438 research outputs found
Steering Taste: Ernest Marsh, a study of private collecting in England in the early 20th Century
No full textThe primary aim of this thesis is to focus attention on the bourgeois, 'un-named' collector. The driving force behind most museum and art gallery collections of the Victorian and Edwardian period. British museum and art gallery records of gifted collections, bequests and loans usually note their donors. However, with a few notable exceptions, little is known about the collectors, their activities and motivation in making such presentations.
Using the interests and activities of the Quaker miller and collector Ernest Marsh (1843-1945) as a case study, this thesis explores how in the period 1890-1945 a collector came to be a key agent in the construction and manifestation of taste in British Applied Arts and to a lesser degree in the Fine Arts. Through primary visual and documentary evidence of the Marsh home, and reference to contemporary and later commentaries it considers the relative influences of husband and wife on decorating and furnishing the domestic interior, the evolution of taste, and, for Ernest Marsh, its impact upon his artistic interests within the public arena.
By examination of private papers, metropolitan and provincial art gallery and museum archives it also considers evidence of the inter-relationships between donors and curators, and the mutual advantages and disadvantages accruing to both, particularly focussing on the processes in bringing about changes in individual and institutional collecting policy. Further, by review of records of, in particular, the Contemporary Art Society and the Greenslade archive, it examines the degree to which private benefactors and those in public or semi-public office, acting as fund-raisers and spenders exercise influence through patronage of particular practitioners, choice of works and initiating new designs
Combustion and Society: A Fire-Centred History of Energy Use
No full textFire is a force that links everyday human activities to some of the most powerful energetic movements of the Earth. Drawing together the energy-centred social theory of Georges Bataille, the fire-centred environmental history of Stephen Pyne, and the work of a number of ‘pyrotechnology’ scholars, the paper proposes that the generalized study of combustion is a key to contextualizing human energetic practices within a broader ‘economy’ of terrestrial and cosmic energy flows. We examine the relatively recent turn towards fossil-fuelled ‘internal combustion’ in the light of a much longer human history of ‘broadcast’ burning of vegetation and of artisanal pyrotechnologies – the use of heat to transform diverse materials. A combustion-centred analysis, it is argued, brings human collective life into closer contact with the geochemical and geologic conditions of earthly existence, while also pointing to the significance of explorative, experimental and even playful dispositions towards energy and matter. © 2014, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved
Symptoms of Meares-Irlen/Visual Stress Syndrome in subjects diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
No full textAbstractSeveral diagnostic symptoms of the visual-processing deficit Meares-Irlen/Visual Stress Syndrome are remarkably similar to symptom manifestations reported by individuals with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). We surveyed the specific incidences of nine widely-recognised symptoms of visual stress (VS) in a group of subjects (n=20) previously diagnosed with CFS. The presence of each symptom of VS in the CFS group was compared to its respective presence in both an age and sex matched healthy comparison group (n=46), and an age and sex matched group comprised of individuals (n=14) diagnosed with VS. Results showed the frequencies of all nine VS symptoms in the CFS-diagnosed group to be significantly higher (p=.032 – p<.0005) than in the comparison group, with only two symptoms being statistically less frequent in the CFS group than in the VS-diagnosed group. The average number of VS symptoms reported by the CFS group was also significantly higher than the comparison group, yet not significantly different from the VS group. Thus, the occurrence of VS symptoms in subjects diagnosed with CFS appears to be far greater than previously reported, which in turn may indicate the interplay of some yet to be identified underlying factor(s) common to both conditions.ResumenAlgunos síntomas del Síndrome de Estrés Visual/Meares-Irlen son similares a los informados por individuos con síndrome de fatiga crónica (SFC). Se evaluó la incidencia de nueve síntomas ampliamente reconocidos de estrés visual (EV) en un grupo de sujetos (n=20) con síndrome de fatiga crónica. La presencia de cada síntoma de EV en el grupo con SFC se comparó con un grupo control de sujetos sanos (n=46) y con un grupo de individuos (n=14) con diagnóstico de EV, equiparables en sexo y edad. Los resultados mostraron una frecuencia en los nueve síntomas de EV en el grupo diagnosticado SFC significativamente mayor (p=0,032-p<0,0005) que en el grupo de comparación, con sólo dos síntomas estadísticamente menos frecuentes en el grupo SFC que en el grupo EV. El número medio de síntomas EV señalados por el grupo SFC también fue significativamente mayor que el del grupo de comparación, aunque no significati vamente diferente el grupo EV. Por lo tanto, la presencia de los síntomas de EV en sujetos con diagnóstico de SFC parece ser mucho mayor que la informada, lo que puede indicar la interacción de algún factor/s subyacente/s aún no identificado/s comunes a ambas condiciones
Behavioural and emotional functioning of adolescents with mild intellectual disability: Perspectives from home and school
No full textThis study examined the frequency and severity of behavioural and emotional disturbances in adolescents with mild intellectual disability. The 50 adolescents, aged between 12 and 16 years, attended a special school in Singapore. Information on the adolescents’ functioning was obtained from their parent/primary carer and their class teacher, who both completed the relevant version of the Developmental Behaviour Checklist. The results showed that, in addition to difficulties related to their intellectual disability, 22% to 27% of students displayed significant behavioural and emotional disturbances. Disruptive/Antisocial behaviours were the most frequently reported problems. But communication disturbances were reported as being the most severe problems. Carers and teachers reported the same pattern in the relative frequencies of the different types of problems. However, primary carers consistently reported a higher frequency than teachers for all types of problems. Implications of these findings for the consistent management of the adolescents’ challenging behaviour are discusse
Cognitive functioning following traumatic brain injury: the first 5 years
No full textOBJECTIVE: This study reports the results from a 5-year longitudinal investigation of the prevalence and severity of cognitive deficits following significant (i.e., ventilation required for > 24 hours) traumatic brain injury. The changes in performance, either improvement or decline, across five domains of cognitive functioning are described.
