Keeping their heads down: Shame and pride in the stories of Protestants in the Irish Republic

This study draws on a number of in-depth interviews to explore the ethnic aspect of Protestantism in the Republic of Ireland. We explore themes of shame and pride around issues of identity, together with a sense of loss of a minority rapidly losing cultural distinctiveness. Following Ireland‘s division, the ordinary Protestants of the south, comprising a range of religious denominations bound by history, intermarriage and culture, found themselves in a society in which their story was rarely told. The dominant narrative was one of a Catholic people, long oppressed by a wealthy Protestant minority. The story of ordinary Protestants, including those in rural and urban poverty, went largely unheard. Today, ordinary Protestants – small farmers, shop keepers, housewives – tell the story of Ireland as seen through their family‘s narratives. Themes of pride and shame, often intertwined, form a thread that binds their testimony, drawing on family, personal and local history, folklore and statements of identity.

Solo and Chamber Music of Pulitzer Prize-Winning Composers

The Pulitzer Prize in Music, established in 1943, is one of America's most prestigious awards. It has been awarded to fifty-three composers for a "distinguished musical composition of significant dimension by an American that has had its first performance in the United States during the year." Composers who have won the Pulitzer Prize are considered to be at the pinnacle of their creativity and have provided the musical world with classical music compositions worthy of future notice. By tracing the history of Pulitzer Prize-winning composers and their compositions, researchers and musicians enhance their understanding of the historical evolution of American music, and its impact on American culture. Although the clarinet music of some of these composers is rarely performed today, their names will be forever linked to the Pulitzer, and because of that, their compositions will enjoy a certain sense of immortality. Of the fifty-four composers who have won the award, forty-seven have written for the clarinet in a solo or chamber music setting (five or less instruments). Just as each Pulitzer Prize-winning composition is a snapshot of the state of American music at that time, these works trace the history of American clarinet musical development, and therefore, they are valuable additions to the clarinet repertoire and worthy of performance. This dissertation project consists of two recitals featuring the solo and chamber clarinet music of sixteen Pulitzer Prize-winning composers, extended program notes containing information on each composer's life, their music, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composition and the recital selection, and a complete list of all Pulitzer Prize-winning composers and their solo and chamber clarinet music. Featured Composers Dominick Argento, To Be Sung Upon the Water Leslie Bassett, Soliloquies William Bolcom, Little Suite of Four Dances Aaron Copland, As it Fell Upon a Day John Corigliano, Soliloquy Norman Dello Joio, Concertante Morton Gould, Benny's Gig Charles Ives, Largo Douglas Moore, Quintet for Clarinet and Strings George Perle, Three Sonatas Quincy Porter, Quintet for Clarinet and Strings Mel Powell, Clarinade Shulamit Ran, Private Game Joseph Schwantner, Entropy Leo Sowerby, Sonata Ernst Toch, Adagio elegiaco

Reflections on Children

In the Fall 2004, while preparing my dissertation project “Reflections on children,” I realized that whether art songs, operatic arias or scenes, the classical repertory offers a wide variety of masterpieces regarding all aspects of children’s life. My first dissertation recital is called “Journeys” and was performed on December 6th 2004 at 8:00pm in the Tawes Recital Hall. Change is the only inevitable condition in life and as such, it has been thought-provoking to many poets and composers. The narrator in Mahler’s Wayfarer Songs experiences the pain of love for the first time and emerges transformed into an adult. The narrator in Barber’s Knoxville is an adult looking back at his journey in an attempt to understand himself. The mothers in Britten’s Charm of Lullabies each make every effort to accept the changes in their own life after the birth of her baby. Finally, both Brahms’ songs are about risks and losses. “Destinies” is the title of the second dissertation recital as it attempts to capture the dark fate of Mignon and of Rückert/Mahler’s children. It was performed on April 8th 2005 in the Tawes Recital Hall. Mignon’s grief is portrayed through songs full of sadness and hopelessness in mourning of a long lost childhood. Rückert wrote 425 Kindertotenlieder in memory of his children’s deaths over a period of twenty years and Mahler orchestrated five of them. Mahler’s choices deal with light and darkness, symbolizing eternal life and hope versus despair and death, in both the literal and the literary sense. Finally, the third dissertation recital called “Blessings” was performed on May 19th 2005 in the Tawes Recital Hall. It relies on the evocation of moods and scenes created by a variety of composers and poets. Poulenc’s La Courte Paille are brief works in the style of a child’s song with unrelated and unexpected images juxtaposed, creating a sense of inner monologues. John Greer’s House of Tomorrow, Guastavino’s Cradle Songs and the rest of the composers offer wonderful pieces of immense power and expression in their directness and sensitive contour.

