Play!

Play is a scholarly topic with a long and convoluted history. This faculty colloquium will make a few obligatory nods to the literature, but then focus instead on how play might be related to the Bucknell educational mission. The talk will be structured more in the spirit of a “This I Believe” essay. It is meant to challenge the Bucknell community to consider play as an important component of a healthy environment. Some questions we will visit: Why as we mature do we view play as the opposite of work? How can play be used to practice skills and explore our world-view? What is the connection between play and creative habits? How can we pair play with reflection to stimulate deep learning? How might we alter our risk/reward structures to encourage productive play?

Natural History on Blocks, in Bodies, and on the Hearth: Juvenile Science Literature and Games, 1850-1875.

This article examines the role of domestic spaces and images in mid-nineteenth-century science writing for children. Analyses of John Mill’s The Fossil Spirit, A.L.O.E.’s Fairy Frisket, John Cargill Brough’s The Fairy Tales of Science, Annie Carey’s “Autobiography of a Lump of Coal,” and an assortment of boxed games reveal a variety of ways in which overwhelming scientific concepts are domesticated. Moreover, juvenile science literature contributes this appeasing domestication to the broader scientific discourse, consistently framing natural history in terms of human experience.

Comparison of in vivo acute stent recoil between the bioresorbable everolimus-eluting coronary scaffolds (revision 1.0 and 1.1) and the metallic everolimus-eluting stent

The ABSORB cohort A trial using the bioresorbable everolimus-eluting scaffold (BVS revision 1.0, Abbott Vascular) demonstrated a slightly higher acute recoil with BVS than with metallic stents. To reinforce the mechanical strength of the scaffold, the new BVS scaffold (revision 1.1) with modified strut design was developed and tested in the ABSORB cohort B trial. This study sought to evaluate and compare the in vivo acute scaffold recoil of the BVS revision 1.0 in ABSORB cohort A and the BVS revision 1.1 in ABSORB cohort B with the historical recoil of the XIENCE V® everolimus-eluting metal stent (EES, SPIRIT I and II).

The Little Metropolis: Religion, Politics, & Spolia

There have been numerous councils throughout the Catholic Church?s history. From the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE to Vatican II in 1962, only a few centuries have passed without any major church doctrinal change. Following hand in hand with changes in doctrine came the bifurcation of the Christian Church into the Roman CatholicChurch and the Orthodox Church. The first split came in 325 CE with Arianism. Arius of Alexandria and his followers did not agree with the Catholic Church?s viewpoint that the son, Jesus, should be on equal footing with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Constantine the Great brought the Arianism debate to the First Council of Nicaea,which declared Arianism a heretical religion. The following Catholic council?s decisions separated the two Churches even more, eventually creating the formal separation of the Church during the East-West Schism in the middle of the 11th century. Although the twoChurches constantly tried to unite, the Churches hit speed bumps along the way. Eventually, the 1274 Second Council of Lyons officially united the two Churches, even if only for an ephemeral time. At first glance, it might not seem that much resulted from the 1274 Second Council of Lyons. Almost immediately after the council?s ruling, the two Churches split again. Little is known as to why the 1274 Second Council of Lyons ultimately failed in its unification attempt. In this thesis, I will examine the churches of the Little Metropolis at Athens, Merbaka in the Argolid, and Agioi Theodoroi in Athens. In detailing the architectural features of these buildings, I will reconstruct the church building program in association with the 1274 Second Council of Lyons. I will also compare these churchesusing historical sources to keep the sociological, religious, political, and historical context accurate.

