Paradise postponed? The Department of National Heritage and political hegemony

Established following the Conservative Party's election victory in April 1992, the Department of National Heritage has been heralded as an important stage in the growing recognition of the significance of the leisure industry to Britain. By combining, for the first time, responsibility for sport, tourism, the arts, libraries, heritage, broadcasting and film, and by providing them with Cabinet representation, a unique opportunity has, seemingly, been provided to develop and promote the interests of leisure in Britain. This paper takes the view that although this initiative has been broadly welcomed, there are important inconsistencies which require attention. On the one hand the selection of the portfolio appears somewhat eclectic. On the other hand, it is questionable why such a department should have been developed at all. An inspection of the implicit ideology suggests that rather than the traditional use of the state to promote leisure interests, the introduction of the department signifies a shift to the use of leisure to promote the Government's interests. Thus the new Department of National Heritage is to be used as a central feature in the legitimation of the government's political programme. Rather than emphasising its traditional quasi-welfare role, the new place for leisure and heritage is firmly in the market economy. Whilst a leisured society may be the epitome of post-industrialism, therefore, the citizen rights claim for access to leisure activities can only be secured by engaging with the market. This legitimised construction of post- modern citizenship is at the centre of a new political order where choice has been replaced by means and where the classless paradigm championed by the Prime Minister will be a classlessness of constructed omission.

A camera based digit location and recognition system for garment tracking

Garment information tracking is required for clean room garment management. In this paper, we present a camera-based robust system with implementation of Optical Character Reconition (OCR) techniques to fulfill garment label recognition. In the system, a camera is used for image capturing; an adaptive thresholding algorithm is employed to generate binary images; Connected Component Labelling (CCL) is then adopted for object detection in the binary image as a part of finding the ROI (Region of Interest); Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) with the BP (Back Propagation) learning algorithm are used for digit recognition; and finally the system is verified by a system database. The system has been tested. The results show that it is capable of coping with variance of lighting, digit twisting, background complexity, and font orientations. The system performance with association to the digit recognition rate has met the design requirement. It has achieved real-time and error-free garment information tracking during the testing.

A rare structure at the syntax-discourse interface: heritage and Spanish-dominant native speakers weigh in

The present study examines knowledge of the discourse-appropriateness of Clitic Right Dislocation (CLRD) in a population of Heritage (HS) and Spanish-dominant Native Speakers in order to test the predictions of the Interface Hypothesis (IH; Sorace 2011). The IH predicts that speakers in language contact situations will experience difficulties with integrating information involving the interface of syntax and discourse modules. CLRD relates a dislocated constituent to a discourse antecedent, requiring integration of syntax and pragmatics. Results from an acceptability judgment task did not support the predictions of the IH. No statistical differences between the HSs’ performance and that of L1-dominant native speakers were evidenced when participants were presented with an offline task. Thus, our study did not find any evidence of “incomplete acquisition” (Montrul 2008) as it pertains to this specific linguistic structure.

EU enlargement and consequences for FDI-assisted industrial development

Many of the new member states as well as candidate and accession countries of the EU are confident that membership will result in substantially increased inward foreign direct investment (FDI) in manufacturing. This paper discusses the policy issues and challenges that cohesion and accession countries face, applying lessons that by now have become mainstream in the parallel discussion of FDI-assisted development in the developing economies. We argue that globalisation has attenuated the benefits that accrue from EU membership for latecomers, and they must now compete for FDI not just with other European countries but also with non- EU emerging economies. We posit that they should not base their industrial development strategy on mere passive reliance of FDI flows without considering how to concatenate their industrial development and the nature of the MNE activities they attract.

Exploring the source of differences and similarities in L1 attrition and heritage speaker competence: evidence from pronominal resolution

