Journal articles on the topic 'First National Bank in St. Louis'

In 1948, a unanimous jury awarded the $40,000 first prize in the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Competition to a design team headed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen. Competitors had been charged with memorializing Thomas Jefferson, his Louisiana Purchase, and the expansion of the American nation by creating a national park and monument on the West bank of the Mississippi River at St. Louis.

Louis Sullivan's proposals for remodeling the First National Bank Building (1919-1922) in Manistique, Michigan, were executed in part. They reveal his underappreciated ability to bring order to someone else's design chaos by skillfully manipulating the tiniest of details. They also suggest that after his partnership with Dankmar Adler ended in 1895 he refined a vocabulary of façade composition meant to differentiate commercial structures according to program. When newly available archival material is fully exploited, it will likely reveal a good deal more about this neglected building, which was not only Sullivan's sole bank remodeling but also proof that as his career came to a close his ornament remained as powerful as ever.

The International accounting congresses, which are held every five years, are numbered under the assumption that the first such international gathering was the one held in St. Louis in 1904. In this paper, the question is raised whether this 1904 Congress should be called “international”. There are reasons to believe that the main objective of the congress was to raise the status of the profession in the United States, and that the slight international involvement was little more than window dressing.

Abstract A matrix of four GCM–RCM combinations from the NARCCAP project is examined for changes in heat stress between contemporary and future scenario climates in the greater St. Louis region in Missouri. The analysis also compares the contemporary simulations with observation-based results from the North American Regional Reanalysis. The character of heat-stress days in one of the RCMs, the CRCM, tends to be like that of heat-stress days in the North American Regional Reanalysis, with high temperatures accompanied by high humidity. In contrast, heat-stress days in the other RCM, the Weather Research and Forecasting Model with Grell-Devenyi Cumulus Scheme (WRFG), have high temperature, but typically the humidity is similar to or even slightly drier than climatological values. Although specific magnitudes of change differ between the simulations, all show a marked increase in projected heat stress, from a variety of perspectives. Increases in temperature contribute more to these increases than do increases in humidity, though both are relevant. All simulations agree that the frequency of excessive heat advisories and excessive heat warnings as defined by the National Weather Service could increase by midcentury, with multiple excessive heat advisories occurring every year. The day of first heat stress each summer could occur 3–4 weeks earlier as part of a more prolonged period when the region might experience heat stress each year. Although St. Louis has adopted measures to reduce health threats during heat-stress events, the measures consume human and economic resources; much more frequent and longer-lasting heat-stress events in the future have the potential to impose substantial costs on the region.

AbstractThis article analyzes political participation and the attitudes of Muslim-Americans. Assessing national patterns, the first part highlights several regression models, discerning the impact of race/ethnicity, gender, foreign born status, age, and education on political activity and attitudes. I also compare changes in voting patterns among respondents between the 2000 and 2004 elections. The second half is based on in-depth interviews of Muslims from St. Louis, Missouri, probing more directly particular shifts in views and participation since September 11. Among the national sample, South Asians and Middle Easterners largely supported Republican George W. Bush in 2000, while African-Americans voted for Democrat Al Gore. However, by 2004, race and ethnicity were no longer statistically significant factors dividing the Muslim vote; instead, support largely went to Democrat John Kerry. Changes in voting patterns between 2000 and 2004 were also evident in the St. Louis sample of South Asians and Middle Easterners. They generally cited unfavorable views of Muslim treatment both at home and abroad since the War on Terror began as major reasons for these changes. Partisan and voting shifts were not evident among African-Americans, who have been consistent Democrats. However, many African-Americans in addition to Middle Easterners and South Asians reported heightened interest in politics and similar changes since September 11. Only Bosnians, who are relatively new to the United States, report few changes. This is largely because they have yet to develop firm political identities. Among both samples, Muslim-Americans generally exhibit high rates of participation in various political activities, many reporting increasing interest and involvement since September 11. Therefore, regardless of the hardships they may currently feel, Muslim-Americans are not hiding in the shadows but are fully participating in the political sphere.

At the end of the Revolutionary War, the United States government acquired the Northwest Territory, including the city of Cincinnati. Given the city's position on the Ohio River, and the subsequent development and introduction of steamboats in the early 1800s, Cincinnati became a major center for commerce and trade. With a population of over 115,000 in 1850, Cincinnati was the sixth largest city in the United States—larger even than St. Louis and Chicago—the first major city west of the Allegheny Mountains, and the largest inland city in the nation. The city's growth and importance is mirrored by the history of one if its prized institutions, Good Samaritan Hospital—the oldest, largest, and busiest private teaching and specialty-care hospital in Greater Cincinnati and a national leader in many surgical fields.

ABSTRACT On January 18, 1994, unleaded gasoline began entering the Mississippi River through the bank adjacent to an oil distribution/storage facility in St. Louis, Missouri. Reported as a minor, per the National Contingency Plan, it developed into a major discharge. Of the 364,930 gallons lost, 140,000 gallons discharged into the river. The amount of product recovered from all sources was 107,000 gallons. The emergency phase of the response ran from January 18 to 24. Not until January 24 was the cause determined to be a 10.7 ft by ¼ in fracture near the center of the floor of a two million gallon tank. Secondary containment showed no evidence of the catastrophic release. The extreme cold permitted the initial booming of the gasoline, but recovery was complicated by flowing river ice, ice shelves, temperatures that froze equipment, and access down 45 feet of snow-covered riprap. Elastol, fire-fighting foam, barges, weir and barrel skimmers, and vacuum trucks were utilized for water and land recovery operations. Safety concerns were paramount for the federal, state, and local personnel and yet there was a demonstrated weakness in timely development and enforcement of the comprehensive site safety plan. This unusual spill heightened the awareness of many prevention and response issues.

ABSTRACTLouis-Philippe-Robert, Duc d'Orléans (1869–1926), the Orléans claimant to the French throne, mounted four private expeditions to the Arctic, in 1904, 1905, 1907, and 1909. During the first of these, on board his private yacht, Maroussia, and accompanied by his wife, Marie Dorothée, he visited Svalbard where he hunted reindeer while his wife, an accomplished amateur artist, executed a number of delightful paintings. In 1905 he chartered the ice strengthened Belgica and employed Adrien de Gerlache de Gomery as her captain; he also recruited an impressive group of scientists. He again visited Svalbard then pushed west through the pack ice to east Greenland. He was able to penetrate further north along that coast than his predecessors, the Germans under Koldewey in Germania, had in 1869–1870, and discovered and named Île-de-France and the Belgica Bank. He shot large numbers of polar bears. In 1907, again on board Belgica, and again with de Gerlache in command of the ship, and again with a contingent of scientists on board, Orléans headed out into the Kara Sea from Matochkin Shar. Belgica soon became beset in the pack ice and drifted slowly south with the ice to emerge through Karskie Vorota after a very frustrating month. Thereafter an attempt to reach Zemlya Frantsa-Iosifa was foiled by heavy ice. Finally, in 1909, again on board Belgica under de Gerlache's command, Orléans visited Jan Mayen, east Greenland, Svalbard and Zemlya Frantsa-Iosifa, with hunting as his primary aim. From all four expeditions Orléans brought back substantial numbers of skins of birds and mammals that were mounted and displayed in his private museums. On his death they were bequeathed to the French people and exhibited in the specially built Musée du Duc d'Orléans in Paris and later in the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle. The scientific data and specimens collected by the scientists on the 1905 and 1907 expeditions resulted in a substantial number of scientific reports in their various fields.

The application of spatiotemporal (ST) analytics to integrated data from major sources such as the World Bank, United Nations, and dozens of others holds tremendous potential for shedding new light on the evolution of cultural, health, economic, and geopolitical landscapes on a global level. Realizing this potential first requires an ST data model that addresses challenges in properly merging data from multiple authors, with evolving ontological perspectives, semantical differences, and changing attributes, as well as content that is textual, numeric, categorical, and hierarchical. Equally challenging is the development of analytical and visualization approaches that provide a serious exploration of this integrated data while remaining accessible to practitioners with varied backgrounds. The WSTAMP project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has yielded two major results in addressing these challenges: 1) development of the WSTAMP database, a significant advance in ST data modeling that integrates 10,000+ attributes covering over 200 nation states spanning over 50 years from over 30 major sources and 2) a novel online ST exploratory and analysis tool providing an array of modern statistical and visualization techniques for analyzing these data temporally, spatially, and spatiotemporally under a standard analytic workflow. We discuss the status of this work and report on major findings.

Hop (Humulus lupulus), of the Cannabaceae family, is a dioecious perennial climbing plant that is native to Asia, North America, and Europe and is commercially grown in many countries for its use in brewing and the pharmaceutical industry. Slovenia has a more than 100-year-old hop-growing tradition and it is an important national agricultural business, with 90% of production exported to foreign markets. Since 2007, symptoms similar to Hop stunt viroid (HSVd) infection have been observed in several hop gardens with cvs. Celeia, Bobek, and Aurora in the Savinja Valley and Koroška Region. Symptoms include stunting, leaf curl, small cone formation, and dry root rot. In the first year of finding the disease, the incidence varied from 1 to 30% and increased rapidly (by as much as 10%) each subsequent year, predominantly along plant rows. For molecular identification of the pathogen, RNA was extracted from leaves and cones of symptomatic and asymptomatic plants from two different hop gardens with cv. Celeia using Tri Reagent (T9424; Sigma-Aldrich, St Louis, MO). Reverse transcription-PCR was carried out using two pairs of specific HSVd primers, HSVdI/HSVdII and HSVdeI/HSVdeII (3,4). Both primer pairs gave a single PCR product from tissue from symptomatic plants, with expected lengths of ~300 bp, but no amplicons were produced using samples from asymptomatic plants. PCR products from HSVdI/HSVdII were subjected to direct sequencing and HSVdeI/HSVdeII products were cloned in PCR Script SK (+) (Stratagene, La Jolla, CA) vector and sequenced. Five sequences (EMBL Accession Nos. HE575344, HE575345, HE575346, HE575347, and HE575348) were obtained, which revealed 96 to 99% sequence identity with various HSVd variants (grapevine, citrus, and cucumber) reported in GenBank of the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). HSVd belonging to the Hostuviroid genus, Pospiviroidae family, has been previously reported in hop in Japan, South Korea, North America, and China (1,2). To our knowledge, this is the first report of the detection of HSVd on hop in Europe. Strict phytosanitary measures have been taken to prevent further spread and to eradicate HSVd infections. References: (1) K. C. Eastwell and T. Sano. Hop Stunt. Page 48 in: Compendium of Hop Diseases and Pests. W. F. Mahaffee et al., eds. The American Phytopathological Society, St. Paul, MN, 2009. (2) L. Guo et al. Plant Pathol. 57:764, 2008. (3) J. Matoušek et al. Plant Soil Environ. 49:168, 2003. (4) J. Matoušek et al. J. Virol. Methods 122:153, 2004.

The St. Louis EachOneTeachOne (EOTO) project is a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)-funded cooperative agreement aimed at examining rates of HIV risk behaviors and studying HIV risk reduction interventions among out-of-treatment injection and crack cocaine drug users. This paper uses data collected during the first year of recruitment and enrollment to document the effect of street outreach on HIV risk behavior involvement. The major findings are that: (1) men reported more HIV risk behaviors than did women, but the results failed to show striking racial or ethnic differences; (2) we successfully enrolled women in spite of the fact that our women street contacts were largely ineligible to enroll in EOTO; and (3) actual EOTO enrollees, compared with all street contacts and eligible street contacts, engaged in fewer HIV risk behaviors. These results imply that strategies in addition to street outreach may be needed to enlist more individuals, particularly whites and women who are engaging in the highest risk drug and sexual behaviors.

PurposeFinancial analysts have been found to be overconfident. The purpose of this paper is to study the ramifications of that overconfidence on the dispersion of earnings estimates as a predictor of the US business cycle.Design/methodology/approachWhether aggregate analyst forecast dispersion contains information about turning points in business cycles, especially downturns, is examined by utilizing the analyst earnings forecast dispersion metric. The primary analysis derives from logit regression and Markov switching models. The analysis controls for sentiment (consumer confidence), output (industrial production), and financial indicators (stock returns and turnover). Analyst data come from Institutional Brokers Estimate System, while the economic data are available at the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Economic Data site.FindingsA rise in the dispersion of analyst forecasts is a significant predictor of turning points in the US business cycle. Financial analyst uncertainty of earnings estimate contains crucial information about the risks of US business cycle turning points. The results are consistent with some analysts becoming overconfident during the expansion period and misjudging the precision of their information, thus over or under weighting various sources of information. This causes the disagreement among analysts measured as dispersion.Originality/valueThis is the first study to show that analyst forecast dispersion contributions valuable information to predictions of economic downturns. In addition, that dispersion can be attributed to analyst overconfidence.

Spatiotemporal (ST) analytics applied to major data sources such as the World Bank and World Health Organization has shown tremendous value in shedding light on the evolution of cultural, health, economic, and geopolitical landscapes on a global level. WSTAMP engages this opportunity by situating analysts, data, and analytics together within a visually rich and computationally rigorous online analysis environment. Since introducing WSTAMP at the First International Workshop on Spatiotemporal Computing, several transformative advances have occurred. Collaboration with human computer interaction experts led to a complete interface redesign that deeply immerses the analyst within a ST context, significantly increases visual and textual content, provides navigational crosswalks for attribute discovery, substantially reduce mouse and keyboard actions, and supports user data uploads. Secondly, the database has been expanded to include over 16,000 attributes, 50 years of time, and 200+ nation states and redesigned to support non-annual, non-national, city, and interaction data. Finally, two new analytics are implemented for analyzing large portfolios of multi-attribute data and measuring the behavioral stability of regions along different dimensions. These advances required substantial new approaches in design, algorithmic innovations, and increased computational efficiency. We report on these advances and inform how others may freely access the tool.

Abstract Abstract 4695 Introduction: UCB is also an attractive stem cell source for transplantation because of the ease of procurement, the absence of donor risks, and reduced risk of transmissible infections. Unfortunately, outcomes of UCB stem cell transplantation are less than optimal because of low cell dose in umbilical cord blood units and defects in homing to bone marrow, which result in both delayed engraftment and delayed immune recovery, both of which increase the mortality rate in UCB transplants. In these experiments, we investigated the use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBO) to improve cord blood stem cell homing and engraftment post irradiation. Method: Six to eight week old NOD/ SCID mice were sublethally irradiated 24 hours prior to cord blood stem cell infusion. The irradiated mice were then divided into two groups (10 mice each). One group of mice served as the control group were mice remained under normoxic conditions. The second group of animals, the HBO group, six hours prior to cord blood stem cell infusion, were exposed to two hours of hyperbaric conditions in a hyperbaric chamber, with 100% oxygen for 2 hours at 2.5 atmospheres absolute (ATA). Erythropoietin (epo) level was checked by ELISA, at time of cord blood stem cell infusion, and was used as a surrogate marker for effective HBO therapy. Prior to CD34+ cord blood stem cell injection, cryopreserved cord blood units obtained from St. Louis Cord Blood Bank were processed for CD34+ selection followed by their transduction with a luciferase lentivirus so that they can be serially imaged, using Xenogen-IVIS imaging system, for engraftment into the bone marrow. Subsequently, cord blood stem cells (7 × 104 / 100 uL) in sterile PBS were administered by tail vein injection. The mice were weighed every other day and were sacrificed at 9–10 weeks post cord blood stem cell infusion. Peripheral blood and spleen tissue were obtained to determine donor engraftment by flow cytometry. Bone tissue was harvested for immunohistochemistry staining for human CD45. Result: Mean epo level in the HBO group was significantly lower than the mean epo level in the control group (226.7 ± 18.02 versus 294.4 ± 14.35 pg/ml (P=.0148)), consistent with effective HBO therapy. The average photon emission, or radiance, measured using the average of ventral and dorsal photon emission values per group, starting week 5, peaked at 7 weeks in the control mice, while peaked at 5 weeks in the HBO group. Since only ventral photon emission values were available during the first 4 weeks, an earlier peak in HBO group could not be excluded. One mouse in each group died, which was thought to be secondary to excessive bleeding related to mandible bleeding. No significant differences in median percentage peripheral blood or spleen engraftment were detected between the two groups. Interestingly, the HBO mice demonstrated a higher mean body weight started day 36 post cord blood stem cell infusion and continued until the end of study. Conclusions: HBO treatment did not result in detectable differences in terms of mean percentage peripheral blood or spleen engraftment at the end of study. However, HBO treated mice, compared to controls, showed an earlier photon emission peak values followed by lower photon emission values overtime. This earlier peak might have corresponded to the significant increase in weight noticed in the HBO mice starting week 5 post cord blood stem cell infusion. *We acknowledge the help we received from St. Louis Cord Blood Bank who provided the cryopreserved cord blood units for this research. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Abstract Editor’s Note: With great pleasure and anticipation in recognition of Clinical Chemistry’s 50th anniversary, I have been able to arm-twist four talented scientists to document their impressive marks on the science of diagnostics in the field of cardiac biomarkers and detection of myocardial infarction. Their exciting discoveries and applications have dramatically influenced the fields of laboratory medicine and cardiology and have greatly influenced the care and management of thousands of patients suffering from coronary artery disease leading to acute myocardial infarction. As a matter of historical record, I owe a great deal of thanks to each one of the coauthors of this special report because each one has personally influenced my scientific career. I met Dr. Rosalki, during my postdoctoral training, at a national AACC meeting, where he kindly answered my numerous queries regarding creatine kinase enzymology and muscle physiology. Dr. Roberts, while serving as Director of the Coronary Care Unit at Washington University in St. Louis, generously allowed this fledgling fellow into his laboratory and shared many of his clinical and experimental findings with me. Dr. Katus, whom I first met at a scientific meeting sponsored by Boehringer Mannheim in 1986 in Bavaria, where I first became fascinated with cardiac troponin T, has remained a friend and colleague. Lastly, Dr. Ladenson, who as mentor, scientific colleague, and close friend remains ultimately responsible for both my professional growth as a clinical chemist (he was my postdoctoral fellowship advisor) and for stimulating and encouraging my goals and aspirations in the field of cardiac biomarkers. With the descriptions of the ground-breaking science described below, I am extremely excited and optimistic that the future of cardiac biomarkers is secure and open to new discoveries by the Rosalkis, Robertses, Katuses, and Ladensons of the future. —Fred Apple

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: To use a systematic and iterative process to develop and refine toolkits to support dissemination and implementation (D&I) research. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Participants included research staff from the Dissemination and Implementation Research Core (DIRC), a research methods core from the Institute of Clinical and Translational Science at Washington University in St. Louis, other D&I experts from the University, and national experts from the D&I field. This project used education design research methodology and a systematic and iterative process involving several phases. The first phase (preliminary research and initial development) consisted of analysis of the educational problem and its context, and led to the development of toolkit prototypes and plans for their implementation. In the second phase (development and formative evaluation), toolkits were iteratively evaluated with emphasis on content validity and consistency and effectiveness as perceived by the users. Finally, in the summative evaluation, the toolkits were evaluated based on their use as intended. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Our team identified the target audience as DIRC customers and investigators from disciplines across the University, and found that resources for beginners to D&I were lacking. The team developed 8 toolkits: (1) Introduction to D&I; (2) How to develop D&I Aims; (3) D&I Designs; (4) Implementation Outcomes; (5) Implementation Organizational Measures; (6) Assessing Barriers and Facilitators; (7) D&I Designs; and (8) Guideline research. These prototypes were iteratively revised for content validity and consistency. Finally, each toolkit was evaluated by two national experts in D&I science, and further refined. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: This systematic and cyclical process led to the development of 8 toolkits to support researchers in D&I science, which are now available on the DIRC Web site. This set the stage for development of new toolkits as additional needs are identified.

