that results in search for solutions of the problem and alleviation of the existing results of coal overuse. This research is the basis of further analysis of ecological imagery in steampunk and gaslight romance as genres, fruitful in that regard.

Conclusion

This conclusion examines a methodological similarity between the book’s attention to small details of movement and the discourse of “cinephilic moments,” which describes a mode of spectatorship that fixates on brief fragments of movement on screen. While cinephilic moments are often understood as resistant to formal analysis due to their apparent contingency, this conclusion shows how each chapter of The Shape of Motion has demonstrated a method of locating formal significance in cinephilic moments through the close analysis of motion. Rather than simply dwelling on the apparent uniqueness of those individual moments, each chapter collects and groups those singular moments according to the forms of movement they take, thereby yielding new theories of cinematic experience in addition to new insights about individual films.

Taking the Reins

The genesis of the present-day director-choreographer, starting with de Mille’s role as director-choreographer on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ill-fated Allegro (1947), is explored. How she employed dance as a narrative and metaphorical device in support of the allegorical structure of the libretto, and how her artistic vision conflicted with her collaborators is investigated. De Mille’s directorial oeuvre is considered in the context of the male-dominated world of Broadway. Robbins’ ascendance as the most influential director-choreographer of twentieth-century musical theater is examined in a close analysis of his choreography for and direction of Pajama Game (1954 [co-directed with George Abbott, co-choreographer Bob Fosse]), Peter Pan (1954), Bells Are Ringing (1956 [in which he collaborated with Bob Fosse]), Gypsy (1959), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). West Side Story (1957) will be discussed here as an anomaly in Robbins’ musical theater career. I argue that Robbins’ interest in movement innovation in relation to his choreography for the “Jets” in West Side Story (1957) differs from his previous musical theater works. In addition, I will examine Robbins’ West Side Story collaboration with co-choreographer Peter Gennaro.

Inter-Confessional Church History: East Syrian Christian Identity and Islam in the Ecclesiastical History of Kitāb al-Maǧdal

Kitāb al-Maǧdal is a large East Syrian theological treatise that was composed in Arabic, probably in the late tenth or early eleventh century CE. One section of the work is an ecclesiastical history of the Church of the East. This essay argues that close analysis of this section reveals that elite East Syrian identity in the period overlapped to a significant extent with contemporary Muslim identity, at the level of vocabulary and conceptions of revelation and communal history. In this sense, the work represents a kind of “inter-confessional” history writing. The essay aims to contribute to recent studies of Middle Eastern Christian identity and historiography, which have focused of Syriac sources and/or late antiquity rather than Arabic sources for the Islamic middle periods.

A Voice Sweeter than Salt: Toyin Falola and the Construction of Subaltern Narrative Space

Gayatrl Spivak is arguably most recognized for her 1988 intervention in the dialogue of Subaltern Studies. It is within the intellectual rift of Spiva k's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" that I explore the narrative of Toyin Falola's memoir, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt. While Spivak concludes that the subaltern cannot speak be­cause of the subaltern's placement within existing knowledge production, Fa­lola's "Mouth" articulates a formation that says otherwise. Indeed, in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, Falola's status In the subalternlty of a decolonlzlng Nigeria depicts a powerful subaltern voice with deep implications for knowledge, rep­resentation, authorial location, multifaceted identity paradox, and most of all, the tendrils of modernity. Fundamentally, this piece argues against Spivak by constructing a case for the relative authenticity of Falola's voice, despite its incorporation into Western intellectualism. Spivak claims that the subaltern cannot speak so long as the Western academy can only relate to the other within its own investigative par­adigm of the non-Western object. Here, I frame A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, not as a Western co-opting of an indigenous voice, but rather, as an invitation to explore Falola's memoir from the position of the non-Western subject. The work also allows us to move beyond the categories of the Western and non-Western subject to seriously engage the paradox of postcolonial existence. In granting credence to the idea of identity paradox, a close analysis of A Mouth Sweeter than Salt reveals the complexities of African subaltern voice and its dialectic with the forces of modernity. While Spivak might argue that this formulation is tainted by the motives of the West, such an interpretation of Fa­lola's memoir also builds ground to discuss alternatives to the Western archive in the development of African intellectualism. Falola's memoir stands as a tes­tament to the legitimization of oral history, micro-historical storytelling, and the disintegration of Western disciplinary divisions between history, literature, sociology, philosophy, and a host of other imported intellectual categories. By outlining the critical duality of Falola's act of subaltern speech, I hope to build a realm in which the African intellectual voice is not artificially segmented from the historical influence of modernity, but can also open discursive space to stand on its own ground.