Saving morality: Why we cannot, and why we must

Philosophers and laymen alike have often used morality to invite misconceptions of human life into ethics, and also of ethics into human life. The Kant/Williams discourse provides a rich backdrop on which to consider these misconceptions. But the misconceptionsof morality involved are just as numerous and just as serious. One thing that the Kant/Williams discourse shows is this: that ethics can be neither contained by nor cultivated without morality. Though much of Williams’ critique of Kantian morality is quite astute, thephilosophical and ethical wisdoms of morality abound in spite of these. Morality understands the fundamental condition of moral loss, and the sometimes irreducible quandaries that this condition places human beings in. It understands the nature of the moral law, and theintricacies that the levels of letter and spirit invite into human life. Perhaps more importantly, it understands the uncompromising relationship between moral loss and moral law, and how the human navigation of this relationship leads into the ethical realm via giving rise to ethical conviction. Finally, for all of its pressures, morality abounds in valuable wisdoms for the one discovering that the human soul occupies a place of ethical significance in the world. It is responsible for pointing out, grounding and providing a framework for some of the most fundamental truths about the world and human beings; and these are essential to any viable ethical theory and sensible conception of human life.

The Insufficient Void": The Problem of an Earthly Paradise in Wuthering Heights and Dracula"

The aim of my thesis is to chart how death and the spirit world - what might be defined as our living essence - becomes the sites of a new and remarkably subversive Victorian exploration of the supernatural.

The Evolution of Media Coverage of Historical Sports Controversies

This thesis will cover sports controversies throughout the 20th Century in the context of the media’s newspaper coverage of the events. The 1919 Black Sox Scandal, the debate over American participation in the 1936 Olympics, and Muhammad Ali’s conversion to the Nation of Islam, standing as a notorious public figure, and conscientious objection to the Vietnam War will represent the three sports controversies. The media’s adherence to cultural norms is clear in all three cases. The consistent devotion to the cultural and racial atmosphere of their respective eras was constant and helped to perpetuate accepted, mainstream cultural attitudes. Cultural and racial norms were followed in the coverage of the three discussed controversies. The anti-Semitism and racially intolerant sentiments in America during great waves of immigration in the early 1900s allowed for journalists to freely vilify Jews as corrupters of baseball and the ballplayers who were rumored to have thrown the 1919 World Series. The white ballplayers were supported in the press, who protected their own and blamed outsiders. Jim Crow and the Americanization movement forced African American and Jewish newspapers to limit their journalistic bias on both sides of the debate over American participation in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The white, mainstream press was void of bias as the spirit of isolationism in America triumphed over journalist’s leanings in the Olympic debate. The racial tension created by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s created an atmosphere that allowed mainstream journalists to heap endless criticism on Muhammad Ali as he gained fame. By portraying him as a villain of society as both a religious radical and traitor to America, journalists created a common enemy in the minds of white America. In all three cases, a pattern of journalists expressing the state of cultural and racial norms of the era is present and significant.

Problem of Tragedy and Tragic Consciousness in Russia at the turn of the 19th Century

