Derek Mahon's Seascapes Mediated through Greece: Antiquity in Modernity, Nature in Abstraction.

The article investigates various approaches to seascape in selected poems of the contemporary Irish poet, Derek Mahon, set against the background of references to Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney or Odysseus Elytis. The sea provides a perspective that cannot be overestimated in trying to get an insight into the communication and the clash between the culture of the South and the North. The two nations have often glimpsed at their reflection in the mirror of the surrounding seas, their history and mentality determined by their geographical position and largely insular experience. Elements such as the isolation from the mainland; the perception of the sea as a personification of the force ruling over life and death, as a threat and a promise; or the focus on some characteristic natural phenomena such as light or surface dominate the seascape imagery both in Greek and Irish literature. The sea often constitutes a border of antagonistic and complementary worlds: dream and reality, light and darkness, male and female, the real world and the underworld – and the vantage point of the poet changes accordingly. Some poems under discussion also explore a series of myths linked with the sea, the best known of which, the Odyssey, has remained a frame of reference for numerous contemporary Greek and Irish poets. Elytis's Cyclades or Longley's Mayo provide us with examples of 'private homelands'. As Longley once observed, “his part of Mayo” reminds him of Ithaca (sandy and remote) and of Greece in general: “I’ve often thought that that part of Ireland . . . looks like Greece. Or Greece looks like a dust-bowl version of Ireland,” which triggers further deliberations on seascape as the common ground for the two countries. Just as Elytis's Cyclades or Longley's Mayo, Mahon’s Cyclades provide us with examples of 'private homelands'. The focus of this article is Derek Mahon’s seascapes: purely Greek (‘Aphrodite’s Pool’), Irish seen through the prism of the Greek ones (‘Achill’) and purely Irish (‘Recalling Aran’). The level of abstraction in the last category is compared with Odysseus Elytis’s imagery of the Cyclades, while the first poem demystifies a practice which I termed as ‘myth trading’, one of consumerist tourism techniques

CRIDE: the survey you love to hate

Many of you will have been involved in completing the CRIDE Survey over the past three years. Some of you will have done so with enthusiasm – thank you! some with reluctance - sorry! and some may even have declined to participate, followed by a Freedom of Information Act application being applied – we really needed the information! We are genuinely appreciative of all the time and effort you have taken to send in your CRIDE surveys

Interobserver Reliability in Describing Radiographic Lung Changes After Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy

Purpose Radiographic lung changes after stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) vary widely between patients. Standardized descriptions of acute (≤6 months after treatment) and late (\u3e6 months after treatment) benign lung changes have been proposed but the reliable application of these classification systems has not been demonstrated. Herein, we examine the interobserver reliability of classifying acute and late lung changes after SBRT. Methods and materials A total of 280 follow-up computed tomography scans at 3, 6, and 12 months post-treatment were analyzed in 100 patients undergoing thoracic SBRT. Standardized descriptions of acute lung changes (3- and 6-month scans) include diffuse consolidation, patchy consolidation and ground glass opacity (GGO), diffuse GGO, patchy GGO, and no change. Late lung change classifications (12-month scans) include modified conventional pattern, mass-like pattern, scar-like pattern, and no change. Five physicians scored the images independently in a blinded fashion. Fleiss\u27 kappa scores quantified the interobserver agreement. Results The Kappa scores were 0.30 at 3 months, 0.20 at 6 months, and 0.25 at 12 months. The proportion of patients in each category at 3 and 6 months was as follows: Diffuse consolidation 11% and 21%; patchy consolidation and GGO 15% and 28%; diffuse GGO 10% and 11%; patchy GGO 15% and 15%; and no change 49% and 25%, respectively. The percentage of patients in each category at 12 months was as follows: Modified conventional 46%; mass-like 16%; scar-like 26%; and no change 12%. Uniform scoring between the observers occurred in 26, 8, and 14 cases at 3, 6, and 12 months, respectively. Conclusions Interobserver reliability scores indicate a fair agreement to classify radiographic lung changes after SBRT. Qualitative descriptions are insufficient to categorize these findings because most patient scans do not fit clearly into a single classification. Categorization at 6 months may be the most difficult because late and acute lung changes can arise at that time

Report of the workshop on assessing governance in the Bay of Bengal Large Marine Ecosystem, Bangkok, Thailand, 28-30 October, 2014

The objective of the workshop was to begin a structured discussion on regional governance in the BOBLME, drawing on lessons from a region with similar issues, the Carribean. Conclusions were made about principles, regional governance arrangements, national-regional interface and national science-policy interfaces. Future work was also planned

Do children enhance phonetic contrasts in speech directed to a hearing-impaired peer?

