495 research outputs found
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The twelve large colour prints of William Blake: a study on techniques, materials and context
No full textThe aim of this thesis is to study in entirety the group of large colour prints which William Blake made between 1795 and 1805. The series of prints represents the single most important and complete development of Blake’s skill as an innovative printmaker. Although they include some of Blake’s best-known images, they have not been studied before in their entirety or from the point of view of analysing the techniques and methods Blake had used. My study will show how Blake executed these truly impressive prints in terms of materials, method and motives. The first half of the thesis deals with the materialistic aspects of Blake’s colour printing. In chapter one tracing the controversial two-pull discussion to the root, I will make clear the focus points as well as revealing the early tradition of experimental criticism on Blake’s colour printing method. Focusing on two important critics, W. Graham Robertson and Ruthven Todd, and the periods they lived, I attempt to reveal the role they played in a wider context. Also I show how the tradition of Blake’s art was inherited directly through the Ancients to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which leads to Robertson and Todd. In the second chapter I deal with the development of Blake’s colour printing experiments. It is obvious that the Twelve Large Colour Prints were produced as a result of Blake’s series of colour printing experiments, starting with monocolour simple prints, going through the illuminated books progressing with more colours and higher skills
Job’s Gethsemane: tradition and imagination in William Blake’s illustrations for the book of job
No full textBlake created two versions of his Illustrations of the Book of Job, and it is now agreed that about twenty years separates his first watercolour series and the final engraved set of plates. The first chapter is biographical and technical: it establishes that the Butts series of water-colours was the product of the tumultuous and creative years 1805-10, following a time wh6n Blake experienced a strong sense of vision and Christian regeneration; whereas the engraved set was produced 1821-1826, at the end of his life. It also reviews all Blake's treatments of the Job theme. The friends-turned-accusers seem to have been a central pre-occupation. Blake's illustrations contain important elements which are not found in the Old Testament text. I have followed Bo Lindberg's principle that explanation should be sought in the artistic tradition, and in the work itself The second chapter concentrates on the tradition available to Blake, following and supplementing Lindberg's examination of the influence of the apocryphal Testament of Job, and of the artistic tradition of seeing Job as alter Christus and as Christian. Chapters three to five, interpreting Blake's imaginative use of this material, are new both in focussing on the Butts set, and in exploring the importance to Blake of St.Teresa, Fenelon, Mme. Guyon, Hervey and other people of prayer. Also discussed are Joseph Hallett's radical biblical commentary, of which Blake owned a copy, variant proofs discovered by Robert Essick of the first and last engraved plates, and the thirteenth century Job wall- paintings discovered in 1800 in St. Stephen's Chapel, Westminster. Blake's Job was unique in the corpus of his work. Previous studies have followed Wicksteed in concentrating on the engraved set, and no one has explored the implications of the earlier dating now agreed for the watercolour series. The thesis is essentially concerned with Blake's Christocentric theme, and Job's inner journey of prayer, in these illustrations. Conclusions drawn differ substantially from Wicksteed's
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Variation in the autism candidate gene GABRB3 modulates tactile sensitivity in typically developing children
No full textBackground: Autism spectrum conditions have a strong genetic component. Atypical sensory sensitivities are one of the core but neglected features of autism spectrum conditions. GABRB3 is a well-characterised candidate gene for autism spectrum conditions. In mice, heterozygous Gabrb3 deletion is associated with increased tactile sensitivity. However, no study has examined if tactile sensitivity is associated with GABRB3 genetic variation in humans. To test this, we conducted two pilot genetic association studies in the general population, analysing two phenotypic measures of tactile sensitivity (a parent-report and a behavioural measure) for association with 43 SNPs in GABRB3.
Findings: Across both tactile sensitivity measures, three SNPs (rs11636966, rs8023959 and rs2162241) were nominally associated with both phenotypes, providing a measure of internal validation. Parent-report scores were nominally associated with six SNPs (P <0.05). Behaviourally measured tactile sensitivity was nominally associated with 10 SNPs (three after Bonferroni correction).
Conclusions: This is the first human study to show an association between GABRB3 variation and tactile sensitivity. This provides support for the evidence from animal models implicating the role of GABRB3 variation in the atypical sensory sensitivity in autism spectrum conditions. Future research is underway to directly test this association in cases of autism spectrum conditions
William Blake and the visionary poetry of the law.
No full textPhDThis dissertation examines the meaning of law in Blake's work. I argue that Blake's poetry
intersects with contemporaneous challenges to the traditional model of the ancient constitution,
a debate which I present as a conflict between custom and code. Blake's support for the French
Revolution's overthrow of the customary systems of the ancien regime is countered by his
nervousness about the rights-based discourse advanced by leading radical intellectuals such as
Thomas Paine, a belief that the new systems which they proposed merely re-stated those which
they sought to replace within an even narrower compass.
Law is also a contested ground within radical political discourse of this period; although the
dominant proposals advocated the enshrinement of fundamental rights and the codification of
law, there was also a tendency towards a more enthusiastic radicalism These millenarian
groups, emerging from antinomian heresy, rejected the notion of life being framed within a set
of moral laws. I argue that Blake cannot easily be placed in either group; his work exhibits a
fidelity to the redemptive potential of law, coupled with a real concern that to define freedoms
in legal terms serves to limit rather than to liberate.
Blake's work thus engages with a problem of the period: how to understand the new
discourses of law. The customary account of the ancient English conunon law is predicated on
the idea that it is codified, yet not written down; secular, though grounded in divine principle.