Black pod or Phytophthora pod rot is the most economically important and widespread disease of cacao, Theobroma cacao L. Total losses due to Phytophthora exceed $400 million worldwide (1), and several species are known to attack cacao with P. palmivora (E.J. Butler) E. J. Butler as the most common. All plant parts are infected, but pod infections are particularly damaging. Symptoms resembling those of black pod disease were observed at the National Plant Germplasm Collection System of cacao at the USDA-ARS Tropical Agriculture Research Station (TARS) in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico for a number of years. During May of 2005, to determine the etiology of the disease, small, surface disinfested sections of pod lesions were placed on water agar and incubated for 4 days. The formation of papillate, deciduous, ellipsoidal to ovoid sporangia produced on sympodial sporangiophores on fruits, fit the description of P. palmivora and the identification was confirmed on cultures on water agar (2). Chlamydospores were readily observed in diseased pods and observed in pure cultures on V8 agar (2). Eight, single hyphal tips were transferred to potato dextrose agar (PDA) (Sigma-Aldrich, St. Louis, MO) and maintained as stock cultures. For pathogenicity tests, healthy mature pods were surface disinfested and placed in a humidity chamber lined with moist paper towels. Eight isolates were tested on four fruits per isolate and the pathogenicity test was repeated once. Inoculum was prepared by growing each isolate on PDA for 5 days with irradiation at 24°C, adding approximately 3.0 ml of water to each plate, dislodging the sporangia with a glass rod, mixing the suspension, estimating spore numbers with a hemacytometer, and adjusting to 104 sporangia per ml. A small, sterile scalpel was used to make an approximately 20.0 mm cut on the fruit epidermis, and approximately 0.2 ml of inoculum was placed on the wound. Pods were evaluated daily for 2 weeks. For molecular analysis, each of the eight cultures were grown in 50% potato dextrose broth to produce mycelia for DNA extraction using the FastDNA kit (Q-Biogen1, Irvine, CA). The internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of the ribosomal RNA gene cluster was amplified, purified, and sequenced for all eight isolates. The ITS sequences of GenBank Accession Nos. DQ987915 to DQ987922 were identical and exhibited strong similarity (>99% identity) to that of three previously described isolates of P. palmivora from cacao (GenBank Accession Nos. AF 228097, AF467093, and AF467089). P. palmivora has been reported on citrus, coconut, black pepper, and Arracacia xanthorrhiza in Puerto Rico (2,3) and inoculum may have originated from these host or imported on cacao planted into the cacao collection before 2000. USDA-ARS-TARS is the official site for the cacao germplasm collection, thus, a detailed integrated pest management plan that includes the evaluation for resistance, sanitation measures, and use of fungicides to reduce disease levels has been implemented. Decreasing incidence and severity of this disease is a top priority. To our knowledge, this is the first report of P. palmivora on cacao in Puerto Rico. References: (1) M. C. T. Braga et al. Agrotropica 1:108, 1989. (2) D. Erwin and O. K. Ribeiro. Phytophthora Diseases Worldwide. The American Phytopathological Society. St. Paul, MN, 1996. (3) E. Rosa-Marquez. J. Agric. Univ. P. R. 84:53, 2000.

The aphid-transmitted Zucchini yellow mosaic virus (ZYMV; genus Potyvirus, family Potyviridae) has been reported to cause severe epidemics and yield losses in cucurbit crops worldwide (1). In Africa, ZYMV has been detected in Algeria, Egypt, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mayotte, Morocco, Nigeria, Reunion, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, and Tunisia (1). In April 2009, leaf yellowing, mosaic, crinkling, and curling were common on cucurbit plants in fields in Mali. Symptomatic leaf samples were collected from five cucumber (Cucumis sativus) plants in Kati, two watermelon (Citrullus lanatus) plants in Samanko, and one weedy melon (Cucumis sp.) plant in Baguineda. All samples tested positive for ZYMV and were negative for Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV), Cucumber green mottle mosaic virus (CGMMV), Papaya ringspot virus type W (PRSV-W), Watermelon mosaic virus (WMV), and Watermelon silver mottle virus (WSMoV) by double-antibody sandwich (DAS)-ELISA. They also tested negative for Melon yellow spot virus (MYSV) by indirect ELISA. Antibodies against ZYMV and WMV were obtained from DSMZ, Braunschweig, Germany, and those against CGMMV, MYSV, PRSV-W, and WSMoV were provided by Shyi-Dong Yeh, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan. Six ZYMV ELISA-positive samples (three cucumber, two watermelon, and the weedy melon sample) were also tested by reverse transcription (RT)-PCR using the potyvirus universal primer pair Sprimer1/Oligo(dT) (2). The expected 1.6-kb viral cDNA was amplified from all six samples and each was sequenced. All sequences obtained from cucumber (GenBank Accession Nos. HM005307, HM005308, and HM005309), watermelon (GenBank Accession Nos. HM005311 and HM005312), and weedy melon (GenBank Accession No. HM005310) isolates were 1,684 nucleotides (nt) long excluding the 3′ poly-A tails. They comprised the 3′-terminal of the NIb region (1 to 633 nt), the coat protein region (634 to 1473 nt), and the 3′-untranslated region (1,474 to 1,684 nt). Because the sequences shared high nucleotide identity (98.3 to 99.7%), these isolates were considered to be the same virus species. When the sequences were compared by BLASTn searching in GenBank and analyzed by DNAMAN Sequence Analysis Software (Lynnon Corporation, St-Louis, Pointe-Claire, Quebec, Canada), they were found to have the greatest nucleotide identity (97.4 to 98.0%) with the Connecticut strain of ZYMV (ZYMV-Connecticut; GenBank Accession No. D00692), within a clade of isolates from China, Italy, Japan, and the United States. When assessed separately, their coat protein (97.7 to 98.3% nucleotide and 98.9 to 99.6% amino acid identity) and 3′-untranslated regions (96.7 to 97.2% identity) also had greatest homology with ZYMV-Connecticut. To our knowledge, this is the first report of ZYMV infecting cucurbit plants in Mali. ZYMV should be taken into consideration when breeding cucurbit crops for this region, and managing viral diseases. References: (1) C. Desbiez et al. Plant Pathol. 46:809, 1997. (2) W. S. Tsai et al. Plant Dis. 94:378, 2010.

Purpose – This paper, a “Q & A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal, aims to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned entrepreneur regarding the evolution, commercialization and challenges of bringing a technological invention to market. Design/methodology/approach – The interviewee is Dr Robert Ambrose, Chief, Software, Robotics and Simulation Division at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. As a young child, even before he started school, Dr Ambrose knew, after seeing the Apollo 11 moonshot, that he wanted to work for NASA. Dr Ambrose describes his career journey into space robotics and shares his teams’ experiences and the importance of the development of Robonaut, a humanoid robotic project designed to work with humans both on Earth and in space. Findings – Dr Ambrose received his MS and BS degrees in mechanical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, and his PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr Ambrose heads the flight spacecraft software, space robotics and system simulations for human spaceflight missions. He oversees on-orbit robotic systems for the International Space Station (ISS), the development of software for the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle and future human spaceflight systems, simulations for engineering development and training, hardware in the loop facilities for anomaly resolution and crew training and the technology branch for development of new robotic systems. Dr Ambrose also serves as a Principal Investigator for NASA’s Space Technologies Mission Directorate, overseeing research and formulating new starts in the domains of robotics and autonomous systems. He co-chairs the Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT) Robotics, Tele-Robotics and Autonomous Systems roadmap team for the agency’s technology program, and is the robotics lead for the agency’s human spaceflight architecture study teams. Working with the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Dr Ambrose is the Technical Point of Contact for NASA’s collaboration in the National Robotics Initiative (NRI). Originality/value – Dr Ambrose not only realized his own childhood dream by pursuing a career at NASA, but he also fulfilled a 15-year national dream by putting the first humanoid robot into space. After seeking a graduate university that would allow him to do research at NASA, it didn’t take long for Dr Ambrose to foresee that the importance of NASA’s future would be in robots and humans working side-by-side. Through the leadership of Dr Ambrose, NASA formed a strategic partnership with General Motors (GM) and together they built Robonaut, a highly dexterous, anthropomorphic robot. The latest Robonaut version, R2, has nearly 50 patents available for licensing. One of the many technology spinoffs from R2 is the innovative Human Grasp Assist device, or Robo-Glove, designed to increase the strength of a human’s grasp.

A disease resembling brown ring (Waitea) patch was observed on a ‘Dominant Extreme’ creeping bentgrass (Agrostis stolonifera) green on a golf course in Maricopa County, Arizona in February 2010. The green was 17 months old and built with 95% sand and 5% peat moss. The superintendent reported seeing yellow rings, 12 to 16 cm in diameter, on several greens as early as 3 months postinstallation; the yellow rings developed into brown, necrotic rings. Symptoms started in the cool, cloudy, and moist conditions of December (5.0 to 6.7°C) and became persistent into the spring. Symptoms on the samples appeared to be yellowing of leaves and stems with the development of a dark, water-soaked appearance of the whole plant on older affected portions. The samples were incubated in a moist chamber at 22 to 25°C for 24 h. Foliar mycelium developed on the symptomatic leaves, and upon microscopic examination, the mycelium appeared to have the characteristics of Rhizoctonia spp.; i.e., a right-angled branching pattern, constriction of the hyphal branch near its point of origin, and the presence of a septum near the point of origin. The pathogen was recovered from chlorotic tissue by plating the symptomatic tissue on one-quarter-strength acidified potato dextrose agar (9.90 g of PDA and 11.26 g of granulated agar [Fisher, Lenexa, KS] and 600 ml of lactic acid [Sigma, St. Louis, MO] per liter of water) and incubating at ~27°C in light. A Rhizoctonia-like pathogen emerged from the tissue within 48 h and was tentatively identified as Waitea circinata var. circinata based on colony and bulbil morphology after 10 days of incubation (3). The recovered isolate was used for DNA extraction and subsequent amplification and sequencing of the rDNA internally transcribed spacer (ITS) region using ITS1F and ITS4 primers (2). The recovered sequence (HM807352) was compared with the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) nucleic acid database and was found to show 100% similarity to W. circinata var. circinata (FJ755879). To confirm pathogenicity, the isolate was used to fulfill Koch's postulates. The isolate was grown on autoclaved sand and corn meal (250 g of sand and 50 g of corn meal) for 4 weeks to produce inoculum. Eight grams of colonized sand and corn meal was broadcast on 4-week-old creeping bentgrass seedlings (‘Penncross’) planted in a 90:10 peat moss/sand mixture in 10-cm-diameter pots. There were three replications and the experiment was repeated twice. Negative controls consisted of plants inoculated with sand and corn meal only. Pots were maintained at 28 to 33°C in the greenhouse with ambient light. Within 4 days of inoculation, the plants showed chlorosis and necrosis, while noninoculated plants showed no symptoms. The pathogen was successfully reisolated from several plants from each replication using the method described above. This pathogen has been known to cause disease on annual and rough bluegrass (1,2) in the United States, but not confirmed as a pathogen on creeping bentgrass here. To our knowledge, this is the first report of brown ring patch on creeping bentgrass in Arizona. References: (1) C. M. Chen et al. Plant Dis. 91:1687, 2007. (2) K. de la Cerda et al. Plant Dis. 91:791, 2007. (3) T. Toda et al. Plant Dis. 89:536, 2005.

Welcome to the fourth issue of volume 43 of the IASSIST Quarterly (IQ 43:4, 2019). The first article is authored by Jessica Mozersky, Heidi Walsh, Meredith Parsons, Tristan McIntosh, Kari Baldwin, and James M. DuBois – all located at the Bioethics Research Center, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri in USA. They ask the question “Are we ready to share qualitative research data?”, with the subtitle “Knowledge and preparedness among qualitative researchers, IRB Members, and data repository curators.” The subtitle indicates that their research includes a survey of key personnel related to scientific data sharing. The report is obtained through semi-structured in-depth interviews with 30 data repository curators, 30 qualitative researchers, and 30 IRB staff members in the USA. IRB stands for Institutional Review Board, which in other countries might be called research ethics committee or similar. There is generally an increasing trend towards data sharing and open science, but qualitative data are rarely shared. The dilemma behind this reluctance to share is exemplified by health data where qualitative methods explore sensitive topics. The sensitivity leads to protection of confidentiality, which hinders keeping sufficient contextual detail for secondary analyses. You could add that protection of confidentiality is a much bigger task in qualitative data, where sensitive information can be hidden in every corner of the data, that consequently must be fine-combed, while with quantitative data most decisions concerning confidentiality can be made at the level of variables. The reporting in the article gives insights into the differences between the three stakeholder groups. An often-found answer among researchers is that data sharing is associated with quantitative data, while IRB members have little practice with qualitative. Among curators, about half had curated qualitative data, but many only worked with quantitative data. In general, qualitative data sharing lacks guidance and standards. The second article also raises a question: “How many ways can we teach data literacy?” We are now in Asia with a connection to the USA. The author Yun Dai is working at the Library of New York University Shanghai, where they have explored many ways to teach data literacy to undergraduate students. These initiatives, described in the article, included workshops and in-class instruction - which tempted students by offering up-to-date technology, through online casebooks of topics in the data lifecycle, to event series with appealing names like “Lying with Data.” The event series had a marketing mascot - a “Lying with Data” Pinocchio - and sessions on being fooled by advertisements and getting the truth out of opinion surveys. Data literacy has a resemblance to information literacy and in that perspective, data literacy is defined as “critical thinking applied to evaluating data sources and formats, and interpreting and communicating findings,” while statistical literacy is “the ability to evaluate statistical information as evidence.” The article presents the approaches and does not conclude on the question, “How many?” No readers will be surprised by the missing answer, and I am certain readers will enjoy the ideas of the article and the marketing focus. With the last article “Examining barriers for establishing a national data service,” the author Janez Štebe takes us to Europe. Janez Štebe is head of the social science data archives (Arhiv Družboslovnih Podatkov) at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) is a distributed European social science data infrastructure for access to research data. CESSDA has many - but not all - European countries as members. The focus is on the situation in 20 non-CESSDA member European countries, with emerging and immature data archive services being developed through such projects as the CESSDA Strengthening and Widening (SaW 2016 and 2017) and CESSDA Widening Activities (WA 2018). By identifying and comparing gaps and differences, a group of countries at a similar level may consider following similar best practice examples to achieve a more mature and supportive open scientific data ecosystem. Like the earlier articles, this article provides good references to earlier literature and description of previous studies in the area. In this project 22 countries were selected, all CESSDA non-members, and interviewees among social science researchers and data librarians were contacted with an e-mail template between October 2018 and January 2019. The article brings results and discussion of the national data sharing culture and data infrastructure. Yes, there is a lack of money! However, it is the process of gradually establishing a robust data infrastructure that is believed to impact the growth of a data sharing culture and improve the excellence and the efficiency of research in general. Submissions of papers for the IASSIST Quarterly are always very welcome. We welcome input from IASSIST conferences or other conferences and workshops, from local presentations or papers especially written for the IQ. When you are preparing such a presentation, give a thought to turning your one-time presentation into a lasting contribution. Doing that after the event also gives you the opportunity of improving your work after feedback. We encourage you to login or create an author login to https://www.iassistquarterly.com (our Open Journal System application). We permit authors to “deep link” into the IQ as well as to deposit the paper in your local repository. Chairing a conference session with the purpose of aggregating and integrating papers for a special issue IQ is also much appreciated as the information reaches many more people than the limited number of session participants and will be readily available on the IASSIST Quarterly website at https://www.iassistquarterly.com. Authors are very welcome to take a look at the instructions and layout: https://www.iassistquarterly.com/index.php/iassist/about/submissions Authors can also contact me directly via e-mail: kbr@sam.sdu.dk. Should you be interested in compiling a special issue for the IQ as guest editor(s) I will also be delighted to hear from you. Karsten Boye Rasmussen - December 2019

