An everyday nostalgia: Memory and the fictions of belonging

In 1984, George Orwell presented the future as a dystopian vision, where everyday existence was governed and redefined by an oppressive regime. Winston Smith's daily duties at the Ministry of Truth involved the invention, rewriting and erasing of fragments of history as a means of perpetuating contentment, uniformity and control. History, as Orwell described it in the novel 'was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.' More that a quarter of a century after the publication of 1984, Michel Foucault discussed the cinematic representation and misrepresentation of French history and identity in terms of what he called the manipulation of 'popular memory'. In what was tantamount to a diluted version of Orwell's palimpsestic histories, Foucault stated that 'people are not shown what they were, but what they must remember having been.' This paper will investigate notions of memory, identity and the everyday through a discussion of the community of Celebration in Florida. Conceived in the 1990s, Celebration was designed around a fictionalised representation of pre 1940s small town America, using nostalgia for a mythologised past to create a sense of comfort, community and conformity among its residents. Adapting issues raised by Orwell, Foucault and Baudrillard, this paper will discuss the way in which architecture, like film and literature, can participate in what Foucault discussed as the manipulation of popular memory, inducing and exploiting a nostalgia for an everyday past that that never really existed.

Effects of memory load and distraction on performance and event-related slow potentials in a visuospatial working memory task

Brain electrical activity related to working memory was recorded at 15 scalp electrodes during a visuospatial delayed response task. Participants (N = 18) touched the remembered position of a target on a computer screen after either a 1 or 8 sec delay. These memory trials were compared to sensory trials in which the target remained present throughout the delay and response periods. Distracter stimuli identical to the target were briefly presented during the delay on 30% of trials. Responses were less accurate in memory than sensory trials, especially after the long delay. During the delay slow potentials developed that were significantly more negative in memory than sensory trials. The difference between memory and sensory trials was greater at anterior than posterior electrodes. On trials with distracters, the slow potentials generated by memory trials showed further enhancement of negativity whereas there were minimal effects on accuracy of performance. The results provide evidence that engagement of visuospatial working memory generates slow wave negativity with a timing and distribution consistent with frontal activation. Enhanced brain activity associated with working memory is required to maintain performance in the presence of distraction. © 1997 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Working memory in schizophrenia and mania: Acute and subacute phases

Baekground: Patients with schizophrenia tend to have impaired performance on tests of working memory (WM). Neurocognitive models have linked WM to certain symptoms of schizophrenia. This study aimed to assess WM in schizophrenia and mania in the acute and subacute phases of the illness and explore correlations between WM and symptom clusters. Methods: A visuo-spatial delayed response task was used to assess WM in schizophrenia (n=20), mania (n= 14) and well controls (n=20). Patients were tested during the first week of an acute admission, and subjects were retested after four weeks. WM, symptoms (PANSS, TLC) and executive ability (COWAT, Stroop, Trail Making) were assessed at both time points. Results: When assessed for overall WM errors (both sensory and memory), there was a significant group difference (F- 11.53, df 2, 40; p

Creating proactive interference in immediate recall: Building a DOG from a DART, a MOP, and a FIG

Phonemic codes are accorded a privileged role in most current models of immediate serial recall, although their effects are apparent in short-term proactive interference (PI) effects as well. The present research looks at how assumptions concerning distributed representation and distributed storage involving both semantic and phonemic codes might be operationalized to produce PI in a short-term cued recall task. The four experiments reported here attempted to generate the phonemic characteristics of a nonrhyming, interfering foil from unrelated filler items in the same list. PI was observed when a rhyme of the foil was studied or when the three phonemes of the foil were distributed across three studied filler items. The results suggest that items in short-term memory are stored in terms of feature bundles and that all items are simultaneously available at retrieval.

Computational chemistry on Fujitsu vector-parallel processors: Development and performance of applications software

In this and a preceding paper, we provide an introduction to the Fujitsu VPP range of vector-parallel supercomputers and to some of the computational chemistry software available for the VPP. Here, we consider the implementation and performance of seven popular chemistry application packages. The codes discussed range from classical molecular dynamics to semiempirical and ab initio quantum chemistry. All have evolved from sequential codes, and have typically been parallelised using a replicated data approach. As such they are well suited to the large-memory/fast-processor architecture of the VPP. For one code, CASTEP, a distributed-memory data-driven parallelisation scheme is presented. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Shared and unique environmental factors determine the ecology of methanogens in humans and rats

OBJECTIVE: This study ascertains the relative contributions of genetics and environment in determining methane emission in humans and rats. There is considerable interest in the factors determining the microbial species that inhabit the colon. Methanogens, which are archaebacteria, are an easily detected colonic luminal bacteria because they respire methane. They are present in some but not all human colons and lower animal hindguts. Opinion varies on the nature of the factors influencing this ecology with some studies proposing the existence of host genetic influences. METHODS: Methane emission was measured in human twin pairs by gas chromatography, and structural equation modeling was used to determine the proportion of genetic and environmental determinants. The importance of the timing of environmental effects and rat strain on the trait of methane emission were ascertained by experiments with cohabiting methanogenic and nonmethanogenic rats. RESULTS: Analysis of breath samples from 274 adolescent twin pairs and their families indicated that the major influences on the trait of methane emission are the result of shared (53%, 95% confidence interval 39-61) and unique environmental (47%, 95% confidence interval 38-56) effects. No significant autosomal genetic effects were detected, but as observed in other studies, men (37%) were less likely to excrete methane in their breath than women (63%). Investigation of methane emission in rats indicated that environmental effects in this animal are most potent during the weaning period, with stable gut microbial ecology thereafter for some but not all rat strains. CONCLUSIONS: These results are consistent with shared and unique environmental factors being the main determinants of the ecology of this colonic microbe. (Am J Gastroenterol 2000;95:2872-2879. (C) 2000 by Am. Coll. of Gastroenterology).