Prospective surveillance for invasive fungal infections in hematopoietic stem cell transplant recipients, 2001-2006: overview of the Transplant-Associated Infection Surveillance Network (TRANSNET) Database.

BACKGROUND: The incidence and epidemiology of invasive fungal infections (IFIs), a leading cause of death among hematopoeitic stem cell transplant (HSCT) recipients, are derived mainly from single-institution retrospective studies. METHODS: The Transplant Associated Infections Surveillance Network, a network of 23 US transplant centers, prospectively enrolled HSCT recipients with proven and probable IFIs occurring between March 2001 and March 2006. We collected denominator data on all HSCTs preformed at each site and clinical, diagnostic, and outcome information for each IFI case. To estimate trends in IFI, we calculated the 12-month cumulative incidence among 9 sequential subcohorts. RESULTS: We identified 983 IFIs among 875 HSCT recipients. The median age of the patients was 49 years; 60% were male. Invasive aspergillosis (43%), invasive candidiasis (28%), and zygomycosis (8%) were the most common IFIs. Fifty-nine percent and 61% of IFIs were recognized within 60 days of neutropenia and graft-versus-host disease, respectively. Median onset of candidiasis and aspergillosis after HSCT was 61 days and 99 days, respectively. Within a cohort of 16,200 HSCT recipients who received their first transplants between March 2001 and September 2005 and were followed up through March 2006, we identified 718 IFIs in 639 persons. Twelve-month cumulative incidences, based on the first IFI, were 7.7 cases per 100 transplants for matched unrelated allogeneic, 8.1 cases per 100 transplants for mismatched-related allogeneic, 5.8 cases per 100 transplants for matched-related allogeneic, and 1.2 cases per 100 transplants for autologous HSCT. CONCLUSIONS: In this national prospective surveillance study of IFIs in HSCT recipients, the cumulative incidence was highest for aspergillosis, followed by candidiasis. Understanding the epidemiologic trends and burden of IFIs may lead to improved management strategies and study design.

Tom Sawyer and the construction of value

This paper challenges the common assumption that economic agents know their tastes. After reviewing previous research showing that valuation of ordinary products and experiences can be manipulated by non-normative cues, we present three studies showing that in some cases people do not have a pre-existing sense of whether an experience is good or bad-even when they have experienced a sample of it. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The coherence of memories for trauma: evidence from posttraumatic stress disorder.

Participants with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and participants with a trauma but without PTSD wrote narratives of their trauma and, for comparison, of the most-important and the happiest events that occurred within a year of their trauma. They then rated these three events on coherence. Based on participants' self-ratings and on naïve-observer scorings of the participants' narratives, memories of traumas were not more incoherent than the comparison memories in participants in general or in participants with PTSD. This study comprehensively assesses narrative coherence using a full two (PTSD or not) by two (traumatic event or not) design. The results are counter to most prevalent theoretical views of memory for trauma.

Event memory: A theory of memory for laboratory, autobiographical, and fictional events.

An event memory is a mental construction of a scene recalled as a single occurrence. It therefore requires the hippocampus and ventral visual stream needed for all scene construction. The construction need not come with a sense of reliving or be made by a participant in the event, and it can be a summary of occurrences from more than one encoding. The mental construction, or physical rendering, of any scene must be done from a specific location and time; this introduces a "self" located in space and time, which is a necessary, but need not be a sufficient, condition for a sense of reliving. We base our theory on scene construction rather than reliving because this allows the integration of many literatures and because there is more accumulated knowledge about scene construction's phenomenology, behavior, and neural basis. Event memory differs from episodic memory in that it does not conflate the independent dimensions of whether or not a memory is relived, is about the self, is recalled voluntarily, or is based on a single encoding with whether it is recalled as a single occurrence of a scene. Thus, we argue that event memory provides a clearer contrast to semantic memory, which also can be about the self, be recalled voluntarily, and be from a unique encoding; allows for a more comprehensive dimensional account of the structure of explicit memory; and better accounts for laboratory and real-world behavioral and neural results, including those from neuropsychology and neuroimaging, than does episodic memory.

Reliving, emotions, and fragmentation in the autobiographical memories of veterans diagnosed with PTSD

Fifty veterans diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) each recalled four autobiographical memories: one from the 2 years before service, one non-combat memory from the time in service, one from combat, and one from service that had often come as an intrusive memory. For each memory, they provided 21 ratings about reliving, belief, sensory properties, reexperiencing emotions, visceral emotional responses, fragmentation, and narrative coherence. We used these ratings to examine three claims about traumatic memories: a separation of cognitive and visceral aspects of emotion, an increased sense of reliving, and increased fragmentation. There was evidence for a partial separation of cognitive judgments of reexperiencing an emotion and reports of visceral symptoms of the emotion, with visceral symptoms correlating more consistently with scores on PTSD tests. Reliving, but not fragmentation of the memories, increased with increases in the trauma relatedness of the event and with increases in scores on standardized tests of PTSD severity. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Internal languages of retrieval: the bilingual encoding of memories for the personal past.