Abstract Background: Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) is the most prevalent adult leukemia in western countries and disparities in outcomes based on race have been identified. In national registry data and institutional studies, black patients were found to have worse overall survival and an earlier age at diagnosis with higher rates of adverse cytogenetics. However, racial disparities commonly correlate with access to care, comorbidities, and differences in treatment. In order to limit these potential confounders not available in other data, we studied patients in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) network to understand differences in treatment and outcomes of black vs. non-black patients with CLL in a single care delivery system. Methods: We used the Veterans Administration Central Cancer Registry to identify patients diagnosed with CLL between September 1999 and October 2015 who were identified by race. Pharmacy records were used identify patients who received fludarabine, cyclophosphamide, rituximab, bendamustine, or chlorambucil as initial treatment of CLL. Comparisons between groups were performed with t-test or chi-square as appropriate. Comorbidity was assessed with Charlson (Romano) index and median survival by the Kaplan-Meier method. Cox proportional hazards regression modeling was used to assess associations between race and while adjusting for age, comorbidity, type of treatment, time to treatment and BMI. The study was approved the Saint Louis VA Medical Center institutional review board. Results: An initial cohort of 7155 patients with CLL was identified, of whom 2597 received chemotherapy within the VHA. Of those receiving chemotherapy, 14.8% were black (345/2597). The median year of treatment was 2006. Black patients were younger (64.0 years vs. 67.1, p<0.001) with similar mean comorbidity scores (2.3 vs. 2.2 p=0.24) compared to non-black patients. The mean time from CLL diagnosis to treatment was shorter for black patients (24.2 months vs. 28.3 p=0.02). Black patients were more likely to receive fludarabine based regimens (43.6% vs. 30.2%, p<0.001) and less likely to receive chlorambucil (25.5% vs. 32.5%, p=0.01). There were no differences based on race in treatment with bendamustine (10.4% vs. 11.4%, p=0.57), cyclophosphamide (8.6% vs. 11.0%, p=0.15) or rituximab alone (11.9% vs 14.9%, p=0.13). Second line treatment was administered to 197 black patients, which was more frequent than non-black (51.2% vs. 43.9%, p=0.01). Mean overall survival from diagnosis was 68.2 months in black patients compared to 72.5 months in non-black (p=0.07) and median overall survival was 76 vs. 83 months (p=0.051) respectively. Mean survival from start of chemotherapy (43.7 months vs. 43.6, p=0.95) in black and non-black patients and median survival was 47 vs. 50 months (p=0.34) respectively. In unadjusted analyses, black race was not associated with differences in survival after chemotherapy (hazard ratio (HR) 1.07, 95% CI:0.93-1.22, p=0.34) nor in overall survival (1.14, 95% CI:0.99-1.30, p=0.051). After adjusting for age, comorbidity index, BMI, duration of observation and treatment characteristics, black race was associated with poorer overall survival (adjusted HR 1.25, 95% CI:1.08-1.44, p=0.002) and survival after chemotherapy (adjusted HR 1.22, 95% CI:1.05-1.41, p=0.008). Conclusions: In this retrospective analysis of patients treated for CLL at the VHA, black patients had worse survival compared to non-black patients in a single health care delivery system, which limits differences in access to care. Black patients were younger and had shorter periods of observation and were more frequently given first-line fludarabine. Future studies should be performed to understand potential differences in CLL disease biology in different racial groups as a potential cause of adverse outcomes in this patient population. Disclosures Carson: Washington University in St. Louis: Employment; Roche: Consultancy; Flatiron Health: Employment. Sanfilippo:BMS/Pfizer: Speakers Bureau.

During the 15th and 16th centuries, a number of long inscriptions were painted on the walls of parish churches in the territory of the medieval Hungarian Kingdom. The first known example is in the St Elisabeth’s of Kassa (Kaschau, Košice, Slovakia). The earlier inscription in the north-east chapel describes the events between 1387 and 1439 while it is continued in the south transept with a political manifestation on the side of the new-born King Ladislas V, opposed by Wladislas I. Another wall-chronicle is readable in the entrance hall of the St James’ in Lőcse (Leutschau, Levoča, Slovakia). Here the inscription, dated to ca 1500, commemorates events between 1431 and 1494, including local fires and diseases, the coronation of Ladisla V and Wladislas II and the royal meeting of John Albert of Poland and Wladislas II of Hungary held at the city in 1494. On the other side of the entrance hall, a detailed Last Judgement was painted, as the final act of world history. The inscriptions of Lőcse are usually interpreted as a manifestation of the local identity of the Saxons in the Szepes (Zips, Spiš, Slovakia) region, enjoying special privileges. This is probably also true for the second group of wall-chronicles, to be found in Transylvania in the important Saxon towns. The only surviving example is in Szeben (Hermannstadt, Sibiu, Romania), in the gallery of the western hall (Ferula). Beside some national events (coronation of King Matthias, death of Louis II) it is dealing with Transylvanian affairs between 1409 and 1566. A similar chronicle has been documented in Brassó (Kronstadt, Braşov, Romania), which started the narrative with the immigration of the Saxons and ended with 1571, with a special attention to the Ottoman wars. Unfortunately the inscriptions have been covered after the fire of 1689. Other wall-chronicles are documented by secondary sources in Segesvár (Säsßburg, Sighișoara), Medgyes (Mediasch, Mediaș), Beszterce (Bistritz, Bistrița), Muzsna (Meschen, Moșna), Baráthely (Pretai, Brateiu) and Ecel (Hetzeldorf, Ațel, all in Romania). While all these were written in Latin, a Hungarian inscription has been preserved in the Calvinist church of Berekeresztúr (Bâra, Romania) in the Szeklerland from the early 17th century. Although a misunderstanding of the sources led some scholars to suppose an inscription or an images cycle with secular content in Buda, these passages refer in reality to the Franciscan friary at Chambery. In international comparison, the Gothic wall-chronicles seem to be a rarity; the best example is known from the cathedral of Genoa, where the rebuilding of the cathedral in the early 14th century is connected to the legendary origin of the city, counterbalancing the civil war between the citizens.Decorating the walls of churches with letters instead of images is certainly aniconic, but not necessarily un-pretentious. Letters always play a decorative function whenever written on the walls. The letters, especially for the illiterate people, was a special type of ornament. Nevertheless, inscriptions, as far as their letters are readable and languages are understandable, tend to be informative. Interpreting their content depends on different levels of literacy. But they work for all as visual symbols. The longish Latin wall chronicles of Late Gothic parish churches were probably understood by the rich patricians; but the large surfaces close to the entrances might have been meaningful for all others who recognized their significance in local identity-building. The illiterate local people of the Protestant villages were unable to decipher the exact meaning of the inscriptions, even if they were in their native Hungarian language. However, these letters were necessarily eloquent for the entire community: the fact itself that there are letters decorating the walls instead of images was meaningful, reflecting the transformation of Christian culture. The letters themselves, legible or not, had a symbolic value which can be decoded taking into consideration their location, forms and context.

During the 15th and 16th centuries, a number of long inscriptions were painted on the walls of parish churches in the territory of the medieval Hungarian Kingdom. The first known example is in the St Elisabeth’s of Kassa (Kaschau, Košice, Slovakia). The earlier inscription in the north-east chapel describes the events between 1387 and 1439 while it is continued in the south transept with a political manifestation on the side of the new-born King Ladislas V, opposed by Wladislas I. Another wall-chronicle is readable in the entrance hall of the St James’ in Lőcse (Leutschau, Levoča, Slovakia). Here the inscription, dated to ca 1500, commemorates events between 1431 and 1494, including local fires and diseases, the coronation of Ladisla V and Wladislas II and the royal meeting of John Albert of Poland and Wladislas II of Hungary held at the city in 1494. On the other side of the entrance hall, a detailed Last Judgement was painted, as the final act of world history. The inscriptions of Lőcse are usually interpreted as a manifestation of the local identity of the Saxons in the Szepes (Zips, Spiš, Slovakia) region, enjoying special privileges. This is probably also true for the second group of wall-chronicles, to be found in Transylvania in the important Saxon towns. The only surviving example is in Szeben (Hermannstadt, Sibiu, Romania), in the gallery of the western hall (Ferula). Beside some national events (coronation of King Matthias, death of Louis II) it is dealing with Transylvanian affairs between 1409 and 1566. A similar chronicle has been documented in Brassó (Kronstadt, Braşov, Romania), which started the narrative with the immigration of the Saxons and ended with 1571, with a special attention to the Ottoman wars. Unfortunately the inscriptions have been covered after the fire of 1689. Other wall-chronicles are documented by secondary sources in Segesvár (Säsßburg, Sighișoara), Medgyes (Mediasch, Mediaș), Beszterce (Bistritz, Bistrița), Muzsna (Meschen, Moșna), Baráthely (Pretai, Brateiu) and Ecel (Hetzeldorf, Ațel, all in Romania). While all these were written in Latin, a Hungarian inscription has been preserved in the Calvinist church of Berekeresztúr (Bâra, Romania) in the Szeklerland from the early 17th century. Although a misunderstanding of the sources led some scholars to suppose an inscription or an images cycle with secular content in Buda, these passages refer in reality to the Franciscan friary at Chambery. In international comparison, the Gothic wall-chronicles seem to be a rarity; the best example is known from the cathedral of Genoa, where the rebuilding of the cathedral in the early 14th century is connected to the legendary origin of the city, counterbalancing the civil war between the citizens.Decorating the walls of churches with letters instead of images is certainly aniconic, but not necessarily un-pretentious. Letters always play a decorative function whenever written on the walls. The letters, especially for the illiterate people, was a special type of ornament. Nevertheless, inscriptions, as far as their letters are readable and languages are understandable, tend to be informative. Interpreting their content depends on different levels of literacy. But they work for all as visual symbols. The longish Latin wall chronicles of Late Gothic parish churches were probably understood by the rich patricians; but the large surfaces close to the entrances might have been meaningful for all others who recognized their significance in local identity-building. The illiterate local people of the Protestant villages were unable to decipher the exact meaning of the inscriptions, even if they were in their native Hungarian language. However, these letters were necessarily eloquent for the entire community: the fact itself that there are letters decorating the walls instead of images was meaningful, reflecting the transformation of Christian culture. The letters themselves, legible or not, had a symbolic value which can be decoded taking into consideration their location, forms and context.

Hox genes encode for homeodomain transcription factors well known to be involved in developmental control after gastrulation. However, the expression of some of these genes has been detected during oocyte maturation and early embryo development. An interesting expression profile has been obtained for HOXB9 in the bovine (Paul et al. 2011 Mol. Reprod. Dev. 78, 436): its relative expression increases between the immature oocyte and the zygote, further increases at the 5- to 8-cell stage to peak at the morula stage before decreasing at the blastocyst stage. The main objective of this work is to establish the HOXB9 protein profile from the immature oocyte to the blastocyst in the bovine. Bovine embryos were produced in vitro from immature oocytes obtained from slaughterhouse ovaries. Embryos were collected at the following stages: immature oocyte, mature oocyte, zygote (18 h post-insemination, hpi), 2-cell (26 hpi), 5 to 8 cell (48 hpi), 9 to 16 cell (96 hpi), morula (120 hpi), and blastocyst (180 hpi). The presence and distribution of HOXB9 proteins were detected by whole-mount immunofluorescence followed by confocal microscopy using an anti-human HOXB9 polyclonal antibody directed against a sequence showing 100% homology with the bovine protein. Its specificity to the bovine protein was controlled by Western blot on total protein extract from the bovine uterus and revealed, among a few bands of weak intensities, 2 bands of high intensity corresponding to the expected size. Oocytes or embryos were fixed and incubated overnight with rabbit anti-HOXB9 (Sigma, St. Louis, MO, USA) and mouse anti-E-cadherin (BD Biosciences, Franklin Lakes, NJ, USA) primary antibodies and then for 1 h with goat anti-rabbit Alexafluor 555 conjugated (Cell Signaling Technology, Beverly, MA, USA) and goat anti-mouse FITC-conjugated (Santa Cruz Biotechnology Inc., Santa Cruz, CA, USA) secondary antibodies. Embryos were then mounted in Vectashield containing DAPI. HOXB9 is detected from the immature oocyte to the blastocyst stage. At the immature oocyte stage, it is mainly localised in the germinal vesicle with a weak signal in the cytoplasm. At the mature oocyte stage, HOXB9 labelling is present in the cytoplasm. At the zygote stage, a stronger immunoreactivity is observed in the pronuclei than in the cytoplasm. From the 2-cell stage to the morula stage, the presence of HOXB9 is also more important in the nuclei than in the cytoplasm. HOXB9 is also observed at the blastocyst stage where it is localised in the nuclei of the trophectoderm cells, whereas an inconstant or weaker labelling is observed in the inner cell mass cells. In conclusion, we have shown for the first time the presence of the HOXB9 protein throughout early bovine embryo development. The results obtained suggest the presence of the maternal HOXB9 protein because it is already detected before the maternal to embryonic transition that occurs during the fourth cell cycle in the bovine. Finally, the pattern obtained at the blastocyst stage suggests a differential role of HOXB9 in the inner cell mass and trophectoderm cells. C. Sauvegarde holds a FRIA PhD grant from the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (Belgium).

AimsTo evaluate paracetamol dosing in paediatric patients against local1 and BNFc2 guidance following advice that toxicity can rarely occur with doses exceeding 75 mg/kg/day. Secondly to determine adherence to regular paracetamol prescriptions to establish the impact of analgesia by reviewing Wong and Baker pain assessment.3MethodThe drug charts of all paediatric inpatients on five separate days were retrospectively reviewed to identify patients prescribed paracetamol for analgesia. The drug charts were scrutinised to determine if any doses of paracetamol prescribed potentially exceeded 75 mg/kg/day. The doses, routes, frequencies, and doses in mg/kg of paracetamol prescribed were recorded. The number of regular paracetamol doses administered was compared against the prescribed frequency and the numbers of regular doses omitted with and without documented reason were recorded. The comfort round sheets were reviewed to establish if the Wong and Baker pain assessment3 were used to assess pain and results obtained before and after the first 24 hour period of regular paracetamol treatment were recorded where available.Results75 paediatric patients prescribed paracetamol for analgesia were identified over data collection period, approximately 50% split surgical: medical. One patient had no dose frequency of paracetamol prescribed hence the data of a total of 74 paediatric patients was analysed.78% of paediatric patients were prescribed paracetamol for use when required; in surgery 40% were prescribed regular paracetamol compared with 9% in medicine.Overall, 74% of paediatric patients were prescribed paracetamol at a dose of 15 mg/kg and at a frequency of QDS in line with local guidance.1Equally distributed across both medical and surgical wards, 11% of patients were prescribed doses of paracetamol potentially exceeding 75 mg/kg/day as no maximum frequency stated when prescribed 4–6 hourly prn. One surgical patient was prescribed 20 mg/kg QDS regularly hence exceeding the recommended 75 mg/kg/day, this was changed by the prescriber.16 paediatric patients were prescribed paracetamol as a regular medicine but 31% of these patients had one or more missed doses without any reason for omission documented on the drug charts. Patients who had omitted doses who had a corresponding Baker Wong pain score indicated little or no pain hence omission was appropriate although not adequately documented.ConclusionsThe majority of patients were prescribed paracetamol at the 15 mg/kg dose 4–6 hourly in keeping with the local guidance1 for inpatients but there was potential to administer up to 90 mg/kg/day when the prescribers did not specify a maximum frequency QDS.One surgical patient had been prescribed 20 mg/kg QDS which was an overdose in relation BNFc2 guidance indicating a training requirement for the surgical and anaesthetic teams.The pain assessment tool was not consistently being used to evaluate analgesia and missed doses of analgesia were not being recorded appropriately.A key message was issued to all teams to emphasise the recommended paracetamol dose and monitoring required ensuring adequate analgesia whist highlighting the need to review regular paracetamol prescriptions daily.ReferencesBedside Clinical Guidelines Partnership and Partners in Paediatrics. Paediatric guidelines2014;(6). Stoke-on-Trent: Bedside Clinical Guidelines Partnership.Royal Pharmaceutical Society. British national formulary for children – September 2015 – 20162015. London: BMJ Group and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.Wong DL, Hockenberry-Eaton M, Wilson D, Winkelstein ML, Schwartz P. Wong’s essentials of paediatric nursing (6th ed.) 2001. St. Louis: Mosby.