Several studies of different bilingual groups including L2 learners, child bilinguals, heritage speakers and L1 attriters reveal similar performance on syntax-discourse interface properties such as anaphora resolution (Sorace, 2011 and references therein). Specifically, bilinguals seem to allow more optionality in the interpretation of overt subject pronouns in null subject languages, such as Greek, Italian and Spanish while the interpretation of null subject pronouns is indistinguishable from monolingual natives. Nevertheless, there is some evidence pointing to bilingualism effects on the interpretation of null subject pronouns too in heritage speakers’ grammars (Montrul, 2004) due to some form of ‘arrested’ development in this group of bilinguals. The present study seeks to investigate similarities and differences between two Greek–Swedish bilingual groups, heritage speakers and L1 attriters, in anaphora resolution of null and overt subject pronouns in Greek using a self-paced listening with a sentence-picture matching decision task at the end of each sentence. The two groups differ in crucial ways: heritage speakers were simultaneous or early bilinguals while the L1 attriters were adult learners of the second language, Swedish. Our findings reveal differences from monolingual preferences in the interpretation of the overt pronoun for both heritage and attrited speakers while the differences attested between the two groups in the interpretation of null subject pronouns affect only response times with heritage being faster than attrited speakers. We argue that our results do not support an age of onset or differential input effects on bilingual performance in pronoun resolution.

The social life of ruins: sites of memory and the politics of a Zimbabwean periphery

This article explores conflicts over a series of ruins located within Zimbabwe's flagship National Park. The relics have long been regarded as sacred places by local African communities evicted from their vicinity, and have come to be seen as their ethnic heritage. Local intellectuals' promotion of this heritage was an important aspect of a defensive mobilization of cultural difference on the part of a marginalized minority group. I explore both indigenous and colonial ideas about the ruins, the different social movements with which they have been associated and the changing social life they have given the stone relics. Although African and European ideas sometimes came into violent confrontation - as in the context of colonial era evictions - there were also mutual influences in emergent ideas about tribe, heritage and history. The article engages with Pierre Nora's notion of 'sites of memory', which has usefully drawn attention to the way in which ideas of the past are rooted and reproduced in representations of particular places. But it criticizes Nora's tendency to romanticize pre-modern 'memory', suppress narrative and depoliticize traditional connections with the past. Thus, the article highlights the historicity of traditional means of relating to the past, highlighting the often bitter and divisive politics of traditional ritual, myth, kinship, descent and 'being first'. It also emphasizes the entanglement of modern and traditional ideas, inadequately captured by Nora's implied opposition between history and memory. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Investigating age related changes in taste and affects on sensory perceptions of oral nutritional supplements

Background: sip feeds are oral nutritional supplements (ONSs) that are commonly prescribed to malnourished patients to improve their nutritional and clinical status. However, ONSs are poorly consumed and frequently wasted, with sweetness being identified as one of the factors leading to patients’ dislike of ONSs. Objectives: to investigate if age affects sweetness thresholds and if this impacts upon perceived sweetness intensity, hedonic (sweetness and overall) and ranked preference of ONS products. Design: prospective, observational. Subjects: thirty-six young adults (18–33 years) and 48 healthy older adults (63–85 years). Setting: Department of Food and Nutritional Sciences and the Clinical Health Sciences at the University of Reading. Methods: detection and recognition threshold levels, basic taste identification and ‘just about right’ level of sweetness were examined. Three ONSs (chocolate, vanilla, strawberry) and sucrose solutions were evaluated for hedonic sweetness, overall hedonic liking, sweetness intensity and rank preference. Results: significant differences were found in both sweetness detection and recognition thresholds (P = 0.0001) between young and older adults, with older adults more likely to incorrectly identify the taste (P = 0.0001). Despite the deterioration in sweetness sensitivity among the older adults, there were no significant differences found in sweetness intensity perceived for the ONS products presented (P > 0.05) when compared with the young adults. However, across both groups sweetness intensity was found to be correlated with overall product dislike across all flavour variants tested (R = 0.398, P = 0.0001). Conclusions: sweetness appears to be one of many factors contributing to the dislike of ONSs. Manufacturers are encouraged to reconsider the formulations of these products so that beneficial effects of ONSs can be delivered in a more palatable and acceptable form and wastage reduced.

Electrochemical and sonoelectrochemical monitoring of indigo reduction by glucose