This project intertwines philosophical and historico-literary themes, taking as its starting point the concept of tragic consciousness inherent in the epoch of classicism. The research work makes use of ontological categories in order to describe the underlying principles of the image of the world which was created in philosophical and scientific theories of the 17th century as well as in contemporary drama. Using these categories brought Mr. Vilk to the conclusion that the classical picture of the world implied a certain dualism; not the Manichaean division between light and darkness but the discrimination between nature and absolute being, i.e. God. Mr. Vilk begins with an examination of the philosophical essence of French classical theatre of the XVII and XVIII centuries. The history of French classical tragedy can be divided into three periods: from the mid 17th to early 19th centuries when it triumphed all over France and exerted a powerful influence over almost all European countries; followed by the period of its rejection by the Romantics, who declared classicism to be "artificial and rational"; and finally our own century which has taken a more moderate line. Nevertheless, French classical tragedy has never fully recovered its status. Instead, it is ancient tragedy and the works of Shakespeare that are regarded to be the most adequate embodiment of the tragic. Consequently they still provoke a great number of new interpretations ranging from specialised literary criticism to more philosophical rumination. An important feature of classical tragedy is a system of rules and unities which reveals a hidden ontological structure of the world. The ontological picture of the dramatic world can be described in categories worked out by medieval philosophy - being, essence and existence. The first category is to be understood as a tendency toward permanency and stability (within eternity) connected with this or that fragment of dramatic reality. The second implies a certain set of permanent elements that make up the reality. And the third - existence - should be understood as "an act of being", as a realisation of permanently renewed processes of life. All of these categories can be found in every artistic reality but the accents put on one or another and their interrelations create different ontological perspectives. Mr. Vilk plots the movement of thought, expressed in both philosophical and scientific discourses, away from Aristotle's essential forms, and towards a prioritising of existence, and shows how new forms of literature and drama structured the world according to these evolving requirements. At the same time the world created in classical tragedy fully preserves another ontological paradigm - being - as a fundamental permanence. As far as the tragic hero's motivations are concerned this paradigm is revealed in the dedication of his whole self to some cause, and his oath of fidelity, attitudes which shape his behaviour. It may be the idea of the State, or personal honour, or something borrowed from the emotional sphere, passionate love. Mr. Vilk views the conflicting ambivalence of existence and being, duty as responsibility and duty as fidelity, as underlying the main conflict of classical tragedy of the 17th century. Having plotted the movement of the being/existence duality through its manifestations in 17th century tragedy, Mr. Vilk moves to the 18th century, when tragedy took a philosophical turn. A dualistic view of the world became supplanted by the Enlightenment idea of a natural law, rooted in nature. The main point of tragedy now was to reveal that such conflicts as might take place had an anti-rational nature, that they arose as the result of a kind of superstition caused by social reasons. These themes Mr. Vilk now pursues through Russian dramatists of the 18th and early 19th centuries. He begins with Sumarakov, whose philosophical thought has a religious bias. According to Sumarakov, the dualism of the divineness and naturalness of man is on the one hand an eternal paradox, and on the other, a moral challenge for humans to try to unite the two opposites. His early tragedies are not concerned with social evils or the triumph of natural feelings and human reason, but rather the tragic disharmony in the nature of man and the world. Mr Vilk turns next to the work of Kniazhnin. He is particularly keen to rescue his reputation from the judgements of critics who accuse him of being imitative, and in order to do so, analyses in detail the tragedy "Dido", in which Kniazhnin makes an attempt to revive the image of great heroes and city-founders. Aeneas represents the idea of the "being" of Troy, his destiny is the re-establishment of the city (the future Rome). The moral aspect behind this idea is faithfulness, he devotes himself to Gods. Dido is also the creator of a city, endowed with "natural powers" and abilities, but her creation is lacking internal stability grounded in "being". The unity of the two motives is only achieved through Dido's sacrifice of herself and her city to Aeneus. Mr Vilk's next subject is Kheraskov, whose peculiarity lies in the influence of free-mason mysticism on his work. This section deals with one of the most important philosophical assumptions contained in contemporary free-mason literature of the time - the idea of the trinitarian hierarchy inherent in man and the world: body - soul - spirit, and nature - law - grace. Finally, Mr. Vilk assess the work of Ozerov, the last major Russian tragedian. The tragedies which earned him fame, "Oedipus in Athens", "Fingal" and "Dmitri Donskoi", present a compromise between the Enlightenment's emphasis on harmony and ontological tragic conflict. But it is in "Polixene" that a real meeting of the Russian tradition with the age-old history of the genre takes place. The male and female characters of "Polixene" distinctly express the elements of "being" and "existence". Each of the participants of the conflict possesses some dominant characteristic personifying a certain indispensable part of the moral world, a certain "virtue". But their independent efforts are unable to overcome the ontological gap separating them. The end of the tragedy - Polixene's sacrificial self-immolation - paradoxically combines the glorification of each party involved in the conflict, and their condemnation. The final part of Mr. Vilk's research deals with the influence of "Polixene" upon subsequent dramatic art. In this respect Katenin's "Andromacha", inspired by "Polixene", is important to mention. In "Andromacha" a decisive divergence from the principles of the philosophical tragedy of Russian classicism and the ontology of classicism occurs: a new character appears as an independent personality, directed by his private interest. It was Katenin who was to become the intermediary between Pushkin and classical tragedy.

Educating...for what?: Meaning and Purpose

Higgins School of the Humanities/Difficult Dialogues: Video Recording from 10/5/2011 event featuring Diana Chapman Walsh and Arthur Zajonc titled "Meaning and Purpose" Event Description: As Kronman tells us, questions of meaning and purpose are often suspect in colleges and universities. If an understanding that to be educated relies on the integration of all of our higher faculties (mind, heart and spirit ) once existed, it was eclipsed long ago by a focus on the rational mind as the locus of reliable behavior. This reduced scope of teaching and learning within the academy has deprived both faculty and students of more substantive and meaningful experiences. How might we re-orient the academy to these deeper purposes—to the heart of higher education? Our guests for a conversation on questions of meaning and purpose are Diana Chapman Walsh, former President of Wellesley College, and Arthur Zajonc, professor of physics at Amherst College. In their work and their writing, they both inspire and ignite conversations around the issue of integrative education.

Book Review of “Frontiers of Social Research: Japan and Beyond”. 351 pages, Trans Pacific Press, 2007, edited by Akira Furukawa

The title ‘Frontiers of Social Research’ implies a pioneering spirit, embarking upon unchartered territories. However, the most fascinating and insightful moments of this book are those which explore age-old Japanese research techniques and the potential for new methodologies to look to the old. The key theme of the work is the role of the researcher and the researcher’s relationships with research participants, the research audience and with knowledge itself.

Iowa State Daily (April 9, 2012)

ContentsTuition concernsGroup helps students budgetRiver recreation floods Iowa's economic fundsCrafty quilt inspires school spirit Ten books to build successCash Mob hits Ames to shop locallyBig 12 teams wrestle with change

Stochastic search for semiparametric linear regression models

This paper introduces and analyzes a stochastic search method for parameter estimation in linear regression models in the spirit of Beran and Millar [Ann. Statist. 15(3) (1987) 1131–1154]. The idea is to generate a random finite subset of a parameter space which will automatically contain points which are very close to an unknown true parameter. The motivation for this procedure comes from recent work of Dümbgen et al. [Ann. Statist. 39(2) (2011) 702–730] on regression models with log-concave error distributions.

Hot QCD vs cosmology

It is a long-standing dream to “simulate” cosmology in laboratory through heavy ion collision experiments. Although the QCD epoch itself may not leave major cosmological signatures, theoretical methods developed and tested in the context of heavy ion collision experiments could indeed find applications at other energy scales. Here recent progress in this spirit is reviewed.

Dermatology in the immunosuppressed patient

This anniversary book gives an animated description of the first one hundred years of the Swiss Society of Dermatology and Venereology (SSDV – SGDV). The approximately 60 authors write from the subjective perspective of the contemporary witness and thus create a vibrant picture of their field and the times in which we live. “Spirit and Soul of Swiss Dermatology and Venereology 1913 – 2013” is therefore an ideal companion to the medical history book “Dermatologie und Venerologie in der Schweiz – ein historischer Rückblick” (2002 Editions Alphil, ISBN 2-940235-08-2), published in 2003 by the SSDV – SGDV for its 90th anniversary. The anniversary edition for the centennial is written in English in order to make the history of the SSDV – SGDV accessible to a larger international public. The introductory chapter is written in all four national languages (German, French, Italian, and Romansh) and also translated into English. It is followed by chapters about the university and non-university public dermatology and venereology departments, the memoirs of those presidents still living, and the depiction of the numerous sub-disciplines of dermatology. Further important chapters include a large contribution on the beginnings of dermatological research in Switzerland, a series of pieces on medical education and continuing education, and finally an overview of healthcare politics in Switzerland. Our friends in Germany, Austria, France, Italy and the USA have provided the outside perspective on Swiss dermatology and venereology in their essays. All in all an informative and entertaining overview of a very diverse medical specialty has been created, which combines historical facts with dynamic insights into this topical field and the current political healthcare framework.