Background. The last quarter of the 20th century – the beginning of the 21st century, marked in Ukraine by significant social changes, actualized the necessity to turn to eternal spiritual values of national culture, among which Taras Shevchenko’s creativity takes leading positions. During this time, a number of works appeared in Ukrainian musical and stage art that supplemented the domestic “Shevchenkiana” (a total of the works devoted to Shevchenko): the operas by O. Zlotnik, V. Gubarenko, H. Maiboroda, L. Kolodub). The tradition of embodying the image of T. Shevchenko was creatively developed by O. Rudianskyi. The significant role of choral scenes in his opera “The Way of Taras” led to their involvement in revealing the leading idea of the work: to show the main periods of the life of the great poet. Choral scenes are peculiarly organized in the time-space of the opera, gaining symbolic meaning. The disclosure of this symbolism becomes the key to understanding in the modern context of the historical role of T. Shevchenko’s life and work. The purpose of this study is to identify the symbolism of chronotope in the choral dramaturgy of the opera by O. Rudianskyi. The following events from the life of Shevchenko are presented in the opera «The Way of Taras» by O. Rudianskyi (1992, 2nd ed. 2002: the libretto by V. Yurechko & V. Reva): his arrival to Kiev from St. Petersburg after the graduation of the Academy of Arts, the activity in The Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, finally, the arrest and the exile. The composer uses the choral factor in full – almost every stage of the opera has choral episodes, which receive various functions depending on the development of the dramaturgy of the opera. O. Rudianskyi created the images of the Ukrainians peasants, young men and women, children, members of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, prisoners, soldiers -- by the use of male, female, children and mixed choir compositions. The opera includes: the "Ukrainian world", which obtains its characteristic precisely due to the presence of choral singing; the "Kazakh world", which is represented mostly by solo and dancing episodes; the "Russian world", which is presented through the spoken dialogues, orchestral fragments, choral recitation. The radical contrast in the depiction of Ukraine, the Kazakh steppes, and the St. Petersburg world creates to the chronotope changes in connection with the plot: Taras Shevchenko is free in Ukraine, he is not free in Russia and Kazakhstan. The opera-biography “The Way of Taras” almost for the first time at the Ukrainian musical stage emphasizes in the image of Shevchenko, who was a poet and a painter, the versatile of his creative personality. O. Rudianskyi introduces the method of artistic documentalism in revealing the events of T. Shevchenko’s life path, but along with the real people (Kostomarov, Petrov, Veresai), there are also fictional characters (the caretaker of the steppe – «Berehynia stepu»). Each of the pictures of the opera highlights a certain episode of the biography of the hero. The fragmentary character inherent in the opera by O. Rudianskyi makes it similar the opera “in four novels” «Taras Shevchenko» by H. Maiboroda and the opera-phantasmagoria «Poet» by L. Kolodub. Two female characters in the opera, Oksana and Zabarzhada, presents as a symbol of Taras’s unrealizable love. The image of Oksana – the first love of the poet – is created due to choreography, that makes it possible to define a ballet as another genre component of the composition. The development of the female theme involves both the women’s and the mixed choirs. O. Rudianskyi found a new approach to embodiment of the personality of the artist and poet in the first picture of the opera. This is the moment when T. Shevchenko is painting one of his picture on the bank of the Dnieper, reciting, at the same time, the lines of his immortal verse «Reve ta stohne Dnipr shyrokyi» («The broad Dnieper is roaring and moaning»), which became a folk song. In the fifth picture of the opera it is being sung powerfully by the choir – all Ukrainian people. So, the poet is presented as a prophet and spiritual leader of the people. Inspired by the Poet, people spoke out against the tyranny of the authorities. T. Shevchenko’s prayer with a mixed choir «To me, O God, give love on Earth» («Meni zh, mii Bozhe, na zemli podai liubov») is the reminiscence of the first picture, where the Poet created his immortal verse (its reciting with the vocalization of the choir basses). Conclusions. Thanks to choral scenes in the opera “The Way of Taras” by O. Rudiiyansky, a single space-time is created, in which the composer gives to the choir a symbolic meaning. In the choral presentation, the song about Dnieper River sounds as a symbol of freedom of the Ukrainian people; the effect by choir “church bells” symbolizes the conciliarity of Ukraine; the Marche funebre is the personification of the soldier serve, and the words-symbols “path”, “movement” embody Poet’s fate, inextricably linked with the fate of the Ukrainian people. The symbol of the opera whole is the word-image “path”. The semantics of the path, the moving is revealed both on the stage and on the mental levels: the Dnieper waves are constantly moving, the peasants are going to work, the path of prisoners is endless, and human life itself is the Path...

Abstract INTRODUCTION : Minimal residual disease (MRD) is emerging as an important predictor of clinical outcome in patients with mantle cell lymphoma (MCL). However, its utility in everyday clinical practice remains uncertain since standardized MRD monitoring strategies and response criteria are not yet formally established. To address this question, we conducted the LyMa-MRD project as an ancillary biology study in a prospective phase III trial in MCL (NCI NCT00921414; LyMa Trial). METHODS : The present MRD analysis was performed in a subgroup of randomized patients (n=178) of the 299 MCL patients (&lt;66yrs) enrolled in the LyMa trial (Sept 2008 to Aug 2012). Briefly, all patients were previously untreated and received 4 courses of R-DHAP followed by ASCT using an R-BEAM conditioning regimen (n=257). After ASCT, patients were randomized between observation (obs) (n=120) versus Rituximab maintenance (RM) (n=119). The first planned interim-analysis, with a median follow-up of 40.6 months was presented at ASH 2014 and indicated superior PFS in the RM versus Obs arms (Le Gouill et al. ASH 2014). Sequential MRD monitoring was a predefined secondary objective and was performed throughout. At interim analysis the aim was to determine if peripheral blood (PB) and/or bone marrow (BM) MRD status, pre- and post ASCT, can predict patient outcome in terms of PFS according to RM or Obs. MRD was quantitatively assessed in PB and / or BM after induction, after ASCT by using gold standard EURO-MRD RQ-PCR assays and interpretation guidelines, targeted to clonal immunoglobulin gene rearrangements, in national reference laboratories. MRD data for survival analysis was generated from assays with a minimal sensitivity of at least 10-4. MRD status was assigned according to EURO-MRD interpretation guidelines. MRD negativity at a given time point was defined as absence of RQ-PCR amplification product in a given follow-up sample (minimal assay sensitivity of 10-4). RESULTS: Among the 299 patients enrolled in the LyMa trial, MRD data in PB and / or BM was successfully generated pre- and/or post-ASCT phases, for a total of 178 randomized patients. Of the 61 out of 239 randomized patients without MRD data, 9 are ongoing and other reasons were no MRD target or MRD assay failure. Pre-ASCT MRD in BM and PB was negative in 66% (n=98) and 80% (n=120), of samples, respectively. Post-ASCT, MRD in BM and PB was found negative in 82% (n=122) and 95% (n=162), respectively. MRD status pre-ASCT in either BM or PB was predictive of longer PFS (respectively; p= 0.0451, p= 0.0016). In contrast, PB MRD status, post-ASCT failed to predict PFS while there was a trend for a better PFS for patients achieving MRD negativity in the BM (median PFS: NR vs 43.4 months ; p= 0.07 ). We next investigated patient outcome according to MRD status pre-ASCT and randomization arms. In BM and PB, respectively, 72% and 79% of patients in the obs arm were MRD negative compared to 59% and 80% in the RM arm, respectively. The estimated 3y-PFS for MRD pos/obs, neg/obs, pos/RM, neg/RM patients, according to BM and PB MRD status were: 61,6% (IC95%, 35.4-79.8) vs 83.9% (IC95%, 70.1-91.7) vs 86.2% (IC95%, 67.3-94.6) vs 91.8% (IC95%, 76.3-97.3) (p=0.0110) and 51.8% (IC95%, 24.4-73.6) vs 86.5% (IC95%, 73.5-93.4) vs 80% (IC95%, 50-93.1) vs 92.8% (IC95%, 81.6-97.3) ( p=0.0027), respectively. CONCLUSION : Pre-ASCT MRD status in both BM and PB is an early predictor of PFS in younger MCL patients receiving ASCT. RM provides longer PFS regardless of MRD status pre-ASCT. Early sequential MRD monitoring at the pre-ASCT treatment phase thus offers strong potential for early clinical outcome prediction and MRD-guided, risk-adapted treatment in future MCL trials. Our preliminary results also suggest continued, clinically relevant, direct or indirect Rituximab-mediated anti-tumor activity, in rare residual circulating or 'tissue-resident' MCL cells. Disclosures Thieblemont: St. Louis Hospital, Paris, France: Employment. Casasnovas:Roche: Consultancy, Research Funding; Takeda: Consultancy; Gilead: Consultancy. Ribrag:Pharmamar: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Gilead: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Servier: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding.

Abstract Background: Hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH) is a severe clinical syndrome characterized by the activation of mononuclear phagocytic system. Patients (pts) typically present with fever, cytopenias, splenomegaly, hyperferritinemia and hemophagocytosis. There are two categories of HLH: primary (familial) and secondary (acquired). Primary HLH (FHL) is caused by genetic defects in proteins involved in cytotoxic function in T and NK cells, and occurs most commonly in children; though hypomorphic mutations in the same genes may cause adult-onset FHL. In contrast, secondary HLH typically occurs in adults, and is due to underlying infectious, autoimmune, and malignant disorders. The limited knowledge about secondary adult HLH is derived from case reports or case series involving few pts. The current study is the first collaborative effort to describe the etiology, clinical characteristics and outcomes in a large cohort of adult HLH pts. Methods: All adult (≥18 years) pts with a diagnosis of HLH according to the HLH-04 criteria seen at Barnes Jewish Hospital, St. Louis, MO (from October 2003 through June 2014) and at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN (from January 1996 through May 2014) were identified. Five of the following eight criteria are considered diagnostic of HLH according to the HLH-04 criteria: 1) fever ≥38.50C; 2) splenomegaly; 3) cytopenia of two or three lines: ANC <1 × 109/L, hemoglobin <9 g/dL, platelet count <100 × 109/L; 4) serum triglycerides ≥265 mg/dL or serum fibrinogen ≤150 mg/dL; 5) serum ferritin ≥500 mcg/L; 6) soluble IL-2 receptor ≥2400 U/mL; 7) low/absent NK cell activity; and 8) biopsy-proven hemophagocytosis. Pts who were treated as HLH but did not fulfill the diagnostic criteria were excluded. The most likely etiology of HLH (malignancy, infection, autoimmune, and idiopathic) was assigned for each patient based on standard diagnostic criteria. Clinical characteristics were compared using Chi-square, student’s t-test and Mann-Whitney test, as appropriate. Overall survival (OS), defined as time from HLH diagnosis to death from any cause, was assessed using Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and log-rank tests. The Institutional Review Boards of both institutions approved this study. Results: One hundred and sixteen adult pts with HLH were identified. Their median age at diagnosis was 50 years (range, 18-82); 69 (58%) pts were male. The clinical and laboratory findings of pts according to HLH-04 criteria are summarized in Table 1. At diagnosis, the median serum ferritin was 18510 mcg/L (range, 561-684,000), median serum fibrinogen was 169 mg/dL (range, 50-766), and median serum triglycerides was 307 mg/dL (range, 68-1475). Ninety-one (78%) pts had transaminitis; 97/106 (92%) pts had hypoalbuminemia; 86/114 (75%) pts had elevated PT and/or aPTT; and 51 (44%) pts had renal insufficiency. The causes of HLH were as follows: 43 (37%) malignancies, 42 (36%) infections, 15 (13%) attributed to autoimmune disorders and primary immunodeficiencies, and 16 (14%) were idiopathic. After a median follow-up of 1.5 months, 70 (60.3%) pts have died. The median OS of the entire cohort was 2.8 months (range, 0.1-73.1 months), with a 5-year overall survival of 20%. Pts with malignancy-associated HLH had a markedly worse survival (median=1.2 months) compared to pts with non-malignancy-associated HLH (median=13.8 months, p < 0.0001, Figure 1). In a multivariable analysis, malignancy-associated HLH (hazard ratio [HR] = 4.4; 95% CI: 1.7-11.3; p = 0.002) and male gender (HR = 2.8, 95% CI: 1.2-6.5; p = 0.02) were independently associated with shorter survival. Conclusions: The triad of fever, cytopenias and elevated ferritin (present in >80% of pts in this series) should alert physicians to a possible diagnosis of adult HLH. Survival after a diagnosis of HLH is dismal, especially among those with malignancy-associated HLH. The development of a national registry for adults with HLH will be beneficial to further our understanding of this condition and develop effective treatment strategies. Table 1: Clinical and laboratory findings according to the HLH-04 criteria Characteristic No. (%) of patients Fever 112/116 (97) Splenomegaly 75/116 (65) Bicytopenia or pancytopenia 95/116 (82) Hypertriglyceridemia 71/107 (66) Hypofibrinogenemia 50/107 (47) Hemophagocytosis 95/111 (86) Hyperferritinemia 115/115 (100) Elevated soluble IL-2 33/40 (82) Absent or decreased NK cell function 12/22 (54) Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