METHOD: A group of 56 adults was assessed at approximately 6 months, 1 year, and 5 years following injury.
RESULTS: Impairment was evident on all measures but prevalence and rate of improvement varied. Overall, by 5 years post-injury over 85% of patients were not impaired on measures of general intelligence, simple attention, and visual perception. However, 28% of patients continued to show some degree of impairment on complex attention and verbal fluency, and performance on verbal memory remained impaired for 60% of patients. There was also evidence for deterioration in complex attention and verbal memory between 1 year and 5 years. ANOVAs showed that improvement occurred on most measures between 6 months and 1 year, but there was both improvement and decline on some measures between 1 year and 5 years.
CONCLUSIONS: The findings show that there is considerable heterogeneity in cognitive outcome following TBI, with some deterioration evident over the long term
Family altruism and incentives
No full textThe author builds on the altruistic model of the family, to explore the strategic interaction between altruistic parents, and selfish children, when children's efforts are endogenous. If there is uncertainty about the amount of income the children will realize, and if parents have imperfect information, the children have an incentive to exert little effort, and to rely on their parent's altruistically motivated transfers. Because of this, parents face a tradeoff between the insurance that bequests implicitly provide their children, and the disincentive to work prompted by their altruism. The author shows that if parents can credibly commit to a pattern of transfers, they will choose not to compensate children in bad outcomes, as much as predicted by the standard (no uncertainty, no asymmetric information) dynastic model of the family. Alternatively, parents may choose to forgo any insurance, and offer a fixed level of bequest, to elicit greater effort from their children. The optimal transfers structure that the author derives, reconciles the predictions of the altruistic family model, with much of the existing evidence on inter-generational transfers, which suggests that parents compensate only partially, or not at all, for earnings differentials among their children. Moreover, the author shows that Ricardian equivalence holds in this setup, except when non-negativity constraints are binding.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Educational Sciences,Safety Nets and Transfers
Semiometrics: producing a compositional view of influence
No full textHigh-impact academic papers are not necessarily the most cited. For example, Einstein's 'Special Relativity' paper from 1905 received (and continues to receive) fewer citations from other papers than his 'Brownian Motion" paper of the same year, despite the former radically changing the course of an entire scientific discipline to a much greater extent. Similarly, 'impact' metrics using citation count alone are, it is argued, not adequate for determining the scientific influence of papers, authors or small groups of authors. Although valid, they remain controversial when used to determine influence of larger groups or journals. While the term 'impact' has become closely linked to a journal's citation-based Journal Impact Factor score, this thesis uses the term 'influence' to describe the wider effectiveness of research, combining citation and metadata analysis to allow richer calculations to be performed over large-scale document networks. As a result, more qualitative influence ratings can be determined and a broader outlook on scientific disciplines can be produced. These ratings are best applied using an ontology-based data source, allowing more efficient inference than under a traditional RDBMS system, and allowing easier integration between heterogeneous data sources. These metrics, termed 'Semantic Bibliometrics' or 'Semiometrics', can be applied at a variety of levels of granularity, allowing a compositional framework for impact and influence analysis. This thesis describes the process of data preparation, systems architecture, metric value and data integration for such a system, introducing novel approaches at all four stages, thereby creating a working semiometrics system for determining influence at different semantic levels of granularity
Anonymous indexing of health conditions for a similarity measure
No full textA health social network is an online information service which facilitates information sharing between closely related members of a community with the same or a similar health condition. Over the years, many automated recommender systems have been developed for social networking in order to help users find their communities of interest. For health social networking, the ideal source of information for measuring similarities of patients is the medical information of the patients. However, it is not desirable that such sensitive and private information be shared over the Internet. This is also true for many other security sensitive domains. A new information-sharing scheme is developed where each patient is represented as a small number of (possibly disjoint) d-words (discriminant words) and the d-words are used to measure similarities between patients without revealing sensitive personal information. The d-words are simple words like "food", and thus do not contain identifiable personal information. This makes our method an effective one-way hashing of patient assessments for a similarity measure. The d-words can be easily shared on the Internet to find peers who might have similar health conditions
Do-it-yourself shuffling and the number of runs under randomness
No full textA common class of problem in statistical science is estimating, as a benchmark, the probability of some event under randomness. For example, in a sequence of events in which several outcomes are possible and the length of the sequence and number of outcomes of each type known, the number of runs gives an indication of whether the outcomes are random, clustered, or alternating. This note explains and illustrates a simple method of random shuffling that is often useful. We show how the conditional probability distribution of the number of runs may be derived easily in Stata, thus yielding p-values for testing the null hypothesis that the type of outcome is random. We also compare our direct approach with that using the simulate command. Copyright 2003 by StataCorp LP.alternation, categorical data, clustering, conditional distribution, forvalues, p-value, permutation, run, sequence, simulate, simulation
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