Britannia’s Rules

As Britain became the dominant naval power with increasingly global reach, its approach to the oceans underwent an important shift. London abandoned its claims to sovereignty over nearby waters and used its diplomatic and economic weight to push for a three-mile limit to territorial waters. At the same time, Britain shifted away from mercantilism and toward an embrace of free ocean commerce. As the anti-slavery movement gained influence in Britain, London used its maritime might to crack down on the slave trade and to stamp out piracy in several parts of the world. Britain was far from consistent in its defense of ocean freedom, however, and it often used its maritime muscle to interfere with shipping. By the end of the 19th century, however, interdictions at sea were becoming less common, and ocean commerce was booming. The first international attempts to study the health of fisheries and regulate shipping began.

Assessment of Implicit Interests through an Unobtrusive Computer Task. Their Relations with Career Decision, Anxiety, and Personality Traits

Adolescence is a period where youngsters still do not know much about themselves. That makes some decisions, like those concerning vocational elections, a complicated issue that has important consequences for their life. The main goal of this piece of research is to measure implicit interests using a situated, unobtrusive computer tool (PrUnAs: Preferences Unobtrusive Assessment) as well as its connection with anxiety and personality traits: neuroticism, extraversion, self-efficacy, optimism, consciousness, and openness. Sample: 304 16-year-old adolescents enrolled in the last course of compulsory education. Instruments: Computer programs were used to measure implicit interests, career preferences, and to self-descript personality traits; finally, the paper-and-pencil test Stai was applied to measure anxiety. Results: Concordance between implicit interests and explicit choices was less than 50%. The software developed for assessing implicit interests not only proved to be an efficient tool to make them arise but also a good predictor of anxiety. Conclusions: Implicit interests and explicit elections are not the same. The approach from implicit preferences is an important shift in the approximation to vocational guiding and to reduce youngsters’ indecision level. Beyond vocational choice, this information may improve the short- and long-term quality of life and mental health.

Best Research Practice Implementation: The Experience of the N.N. Burdenko National Medical Research Center of Neurosurgery

Implementing the best research principles initiates an important shift in clinical research culture, improving efficiency and the level of evidence obtained. In this article, we share our own view on the best research practice and our experience introducing it into the scientific activities of the N.N. Burdenko National Medical Research Center of Neurosurgery (Moscow, Russian Federation). While being adherent to the principles described in the article, the percentage of publications in the international scientific journals in our Center has increased from 7% to 27%, with an overall gain in the number of articles by 2 times since 2014. We believe it is important that medical informatics professionals equally to medical experts involved in clinical research are familiar with the best research principles.

Work between Obligation and Right in Muslim Culture: Is There a Paradigm Shift?

The paper starts from the premise that the revolutions in the countries of the so-called Arab Spring (2011 and onwards) brought about an important shift in the understanding of right and duty. This trend is related to the transformation of the relationship of the ruler and the ruled in those countries as well as in the perception of work ethics. Whereas the systems of these countries have consistently considered work as a duty of citizens and encouraged them to work hard for the development and prospering of the state, these popular movements have transformed work from a duty and responsibility on the shoulders of the individual into a right of the individual that can be claimed from the state, which is trying to evade its responsibilities – including the duty to provide job opportunities for its citizens. The researcher does not claim to present a comprehensive outline of the topic; this is rather a preliminary approach that deserves further study and analysis. What happened is not necessarily caused by direct contact with the “West” or being influenced by “Western” political philosophy, as we can find hints and origins for this transformation in both classical and modern Islamic moral thought. This paper presents examples of the relationship of right and duty from different historical periods.

Reinventing the clinic? Consuming hospital spaces in the PFI era

Since 1997, Labour has overseen a new hospital building programme in the UK that has been heralded by Tony Blair as part of a ‘new civic building programme that will rival that of the Victorian age’. These hospitals, primarily funded through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), are depicted as setting new standards in healthcare facility design. In this paper, we examine the distinctiveness of these designs, exploring the rhetoric that proclaims them as offering new levels of clinical efficiency and patient care in a distinctly ‘non-institutional’ setting. Emphasising the homology between these designs and the (il)logics of the marketplace, we conclude that this new generation of hospitals is indicative of an important shift in the locus of healthcare from the world of the service user to the world of the consumer.