This study examines whether normal-hearing (NH) children enhance phonetic contrasts when speaking to a hearing-impaired (HI) peer. A problem-solving ‘Grid’ task was developed to elicit frequent repetitions of /p/-/b/, /s/-/S/ and /i/-/I/ segmental contrasts and point vowels in communicative spontaneous speech. Eighteen NH children between 9 and 15 years old performed the task once with a NH friend and once with a HI friend. Both category means and within-speaker variability were analysed. Results suggest that although HI interlocutors are likely to find the phonetic contrasts difficult to produce and perceive, children’s HI-directed speech contains little evidence of phonetic category enhancement

Phase Space Transport in Noisy Hamiltonian Systems

This paper analyses the effect of low amplitude friction and noise in accelerating phase space transport in time-independent Hamiltonian systems that exhibit global stochasticity. Numerical experiments reveal that even very weak non-Hamiltonian perturbations can dramatically increase the rate at which an ensemble of orbits penetrates obstructions like cantori or Arnold webs, thus accelerating the approach towards an invariant measure, i.e., a near-microcanonical population of the accessible phase space region. An investigation of first passage times through cantori leads to three conclusions, namely: (i) that, at least for white noise, the detailed form of the perturbation is unimportant, (ii) that the presence or absence of friction is largely irrelevant, and (iii) that, overall, the amplitude of the response to weak noise scales logarithmically in the amplitude of the noise.Comment: 13 pages, 3 Postscript figures, latex, no macors. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, in pres

Children's acoustic and linguistic adaptations of peers with hearing impairment

Purpose: This study aims to examine the clear speaking strategies used by older children when interacting with a peer with hearing loss, focusing on both acoustic and linguistic adaptations in speech. Method: The Grid task, a problem-solving task developed to elicit spontaneous interactive speech, was used to obtain a range of global acoustic and linguistic measures. Eighteen 9- to 14-year-old children with normal-hearing (NH) performed the task in pairs, once with a friend with NH, and once with a friend with a hearing-impairment (HI). Results: In HI-directed speech, children increased their fundamental frequency range and mid-frequency intensity, decreased the number of words per phrase, and expanded their vowel space area by increasing F1 and F2 range, relative to NH-directed speech. However, participants did not appear to make changes to their articulation rate, the lexical frequency of content words, or to lexical diversity, when talking to their friend with HI compared to their friend with NH. Conclusions: Older children show evidence of listener-oriented adaptations to their speech production; although their speech production systems are still developing, they are able to make speech adaptations to benefit the needs of a peer with HI, even without being given specific instruction to do so

Learning intrinsic excitability in medium spiny neurons

We present an unsupervised, local activation-dependent learning rule for intrinsic plasticity (IP) which affects the composition of ion channel conductances for single neurons in a use-dependent way. We use a single-compartment conductance-based model for medium spiny striatal neurons in order to show the effects of parametrization of individual ion channels on the neuronal activation function. We show that parameter changes within the physiological ranges are sufficient to create an ensemble of neurons with significantly different activation functions. We emphasize that the effects of intrinsic neuronal variability on spiking behavior require a distributed mode of synaptic input and can be eliminated by strongly correlated input. We show how variability and adaptivity in ion channel conductances can be utilized to store patterns without an additional contribution by synaptic plasticity (SP). The adaptation of the spike response may result in either "positive" or "negative" pattern learning. However, read-out of stored information depends on a distributed pattern of synaptic activity to let intrinsic variability determine spike response. We briefly discuss the implications of this conditional memory on learning and addiction.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure