Zbrodnicze umysły i muzyczne harmonie. „Tajemnica Edwina Drooda” Charlesa Dickensa jako utwór protodetektywistyczny

The paper analyses the role of music in Dickens’ last, unfinished novel and its relation to the criminal puzzle which — for obvious reason — was left unsolved. Contrary to the traditional cultural associations (harmony, beauty, order), music in The Mystery of Edwin Drood is related to darkness, which shrouds the places where it is performed (the cathedral, Jasper’s room); it also functions as the background of various disharmonies (physical indisposition, quarrel, signs of hatred, fear). The theme of the only two religious songs that are referred to is sin and wickedness. On the one hand, considering the fact that music is John Jasper’s domain, the discordance not only functions as an “ethical metaphor” and externalization of the man’s character, but also points to him as the murderer of his nephew. On the other hand, the aforementioned songs foreground the motif of repentance or turning away from sin, which undermines the ostensibly obvious conclusions concerning Jasper’s guilt. Similarly to the detective novel of the (much later) Golden Age period, the hints prompting the puzzle’s solution are provided here, though they are not univocal, leaving a shadow of doubt as to the guilt of the most obvious suspect. Yet, contrary to the genre conventions, the clues appear mainly on the implied level of communication, available to the implied reader deciphering textual patterns and not merely “observing” the presented reality.

Beyond Judging Books by Their Covers: "Reflections on Interrogating Cultural Anthropology Text Covers"

Why place covers on books? The most obvious reason is to protect the pages. But what do you put on the covers themselves? Answers to the “what” question have evolved over the nearly two millennia since the birth of the codex. To situate the use—and user interpretation—of contemporary covers, particularly for textbooks, let’s start with some history.1

Masses Are Other People

The obvious reason to drop the word “mass” from our disciplinary name is that social reality has moved on. “Mass communication” is irredeemably linked to the broadcast era and one-to-many dispersal. The “mass” of “mass communication”—as a catch-all for the field—is plainly outdated. There is another reason to drop the label. The word “mass” comes freighted with a history of abusive associations. A “mass,” as the term came to be used in the late nineteenth century, referred to a mob—to a crowd-in-waiting, suggestible and bovine. “Mass” was a pejorative linked to a warning: popular democracy is dangerous. Raymond Williams drew out the term’s fundamentally ascriptive character: “There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” Masses, he added, “are other people.”

Interorganelle lipid flux revealed by enzymatic mass tagging in vivo

The distinct activities of cellular organelles are dependent on the proper function of their membranes. Coordinated membrane biogenesis of the different organelles necessitates interorganelle transport of lipids from their site of synthesis to their destination membranes. Several proteins and trafficking pathways have been proposed to participate in lipid distribution, but despite the basic importance of this process, in vivo evidence linking the absence of putative transport pathways to specific transport defects remains scarce. An obvious reason for this scarcity is the near absence of in vivo lipid trafficking assays. Here we introduce a versatile method named METALIC (Mass tagging-Enabled TrAcking of Lipids In Cells) to track interorganelle lipid flux inside living cells. In this strategy, two enzymes, one directed to a "donor" and the other to an "acceptor" organelle, add two distinct mass tags to lipids. Mass spectrometry-based detection of lipids bearing the two mass tags is then used as a proxy for lipid exchange between the two organelles. By applying this approach to ER and mitochondria, we show that the ERMES and Vps13-Mcp1 complexes have lipid transport activity in vivo, and unravel their relative contributions to ER-mitochondria lipid exchange.

Test Position Effects on Hit and False Alarm Rates in Recognition Memory for Paintings and Words

When old/new recognition memory is tested with equal numbers of studied and non-studied items and no rewards or instructions that favour one response over the other, there is no obvious reason for response bias. In line with this, Canadian undergraduates have shown, on average, a neutral response bias when we tested them on recognition of common English words. By contrast, most subjects we have tested on recognition of richly detailed images have shown a conservative bias: they more often erred by missing a studied image than by judging a non-studied image as studied. Here, in an effort to better understand these materials-based bias effects (MBBEs), we examined changes in hit and false alarm (FA) rates (and in sensitivity and bias) from the first to fourth quartile of a recognition memory test in eight experiments in which undergraduates studied words and/or images of paintings. Response bias for images tended to increase across quartiles, whereas bias for words showed no consistent pattern across quartiles. This pattern could be described as an increase in the MBBE over the course of the test, but the underlying patterns for hits and FAs are not easily reconciled with this interpretation. Hit rates decreased over the course of the test for both materials types, with that decline tending to be steeper for images than words. For words, FA rates tended to increase across quartiles, whereas for paintings FA rates did not increase across quartiles. We discuss implications of these findings for theoretical accounts of the MBBE.

Relationship of lunar phases and sex of the foetus: a retrospective study

Background: The relation of lunar phases at the time of conception to the sex of the child at birth has been touted as a method of sex selection by various birth calendars with controversial results. It is made to believe that indeed there is a relation of lunar phase at the time of conception/intercourse which results in birth of a particular gender. The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of the lunar phase on the possible relationship between lunar position at EDD/LMP and the gender of the child.Methods: One thousand and five deliveries were retrospectively analysed from 1 January 2016 to 31 December 2018 at the department of obstetrics and gynaecology of military hospital, Gwalior (latitude and longitude coordinates: 26.218287, 78.182831). Females having regular menstrual periods history around conception and in general their periods have been normal and regular were included in the study. Females having irregular menstrual periods history or having oligomenorrhoea/polymenorrhoea, ART/IVF conceptions were excluded from the study. Exact lunar phases were determined at the time of EDD and not with their LMP since that would automatically corelate well with LMP because of regularity of their periods. The actual date of birth was not considered while corelating with moon phase because of obvious reason of unexpected timing of labour.Results: The analysis revealed no significant correlation of gender of the child to lunar phases at EDD. This would indirectly corelate well with the LMP since the inclusion criterion had females having normal and regular menstrual periods.Conclusions: There is no predictable influence of the lunar phase on the gender of the baby. As expected, and in agreement with some recent studies this pervasive myth is not evidence based.

Particulate Exotica

Recent advances in differential topology single out four-dimensions as being special, allowing for vast varieties of exotic smoothness (differential) structures, distinguished by their handlebody decompositions, even as the coarser algebraic topology is fixed. Should the spacetime we reside in takes up one of the more exotic choices, and there is no obvious reason why it shouldn't, apparent pathologies would inevitably plague calculus-based physical theories assuming the standard vanilla structure, due to the non-existence of a diffeomorphism and the consequent lack of a suitable portal through which to transfer the complete information regarding the exotic physical dynamics into the vanilla theories. An obvious plausible consequence of this deficiency would be the uncertainty permeating our attempted description of the microscopic world. We tentatively argue here, that a re-inspection of the key ingredients of the phenomenological particle models, from the perspective of exotica, could possibly yield interesting insights. Our short and rudimentary discussion is qualitative and speculative, because the necessary mathematical tools have only just began to be developed.

Asteroseismic Observations of Hot Subdwarfs

There are a number of reasons for studying hot subdwarf pulsation; the most obvious being that these stars remain a poorly understood late-stage of stellar evolution and knowledge of their interior structure, which pulsation studies reveal, constrains evolution models. Of particular interest are the red giant progenitors as in looking at a hot subdwarf we are seeing a stripped-down red giant as it would have been just before the Helium Flash. Moreover, hot subdwarfs may have formed through the merger of two helium white dwarfs and their study gives insight into how such a merger may have happened. A less obvious reason for studying pulsation in hot subdwarfs is that they provide a critical test of stellar envelope opacities and the atomic physics upon which they depend.

Mobile Technology Support for the Assessment and Management of COVID-19 Outbreak

The early months in 2020 saw a rapid increase in the adoption of mHealth and telehealth across the globe. The obvious reason being the sudden outbreak of coronavirus infectious disease (COVID-19), which sent the entire world scrambling for solutions to contain and mitigate the spread. Ordinarily, telehealth and mHealth are considered optional in most traditional healthcare systems even in developed countries, but today, these technologies have become the most sought-after tools required to augment the overwhelmed healthcare systems orchestrated by COVID-19. Mobile technology in particular has continued to play important roles in the monitoring, surveillance, and the assessment of the outbreak in so many ways. This chapter offers a window into different ways mHealth and telemedicine are used to provide healthcare services and disease management, as well as the challenges in the implementation of these technologies as the world braces for the devastating effects of COVID-19.

Заметка Николая Гринкевича «О школе» и дополняющие ее тексты

The text corpus of the Grinkevich Research and Translation Project About the School, which had an active phase in 2014-2019, is considered. The sources of 9 texts are: 2 – the Alaskan Russian Church archive in the Library of Congress, 3 – N. Russel’s brochure, 4 – San Francisco newspapers; the note On the School by N. Grinkevich is supplemented, confirming the facts reported in it, by 2 testimonies of Dr. Russel himself (including the history of the creation of the note), 3 parts dedicated to the school student of Belarusian-Tlingit origin N. Savchenko (letters from his father Demian), 2 newspaper publications revealing Grinkevich’s ambiguous role. The obvious reason for the change in public position of this psalm reader, later a member of the Ecclesiastical Consistory of Alaska in relation to the problems of the church school was the inertial adherence to routine rules and procedures, official subordination and the desire to maintain position, but it was the promulgation of his note by the revolutionaries that probably led to his dismissal, already as an archpriest, from the Diocese of the Aleutians and Alaska.