Landscapes and Sublime Memories: Revisiting Liang Xiaosheng's "A Land of Wonder and Mystery"

This essay suggests memory studies, ecocriticism, and trauma studies as new avenues for the study of rusticated youth narratives. Towards reaching this goal, I first introduce a meditation on memory by Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), especially his sketch of memory and imagination with classical Greek philosophy. His ideas on affective and practical memories are then telescoped into individual and communal memories. Onze Fleurs (Wo shiyi, 2011), directed by Wang Xiaoshuai (1966- ), and The River without Buoys (Meiyou hangbiao de heliu, 1984), directed by Wu Tianming (1939-2014) provide illustrative examples of each. Building upon these notions of personal memory I turn to the popular memory of rustication, especially that of the natural environment in Liang Xiaosheng's "A Land of Wonder and Mystery" ("Zhe shi yipian shenqi de tudi," 1985). More specifically I examine the evocation of the ghost marsh, narratives of departure, the family left in the city, and the menace of nature in Liang's short story to force not only a reconsideration of rustication, but also of nature in contemporary China. Moreover, in addition to noting the questioning of the sanitization of rusticated memories as a means of conforming to dominant state ideological discourses, I introduce a comparison of the story of doomed rusticated youth to the doomed youth in Sean Penn's Into the Wild, in order to force a comparison of youth and the environment often overlooked in rusticated youth studies. Finally, this essay concludes by suggesting that by more carefully considering the interplay between memory and place more nuanced and perhaps more ecologically and critically engaged assessments of rusticated youth fiction become possible

Stumbling Toward a Social Psychology of Organizations: An Autobiographical Look at the Direction of Organizational Research

I recount some of my early experiences in the field and how they shaped my views about conducting research. As I describe it, my entry into organizational behavior was not at all seamless, requiring a series of adjustments along the way. Like many of my colleagues who had moved into the field of organizational behavior, I had to find a source of valued added a new perspective or set of alternative ideas to contribute to the field. This process of adjustment, I fear, is no longer so prevalent in the field today. Although many social psychologists have migrated to business schools, they are still by and large doing social psychological rather than organizational research. They often extend social psychological theories to the business context, but they rarely seek to reframe and reformulate core organizational issues and problems. For this to change, I argue that future research needs to become more contextual and phenomenon-driven. My hope is that, with the recent upsurge in talent entering the field, we can find a way to harvest more of its creativity, moving from the application of social psychology to a genuine social psychology of organizations

Studies in modal density – its effect at low frequencies

The ability to objectively measure the reproduction quality of a small room at low frequencies has long been desired. Over many years, there have been attempts to produce recommendations, metrics, and criteria by which to define a particular room. These have often concentrated on some aspect of the modal distribution, such as spacing or density. Other attempts have focused upon the deviation from a desired frequency response. Whilst the subjective validity of objective measures such as these has often been questioned, the notion that a transitional region between a modal and diffuse sound fields exists, dependant on the room volume and reverberation time continues to permeate much thinking. The calculation of this transitional frequency relies on the calculation of a desired modal density. In the case of the most well known definition, the Schroeder Frequency1, the transitional frequency is that point where the density becomes sufficient that three modes lie within one bandwidth. Although this idea may well be useful in some instances, such as defining points for the use of statistical sound field analysis, recent thought has cast some doubt over its relevance as a subjective frequency above which we may ignore modal issues2. This paper highlights a number of studies along with a new listening test, which help us to better understand the role of modal density upon subjective perception of modal soundfields

FDTD/K-DWM simulation of 3D room acoustics on general purpose graphics hardware using compute unified device architecture (CUDA)

The growing demand for reliable prediction of sound fields in rooms have resulted in adaptation of various approaches for physical modeling, including the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) and the Digital Waveguide Mesh (DWM). Whilst considered versatile and attractive methods, they suffer from dispersion errors that increase with frequency and vary with direction of propagation, thus imposing a high frequency calculation limit. Attempts have been made to reduce such errors by considering different mesh topologies, by spatial interpolation, or by simply oversampling the grid. As the latter approach is computationally expensive, its application to three-dimensional problems has often been avoided. In this paper, we propose an implementation of the FDTD on general purpose graphics hardware, allowing for high sampling rates whilst maintaining reasonable calculation times. Dispersion errors are consequently reduced and the high frequency limit is increased. A range of graphics processors are evaluated and compared with traditional CPUs in terms of accuracy, calculation time and memory requirements

Constructing commons in the cultural environment

This Article sets out a framework for investigating sharing and resource-pooling arrangements for information- and knowledge-based works. We argue that adapting the approach pioneered by Elinor Ostrom and her collaborators to commons arrangements in the natural environment provides a template for examining the construction of commons in the cultural environment. The approach promises to lead to a better understanding of how participants in commons and pooling arrangements structure their interactions in relation to the environments in which they are embedded, in relation to information and knowledge resources that they produce and use, and in relation to one another

Identification of microtubule-associated proteins in the centrosome, spindle, and kinetochore of the early Drosophila embryo.

We have developed affinity chromatography methods for the isolation of microtubule-associated proteins (MAPs) from soluble cytoplasmic extracts and have used them to analyze the cytoskeleton of the early Drosophila embryo. More than 50 Drosophila embryo proteins bind to microtubule affinity columns. To begin to characterize these proteins, we have generated individual mouse polyclonal antibodies that specifically recognize 24 of them. As judged by immunofluorescence, some of the antigens localize to the mitotic spindle in the early Drosophila embryo, while others are present in centrosomes, kinetochores, subsets of microtubules, or a combination of these structures. Since 20 of the 24 antibodies stain microtubule structures, it is likely that most of the proteins that bind to our columns are associated with microtubules in vivo. Very few MAPS seem to be identically localized in the cell, indicating that the microtubule cytoskeleton is remarkably complex

Studies on the mechanism of retinoid-induced pattern duplications in the early chick limb bud: temporal and spatial aspects.

All-trans-retinoic acid causes striking digit pattern changes when it is continuously released from a bead implanted in the anterior margin of an early chick wing bud. In addition to the normal set of digits (234), extra digits form in a mirror-symmetrical arrangement, creating digit patterns such as a 432234. These retinoic acid-induced pattern duplications closely mimic those found after grafts of polarizing region cells to the same positions with regard to dose-response, timing, and positional effects. To elucidate the mechanism by which retinoic acid induces these pattern duplications, we have studied the temporal and spatial distribution of all-trans-retinoic acid and its potent analogue TTNPB in these limb buds. We find that the induction process is biphasic: there is an 8-h lag phase followed by a 6-h duplication phase, during which additional digits are irreversibly specified in the sequence digit 2, digit 3, digit 4. On average, formation of each digit seems to require between 1 and 2 h. The tissue concentrations, metabolic pattern, and spatial distribution of all-trans-retinoic acid and TTNPB in the limb rapidly reach a steady state, in which the continuous release of the retinoid is balanced by loss from metabolism and blood circulation. Pulse-chase experiments reveal that the half-time of clearance from the bud is 20 min for all-trans-retinoic acid and 80 min for TTNPB. Manipulations that change the experimentally induced steep concentration gradient of TTNPB suggest that a graded distribution of retinoid concentrations across the limb is required during the duplication phase to induce changes in the digit pattern. The extensive similarities between results obtained with retinoids and with polarizing region grafts raise the possibility that retinoic acid serves as a natural "morphogen" in the limb