AbstractAs was the case with silversmiths (Note 3), many more cabinet-makers were wcrking in Amsterdam during the second half of the 18th century than in any other city in the Dutch Republic, the names of 195 of them being now known as opposed to 57 in The Hague and 32 in Rotterdam (Note 2). Most of those 195 names have been culled from the few surviving documents of the Guild of St. Joseph in Amsterdam, to which the cabinet-makers belonged (Note 4), supplemented by other sources, such as printed registers of craftsmen and shopkeepers (Note 6). Another important source is the newspaper the Amsterdamsche Courant with its advertisements placed by craftsmen themselves, with notices of sales, bankruptcies, lotteries and annual fairs and with advertisements concerning subsidiary or related trades. Since these advertisements were directed at the consumer, they often contain stylistic descriptions such as are not found elsewhere. Moreover, they aford valuable clues to archival material. Hence an investigation of all the advertisements from the years 1751-1800 has formed the basis for a study of Amsterdam cabinet-making, some results of which are presented here. Such a study is doomed largely to remain theoretical. The records can hardly ever be linked with surviving pieces, as these are virtually always anonymous since Amsterdam cabinet-makers were not required to stamp or sign their work. Moreover, only a few pieces of Dutch 18th-century furniture have a known provenance, so that it is only rarely possible to link a piece with a bill or another document and identify its maker. Thus it is not yet possible to form a reliable picture of a local Amsterdam style, let alone embark on attributions to individual makers (Note 8). In this light special importance may be attached to two commodes of the third quarter of the century which are exceptional in that they bear a signature, that of Andries Bongen (Figs. 1, 2, Notes 10, 11). These commodes, being entirely French-inspired, illustrate a specific and little-known aspect of Amsterdam cabinet-making. French furniture was so sought after in Amsterdam at that period that in 1771 a strict ban was imposed on its importation in order to protect local cabinet-makers (Note 12). It had begun to be imitated even before that and the commodes by Bongen exemplify this development. Andries Bongen, who was probably born in Geldern, south of Cleves and just east of the border of the Dutch Republic, is first recorded in Amsterdam in May 1763 on his marriage to Willemina, daughter of the smith Lambert van der Beek. He registered as a citizen on 5 July 1763 and became a master cabinet-maker some time between March 1763 and March 1764 (Note 19), so that, accordirtg to the Guild regulations, he must previously have trained for two years under an Amsterdam master (Note 20). At the time of his marriage he was living in St. Jorisstraat, but by the end of 1766 he had moved to Spui and between 1769 and 1771 he moved again, to Muiderpleinlje. When he and his wife made their will in 1772, their possessions were worth something under 8000 guilders (Note 23). This suggests that the business was quite flourishing, which seems to be confirmed by the fact that Bongen received a commission from the city of Amsterdam in 1771. Two more pieces were made for the city in 1786 and 1789, but in the latter year Bongen was declared bankrupt. The inventory of his possessions drawn up then (see Appeytdix) shows how parlous his conditions had become, his goods being valued at only 300 guilders. The reference to a shop indicates that Bongen sold his own furniture, although he had no stock to speak of at that point. The mention of eight work-benches, however, sugests that his output had previously been quite large. This is confirmed by the extent of his debts, notably that to the timber merchant Jan van Mekeren (Note 27). Other creditors included 'Rudolfeus Eyk', who probably supplied iron trelliszvork for bookcases and the like (Note 28), and the glass merchants Boswel en Zonen (Note 29) No debtors are listed and the only customer who can tentatively be identified is a 'Heer Hasselaar' who might be Pieter Cornelis Hasselaer (1720-95), several times burgomaster of Amsterdam between 1773 and 1794 (Note 30). Bongen died three years after his bankruptcy, at which time he was living in Nieuwe Looiersstraat. He appears to have continued working as a cabiytet-maker up to his death and his widow probably carried on the business until her own death in 1808, but nothing is known of this later period. The clearest insight into the character of part of Bongen's output is aforded by the advertisement he placed in the Amsterdamsehe Courant of 4 December 1766, describing three pieces of furniture 'in the French manner'. This is the first announcement by an 18th-century Amsterdam cabinet-maker of work in the French style. Bongen mentions two commodes decorated with floral marquetry, a technique which had flourished in Amsterdam in the late 17th and early 18th centuries (Note 34), but which had largely fallen into disuse on the advent around 1715 of a more sober type of furniture with plain walnut veneers on the English model (Note 36). In France a form of floral marquetry reappeared in the 1740s, being further developed in the following decade under the influence of Jean-François Oeben (1721-63). From the late 1750s there are indications of the presence of pieces of French marquetry furniture in the new style in Amsterdam (Notes 42, 43). The earliest explicit description of floral marquetry appears in a sale catalogue of 5 June 1765 (Note 44), while in another of 25 March 1766 (Note 46) many French pieces are detailed. Obviously, then, Bongen was endeavouring to capture a share, of this new market. The reappearance of elaborate marquetry on Amsterdam-made furniture was the result of a desire to emulate the French examples. The two commodes described in Bongen's advertisement can be identified with the one now in Amsterdam (Fig.2) and the one sold in London in 1947 (Fig.1). The latter still had more of its original mounts at the time nf the sale (Fig. 4) and the two probably formed a pair originally. The unusual fact that they are signed indicates that Bongen intended them to serve as show-pieces to demonstrate his skill at the beginning of his career (cf. Note 51, for another craftsman from abroad who began his career in Amsterdam by similarly advertising a spectacular piece). The commode in Amsterdam, with all its original mounts, demonstrates most clearly how close Bongen came to French prototypes, although his work has many personal traits nonetheless. In the marquetry the vase on a plinth on the front and the composition of the bouquets on the sides are notable (Fig.5), as are the large, full-blown blooms. The carcase, made entirely of oak, is remarkably well constructed and has a heavy, solid character. The commodes are outstanding for the complete integration of the marquetry and the mounts, in the manner of the finesl French furniture. The mounts presenl a problem, as it is not clear where they were made. They do not appear to be French or English, but one hesitates to attribute them to Amsterdam, as it is clear from documentary material that ornamental furniture-mounts were hardly ever made there in the second half of the 18th century. The mounts advertised by Ernst Meyrink in 1752 (Note 53) were probably still of the plain variety of the early part of the century and there is no further mention of mounts made in Amsterdam in the Amsterdamsche Courant. Once, in 1768, the silversmith J. H. Strixner placed an advertisement which refers to their gilding (Note 55). There is virtually no indication either of French mounts being imported and there is little Dutch furniture of this period that bears mounts which are indisputably French. In contrast to this, a large number of advertisements from as early as 1735 show that many mounts were imported from England, while among English manufacturers who came to sell their wares in Amsterdam were Robert Marshall of London (Note 60), James Scott (Note 61), William Tottie of Rotterdam (Note 62), whose business was continued after his death by Klaas Pieter Sent (Note 64), and H. Jelloly, again of Rotterdam (Notes 66, 67). It seems surprising that in a period when the French style reigned supreme so many mounts were imported from England, but the English manufacturers, mainly working in Birmingham, produced many mounts in the French style, probably often directed expressly at foreign markets. On the two commodes by Bongen only the corner mounts and the handles are of types found in the trade-catalogues of the English manufacturers (Figs. 7, 8, Notes 65, 70). The corner mounts are of a common type also found on French furniture (Note 71), so they doubtless copy a French model. The remaining mounts, however, are the ones which are so well integrated with the marquetry and these are not found elsewhere. Recently a third commode signed by Bongen has come to light, of similar character to the first two (Fig.3). Here all the mounts are of types found in the catalogues (Figs.7-10, Note 72). Apparently Bongen could not, or did not choose to, obtain the special mounts any more, although he clearly wanted to follow the same design (Fig. 6). This third commode was undoubtedly made somewhal later than the other two. The marquetry on it is the best preserved and it is possible to see how Bongen enlivened it with fine engraving. Because this piece is less exceptional, it also allows us to attribute some unsigned pieces to Bongen on the basis of their closeness to it, namely a commode sold in London in 1962 (Fig.11, Note 73) and two smaller, simpler commodes, which may originally have formed a pair, one sold in London in 1967 (Fig.12, Nole 74) and the other in a Dutch private collection (Figs.13, 14). The first one has a highly original marquetry decoration of a basket of flowers falling down. On the sides of this piece, and on the front of the two smaller ones, are bouquets tied with ribbons. These were doubtless influenced by contemporary engravings, but no direct models have been identified. The construction of the commode in the Netherlands tallies completely with tltat of the signed example in Amsterdam. The mounts are probably all English, although they have not all been found in English catalogues (Fig.15, Note 76). A seventh commode attributable to Bongen was sold in Switzerland in 1956 (Fig.16, Note 77). It is unusual in that walnut is employed as the background for the floral marquetry, something virtually unknown in Paris, but not uncommon on German work of French inspiration (Note 78). That commodes constitute the largest group among the furniture in the French style attributable to Bongen should cause no surprise, for the commode was the most sought after of all the pieces produced by the ébénistes not only in France, but all over Europe. Two other pieces which reveal Bongen's hand are two tables which look like side-tables, but which have fold-out tops to transform them into card-tables, a type seldom found in France, but common in England and the Netherlands (Note 80). One is at Bowhill in Scotland (Figs.17, 19, 20), the other was sold in London in 1972 (Fig.18, Note 79). The corner mounts on the Bowhill table, which probably also graced the other one originally, are the same as those on the two small commodes, while the handles are again to be found in an English catalogue (Fig.21, Note 81). What sounds like a similar card-table was sold at auction in Amsterdam in 1772 (Note 82). In Bongen's advertisement of 1766 mention is also made of a secretaire, this being the first appearance of this term in the Amsterdamsche Courant and Bongen finding it necessary to define it. No secretaire is known that can be attributed to him. A medal-cabinet in the form of a secretaire in Leiden (Figs.22, 23) hasfloral marquetry somewhat reminiscent of his work, but lacking its elegance, liveliness and equilibrium. Here the floral marquetry is combined with trompe l'oeil cubes and an interlaced border, early Neo-Classical elements which were first employed in France in the 1750s, so that this piece represents a later stage than those attributable to Bongen, which are all in a pure Louis xvstyle. Virtually identical in form to the medal-cabinet is a secretaire decorated solely with floral marquetry (Fig. 24, Note 87). This also appears not to be by Bongen, but both pieces may have been made under his influence. The picture we can form of Bongen's work on the basis of the signed commodes is clearly incomplete. His secretaire was decorated with '4 Children representing Trade', an exceptionally modern and original idea in 1766 even by French standards (Note 88). His ambitions in marquetry obviously wentfar beyondflowers, but no piece has yet beenfound which evinces this, nor is anything known of the Neo-Classical work which he may have produced after this style was introduced in Amsterdam around 1770. Bongen may perhaps have been the first Amsterdam cabinet-maker to produce marquetry furniture in the French style, but he was not to remain the only one. In 1771 and 1772 furniture in both the Dutch and French mode was advertised for sale at the Kistenmakerspand in Kalverstraat, where all furniture-makers belonging to the Guild of St. Joseph could sell their wares (Note 89). The 'French' pieces were probably decorated with marquetry. Only a small number of cabinet-makers are known to have worked in this style, however. They include Arnoldus Gerritsen of Rheestraat, who became a master in 1769 and sold his stock, including a 'small French inlaid Commode', in 1772, and Johan Jobst Swenebart (c.1747 - active up to 1806 or later), who became a master in 1774 and advertised in 1775 that he made 'all sorts of choice Cabinet- and Flower-works', the last term referring to furniture decorated with floral marquetry. Not only French types of furniture, but also traditional Dutch pieces were now decorated with French-inspired marquetry,for example a collector's cabinet advertised in 1775 by Johan Jacob Breytspraak (c.1739-95), who had become a master in 1769-70; a bureau-bookcase, a form introduced in the first half of the century probably under English influence (Note 100), exhibited in 1772 (Note 99); and a display cabinet for porcelain supplied, though not necessarily made, by Pieter Uylenburg en Zoon in 1775 (Notes 101, 102). Even long-case clocks were enriched with marquetry, witness the one advertised by the clock-maker J. H. Kühn in 1775 and another by him which was sold by auction in Edam in 1777 (Note 104). The latter was, like the bureau-bookcase exhibited in 1772, decorated with musical instruments, again a motif borrowed from France, where it was used increasingly from the 1760s onwards (Note 105). A clock signed by the Amsterdam clock-maker J. George Grüning also has a case with marquetry of musical instruments. This must date from about 1775-80, but its maker is unknown (Fig. 25, Notes 106, 107). All four of the Amsterdam cabinet-makers known to have done marquetry around 1770 came from Germany and all were then only recently established in Amsterdam. In fact half of the 144 Amsterdam cabinet-makers working in the second half of the 18th century whose origins it has been possible to trace came from Germany, so the German element was even stronger there than in Paris, where Germans comprised about a third of the ébénistes (Note 108) and where they had again played an important role in the revival of marquetry. None qf the four in Amsterdam was exclusively concerned with marquetry. Indeed, for some of them it may only have been a secondary aspect of their work. This was not true of Bongen, but he too made plain pieces, witness the four mahogany gueridons he made for the city of Amsterdam in 1771 or the two cupboards also made for the city in 1786 and 1789 (Notes 111, 112).No marquetry is listed in his inventory either. Perhaps fashions had changed by the time of his bankruptcy. Such scant knowledge as we have of Amsterdam cabinet-making between 1775 and 1785 certainly seems to suggest this. In the descriptions of the prizes for furraiture-lotteries, such as took place regularly from 1773 onwards (Note 114), marquetry is mentioned in 1773 and 1775 (Notes 115, 116), but after that there is no reference to itfor about tenyears. Nor is there any mention of marquetry in the very few cabinet-makers' advertisements of this period. When the clock-maker Kühn again advertised long-case clocks in 1777 and 1785, the cases were of carved mahogany (Notes 121, 122). Certainly in France the popularity of marquetry began to wane shortly before 1780 and developments in the Netherlands were probably influenced by this. Towards the end of the 1780s, however, pieces described as French and others decorated with 'inlaid work' again appear as prizes in lotteries, such as those organized by Johan Frederik Reinbregt (active 1785-95 or later), who came from Hanover (Note 128), and Swenebart. The latter advertised an inlaid mahogany secretaire in 1793 (Note 132) and similar pieces are listed in the announcement of the sale of the stock of Jean-Matthijs Chaisneux (c.1734-92), one of a small group of French upholsterers first mentioned in Amsterdam in the 1760s, who played an important part in the spread of French influence there (Note 134). In this later period, however, reference is only made to French furniture when English pieces are also mentioned, so a new juxtaposition is implied and 'French' need not mean richly decorated with marquetry as it did in the 1760s. In fact the marquetry of this period was probably of a much more modest character. A large number of pieces of Dutch furniture in the late Neo-Classical style are known, generally veneered with rosewood or mahogany, where the marquetry is confined to trophies, medallions on ribbons, geometric borders and suchlike. A sideboard in the Rijksmuseum is an exceptionally fine and elaborately decorated example of this light and elegant style (Fig. 26) None of this furniture is known for certain to have been made in Amsterdam, but two tobacco boxes with restrained marquetry decoration (Fig.27, Note 136) were made in Haarlem in 1789 by Johan Gottfried Fremming (c.1753-1832) of Leipzig, who had probably trained in Amsterdam and whose style will not have differed much from that current in the capital. Boxes of this type are mentioned in the 1789 inventory of the Amsterdam cabinet-maker Johan Christiaan Molle (c.1748-89) as the only pieces decorated with inlay (Note 138). In the 1792 inventory of Jacob Keesinger (active 1764-92) from Ziegenhain there are larger pieces of marquetry furniture as well (Note 139), but they are greatly in the minority, as is also the case with a sale of cabinet-makers' wares held in 1794 (Note 141), which included a book-case of the type in Fig.28 (Note 142). Similarly the 1795 inventory of Johan Jacob Breytspraak, one of the most important and prosperous cabinet-makers of the day, contains only a few marquetry pieces (Note 144). The 1793 inventory of Hendrik Melters (1720-93) lists tools and patterns for marquetry, but no pieces decorated with it (Note 145). Melters seems to have specialized in cases for long-case clocks, the Amsterdam clock-maker Rutgerus van Meurs (1738-1800) being one of his clients (Note 146). The cases of clocks signed by Van Meurs bear only simple marquetry motifs (Note 147). The Dutch late Neo-Classical furniture with restrained marquetry decoration has no equivalent in France; it is more reminiscent of English work (Note 148). The pattern-books of Hepplewhite and Sheraton undoubtedly found their way to the Dutch Republic and the 'English' furniture mentioned in Amsterdam sources from 1787 probably reflected their influence. However, the introduction of the late, restrained Neo-Classical style in furniture was not the result of English influence alone. Rather, the two countries witnessed a parallel development. In England, too, marquetry was re-introduced under French influence around 1760 and it gradually became much simpler during the last quarter of the century, French influences being amalgamated into a national style (Notes 150, 151). On the whole, the Frertch models were followed more closely in the Netherlands than in England. Even at the end of the century French proportions still very much influenced Dutch cabinet-making. Thus the typically Dutch late Neo-Classical style sprang from a combirtation of French and English influences. This makes it difficult to understand what exactly was meant by the distinction made between ;French' and 'English' furniture at this time. The sources offer few clues here and this is even true of the description of the sale of the stock of the only English cabinet-maker working in Amsterdam at this period, Joseph Bull of London, who was active between 1787 and 1792, when his goods were sold (Notes 155, 156).