From Unspeakability to Inequality Talk: Why Conversations about Inequalities May Not Lead to Change

This article draws on eighteen qualitative in-depth interviews with female, early-career classical musicians to investigate if, and if so in which ways, recent discourse around the lack of diversity in the classical music profession has affected how young musicians talk about inequalities in the field of classical music. The article demonstrates that the research participants were aware of ongoing inequalities and discussed them openly. This marks an important shift from previously conducted research, which highlighted the ‘unspeakability’ of inequalities in the classical music profession and the cultural and creative industries. By drawing on discursive psychology, this article explores the rhetorical and ideological work that such ‘inequality talk’ performs, arguing that conversations about inequalities do not necessarily lead to political change. Divided into three analytical sections, the article demonstrates that inequality talk can become an end in itself, rather than a means to an end (such as political change); that a fatalist sentiment can characterise discussions of inequalities, presenting structural change as unachievable; and that acknowledgement and recognition of privilege, crucial to overcoming inequalities, is not a consistent feature of inequality talk, which in turn risks reinforcing the normativity of whiteness and middle-classness in the field of classical music. Overall, the article provides a detailed analysis of recently collected empirical data to caution against overly optimistic accounts of the shift towards a more open discussion of inequalities in the classical music profession and beyond.

Learning to Detain Asylum Seekers and the Growth of Mass Immigration Detention in the United States

Drawing upon an analysis of congressional records and media coverage from 1981 to 1996, this article examines the growth of mass immigration detention. It traces an important shift during this period: while detention began as an ad hoc executive initiative that was received with skepticism by the legislature, Congress was ultimately responsible for entrenching the system over objections from the agency. As we reveal, a critical component of this evolution was a transformation in Congress’s perception of asylum seekers. While lawmakers initially decried their detention, they later branded them as dangerous. Lawmakers began describing asylum seekers as criminals or agents of infectious diseases in order to justify their detention, which then cleared the way for the mass detention of arriving migrants more broadly. Our analysis suggests that they may have emphasized the dangerousness of asylum seekers to resolve the dissonance between their theoretical commitments to asylum and their hesitance to welcome newcomers. In addition to this distinctive form of cognitive dissonance, we discuss a number of other implications of our research, including the ways in which the new penology framework figured into the changing discourse about detaining asylum seekers.

Fish Ecology of the Alto Madre de Dios River Basin (Peru): Notes on Electrofishing Surveys, Elevation, Palm Swamp and Headwater Fishes

Our study analyzes the distribution of fish communities related to the environmental variables of the Alto Madre de Dios River, an Andean-Amazon watershed of southern Peru, between 300 and 2811 m a.s.l. within the Manu Biosphere Reserve. We provide new ecological and diversity data on fishes for these poorly studied rivers and new data for palm swamp habitats. With electric fishing techniques, we collected a total of 1934 fish specimens belonging to 78 species, 42 genera and 15 families. To assess main patterns of diversity we combined SIMPER and ANOSIM with canonical correspondence analysis to obtain an overview of the community structure of fish and their distribution related to aquatic habitats. Our results show an important shift on fish diversity at 700 m a.s.l. separating headwater and middle-lowland communities. Electrofishing was a hindrance due to the depth, flow and low conductivity of the rivers, but also allowed us to capture fish not observed with other techniques. We also compared the use of elevation with slope as an alternative variable for statistical analysis. Our results show that slope offers a solid and equivalent explanation for fish distribution variability, avoids redundance, and instead of giving geographical data offers ecologically solid information.

Relația text-imagine în cazul ilustrației de carte la sfârșitul secolului al XIX-lea. Două studii de caz: Le voyage d’Urien și Les Vierges

The 19th century witnessed an important shift in the relationship between book illustrations and literature: the literal approach of Romantics, which subordinated images to the literary text was replaced by the interpretative and metaphorical paradigm of the Symbolists. By the end of the century, painters refused the traditional servile attitude towards text, demanding a real autonomy of their creations. Instead of “illustration”, artists such as Odilon Redon preferred words like “transmission” and “interpretation”, whilst art critic André Mellerio coined the terms “concordance” and “correlative parallelism” to describe the relationship between the two arts. This paper aims to identify the traces of this debate in two rather different projects: Urien’s Voyage, by André Gide, decorated by Maurice Denis, and The Virgins, a text written by Georges Rodenbach and meant to accompany 4 lithographs created by József Rippl-Rónai.

From the Periphery to the Interstices: Avant-garde Film, Medium Specificity and Intermediality, 1970–2015

This chapter surveys an important shift in the last fifty years in the study of avant-garde film within academia. It explores the move from study at the margins of widely separated disciplines, notably Art History and the nascent field of Film Studies, to the interstices between increasingly connected disciplines, but focused upon English and Modern Languages. As a consequence of this move, the author argues, avant-garde film has become the object of a form of scholarship that scrutinises the intermedial relations of films and texts. With this attention, mostly from scholars trained in literature and textual analysis, there is a risk of losing the technical competence in film analysis that characterised the earlier mode of scholarship. In the 1960s and 70s, much of the crucial work in the field was undertaken by practising, experimental filmmakers who understood the material possibilities and constraints of their medium. Both approaches and sites of scholarship bring particular benefits and problems, and contemporary study of the intermedial relationships of experimental film in the wider, intermedial, culture needs to account for both in its historiography.