140 research outputs found
Literary Stardom and Heavenly Gifts: Haruki Murakami (1949)
No full textFrom the volume's introduction: "That contemporary literary celebrity can be a global phenomenon is demonstrated by the example of Haruki Murakami. Globalization of literary production, Gaston Franssen reasons, has had major consequences for this author’s image: for instance, Murakami is frequently attacked in Japan by literary critics on account of the allegedly over-Western style and atmosphere that characterize his work, whereas he is frequently framed in Europe and the United States as an author who presents a penetrating analysis of Japanese culture. Intriguingly, Murakami boasts a broad fan base of loyal readers in both the West and in Japan, who will stand in line at bookstores for hours to buy his latest novel and who gather to share experiences at Murakami festivals. Franssen demonstrates that the author pits diffferent forms of literary authorship against each other in his work, expressing apparent criticism of the commercialization and mediatization of literature.
Introduction: Starring the Author
No full textLiterary celebrity is by now a familiar feat of contemporary literary culture, but it continues to raise complex questions about the history and development of fame, the interplay between the cultural marketplace and the official culture of critics and the canon, and the relation between authorial agency and public appropriation. This introduction addresses these questions by approaching literary celebrity as a merging of two discursive constructions: the celebrity-function and the author-function. By combining insights from celebrity studies, literary history and cultural memory studies, the introduction conceptualizes literary celebrity as a discursive construction with several variables, such as the author’s self-presentation, the circulation of his public identity, changing opinions on literature and writership, and the public afterlife of the author’s image
Adenosine and dialysis hypotension
No full textIn this issue, Imai et al. report the results of a double-blind placebo-controlled study on the effect of an adenosine A1 receptor antagonist, FK352, on the incidence of dialysis hypotension in hypotension-prone patients. This Commentary discusses the use of selective adenosine A1 receptor antagonists for the prevention of dialysis hypotension from the perspective of the potential role of adenosine in its pathogenesis
An empirical investigation of the tribes and their territories: Are research specialisms rural and urban?
No full textWe propose an operationalization of the rural and urban analogy introduced in Becher and Trowler (2001). According to them, a specialism is rural if it is organized into many, smaller topics of research, with higher author mobility among them, lower rate of collaboration and productivity, lower competition for resources and citation recognitions compared to an urban specialism. It is assumed that most humanities specialisms are rural while science specialisms are in general urban: we set to test this hypothesis empirically. We first propose an operationalization of the theory in most of its quantifiable aspects. We then consider specialisms from history, literature, computer science, biology, astronomy. Our results show that specialisms in the humanities present a sensibly lower citation and textual connectivity, in agreement with their organization into more, smaller topics per specialism, as suggested by the analogy. We argue that the intellectual organization of rural specialisms might indeed be qualitative different from urban ones, discouraging the straightforward application of citation-based indicators commonly applied to urban specialisms without a dedicated re-design in acknowledgement of these differences
Effects of relative blood volume-controlled hemodialysis on blood pressure and volume status in hypertensive patients
No full textIn hypertensive hemodialysis (HD) patients, dry weight reduction to normalize blood pressure (BP) often results in increased frequency of HD hypotension. Because HD with blood volume tracking (BVT) has been shown to improve intra-HD hemodynamic stability, we performed a prospective, randomized study to test whether BVT is more effective than standard hemodialysis (SHD) in the management of hypertension by dry weight reduction. After a run-in period of 4 weeks on SHD, 28 patients were randomly assigned for a 12-week treatment period with either SHD (n = 14) or BVT (n = 14). The mean pre-HD and post-HD weight did not change over time in either group. In the BVT group, pre-HD systolic and diastolic BP decreased on average 22.5 mm Hg and 8.3 mm Hg, respectively (both p < 0.05), whereas BP did not change in the SHD group. Extracellular water and cardiothoracic ratio decreased significantly (all p < 0.05) in the BVT group but not in the SHD group. Brain natriuretic peptide levels declined only in the BVT group, without reaching statistical significance. The frequency of HD hypotensive episodes decreased significantly (p < 0.05) in the BVT group and was unchanged in the SHD group. HD with BVT was associated with a significant reduction in pre-HD BP. At the same time, the frequency of intra-HD hypotensive episodes decreased. Although the mean weight did not change, the reductions in cardiothoracic ratio and extracellular water suggest that HD with BVT resulted in optimization of volume status
An Exploratory Study on Authorship Verification Models for Forensic Purpose
No full textAuthorship verification is one subfield of authorship analysis. However, the majority of the research in the field of authorship analysis is on the authorship identification problem. The authorship verification problem has received less attention than the authorship identification problem. Thus, there is a demand for a study on the authorship verification problem. The authorship verification problem of digital documents is becoming increasingly important as the criminals or terrorist organizations take advantage of the anonymity of the cyberspace to avoid being punished. Thus, it is critical for forensic linguistic experts to come up with effective methods to verify a short text written by a suspect. This master thesis project provides an exploratory study on the authorship verification models to solve the authorship verification problem. The research problem is as follows: Given a few texts (around 1000 words each) of one author, determine whether the text in dispute is written by the same author. The primary objective of this research is to design several innovative authorship verification models to solve the problem described above. A second goal of this research is to participate in the PAN Contest 2013 in the task of authorship verification. This thesis project explores extensively the possibilities of using compression features to solve the authorship verification. Both one-class classification models and two-class classification models are designed in this project. In a one-class classification model, there is only target class, and the decision is based on a predefined rule. In a two-class classification model, there are both target class and outlier class, and the threshold is decided by learning the boundary between the two classes. In total five models have been designed and evaluated, four of which use compression features. Character N-Gram Model is designed in this research to make a comparison of character-grams and compression features. The initial task of this project is the data collection. In order to participate in the PAN Contest, similar data (engineering textbooks from bookboon.com) were collected. In total 72 books written by 51 authors are in the collected corpus. The Book Collection Corpus was derived from the collected book and was used to develop the models. Additionally, an Enron Email Corpus was used to test the performance of one authorship verification model. As a result, the models designed received desirable performances and have shown potential to solve other similar problems.Management of TechnologyICTTechnology, Policy and Managemen
When is subjective objective enough?: Frequentist analysis of Bayesian methods
No full textIn this thesis, we investigate the properties of Bayesian methods. In particular, we want to give frequentist guarantees for Bayesian methods. A Bayesian starts with specifying their apriori belief as a probability distribution, the prior distribution. The prior is their inherently subjective beliefs. After a Bayesian has specified their prior, they collect data and compute the posterior distribution. For a Bayesian, this posterior distribution encodes their new beliefs on the world. However, this prior was subjective. Thus the posterior is also subjective. So we can wonder, will this posterior distribution give a better representation of reality? Will it be more accurate? The posterior distribution quantifies a subjective belief of uncertainty. How reliable is this quantification of uncertainty?These questions lie at the foundation of this thesis. They have been answered for certain classes of prior distributions. However, they have not been fully answered for all distributions in use. In this thesis, in the introduction, we explain the foundational statistical theory to study these questions. In particular, we show how to apply Schwartz theorem and the Bernstein-von Mises theorems to study posterior distributions. We then turn to novel research....
Some considerations on the mechanism of directional hearing
No full textElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
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