Starch quality is one of the most important agronomic traits in rice (Oryza sativa L). In this study, we identified single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the Waxy and Alk genes of eight rice varieties and their associations with starch physicochemical properties.vi.e.vamylose content (AC) and gelatinization temperature (GT). Seven Sri Lankan rice varieties, Pachchaperumal, Herathbanda, At 354, Bg 352, Balasuriya, H 6 and Bw 295-5 were detected as high amylose varieties while Nipponbare exhibited low amylose content. In silico analysis of the Waxy gene revealed that all tested Sri Lankan varieties possessed ‘G’ (Wxa allele) instead of ‘T’ in the first intron which could explain varieties with high and intermediate amylose content. All Sri Lankan varieties had ‘A’ instead of ‘C’ in exon 6 of the Waxy gene and this fact was tally with the varieties showing high amylose content. Therefore, possessing the Wxa allele in the first intron and ‘A’ in exon 6 could be used as a molecular marker for the selection of high amylose varieties as validated using several Sri Lankan varieties. All Sri Lankan varieties except, Bw 295-5 exhibited the intermediate type of GT which could not be explained using the so far reported allelic differences in the Alk gene. However, Bw 295-5 which is a low GT variety had two nucleotide polymorphisms in the last exon of the Alk gene, i.e. ‘G’ and ‘TT’ that represent low GT class. Therefore, it can be concluded that sequence variations of Waxy and Alk genes reported in this study are useful in breeding local rice varieties with preferential amylose content and GT class.Key word Alk gene, amylose content, single nucleotide polymorphism, Waxy gene.INTRODUCTIONRice (Oryza sativa L.) is one of the leading food crops of the world. More than half of the world’s population relies on rice as the major daily source of calories and protein (Sartaj and Suraweera, 2005). After grain yield, quality is the most important aspect of rice breeding. Grain size and shape largely determine the market acceptability of rice, while cooking quality is influenced by the properties of starch. In rice grains starch is the major component that primarily controls rice quality. Starch consists of two forms of glucose polymers, relatively unbranched amylose and a highly branched amylopectin. Starch-synthesizing genes may contribute to variation in starch physicochemical properties because they affect the amount and structure of amylose and amylopectin in rice grain (Kharabian-Masouleh et al., 2012). Amylose content (AC), gelatinization temperature (GT) and gel consistency (GC) is the three most important determinants of eating and cooking quality. Amylose content is the ratio of amylose amount present in endosperm to total starch content. Rice varieties are grouped based on their amylose content into waxy (0-2%), very low (3-9%), low (10-19%), intermediate (20-25%), and high (> 25%) (Kongseree and Juliano, 1972). The most widely used method for amylose determination is a colorimetric assay where iodine binds with amylose to produce a blue-purple color, which is measured spectrophotometrically at a single wavelength (620nm). Low amylose content is usually associated with tender, cohesive and glossy cooked rice; while, high amylose content is associated with firm, fluffy and separate grains of cooked rice. The Waxy (Wx) gene, which encodes granule-bound starch synthase I (GBSSI), is the major gene controlling AC in rice (Nakamura, 2002). The Waxy gene is located on chromosome six and various single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of Wx were found, including a ‘G’ to ‘T’ SNP of the first intron, ‘A’ to ‘C’ SNP of the sixth exon and ‘C’ to ‘T’ SNP of the tenth exon (Larkin and Park, 2003). The ‘AGGTATA’ sequence at the 5’splice-junction coincides with the presence of the Wxa allele, while the ‘AGTTATA’ sequence coincides with the presence of the Wxb allele. Therefore, all intermediate and high amylose cultivars had ‘G’ nucleotide while low amylose cultivars had ‘T’ nucleotide at the putative leader intron 5′ splice site. The cytosine and thymidine (CT) dinucleotide repeats in the 5’- untranslated region (UTR) of the Waxy gene were reported to be a factor associated with AC. However, the relationship between these polymorphisms and amylose contents is not clear. Amylopectin chain length distribution plays a very important role to determine GT in cooked rice. The time required for cooking is determined by the gelatinization temperature of starch. It is important because it affects the texture of cooked rice and it is related to the cooking time of rice. The gelatinization temperature is estimated by the alkali digestibility test. It is measured by the alkali spreading value (ASV). The degree of spreading value of individual milled rice kernels in a weak alkali solution (1.7% KOH) is very closely correlated with gelatinized temperature. According to the ASV, rice varieties may be classified as low (55 to 69°C), intermediate (70 to 74°C) and high (> 74°C) GT classes. In a breeding program ASV is extensively used to estimate the gelatinization temperature. The synthesis of amylopectin is more complex than that of amylose. Polymorphisms in the starch synthase IIa (SSIIa) gene which is recognized as the Alk gene are responsible for the differences in GT in rice (Umemoto and Aoki, 2005; Waters et al., 2006). Two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the last exon of the Alk gene are responsible for the differences in GT in rice. The biochemical analysis clearly showed that the function of the amino acids caused by these two SNPs is essential for SSIIa enzyme activity (Nakamura et al., 2005) and those are ‘G’/‘A’ SNP at 4424 bp position and ‘GC’/‘TT’ SNPs at 4533/4534 bp position with reference to Nipponbare rice genomic sequence. Based on the SNPs, Low SSIIa enzyme activity results in S-type amylopectin, which is enriched in short chains whereas high SSIIa enzyme activity produces L-type amylopectin (Umemoto et al., 2004). Therefore, the combination of ‘G’ at SNP3 and ‘GC’ at SNP4 is required to produce L-type rice starch and this has a higher GT relative to S-type starch. GC is a standard assay that is used in rice improvement programs to determine the texture of softness and firmness in high amylose rice cultivars. Intermediate and low amylose rice usually has soft gel consistency. Sequence variation in exon 10 of the Waxy gene associates with GC (Tran et al., 2011).OBJECTIVES The objectives of this study were to detect polymorphisms in major starch synthesizing genes among several rice cultivars as models and to determine the relationship between their SNP variations and starch physicochemical properties. Also, we analyzed major starch synthesizing gene sequences of several Sri Lankan rice varieties in silico aiming at utilizing this information in rice breeding programs.MATERIALS AND METHODSPlant materials: Seeds of eight Oryza sativa L. accessions were obtained from the Rice Research and Development Institute (RRDI), Bathalagoda, Sri Lanka and Gene Bank of Plant Genetic Resource Center (PGRC), Gannoruwa.Characterization of grain physical parameters: Grain length and width were determined using a vernier caliper. Ten grains from each sample were collected randomly and measured to obtain the average length and width of the milled rice. The average length and width were recorded as their length and width. Based on the length and width of the grains, the milled rice grains were classified into four classes (table 1) according to the method accepted by RRDI Bathalagoda, Sri Lanka.According to the scale L/S – Long Slender, L/M – Long Medium, I/B – Intermediate Bold and S/R –Short RoundAnalysis of amylose content: Initially, rice samples were dehusked and polished prior to milling. Ten whole – milled rice kernels of eight rice samples were ground separately by using mortar and pestle. Amylose content per 100 mg was determined by measuring the blue value of rice varieties as described by Juliano (1971). About 100mg rice sample was shifted into a 100 mL volumetric flask and 1mL of 95% ethanol was added. Then 9mL of 1N NaOH was added and the content was boiled for 20min. at boiling temperature to gelatinize the starch. After cooling the content, the volume was made up to 100mL and 5mL of starch solution was pipetted out into a 100mL volumetric flask. The blue color was developed by adding 1mL of 1N acetic acid and 2 mL of iodine solution (0.2g iodine and 2.0g potassium iodine in 10 mL aqueous solution). Then volume was made up to 100mL with distilled water and the solution was kept for 20min. after shaking. Finally, the absorbance of the solution was measured at 620nm using Spectrophotometer T80 (PG Instruments Limited) as described by Juliano (1971). The standard curve was prepared using 40mg of potato-amylose to calculate the amylose content of rice varieties through absorbance values. Forty mg of potato amylose was put into a 100 mL of volumetric flask and 1ml of 95% ethanol and 9mL of NaOH were added and content was heated for 20min at boiling temperature. After cooling the content volume of the solution was made up to 100mL using distilled water. Then 1mL, 2mL, 3mL, 4mL and 5mL of amylose solution were pipetted out into 100mL flasks. Then 0.2mL, 0.4mL, 0.6mL, 0.8mL and 1mL of 1N acetic acid were added to the flasks respectively. Finally, 2mL of iodine solution was added to each flask and volume was made up to 100mL with distilled water. Solutions were stood up for 20min. after shaking and absorbance values were measured at 620nm. Measured absorbance values were plotted at 620nm against the concentration of anhydrous amylose (mg).Analysis of gelatinization temperature: GT was indirectly measured on rice by the alkali spreading value. Husked and polished seeds per accession were used for the analysis. Selected duplicate sets of six milled grains without cracks of each sample were put into Petri dishes. About 10mL of 1.7% KOH was added and grains were spread in the petri dish to provide enough space. The constant temperature at 30°C was maintained to ensure better reproducibility. After 23hrs, the degree of disintegration was quantified by a standard protocol with a numerical scale of 1–7 (table 2) as reported by Cruz and Khush (2000). As reported by Juliano (2003), GT of rice was determined using the alkaline spreading scale, where 1.0-2.5: High (74-80 °C), 2.6-3.4: High-intermediate (70-74 °C), 3.5-5.4: Intermediate (70-74 °C) and 5.5-7.0 Low: (55-70 °C).Bioinformatics and statistical analysis: The available literature was used to identify the most likely candidate genes associated with rice starch quality and their SNPs of each gene (Hirose et al., 2006; Waters and Henry, 2007; Tran et al., 2011). In all the tested varieties except Bg 352 and At 354, the DNA sequence of each gene was retrieved from the Rice SNP Seek database (http://snp-seek.irri.org/). The gene sequences of At 354 and Bg 352 were obtained from the National Research Council 16-016 project, Wayamba University of Sri Lanka. Multiple sequence alignment was conducted for the DNA sequence using Clustal Omegavsoftware (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/msa/clustalo/). Starch physiochemical data obtained were subjected to a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) followed by Duncan’s New Multiple Range Test (DNMRT) to determine the statistical differences among varieties at the significance level of p ≤ 0.05. Statistical analysis was done using SAS version 9.1 (SAS, 2004).ESULTS AND DISCUSSION: Physical properties of rice grains: Physical properties such as length, width, size, shape and pericarp color of rice grains obtained from eight different rice varieties are given in table 3. Classification of rice grains was carried out, according to their sizes and shapes based on Juliano (1985). The size of the rice grains was determined as per grain length while grain shape was determined by means of length and width ratio of the rice kernel. In the local market, rice is classified as Samba (short grain), Nadu (intermediate grain) and Kora (long/medium) based on the size of the grain (Pathiraje et al., 2010). Lengths of rice kernels were varied from 5.58 to 6.725 mm for all varieties. The highest grain length and width were given by At 354 and Pachchaperumal respectively. The varieties, Bw 295-5 and H 6 showed a length: width ratio over 3 which is considered as slender in grain shape. Bw 295-5, H 6, At 354, Bg 352 and Nipponbare possessed white pericarp and others possessed red pericarp.Relationship between amylose content and SNPs variation of waxy loci in selected varieties: Amylose content was measured in seven Sri Lankan rice varieties and one exotic rice variety. Amylose content of the evaluated varieties varied significantly with p ≤ 0.05 with the lowest of 15.11% and highest of 28.63% which were found in Nipponbare and Bw 295-5, respectively (table 4). The majority of the evaluated varieties fell into the high AC category (between 25-28%). Only Nipponbare could be clearly categorized under the low amylose group (table 4). The amylose content of Bg 352, Pachchaperumal and Herathbanda have already been determined by early studies of Rebeira et al. (2014) and Fernando et al. (2015). Most of the data obtained in the present experiment has agreed with the results of previous studies. Major genes such as Waxy and their functional SNPs have a major influence on amylose in rice (Nakamura et al., 2005). Accordingly, single nucleotide polymorphism, ‘G’/‘T’, at the 5’ leader intron splice site of the GBSSI has explained the variation in amylose content of varieties. Accordingly, high and intermediate amylose varieties have ‘AGGTATA’ while low amylose varieties have the sequence ‘AGTTATA’, which might lead to a decrease in the splicing efficiency. Therefore, the GBSSI activity of Nipponbare might be considerably weak and resulted in starch with low amylose content. Hence, producing ‘G’/‘T’ polymorphism clearly differentiates low amylose rice varieties, as reported by Nakamura et al. (2005). In GBSSI, Larkin and Park (2003) identified an ‘A’/‘C’ polymorphism in exon 6 and a ‘C’/‘T’ polymorphism in exon 10 which resulted in non- synonymous amino acid change. Chen et al. (2008) reported that the non-synonymous ‘A’/‘C’ SNP at exon 6 had the highest possible impact on GBSSI. Accordingly, the ‘A’/‘C’ polymorphism in exon 6 causes a tyrosine/serine amino acid substitution while the ‘C’/‘T’ polymorphism in exon 10 causes a serine/proline amino acid substitution. In view of this information, there is a relationship between the polymorphism detected by in silico analysis and amylose content obtained from our experiment. Out of the eight tested rice varieties, only one variety, Nipponbare was categorized as low amylose variety (10-19%) and it exhibited ‘T’ nucleotide at the intron splice site (table 4; figure 1). Varieties such as Pachchaperumal, Balasuriya, Bw 295-5, H 6, Herathbanda, At 354 and Bg 352 which contained high amylose (> 25%), had ‘G’ and ‘A’ nucleotides at intron splice site and exon 6 respectively (table 4; figure 1). The predominant allelic pattern of intron splice site and exon 6 are different in varieties containing intermediate amylose content (20-25%) which showed ‘G’ and ‘C’ nucleotides respectively. Of these selected rice varieties, none of the intermediate type amylose variety was found.Relationship between gel consistency and SNPs variation in Waxy loci: In this study, GC data of Herathbanda, Hondarawalu, Kuruluthuda, Pachchaperumal and Bg 352 were obtained from Fernando et al. (2015). The results of Tran et al. (2011) showed that the exon 10 ‘C’/‘T’ SNP of Wx has mainly affected GC. Accordingly, rice with a ‘C’ at exon 10 had soft and viscous gels once cooked. However, a sample with a ‘T’ had short and firm gels. In this study, Herathbanda, Hondarawalu, Kuruluthuda and Pachchaperumal had ‘C’ nucleotide and Bg 352 had ‘T’ nucleotide in exon 10 (table 5; figure 2). However, ‘C’/‘T’ substitution analysis could not be used to explain the GC of tested varieties.Relationship between gelatinized temperature and SNPs variation of Alk loci in selected rice varieties: Although there were differences in the scores, the degree of disintegration of all samples was saturated at 23 hrs. Most of the selected rice varieties showed the intermediate disintegration score. Varieties, Pachchaperumal, Balasuriya, H 6, Herathbanda, At 354 and Bg 352 were categorized into intermediate GT class (70–74°C) as indicated by an alkali spreading (AS) value of 5 (table 6; figure 3). Nipponbare and Bw 295-5 showed the highest disintegration score indicating the dispersion of all grains. Hence these varieties were categorized into low GT class (55-69°C) as indicated by an AS value of 6 (table 6; figure 3). However, high GT class rice varieties (> 74°C) were not found in the tested samples. Chromosomal mutation within the Alk gene has led to a number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Umemoto et al. (2004) identified four SNPs in Alk gene. Thus, SNP3 and SNP4 may be important genetic polymorphisms that are associated with GT class. According to the SNP3 and SNP4, eight rice varieties could be classified into either high GT or low GT types. If there is ‘A’ instead of ‘G’ at 4424 bp position of Alk gene with reference to Nipponbare rice genomic sequence, it codes methionine instead of valine amino acid residue in SSIIa, whilst two adjacent SNPs at bases 4533 and 4534 code for either leucine (‘GC’) or phenylalanine (‘TT’). Rice varieties with high GT starch had a combination of valine and leucine at these residues. Rice varieties with low GT starch had a combination of either methionine and leucine or valine and phenylalanine at these same residues. Nipponbare carried the ‘A’ and ‘GC’ nucleotides, while Bw 295-5 carried the ‘G’ and ‘TT’ nucleotides. Hence these varieties were classified into low GT class. Varieties such as Pachchaperumal, Balasuriya, H 6, Herathbanda, At 354 and Bg 352 carried ‘G’ and ‘GC’ nucleotides and these varieties were classified into high GT rice varieties. However, intermediate GT status could not be determined by SNP3 and SNP4 mutation of Alk gene (table 6; figure 4).In silico analysis of the polymorphisms in GBSSI gene and Alk genes of rice varieties retrieved from Rice-SNP-database: In this study, GBSSI gene and Alk gene were compared with the sequences retrieved from the Rice-SNP-Seek database to validate the SNPs further. As previously reported by Ayres et al. (1997), all low amylose varieties had the sequence ‘AGTTATA’ in exon 1. In agreement with preliminary work done by Larkin and Park (2003), all of the intermediate amylose varieties have the allelic pattern of GCC. All of the high amylose varieties have either the GAC or GAT allele of GBSSI. Among 42 rice accessions with the Sri Lankan pedigree, four allelic patterns were found; TAC, GCC, GAC and GAT (table 7). In this allelic pattern, the first letter corresponds to the ‘G’/‘T’ polymorphism in 5’ leader intron splice-junction, the second letter corresponds to the ‘A’/‘C’ polymorphism in exon 6 and the third letter corresponds to the ‘C’/‘T’ polymorphism in exon10 of Waxy gene. Analysis of the ‘G’/‘T’ polymorphism in the Wx locus showed that 41 rice cultivars shared the same ‘AGGTATA’ sequence at the 5’ leader intron splice-junction. But only 1 rice cultivar, Puttu nellu was found with ‘T’ nucleotide in intron1/exon1 junction site, which could be categorized as a low amylose variety (table 7). As discussed above, varieties with an intermediate level of apparent amylose could be reliably distinguished from those with higher apparent amylose based on a SNP in exon 6. Hence, only three rice varieties Nalumoolai Karuppan, Pannithi and Godawel with ‘C’ nucleotide in exon 6 exhibited the possibility of containing intermediate amylose content (table 7). High activity of GBSSI produces high amylose content leading to a non-waxy, non-sticky or non-glutinous phenotype. Therefore, according to the in silico genotypic results, rest of the 38 rice varieties may produce high amylose content in the endosperm (table 7). Proving this phenomenon. Abeysekera et al. (2017) has reported that usually, most of Sri Lankan rice varieties contain high amylose content. Targeted sequence analysis of exon 8 of the Alk gene in 42 different rice cultivars were found with three SNP polymorphisms that resulted in a changed amino acid sequence and, of these three SNPs, two SNPs were reported to be correlated with possible GT differences. Accordingly, Puttu nellu and 3210 rice varieties carried the ‘G’ and ‘TT’ nucleotides in SNP3 and SNP4 respectively (table 7). Hence these varieties can be classified into low GT class and except these two; other rice varieties carried the ‘G’ and ‘GC’ nucleotides in SNP3 and SNP4 respectively. Therefore, those varieties can possibly be classified into high GT rice varieties (table 7). However, further experiments are necessary to check the phenotypic variations for grain amylose content and GT class of in silico analyzed rice varieties. CONCLUSION Present results revealed the relationship between SNPs variation at Waxy loci and the amylose content of selected rice varieties. Accordingly, Pachchaperumal, At 354, Bg 352, Herathbanda, H 6, Balasuriya and Bw 295-5 with high amylose content had ‘G’ instead of ‘T’ in the first intron exhibiting the presence of Wxa allele with reference to Nipponbare which had low amylose content. Also all tested varieties had ‘A’ in exon 6 of the Waxy gene. Thus present findings i.e. presence of Wxa allele and SNP ‘A’ in exon 6 could be used as a potential molecular marker for the selection of high amylose varieties. In addition, Bw 295-5 which is a low GT variety, had two SNPs variations in the last exon of the Alk gene i.e. ‘G’ and ‘TT’ which is likely to be used to represent low GT class. Accordingly, sequence variations identified in Waxy and Alk genes could be utilized in the future rice breeding programs for the development of varieties with preferential amylose content and GT class.ACKNOWLEDGMENTSDirector and staff of the Gene Bank, Plant Genetic Resources Center, Gannoruwa are acknowledged for giving rice accessions.CONFLICT OF INTERESTAuthors have no conflict of interest.REFERENCESAbeysekera, W., G. Premakumara, A. Bentota and D. S. Abeysiriwardena, 2017. Grain amylose content and its stability over seasons in a selected set of rice varieties grown in Sri Lanka. Journal of agricultural sciences Sri Lanka, 12(1): 43-50.Ayres, N., A. McClung, P. Larkin, H. Bligh, C. Jones and W. Park, 1997. Microsatellites and a single-nucleotide polymorphism differentiate apparentamylose classes in an extended pedigree of us rice germ plasm. Theoretical applied genetics, 94(6-7): 773-781.Chen, M.-H., C. Bergman, S. Pinson and R. Fjellstrom, 2008. Waxy gene haplotypes: Associations with apparent amylose content and the effect by the environment in an international rice germplasm collection. Journal of cereal science, 47(3): 536-545.Cruz, N. D. and G. Khush, 2000. Rice grain quality evaluation procedures. Aromatic rices, 3: 15-28.Fernando, H., T. Kajenthini, S. Rebeira, T. Bamunuarachchige and H. Wickramasinghe, 2015. Validation of molecular markers for the analysis of genetic diversity of amylase content and gel consistency among representative rice varieties in sri lanka. Tropical agricultural research, 26(2): 317-328.Hirose, T., T. Ohdan, Y. Nakamura and T. Terao, 2006. Expression profiling of genes related to starch synthesis in rice leaf sheaths during the heading period. Physiologia plantarum, 128(3): 425-435.Juliano, B., 1971. A simplified assay for milled rice amylose. Journal of cereal science today, 16: 334-360.Juliano, B. O., 1985. Rice: Chemistry and technology. The american association of cereal chemists. Inc. St. Paul, Minnesota, USA, 774.Juliano, B. O., 2003. Rice chemistry and quality. Island publishing house. Island publishing house, Manila: 1-7.Kharabian-Masouleh, A., D. L. Waters, R. F. Reinke, R. Ward and R. J. Henry, 2012. Snp in starch biosynthesis genes associated with nutritional and functional properties of rice. Scientific reports, 2(1): 1-9.Kongseree, N. and B. O. Juliano, 1972. Physicochemical properties of rice grain and starch from lines differing in amylose content and gelatinization temperature. Journal of agricultural food chemistry, 20(3): 714-718.Larkin, P. D. and W. D. Park, 2003. Association of waxy gene single nucleotide polymorphisms with starch characteristics in rice (Oryza sativa L.). Molecular Breeding, 12(4): 335-339.Nakamura, Y., 2002. Towards a better understanding of the metabolic system for amylopectin biosynthesis in plants: Rice endosperm as a model tissue. Plant cell physiology, 43(7): 718-725.Nakamura, Y., P. B. Francisco, Y. Hosaka, A. Sato, T. Sawada, A. Kubo and N. Fujita, 2005. Essential amino acids of starch synthase iia differentiate amylopectin structure and starch quality between Japonica and Indica rice varieties. Plant molecular biology, 58(2): 213-227.Pathiraje, P., W. Madhujith, A. Chandrasekara and S. Nissanka, 2010. The effect of rice variety and parboiling on in vivo glycemic response. Journal of tropical agricultural research, 22(1): 26-33.Rebeira, S., H. Wickramasinghe, W. Samarasinghe and B. Prashantha, 2014. Diversity of grain quality characteristics of traditional rice (Oryza sativa L.) varieties in sri lanka. Tropical agricultural research, 25(4): 470-478.Sartaj, I. Z. and S. A. E. R. Suraweera, 2005. Comparison of different parboiling methods on the quality characteristics of rice. Annals of the Sri Lankan Department of Agriculture, 7: 245-252.Tran, N., V. Daygon, A. Resurreccion, R. Cuevas, H. Corpuz and M. Fitzgerald, 2011. A single nucleotide polymorphism in the waxy gene explains a significant component of gel consistency. Theoretical applied genetics, 123(4): 519-525.Umemoto, T. and N. Aoki, 2005. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms in rice starch synthase iia that alter starch gelatinisation and starch association of the enzyme. Functional plant biology, 32(9): 763-768.Umemoto, T., N. Aoki, H. Lin, Y. Nakamura, N. Inouchi, Y. Sato, M. Yano, H. Hirabayashi and S. Maruyama, 2004. Natural variation in rice starch synthase iia affects enzyme and starch properties. Functional plant biology, 31(7): 671-684.Waters, D. L. and R. J. Henry, 2007. Genetic manipulation of starch properties in plants: Patents 2001-2006. Recent patents on biotechnology, 1(3): 252-259.Waters, D. L., R. J. Henry, R. F. Reinke and M. A. Fitzgerald, 2006. Gelatinization temperature of rice explained by polymorphisms in starch synthase. Plant biotechnology journal, 4(1): 115-122.

Introduction Ireland did not have a tradition of printed cookbooks prior to the 20th century. As a consequence, Irish culinary manuscripts from before this period are an important primary source for historians. This paper makes the case that the manuscripts are a unique way of accessing voices that have quotidian concerns seldom heard above the dominant narratives of conquest, colonisation and famine (Higgins; Dawson). Three manuscripts are examined to see how they contribute to an understanding of Irish social and culinary history. The Irish banking crisis of 2008 is a reminder that comments such as the one in the title of this paper may be more then a casual remark, indicating rather an underlying anxiety. Equally important is the evidence in the manuscripts that Ireland had a domestic culinary tradition sited within the culinary traditions of the British Isles. The terms “vernacular”, representing localised needs and traditions, and “polite”, representing stylistic features incorporated for aesthetic reasons, are more usually applied in the architectural world. As terms, they reflect in a politically neutral way the culinary divide witnessed in the manuscripts under discussion here. Two of the three manuscripts are anonymous, but all are written from the perspective of a well-provisioned house. The class background is elite and as such these manuscripts are not representative of the vernacular, which in culinary terms is likely to be a tradition recorded orally (Gold). The first manuscript (NLI, Tervoe) and second manuscript (NLI, Limerick) show the levels of impact of French culinary influence through their recipes for “cullis”. The Limerick manuscript also opens the discussion to wider social concerns. The third manuscript (NLI, Baker) is unusual in that the author, Mrs. Baker, goes to great lengths to record the provenance of the recipes and as such the collection affords a glimpse into the private “polite” world of the landed gentry in Ireland with its multiplicity of familial and societal connections. Cookbooks and Cuisine in Ireland in the 19th Century During the course of the 18th century, there were 136 new cookery book titles and 287 reprints published in Britain (Lehmann, Housewife 383). From the start of the 18th to the end of the 19th century only three cookbooks of Irish, or Anglo-Irish, authorship have been identified. The Lady’s Companion: or Accomplish’d Director In the whole Art of Cookery was published in 1767 by John Mitchell in Skinner-Row, under the pseudonym “Ceres,” while the Countess of Caledon’s Cheap Receipts and Hints on Cookery: Collected for Distribution Amongst the Irish Peasantry was printed in Armagh by J. M. Watters for private circulation in 1847. The modern sounding Dinners at Home, published in London in 1878 under the pseudonym “Short”, appears to be of Irish authorship, a review in The Irish Times describing it as being written by a “Dublin lady”, the inference being that she was known to the reviewer (Farmer). English Copyright Law was extended to Ireland in July 1801 after the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland in 1800 (Ferguson). Prior to this, many titles were pirated in Ireland, a cause of confusion alluded to by Lehmann when she comments regarding the Ceres book that it “does not appear to be simply a Dublin-printed edition of an English book” (Housewife 403). This attribution is based on the dedication in the preface: “To The Ladies of Dublin.” From her statement that she had a “great deal of experience in business of this kind”, one may conclude that Ceres had worked as a housekeeper or cook. Cheap Receipts and Hints on Cookery was the second of two books by Catherine Alexander, Countess of Caledon. While many commentators were offering advice to Irish people on how to alleviate their poverty, in Friendly Advice to Irish Mothers on Training their Children, Alexander was unusual in addressing her book specifically to its intended audience (Bourke). In this cookbook, the tone is of a practical didactic nature, the philosophy that of enablement. Given the paucity of printed material, manuscripts provide the main primary source regarding the existence of an indigenous culinary tradition. Attitudes regarding this tradition lie along the spectrum exemplified by the comments of an Irish journalist, Kevin Myers, and an eminent Irish historian, Louis Cullen. Myers describes Irish cuisine as a “travesty” and claims that the cuisine of “Old Ireland, in texture and in flavour, generally resembles the cinders after the suttee of a very large, but not very tasty widow”, Cullen makes the case that Irish cuisine is “one of the most interesting culinary traditions in Europe” (141). It is not proposed to investigate the ideological standpoints behind the various comments on Irish food. Indeed, the use of the term “Irish” in this context is fraught with difficulty and it should be noted that in the three manuscripts proposed here, the cuisine is that of the gentry class and representative of a particular stratum of society more accurately described as belonging to the Anglo-Irish tradition. It is also questionable how the authors of the three manuscripts discussed would have described themselves in terms of nationality. The anxiety surrounding this issue of identity is abating as scholarship has moved from viewing the cultural artifacts and buildings inherited from this class, not as symbols of an alien heritage, but rather as part of the narrative of a complex country (Rees). The antagonistic attitude towards this heritage could be seen as reaching its apogee in the late 1950s when the then Government minister, Kevin Boland, greeted the decision to demolish a row of Georgian houses in Dublin with jubilation, saying that they stood for everything that he despised, and describing the Georgian Society, who had campaigned for their preservation, as “the preserve of the idle rich and belted earls” (Foster 160). Mac Con Iomaire notes that there has been no comprehensive study of the history of Irish food, and the implications this has for opinions held, drawing attention to the lack of recognition that a “parallel Anglo-Irish cuisine existed among the Protestant elite” (43). To this must be added the observation that Myrtle Allen, the doyenne of the Irish culinary world, made when she observed that while we have an Irish identity in food, “we belong to a geographical and culinary group with Wales, England, and Scotland as all counties share their traditions with their next door neighbour” (1983). Three Irish Culinary Manuscripts The three manuscripts discussed here are held in the National Library of Ireland (NLI). The manuscript known as Tervoe has 402 folio pages with a 22-page index. The National Library purchased the manuscript at auction in December 2011. Although unattributed, it is believed to come from Tervoe House in County Limerick (O’Daly). Built in 1776 by Colonel W.T. Monsell (b.1754), the Monsell family lived there until 1951 (see, Fig. 1). The house was demolished in 1953 (Bence-Jones). William Monsell, 1st Lord Emly (1812–94) could be described as the most distinguished of the family. Raised in an atmosphere of devotion to the Union (with Great Britain), loyalty to the Church of Ireland, and adherence to the Tory Party, he converted in 1850 to the Roman Catholic religion, under the influence of Cardinal Newman and the Oxford Movement, changing his political allegiance from Tory to Whig. It is believed that this change took place as a result of the events surrounding the Great Irish Famine of 1845–50 (Potter). The Tervoe manuscript is catalogued as 18th century, and as the house was built in the last quarter of the century, it would be reasonable to surmise that its conception coincided with that period. It is a handsome volume with original green vellum binding, which has been conserved. Fig. 1. Tervoe House, home of the Monsell family. In terms of culinary prowess, the scope of the Tervoe manuscript is extensive. For the purpose of this discussion, one recipe is of particular interest. The recipe, To make a Cullis for Flesh Soups, instructs the reader to take the fat off four pounds of the best beef, roast the beef, pound it to a paste with crusts of bread and the carcasses of partridges or other fowl “that you have by you” (NLI, Tervoe). This mixture should then be moistened with best gravy, and strong broth, and seasoned with pepper, thyme, cloves, and lemon, then sieved for use with the soup. In 1747 Hannah Glasse published The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy. The 1983 facsimile edition explains the term “cullis” as an Anglicisation of the French word coulis, “a preparation for thickening soups and stews” (182). The coulis was one of the essential components of the nouvelle cuisine of the 18th century. This movement sought to separate itself from “the conspicuous consumption of profusion” to one where the impression created was one of refinement and elegance (Lehmann, Housewife 210). Reactions in England to this French culinary innovation were strong, if not strident. Glasse derides French “tricks”, along with French cooks, and the coulis was singled out for particular opprobrium. In reality, Glasse bestrides both sides of the divide by giving the much-hated recipe and commenting on it. She provides another example of this in her recipe for The French Way of Dressing Partridges to which she adds the comment: “this dish I do not recommend; for I think it an odd jumble of thrash, by that time the Cullis, the Essence of Ham, and all other Ingredients are reckoned, the Partridges will come to a fine penny; but such Receipts as this, is what you have in most Books of Cookery yet printed” (53). When Daniel Defoe in The Complete English Tradesman of 1726 criticised French tradesmen for spending so much on the facades of their shops that they were unable to offer their customers a varied stock within, we can see the antipathy spilling over into other creative fields (Craske). As a critical strategy, it is not dissimilar to Glasse when she comments “now compute the expense, and see if this dish cannot be dressed full as well without this expense” at the end of a recipe for the supposedly despised Cullis for all Sorts of Ragoo (53). Food had become part of the defining image of Britain as an aggressively Protestant culture in opposition to Catholic France (Lehmann Politics 75). The author of the Tervoe manuscript makes no comment about the dish other than “A Cullis is a mixture of things, strained off.” This is in marked contrast to the second manuscript (NLI, Limerick). The author of this anonymous manuscript, from which the title of this paper is taken, is considerably perplexed by the term cullis, despite the manuscript dating 1811 (Fig. 2). Of Limerick provenance also, but considerably more modest in binding and scope, the manuscript was added to for twenty years, entries terminating around 1831. The recipe for Beef Stake (sic) Pie is an exact transcription of a recipe in John Simpson’s A Complete System of Cookery, published in 1806, and reads Cut some beef steaks thin, butter a pan (or as Lord Buckingham’s cook, from whom these rects are taken, calls it a soutis pan, ? [sic] (what does he mean, is it a saucepan) [sic] sprinkle the pan with pepper and salt, shallots thyme and parsley, put the beef steaks in and the pan on the fire for a few minutes then put them to cool, when quite cold put them in the fire, scrape all the herbs in over the fire and ornament as you please, it will take an hour and half, when done take the top off and put in some coulis (what is that?) [sic]. Fig. 2. Beef Stake Pie (NLI, Limerick). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. Simpson was cook to Lord Buckingham for at least a year in 1796, and may indeed have travelled to Ireland with the Duke who had several connections there. A feature of this manuscript are the number of Cholera remedies that it contains, including the “Rect for the cholera sent by Dr Shanfer from Warsaw to the Brussels Government”. Cholera had reached Germany by 1830, and England by 1831. By March 1832, it had struck Belfast and Dublin, the following month being noted in Cork, in the south of the country. Lasting a year, the epidemic claimed 50,000 lives in Ireland (Fenning). On 29 April 1832, the diarist Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin notes, “we had a meeting today to keep the cholera from Callan. May God help us” (De Bhaldraithe 132). By 18 June, the cholera is “wrecking destruction in Ennis, Limerick and Tullamore” (135) and on 26 November, “Seed being sown. The end of the month wet and windy. The cholera came to Callan at the beginning of the month. Twenty people went down with it and it left the town then” (139). This situation was obviously of great concern and this is registered in the manuscript. Another concern is that highlighted by the recommendation that “this receipt is as good as the bank. It has been obligingly given to Mrs Hawkesworth by the chief book keeper at the Bank of Ireland” (NLI, Limerick). The Bank of Ireland commenced business at St. Mary’s Abbey in Dublin in June 1783, having been established under the protection of the Irish Parliament as a chartered rather then a central bank. As such, it supplied a currency of solidity. The charter establishing the bank, however, contained a prohibitory clause preventing (until 1824 when it was repealed) more then six persons forming themselves into a company to carry on the business of banking. This led to the formation, especially outside Dublin, of many “small private banks whose failure was the cause of immense wretchedness to all classes of the population” (Gilbert 19). The collapse that caused the most distress was that of the Ffrench bank in 1814, founded eleven years previously by the family of Lord Ffrench, one of the leading Catholic peers, based in Connacht in the west of Ireland. The bank issued notes in exchange for Bank of Ireland notes. Loans from Irish banks were in the form of paper money which were essentially printed promises to pay the amount stated and these notes were used in ordinary transactions. So great was the confidence in the Ffrench bank that their notes were held by the public in preference to Bank of Ireland notes, most particularly in Connacht. On 27 June 1814, there was a run on the bank leading to collapse. The devastation spread through society, from business through tenant farmers to the great estates, and notably so in Galway. Lord Ffrench shot himself in despair (Tennison). Williams and Finn, founded in Kilkenny in 1805, entered bankruptcy proceedings in 1816, and the last private bank outside Dublin, Delacours in Mallow, failed in 1835 (Barrow). The issue of bank failure is commented on by writers of the period, notably so in Dickens, Thackery, and Gaskill, and Edgeworth in Ireland. Following on the Ffrench collapse, notes from the Bank of Ireland were accorded increased respect, reflected in the comment in this recipe. The receipt in question is one for making White Currant Wine, with the unusual addition of a slice of bacon suspended from the bunghole when the wine is turned, for the purpose of enriching it. The recipe was provided to “Mrs Hawkesworth by the chief book keeper of the bank” (NLI, Limerick). In 1812, a John Hawkesworth, agent to Lord CastleCoote, was living at Forest Lodge, Mountrath, County Laois (Ennis Chronicle). The Coote family, although settling in County Laois in the seventeenth century, had strong connections with Limerick through a descendent of the younger brother of the first Earl of Mountrath (Landed Estates). The last manuscript for discussion is the manuscript book of Mrs Abraham Whyte Baker of Ballytobin House, County Kilkenny, 1810 (NLI, Baker). Ballytobin, or more correctly Ballaghtobin, is a townland in the barony of Kells, four miles from the previously mentioned Callan. The land was confiscated from the Tobin family during the Cromwellian campaign in Ireland of 1649–52, and was reputedly purchased by a Captain Baker, to establish what became the estate of Ballaghtobin (Fig. 3) To this day, it is a functioning estate, remaining in the family, twice passing down through the female line. In its heyday, there were two acres of walled gardens from which the house would have drawn for its own provisions (Ballaghtobin). Fig. 3. Ballaghtobin 2013. At the time of writing the manuscript, Mrs. Sophia Baker was widowed and living at Ballaghtobin with her son and daughter-in-law, Charity who was “no beauty, but tall, slight” (Herbert 414). On the succession of her husband to the estate, Charity became mistress of Ballaghtobin, leaving Sophia with time on what were her obviously very capable hands (Nevin). Sophia Baker was the daughter of Sir John Blunden of Castle Blunden and Lucinda Cuffe, daughter of the first Baron Desart. Sophia was also first cousin of the diarist Dorothea Herbert, whose mother was Lucinda’s sister, Martha. Sophia Baker and Dorothea Herbert have left for posterity a record of life in the landed gentry class in rural Georgian Ireland, Dorothea describing Mrs. Baker as “full of life and spirits” (Herbert 70). Their close relationship allows the two manuscripts to converse with each other in a unique way. Mrs. Baker’s detailing of the provenance of her recipes goes beyond the norm, so that what she has left us is not just a remarkable work of culinary history but also a palimpsest of her family and social circle. Among the people she references are: “my grandmother”; Dorothea Beresford, half sister to the Earl of Tyrone, who lived in the nearby Curraghmore House; Lady Tyrone; and Aunt Howth, the sister of Dorothea Beresford, married to William St Lawrence, Lord Howth, and described by Johnathan Swift as “his blue eyed nymph” (195). Other attributions include Lady Anne Fitzgerald, wife of Maurice Fitzgerald, 16th knight of Kerry, Sir William Parsons, Major Labilen, and a Mrs. Beaufort (Fig. 4). Fig. 4. Mrs. Beauforts Rect. (NLI, Baker). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. That this Mrs. Beaufort was the wife of Daniel Augustus Beaufort, mother of the hydrographer Sir Francis Beaufort, may be deduced from the succeeding recipe supplied by a Mrs. Waller. Mrs. Beaufort’s maiden name was Waller. Fanny Beaufort, the elder sister of Sir Francis, was Richard Edgeworth’s fourth wife and close friend and confidante of his daughter Maria, the novelist. There are also entries for “Miss Herbert” and “Aunt Herbert.” While the Baker manuscript is of interest for the fact that it intersects the worlds of the novelist Maria Edgeworth and the diarist Dorothea Herbert, and for the societal references that it documents, it is also a fine collection of recipes that date back to the mid-18th century. An example of this is a recipe for Sligo pickled salmon that Mrs. Baker, nee Blunden, refers to in an index that she gives to a second volume. Unfortunately this second volume is not known to be extant. This recipe features in a Blunden family manuscript of 1760 as referred to in Anelecta Hibernica (McLysaght). The recipe has also appeared in Cookery and Cures of Old Kilkenny (St. Canices’s 24). Unlike the Tervoe and Limerick manuscripts, Mrs. Baker is unconcerned with recipes for “cullis”. Conclusion The three manuscripts that have been examined here are from the period before the famine of 1845–50, known as An Gorta Mór, translated as “the big hunger”. The famine preceding this, Bliain an Áir (the year of carnage) in 1740–1 was caused by extremely cold and rainy weather that wiped out the harvest (Ó Gráda 15). This earlier famine, almost forgotten today, was more severe than the subsequent one, causing the death of an eight of the population of the island over one and a half years (McBride). These manuscripts are written in living memory of both events. Within the world that they inhabit, it may appear there is little said about hunger or social conditions beyond the walls of their estates. Subjected to closer analysis, however, it is evident that they are loquacious in their own unique way, and make an important contribution to the narrative of cookbooks. Through the three manuscripts discussed here, we find evidence of the culinary hegemony of France and how practitioners in Ireland commented on this in comparatively neutral fashion. An awareness of cholera and bank collapses have been communicated in a singular fashion, while a conversation between diarist and culinary networker has allowed a glimpse into the world of the landed gentry in Ireland during the Georgian period. References Allen, M. “Statement by Myrtle Allen at the opening of Ballymaloe Cookery School.” 14 Nov. 1983. Ballaghtobin. “The Grounds”. nd. 13 Mar. 2013. ‹http://www.ballaghtobin.com/gardens.html›. Barrow, G.L. “Some Dublin Private Banks.” Dublin Historical Record 25.2 (1972): 38–53. Bence-Jones, M. A Guide to Irish Country Houses. London: Constable, 1988. Bourke, A. Ed. Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Vol V. Cork: Cork UP, 2002. Craske, M. “Design and the Competitive Spirit in Early and Mid 18th Century England”, Journal of Design History 12.3 (1999): 187–216. Cullen, L. The Emergence of Modern Ireland. London: Batsford, 1981. Dawson, Graham. “Trauma, Memory, Politics. The Irish Troubles.” Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors. Ed. Kim Lacy Rogers, Selma Leydesdorff and Graham Dawson. New Jersey: Transaction P, 2004. De Bhaldraithe,T. Ed. Cín Lae Amhlaoibh. Cork: Mercier P, 1979. Ennis Chronicle. 12–23 Feb 1812. 10 Feb. 2013 ‹http://astheywere.blogspot.ie/2012/12/ennis-chronicle-1812-feb-23-feb-12.html› Farmar, A. E-mail correspondence between Farmar and Dr M. Mac Con Iomaire, 26 Jan. 2011. Fenning, H. “The Cholera Epidemic in Ireland 1832–3: Priests, Ministers, Doctors”. Archivium Hibernicum 57 (2003): 77–125. Ferguson, F. “The Industrialisation of Irish Book Production 1790-1900.” The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Vol. IV The Irish Book in English 1800-1891. Ed. J. Murphy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Foster, R.F. Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change from 1970. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Gilbert, James William. The History of Banking in Ireland. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1836. Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by a Lady: Facsimile Edition. Devon: Prospect, 1983. Gold, C. Danish Cookbooks. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2007. Herbert, D. Retrospections of an Outcast or the Life of Dorothea Herbert. London: Gerald Howe, 1929. Higgins, Michael D. “Remarks by President Michael D. Higgins reflecting on the Gorta Mór: the Great famine of Ireland.” Famine Commemoration, Boston, 12 May 2012. 18 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.president.ie/speeches/ › Landed Estates Database, National University of Galway, Moore Institute for Research, 10 Feb. 2013 ‹http://landedestates.nuigalway.ie/LandedEstates/jsp/family-show.jsp?id=633.› Lehmann, G. The British Housewife: Cookery books, cooking and society in eighteenth-century Britain. Totnes: Prospect, 1993. ---. “Politics in the Kitchen.” 18th Century Life 23.2 (1999): 71–83. Mac Con Iomaire, M. “The Emergence, Development and Influence of French Haute Cuisine on Public Dining in Dublin Restaurants 1900-2000: An Oral History”. Vol. 2. PhD thesis. Dublin Institute of Technology. 2009. 8 Mar. 2013 ‹http://arrow.dit.ie/tourdoc/12›. McBride, Ian. Eighteenth Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2009. McLysaght, E.A. Anelecta Hibernica 15. Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1944. Myers, K. “Dinner is served ... But in Our Culinary Dessert it may be Korean.” The Irish Independent 30 Jun. 2006. Nevin, M. “A County Kilkenny Georgian Household Notebook.” Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 109 (1979): 5–18. (NLI) National Library of Ireland. Baker. 19th century manuscript. MS 34,952. ---. Limerick. 19th century manuscript. MS 42,105. ---. Tervoe. 18th century manuscript. MS 42,134. Ó Gráda, C. Famine: A Short History. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2009. O’Daly, C. E-mail correspondence between Colette O’Daly, Assistant Keeper, Dept. of Manuscripts, National Library of Ireland and Dorothy Cashman. 8 Dec. 2011. Potter, M. William Monsell of Tervoe 1812-1894. Dublin: Irish Academic P, 2009. Rees, Catherine. “Irish Anxiety, Identity and Narrative in the Plays of McDonagh and Jones.” Redefinitions of Irish Identity: A Postnationalist Approach. Eds. Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Carmen Zamorano Llena. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. St. Canice’s. Cookery and Cures of Old Kilkenny. Kilkenny: Boethius P, 1983. Swift, J. The Works of the Rev Dr J Swift Vol. XIX Dublin: Faulkner, 1772. 8 Feb. 2013. ‹http://www.google.ie/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q=works+of+jonathan+swift+Vol+XIX+&btnG=› Tennison, C.M. “The Old Dublin Bankers.” Journal of the Cork Historical and Archeological Society 1.2 (1895): 36–9.