In contrast to most research on bilingual memory that focuses on how words in either lexicon are mapped onto memory for objects and concepts, we focus on memory for events in the personal past. Using a word-cue technique in sessions devoted exclusively to one language, we found that older Hispanic immigrants who had come to the United States as adults internally retrieved autobiographical memories in Spanish for events in the country of origin and in English for events in the U.S. These participants were consistently capable of discerning whether a memory had come to them "in words" or not, reflecting the distinction between purely imagistic or conceptual memories and specifically linguistic memories. Via examination of other phenomenological features of these memories (sense of re-living, sensory detail, emotionality, and rehearsal), we conclude that the linguistic/nonlinguistic distinction is fundamental and independent of these other characteristics. Bilinguals encode and retrieve certain autobiographical memories in one or the other language according to the context of encoding, and these linguistic characteristics are stable properties of those memories over time.

FOLLOWING THE TRAIL OF THE SNAKE: A LIFE HISTORY OF COBRA MANSA "COBRINHA" MESTRE OF CAPOEIRA

This dissertation is a cultural biography of Mestre Cobra Mansa, a mestre of the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira angola. The intention of this work is to track Mestre Cobrinha's life history and accomplishments from his beginning as an impoverished child in Rio to becoming a mestre of the tradition-its movements, music, history, ritual and philosophy. A highly skilled performer and researcher, he has become a cultural ambassador of the tradition in Brazil and abroad. Following the Trail of the Snake is an interdisciplinary work that integrates the research methods of ethnomusicology (oral history, interview, participant observation, musical and performance analysis and transcription) with a revised life history methodology to uncover the multiple cultures that inform the life of a mestre of capoeira. A reflexive auto-ethnography of the author opens a dialog between the experiences and developmental steps of both research partners' lives. Written in the intersection of ethnomusicology, studies of capoeira, social studies and music education, the academic dissertation format is performed as a roda of capoeira aiming to be respectful of the original context of performance. The result is a provocative ethnographic narrative that includes visual texts from the performative aspects of the tradition (music and movement), aural transcriptions of Mestre Cobra Mansa's storytelling and a myriad of writing techniques to accompany the reader in a multi-dimensional journey of multicultural understanding. The study follows Cinezio Feliciano Pe anha in his childhood struggle for survival as a street performer in Rio de Janeiro. Several key moves provided him with the opportunity to rebuild his life and to grow into a recognized mestre of the capoeira angola martial art as Mestre Cobra Mansa ("Tame Snake" in Portuguese). His dedicated work enabled him to contribute to the revival of the capoeira angola tradition during the 1980's in Bahia. After his move to the United States in the early 1990's, Mestre Cobrinha founded the International Capoeira Angola Foundation, which today has expanded to 28 groups around the world. Mestre Cobra returned home to Brazil to initiate projects that seek to develop a new sense of community from all that he has learned and been able to accomplish in his life through the performance and study of capoeira angola.

WormSizer: high-throughput analysis of nematode size and shape.

The fundamental phenotypes of growth rate, size and morphology are the result of complex interactions between genotype and environment. We developed a high-throughput software application, WormSizer, which computes size and shape of nematodes from brightfield images. Existing methods for estimating volume either coarsely model the nematode as a cylinder or assume the worm shape or opacity is invariant. Our estimate is more robust to changes in morphology or optical density as it only assumes radial symmetry. This open source software is written as a plugin for the well-known image-processing framework Fiji/ImageJ. It may therefore be extended easily. We evaluated the technical performance of this framework, and we used it to analyze growth and shape of several canonical Caenorhabditis elegans mutants in a developmental time series. We confirm quantitatively that a Dumpy (Dpy) mutant is short and fat and that a Long (Lon) mutant is long and thin. We show that daf-2 insulin-like receptor mutants are larger than wild-type upon hatching but grow slow, and WormSizer can distinguish dauer larvae from normal larvae. We also show that a Small (Sma) mutant is actually smaller than wild-type at all stages of larval development. WormSizer works with Uncoordinated (Unc) and Roller (Rol) mutants as well, indicating that it can be used with mutants despite behavioral phenotypes. We used our complete data set to perform a power analysis, giving users a sense of how many images are needed to detect different effect sizes. Our analysis confirms and extends on existing phenotypic characterization of well-characterized mutants, demonstrating the utility and robustness of WormSizer.

The Experience of Security in Mathematics

In this paper, we report some findings from an investigation of a topic related to affect and mathematics which is not well-represented in the literature. For some mathematicians, mathematics itself is a source of security in an uncertain world, and we investigated this feeling and experience in the case of 19 adult mathematicians working in universities and schools in Greece. The focus reported here is on ways that a relationship with mathematics offers a sense of permanence and stability on the one hand, and an assurance of novelty and progress on the other.

I wanna be a protocol: online media and electronic structures of kinship

Heidegger famously identified Modernity with a technological leveling of being to a single order of a “standing reserve.” In a radically different tone, Gilles Deleuze articulated a single “plane of immanence” within which ontological distinctions between mind and body, God and world, interiority and exteriority become indiscernible. Taking such philosophical declarations as points of departure, this panel will consider how a collapse of ontological distinction emerged as a thematic and structural trope in literary and cinematic modernisms. We hope to consider how writers and film-makers of the 20th c. utilize the resources of their media to ask “the question of being” that troubled their philosophical contemporaries and heirs. In this vein, we will examine how these modernist ontologies of immanence describe the crisis of a subject saturated and eclipsed by a world which comprises her while also remaining strange or opaque. Papers will ask what is lost with the departure of a distinctly human sense of “being” and how the historical arrival of an alternative ontological order may be evident in the lived experience of modernity. In this sense, the relationship to departures and arrivals becomes the modern subject’s suspicion that he is unable to do either vis á vis the world.

A 'ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry': Joyce's Orientalism in the Context of 11 September 2001 and 1922

Chapters 3 and 15 of Joyce's Ulysses exhibit glimpses of three dreams, fantasies and eventual nightmares linked to the figure of 'Haroun al Raschid.' Historically speaking, the latter was a powerful Caliph of Baghdad, a medieval potentate about whom many of the most memorable of The Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights' Entertainments were once and then again spun as tales of pleasure. Joyce seizes upon the figure of 'Haroun al Raschid' as a fictive measure to articulate the 'orientalist' fantasies of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. However, this evocative figure of Near Eastern history, of fabulous narrative and the progressively converging fantasies of two modern European literary characters is riddled with paradox. Such material provides Joyce a perceptive and proleptic sense of the paradoxes and brutal historical contradictions through which Western and Eastern dreams of theocratic nationalism, ethnic zealotry, colonial rebellion and Zionism are to be played out. W. B. Yeats' poem 'The Gift of Harun al-Raschid', written in 1923, the year after the book publication of Ulysses, provides both a fitting foil and a significant socio-historical point of reference for Joyce's own figurative use of the Caliph of Baghdad.

p53 Regulates the Formation of Lamellipodia and Circular Dorsal Ruffles Through Caldesmon and PTEN

Vascular smooth muscle cell migration is a significant contributor to many aspects of heart disease, and specifically atherosclerosis. Tissue damage in the arteries can result in the formation of a fatty streak. Smooth muscle cells (SMC) can then migrate to this site to form a fibrous cap, stabilizing the fatty plaque. Since cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in developed countries, this function of SMC is an essential area of study. The formation of lamellipodia and circular dorsal ruffles were studied in this project as indicators that cell migration is occurring. The roles of the proteins p53, Rac, caldesmon and PTEN were investigated with regards to these actin-based structures. The tumour suppressor p53 is often reported to cause apoptosis, senescence or cell cycle arrest when stress is placed on a cell, but has recently been shown to regulate cell migration as well. It was determined in this project that p53 could inhibit the formation of both lamellipodia and circular dorsal ruffles. It was also shown that this could occur directly through an inhibition of the GTPase Rac. Previous studies have shown that p53 can upregulate caldesmon, a protein which is known to bind to and stabilize actin filaments while inhibiting Arp2/3-mediated branching. It was confirmed that p53 could upregulate caldesmon, and that caldesmon could inhibit the formation of lamellipodia and circular dorsal ruffles. The phosphorylation of caldesmon by p21-associated kinase (PAK) or extracellular signal-related kinase (Erk) was shown to effectively reverse the ability of caldesmon to inhibit these structures. The role of phosphatase and tensin homologue deleted on chromosome 10 (PTEN) was also studied with regards to this signalling pathway. PTEN was shown to inhibit lamellipodia and circular dorsal ruffles through its lipid phosphatase activity. It was concluded that p53 can inhibit the formation of lamellipodia and circular dorsal ruffles in vascular SMC, and that this occurs through Rac, caldesmon and PTEN.