The reduction of indigo (dispersed in water) to leuco-indigo (dissolved in water) is an important industrial process and investigated here for the case of glucose as an environmentally benign reducing agent. In order to quantitatively follow the formation of leuco-indigo two approaches based on (i) rotating disk voltammetry and (ii) sonovoltammetry are developed. Leuco-indigo, once formed in alkaline solution, is readily monitored at a glassy carbon electrode in the mass transport limit employing hydrodynamic voltammetry. The presence of power ultrasound further improves the leuco-indigo determination due to additional agitation and homogenization effects. While inactive at room temperature, glucose readily reduces indigo in alkaline media at 65 degrees C. In the presence of excess glucose, a surface dissolution kinetics limited process is proposed following the rate law d eta(leuco-indigo)/dt = k x c(OH-) x S-indigo where eta(leuco-indigo) is the amount of leuco-indigo formed, k = 4.1 x 10(-9) m s(-1) (at 65 degrees C, assuming spherical particles of I gm diameter) is the heterogeneous dissolution rate constant,c(OH-) is the concentration of hydroxide, and Sindigo is the reactive surface area. The activation energy for this process in aqueous 0.2 M NaOH is E-A = 64 U mol(-1) consistent with a considerable temperature effects. The redox mediator 1,8-dihydroxyanthraquinone is shown to significantly enhance the reaction rate by catalysing the electron transfer between glucose and solid indigo particles. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All fights reserved.

Modification of hemicellulose content by antisense down-regulation of UDP-glucuronate decarboxylase in tobacco and its consequences for cellulose extractability

Extractability and recovery of cellulose from cell walls influences many industrial processes and also the utilisation of biomass for energy purposes. The utility of genetic manipulation of lignin has proven potential for optimising such processes and is also advantageous for the environment. Hemicelluloses, particularly secondary wall xylans, also influence the extractability of cellulose. UDP-glucuronate decarboxylase produces UDP-xylose, the precursor for xylans and the effect of its down-regulation on cell wall structure and cellulose extractability in transgenic tobacco has been investigated. Since there are a number of potential UDP-glucuronate decarboxylase genes, a 490 bp sequence of high similarity between members of the family, was chosen for general alteration of the expression of the gene family. Sense and antisense transgenic lines were analysed for enzyme activity using a modified and optimised electrophoretic assay, for enzyme levels by western blotting and for secondary cell wall composition. Some of the down-regulated antisense plants showed high glucose to xylose ratios in xylem walls due to less xylose-containing polymers, while arabinose and uronic acid contents, which could also have been affected by any change in UDP-xylose provision, were unchanged. The overall morphology and stem lignin content of the modified lines remained little changed compared with wild-type. However, there were some changes in vascular organisation and reduction of xylans in the secondary walls was confirmed by immunocytochemistry. Pulping analysis showed a decreased pulp yield and a higher Kappa number in some lines compared with controls, indicating that they were less delignified, although the level of residual alkali was reduced. Such traits probably indicate that lignin was less available for removal in a reduced background of xylans. However, the viscosity was higher in most antisense lines, meaning that the cellulose was less broken-down during the pulping process. This is one of the first studies of a directed manipulation of hemicellulose content on cellulose extractability and shows both positive and negative outcomes.

Modification of hemicellulose content by antisense down-regulation of UDP-glucuronate decarboxylase in tobacco and its conscequence for cellulose extractability

Extractability and recovery of cellulose from cell walls influences many industrial processes and also the utilisation of biomass for energy purposes. The utility of genetic manipulation of lignin has proven potential for optimising such processes and is also advantageous for the environment. Hemicelluloses, particularly secondary wall xylans, also influence the extractability of cellulose. UDP-glucuronate decarboxylase produces UDP-xylose, the precursor for xylans and the effect of its down-regulation on cell wall structure and cellulose extractability in transgenic tobacco has been investigated. Since there are a number of potential UDP-glucuronate decarboxylase genes, a 490 bp sequence of high similarity between members of the family, was chosen for general alteration of the expression of the gene family. Sense and antisense transgenic lines were analysed for enzyme activity using a modified and optimised electrophoretic assay, for enzyme levels by western blotting and for secondary cell wall composition. Some of the down-regulated antisense plants showed high glucose to xylose ratios in xylem walls due to less xylose-containing polymers, while arabinose and uronic acid contents, which could also have been affected by any change in UDP-xylose provision, were unchanged. The overall morphology and stem lignin content of the modified lines remained little changed compared with wild-type. However, there were some changes in vascular organisation and reduction of xylans in the secondary walls was confirmed by immunocytochemistry. Pulping analysis showed a decreased pulp yield and a higher Kappa number in some lines compared with controls, indicating that they were less delignified, although the level of residual alkali was reduced. Such traits probably indicate that lignin was less available for removal in a reduced background of xylans. However, the viscosity was higher in most antisense lines, meaning that the cellulose was less broken-down during the pulping process. This is one of the first studies of a directed manipulation of hemicellulose content on cellulose extractability and shows both positive and negative outcomes.