SOCIOLOGICAL NEEDS OF FARMERS FACING SEVERE ECONOMIC PROBLEMS

Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Nothing is forever: boom and bust in Midwest farming

Agriculture - North Central states ; Federal Reserve District, 7th

Interpretation, 1980 And 1880

This article reviews recent methodological interventions in the field of literary study, many of which take nineteenth-century critics, readers, or writers as models for their less interpretive reading practices. In seeking out nineteenth-century models for twenty-first-century critical practice, these critics imagine a world in which English literature never became a discipline. Some see these new methods as formalist, yet we argue that they actually emerge from historicist self-critique. Specifically, these contemporary critics view the historicist projects of the 1980s as overly influenced by disciplinary models of textual interpretation models that first arose, we show through our reading of the Jolly Bargemen scene in Charles Dickens\u27s Great Expectations (1860 61), in the second half of the nineteenth century. In closing, we look more closely at the work of a few recent critics who sound out the metonymic, adjacent, and referential relations between readers, texts, and historical worlds in order sustain historicism\u27s power to restore eroded meanings rather than reveal latent ones

Limit laws for random vectors with an extreme component

Models based on assumptions of multivariate regular variation and hidden regular variation provide ways to describe a broad range of extremal dependence structures when marginal distributions are heavy tailed. Multivariate regular variation provides a rich description of extremal dependence in the case of asymptotic dependence, but fails to distinguish between exact independence and asymptotic independence. Hidden regular variation addresses this problem by requiring components of the random vector to be simultaneously large but on a smaller scale than the scale for the marginal distributions. In doing so, hidden regular variation typically restricts attention to that part of the probability space where all variables are simultaneously large. However, since under asymptotic independence the largest values do not occur in the same observation, the region where variables are simultaneously large may not be of primary interest. A different philosophy was offered in the paper of Heffernan and Tawn [J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. B Stat. Methodol. 66 (2004) 497--546] which allows examination of distributional tails other than the joint tail. This approach used an asymptotic argument which conditions on one component of the random vector and finds the limiting conditional distribution of the remaining components as the conditioning variable becomes large. In this paper, we provide a thorough mathematical examination of the limiting arguments building on the orientation of Heffernan and Tawn [J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. B Stat. Methodol. 66 (2004) 497--546]. We examine the conditions required for the assumptions made by the conditioning approach to hold, and highlight simililarities and differences between the new and established methods.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/105051606000000835 in the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Subjective ratings of prospective memory deficits in chronic heavy alcohol users

Chronic alcohol abuse has a detrimental effect on retrospective memory. Less is known about its putative effects on everyday memory. This study looked at self-ratings of prospective memory (PM) (memory for future events). After controlling for other drug and strategy use, chronic heavy alcohol users showed global impairments in PM, when compared to matched controls. The underlying mechanisms are discussed

High-order expansions of the Detweiler-Whiting singular field in Schwarzschild spacetime

The self field of a charged particle has a component that diverges at the particle. We use both coordinate and covariant approaches to compute an expansion of this singular field for generic geodesic orbits in Schwarzschild spacetime for scalar, electromagnetic and graviational cases. We check agreement of both approaches and give, as an application, the calculation of previously unknown regularisation parameters. In this so-called "mode-sum regularization" approach, each mode of the field is finite, while their sum diverges. The sum may be rendered finite and convergent by the subtraction of "regularization parameters". Higher order parameters lead to faster convergence in the mode-sum. As a second example application, we compute high order expressions for the effective source approach to self-force calculations.Comment: 38 pages, typos fixed, final published versio

The Synergistic Impact of Excessive Alcohol Drinking and Cigarette Smoking upon Prospective Memory

The independent use of excessive amounts of alcohol or persistent cigarette smoking have been found to have a deleterious impact upon Prospective Memory (PM: remembering future intentions and activities), although to date, the effect of their concurrent use upon PM is yet to be explored. The present study investigated the impact of the concurrent use of drinking excessive amounts of alcohol and smoking cigarettes (a “Polydrug” group) in comparison to the combined effect of the single use of these substances upon PM. The study adopted a single factorial independent groups design. The Cambridge Prospective Memory Test (CAMPROMPT) is a test of both time-based and event-based PM and was used here to measure PM. The CAMPROMPT was administered to 125 adults; an excessive alcohol user group (n = 40), a group of smokers who drink very little alcohol (n = 20), a combined user group (the “Polydrug” group) who drink excessively and smoke cigarettes (n = 40) and a non-drinker/low alcohol consumption control group (n = 25). The main findings revealed that the Polydrug users recalled significantly fewer time-based PM tasks than both excessive alcohol users p < 0.001 and smokers p = 0.013. Polydrug users (mean = 11.47) also remembered significantly fewer event-based PM tasks than excessive alcohol users p < 0.001 and smokers p = 0.013. With regards to the main aim of the study, the polydrug users exhibited significantly greater impaired time-based PM than the combined effect of single excessive alcohol users and cigarette smokers p = 0.033. However, no difference was observed between polydrug users and the combined effect of single excessive alcohol users and cigarette smokers in event-based PM p = 0.757. These results provide evidence that concurrent (polydrug) use of these two substances has a synergistic effect in terms of deficits upon time-based PM. The observation that combined excessive drinking and cigarette smoking leads to a greater impairment in time-based PM may be of paramount importance, given the key role PM plays in everyday independent living