Writing the Dark Side of Travel

The travel experience filled with personal trauma; the pilgrimage through a war-torn place; the journey with those suffering: these represent the darker sides of travel. What is their allure and how are they represented? This volume takes an ethnographic and interdisciplinary approach to explore the writings and texts of dark journeys and travels. In traveling over the dead, amongst the dying, and alongside the suffering, the authors give us a tour of humanity’s violence and misery. And yet, from this dark side, there comes great beauty and poignancy in the characterization of plight; creativity in the comic, graphic, and graffiti sketches and comments on life; and the sense of profound and spiritual journeys being undertaken, recorded, and memorialized.

Technical Note: Assessing a 24/7 solution for monitoring water quality loads in small river catchments

Quantifying nutrient and sediment loads in catchments is dif?cult owing to diffuse controls related to storm hydrology. Coarse sampling and interpolation methods are prone to very high uncertainties due to under-representation of high discharge, short duration events. Additionally, important low-?ow processes such as diurnal signals linked to point source impacts are missed. Here we demonstrate a solution based on a time-integrated approach to sampling with a standard 24 bottle autosampler con?gured to take a sample every 7 h over a week according to a Plynlimon design. This is evaluated with a number of other sampling strategies using a two-year dataset of sub-hourly discharge and phosphorus concentration data. The 24/7 solution is shown to be among the least uncertain in estimating load (inter-quartile range: 96% to 110% of actual load in year 1 and 97% to 104% in year 2) due to the increased frequency raising the probability of sampling storm events and point source signals. The 24/7 solution would appear to be most parsimonious in terms of data coverage and certainty, process signal representation, potential laboratory commitment, technology requirements and the ability to be widely deployed in complex catchments.

PicSOr - An objective test of perceptual skill that predicts laparoscopic technical skill in three initial studies of laparoscopic performance

Background: Laparoscopic surgery requires surgeons to infer the shape of 3-D structures, such as the internal organs of patients, from 2-D displays on a video monitor. Recent evidence indicates that the issue is not resolved by the use of contemporary 3-D camera systems. It is therefore crucial to find ways of measuring differences in aptitude for recovering 3-D structure from 2-D images, and assessing its impact on performance. Our aim was to test empirically for a relationship between laparoscopic ability and the perceptual skill of recovering information about 3-D structures from 2-D monitor displays.

'Neo-Latin Writing in the British Isles'

This chapter seeks to identify cultural and generic trends and authorial methodologies that may serve to unify or to differentiate between the histories of neo-Latin literature in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. It considers ways in which Latin served to bridge horizontal spaces (both physical and metaphorical) between four British regions, between neo-Latin writers in Britain and their continental predecessors and peers, and between Latin and the respective vernacular(s). It also examines vertical spaces (both chronological and cultural) between the neo-Latin and the classical Latin text, and between the linear demarcations of ‘early modern’, ‘Augustan’ and ‘Romantic’. An assessment of links between nationhood and the neo-Latin text as evinced by anthologies, antiquarian and quasi-historical writing, is followed by examples of generic continuity and metamorphosis in the British neo-Latin pastoral, ode and epigram. The concluding sections offer two generic case-studies (neo-Latin epic and didactic) both of which, it is argued, engendered the birth of specifically British versions of the mock-heroic and mock-didactic.

Perceptions of authorial identity in academic writing among undergraduate accounting students: implications for unintentional plagiarism

The current study explores first, second and third year UK accounting students’ perceptions of authorial identity and their implications for unintentional plagiarism. The findings suggest that whilst all students have reasonably positive perceptions of their authorial identity, there is room for improvement. Significant differences in second year students’ perceptions were reported for some positive aspects of authorial identity. However, results for negative aspects show that second year students find it significantly more difficult to express accounting in their own words than first and third years. Furthermore, second years are significantly more afraid than first years that what they write will look unimpressive. Finally, the results for approaches to writing, which also have implications for unintentional plagiarism, revealed that students across all years appear to adopt aspects of top-down, bottom-up and pragmatic approaches to writing. Emerging from these findings, the study offers suggestions to accounting educators regarding authorial identity instruction.

An Empirical Analysis of Scale and Scope Economies and Technical Change in an Irish Multiproduct Banking Firm

In contrast to most empirical investigations of the efficiency of multiproduct financial institutions, which either estimate scale and scope economies with a given state of technology, or only analyse technical change in the presence of overall scale economies, this study estimates overall scale economies, product-specific scale economies and scope economies in the presence of both neutral and non-neutral technical change. Also, in contrast to most other empirical studies in this area, standard errors are computed for all relevant statistics. The findings indicate diseconomies of scope; overall diseconomies of scale; product-specific economies are decreasing for investments and increasing for loans; in addition to substantial neutral technical change, biased technical change is labour- and capital-saving and deposits-using in character.