These ambivalences are exploited by Blake in his poetic exploration of the law in the 1790s. In
his nineteenth-century epics, Blake finds increasing help in dissenting religion's reconstruction
of a radicalized Jesus. Through this radical prophetic voice, Blake is able to construct a
redemptive legality founded on a deinstitutio-nalized Christianity, a constitutionalism that is
also recovered from the conventional customary account
Attentional functions of parietal and frontal cortex
No full textA model of normal attentional function, based on the concept of competitive parallel processing, is used to compare attentional deficits following parietal and frontal lobe lesions. Measurements are obtained for visual processing speed, capacity of visual short-term memory (VSTM), spatial bias (bias to left or right hemifield) and top-down control (selective attention based on task relevance). The results show important differences, but also surprising similarities, in parietal and frontal lobe patients. For processing speed and VSTM, deficits are selectively associated with parietal lesions, in particular lesions of the temporoparietal junction. We discuss explanations based on either grey matter or white matter lesions. In striking contrast, measures of attentional weighting (spatial bias and top-down control) are predicted by simple lesion volume. We suggest that attentional weights reflect competition between broadly distributed object representations. Parietal and frontal mechanisms work together, both in weighting by location and weighting by task context
Corticocortical connections of anatomically and physiologically defined subdivisions within the inferior parietal lobule
No full textValidating gravitational-wave detections: the advanced LIGO hardware injection system
No full textHardware injections are simulated gravitational-wave signals added to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). The detectors' test masses are physically displaced by an actuator in order to simulate the effects of a gravitational wave. The simulated signal initiates a control-system response which mimics that of a true gravitational wave. This provides an end-to-end test of LIGO's ability to observe gravitational waves. The gravitational-wave analyses used to detect and characterize signals are exercised with hardware injections. By looking for discrepancies between the injected and recovered signals, we are able to characterize the performance of analyses and the coupling of instrumental subsystems to the detectors' output channels. This paper describes the hardware injection system and the recovery of injected signals representing binary black hole mergers, a stochastic gravitational wave background, spinning neutron stars, and sine-Gaussians
SEARCHES FOR CONTINUOUS GRAVITATIONAL WAVES FROM NINE YOUNG SUPERNOVA REMNANTS
No full textWe describe directed searches for continuous gravitational waves (GWs) in data from the sixth Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) science data run. The targets were nine young supernova remnants not associated with pulsars; eight of the remnants are associated with non-pulsing suspected neutron stars. One target's parameters are uncertain enough to warrant two searches, for a total of 10. Each search covered a broad band of frequencies and first and second frequency derivatives for a fixed sky direction. The searches coherently integrated data from the two LIGO interferometers over time spans from 5.3–25.3 days using the matched-filtering F-statistic. We found no evidence of GW signals. We set 95% confidence upper limits as strong (low) as 4 × 10[superscript −25] on intrinsic strain, 2 × 10[superscript −7] on fiducial ellipticity, and 4 × 10[superscript −5] on r-mode amplitude. These beat the indirect limits from energy conservation and are within the range of theoretical predictions for neutron-star ellipticities and r-mode amplitudes
Brain changes after learning to read and play music
No full textMusically naive participants were scanned before and after a period of 15 weeks during which they were taught to read music and play the keyboard. When participants played melodies from musical notation after training, activation was seen in a cluster of voxels within the bilateral superior parietal cortex. A subset of these voxels were activated in a second experiment in which musical notation was present, but irrelevant for task performance. These activations suggest that music reading involves the automatic sensorimotor translation of a spatial code (written music) into a series of motor responses (keypresses)
Variability in somatosensory cortical neuron discharge: effects on capacity to signal different stimulus conditions using a mean rate code
No full text 1. The present study is based on the demonstration (8, 9) that the relationship between mean interval (MI) and standard deviation (SD) for stimulus-driven activity recorded from SI neurons is well fitted by the linear equation SD = a X MI + b and on the observations that the values of the slope (a) and y intercept (b) parameters of this relationship are independent of stimulus conditions and may vary widely from one neuron to the next (8). 2. A criterion for the discriminability of two different mean firing rates requiring that the mean intervals of their respective interspike interval (ISI) distributions be separated by a fixed interval (expressed in SD units) is developed and, on the basis of this criterion, a graphical display of the capacity of a neuron with a known SD-MI relationship to reflect a change in stimulus conditions with a change in mean firing rate is derived. Using this graphical approach, it is shown that the parameters of the SD-MI relationship for a single neuron determine a range of firing frequencies, within which that neuron exhibits the greatest capacity to signal differences in stimulus conditions using a frequency code. 3. The discrimination criterion is modified to incorporate the changes in the symmetry of the ISI distribution observed to accompany changes in mean firing rate. It is shown that, although the observed symmetry changes do influence the capacity of a cortical neuron to signal a change in stimulus conditions with a change in mean firing rate, they do not alter the range of firing rates (determined by the parameters of the SD-MI relationship) within which the capacity for discrimination is maximal. 4. The maximal number of firing levels that can be distinguished by a somatosensory cortical neuron (using the same discrimination criterion described above) discharging within a specified range of mean frequencies also is demonstrated to depend on the parameters of the linear equation which relates SD to MI. 5. Two approaches based on the t test for differences between two means are developed in an attempt to ascertain the minimum separation of the mean intervals of the ISI distributions necessary for two different mean firing rates to be discriminated with 80% certainty. </jats:p
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