Christopher J. Waller of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reviews “The Myth of Independence: How Congress Governs the Federal Reserve,” by Sarah Binder and Mark Spindel. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Explores the political and economic catalysts that transformed the Federal Reserve's development during its first one hundred years, contextualizing Congress's existential role in driving the evolution of the Fed.”

Criminologists largely rely on national deidentified data sources to study homicide in the United States. The National Death Index (NDI), a comprehensive and well-established database compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics, is an untapped source of homicide data that offers identifiable linkages to other data sources while retaining national coverage. This study’s five aims follow. First, we review the data sources in articles published in Homicide Studies over the past decade. Second, we describe the NDI, including its origins, procedures, and uses. Third, we outline the procedures for linking a police gang intelligence database to the NDI. Fourth, we introduce the St. Louis Gang Member-Linked Mortality Files database, which is composed of 3,120 police-identified male gang members in the St. Louis area linked to NDI records. Finally, we report on preliminary cause-of-death findings. We conclude by outlining the benefits and drawbacks of the NDI as a source of homicide data for criminologists.

ABSTRACTSt. Louis encephalitis virus (SLEV) is the prototypic mosquito-borne flavivirus in the Americas. Birds are its primary vertebrate hosts, but amplification in certain mammals has also been suggested. The place and time of SLEV emergence remain unknown. In an ecological investigation in a tropical rainforest in Palenque National Park, Mexico, we discovered an ancestral variant of SLEV inCulex nigripalpusmosquitoes. Those SLEV-Palenque strains form a highly distinct phylogenetic clade within the SLEV species. Cell culture studies of SLEV-Palenque versus epidemic SLEV (MSI-7) revealed no growth differences in insect cells but a clear inability of SLEV-Palenque to replicate in cells from birds, cotton rats, and free-tailed bats permissive for MSI-7 replication. Only cells from nonhuman primates and neotropical fruit bats were moderately permissive. Phylogeographic reconstruction identified the common ancestor of all epidemic SLEV strains to have existed in an area between southern Mexico and Panama ca. 330 years ago. Expansion of the epidemic lineage occurred in two waves, the first representing emergence near the area of origin and the second involving almost parallel appearances of the virus in the lower Mississippi and Amazon delta regions. Early diversification events overlapped human habitat invasion during the post-Columbian era. Several documented SLEV outbreaks, such as the 1964 Houston epidemic or the 1990 Tampa epidemic, were predated by the arrival of novel strains between 1 and 4 years before the outbreaks. Collectively, our data provide insight into the putative origins of SLEV, suggesting that virus emergence was driven by human invasion of primary rainforests.IMPORTANCESt. Louis encephalitis virus (SLEV) is the prototypic mosquito-transmitted flavivirus of the Americas. Unlike the West Nile virus, which we know was recently introduced into North America from the Old World, the provenience of SLEV is obscure. In an ecological investigation in a primary rainforest area of Palenque National Park, Mexico, we have discovered an ancestral variant of SLEV. The ancestral virus was much less active than the epidemic virus in cell cultures, reflecting its incomplete adaptation to hosts encountered outside primary rainforests. Knowledge of this virus enabled a spatiotemporal reconstruction of the common ancestor of all SLEVs and how the virus spread from there. We can infer that the cosmopolitan SLEV lineage emerged from Central America in the 17th century, a period of post-Columbian colonial history marked by intense human invasion of primary rainforests. Further spread followed major bird migration pathways over North and South America.

IntroductionIn the year 2000, a group of likeminded individuals got together and convened the first annual World Barista Championship in Monte Carlo. With twelve competitors from around the globe, each competitor was judged by seven judges: one head judge who oversaw the process, two technical judges who assessed technical skills, and four sensory judges who evaluated the taste and appearance of the espresso drinks. Competitors had fifteen minutes to serve four espresso coffees, four cappuccino coffees, and four “signature” drinks that they had devised using one shot of espresso and other ingredients of their choice, but no alcohol. The competitors were also assessed on their overall barista skills, their creativity, and their ability to perform under pressure and impress the judges with their knowledge of coffee. This competition has grown to the extent that eleven years later, in 2011, 54 countries held national barista championships with the winner from each country competing for the highly coveted position of World Barista Champion. That year, Alejandro Mendez from El Salvador became the first world champion from a coffee producing nation. Champion baristas are more likely to come from coffee consuming countries than they are from coffee producing countries as countries that produce coffee seldom have a culture of espresso coffee consumption. While Ireland is not a coffee-producing nation, the Irish are the highest per capita consumers of tea in the world (Mac Con Iomaire, “Ireland”). Despite this, in 2008, Stephen Morrissey from Ireland overcame 50 other national champions to become the 2008 World Barista Champion (see, http://vimeo.com/2254130). Another Irish national champion, Colin Harmon, came fourth in this competition in both 2009 and 2010. This paper discusses the history and development of coffee and coffee houses in Dublin from the 17th century, charting how coffee culture in Dublin appeared, evolved, and stagnated before re-emerging at the beginning of the 21st century, with a remarkable win in the World Barista Championships. The historical links between coffeehouses and media—ranging from print media to electronic and social media—are discussed. In this, the coffee house acts as an informal public gathering space, what urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls a “third place,” neither work nor home. These “third places” provide anchors for community life and facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction (Oldenburg). This paper will also show how competition from other “third places” such as clubs, hotels, restaurants, and bars have affected the vibrancy of coffee houses. Early Coffee Houses The first coffee house was established in Constantinople in 1554 (Tannahill 252; Huetz de Lemps 387). The first English coffee houses opened in Oxford in 1650 and in London in 1652. Coffee houses multiplied thereafter but, in 1676, when some London coffee houses became hotbeds for political protest, the city prosecutor decided to close them. The ban was soon lifted and between 1680 and 1730 Londoners discovered the pleasure of drinking coffee (Huetz de Lemps 388), although these coffee houses sold a number of hot drinks including tea and chocolate as well as coffee.The first French coffee houses opened in Marseille in 1671 and in Paris the following year. Coffee houses proliferated during the 18th century: by 1720 there were 380 public cafés in Paris and by the end of the century there were 600 (Huetz de Lemps 387). Café Procope opened in Paris in 1674 and, in the 18th century, became a literary salon with regular patrons: Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Condorcet (Huetz de Lemps 387; Pitte 472). In England, coffee houses developed into exclusive clubs such as Crockford’s and the Reform, whilst elsewhere in Europe they evolved into what we identify as cafés, similar to the tea shops that would open in England in the late 19th century (Tannahill 252-53). Tea quickly displaced coffee in popularity in British coffee houses (Taylor 142). Pettigrew suggests two reasons why Great Britain became a tea-drinking nation while most of the rest of Europe took to coffee (48). The first was the power of the East India Company, chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600, which controlled the world’s biggest tea monopoly and promoted the beverage enthusiastically. The second was the difficulty England had in securing coffee from the Levant while at war with France at the end of the seventeenth century and again during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13). Tea also became the dominant beverage in Ireland and over a period of time became the staple beverage of the whole country. In 1835, Samuel Bewley and his son Charles dared to break the monopoly of The East India Company by importing over 2,000 chests of tea directly from Canton, China, to Ireland. His family would later become synonymous with the importation of coffee and with opening cafés in Ireland (see, Farmar for full history of the Bewley's and their activities). Ireland remains the highest per-capita consumer of tea in the world. Coffee houses have long been linked with social and political change (Kennedy, Politicks; Pincus). The notion that these new non-alcoholic drinks were responsible for the Enlightenment because people could now gather socially without getting drunk is rejected by Wheaton as frivolous, since there had always been alternatives to strong drink, and European civilisation had achieved much in the previous centuries (91). She comments additionally that cafés, as gathering places for dissenters, took over the role that taverns had long played. Pennell and Vickery support this argument adding that by offering a choice of drinks, and often sweets, at a fixed price and in a more civilized setting than most taverns provided, coffee houses and cafés were part of the rise of the modern restaurant. It is believed that, by 1700, the commercial provision of food and drink constituted the second largest occupational sector in London. Travellers’ accounts are full of descriptions of London taverns, pie shops, coffee, bun and chop houses, breakfast huts, and food hawkers (Pennell; Vickery). Dublin Coffee Houses and Later incarnations The earliest reference to coffee houses in Dublin is to the Cock Coffee House in Cook Street during the reign of Charles II (1660-85). Public dining or drinking establishments listed in the 1738 Dublin Directory include taverns, eating houses, chop houses, coffee houses, and one chocolate house in Fownes Court run by Peter Bardin (Hardiman and Kennedy 157). During the second half of the 17th century, Dublin’s merchant classes transferred allegiance from taverns to the newly fashionable coffee houses as places to conduct business. By 1698, the fashion had spread to country towns with coffee houses found in Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny, Clonmel, Wexford, and Galway, and slightly later in Belfast and Waterford in the 18th century. Maxwell lists some of Dublin’s leading coffee houses and taverns, noting their clientele: There were Lucas’s Coffee House, on Cork Hill (the scene of many duels), frequented by fashionable young men; the Phoenix, in Werburgh Street, where political dinners were held; Dick’s Coffee House, in Skinner’s Row, much patronized by literary men, for it was over a bookseller’s; the Eagle, in Eustace Street, where meetings of the Volunteers were held; the Old Sot’s Hole, near Essex Bridge, famous for its beefsteaks and ale; the Eagle Tavern, on Cork Hill, which was demolished at the same time as Lucas’s to make room for the Royal Exchange; and many others. (76) Many of the early taverns were situated around the Winetavern Street, Cook Street, and Fishamble Street area. (see Fig. 1) Taverns, and later coffee houses, became meeting places for gentlemen and centres for debate and the exchange of ideas. In 1706, Francis Dickson published the Flying Post newspaper at the Four Courts coffee house in Winetavern Street. The Bear Tavern (1725) and the Black Lyon (1735), where a Masonic Lodge assembled every Wednesday, were also located on this street (Gilbert v.1 160). Dick’s Coffee house was established in the late 17th century by bookseller and newspaper proprietor Richard Pue, and remained open until 1780 when the building was demolished. In 1740, Dick’s customers were described thus: Ye citizens, gentlemen, lawyers and squires,who summer and winter surround our great fires,ye quidnuncs! who frequently come into Pue’s,To live upon politicks, coffee, and news. (Gilbert v.1 174) There has long been an association between coffeehouses and publishing books, pamphlets and particularly newspapers. Other Dublin publishers and newspapermen who owned coffee houses included Richard Norris and Thomas Bacon. Until the 1850s, newspapers were burdened with a number of taxes: on the newsprint, a stamp duty, and on each advertisement. By 1865, these taxes had virtually disappeared, resulting in the appearance of 30 new newspapers in Ireland, 24 of them in Dublin. Most people read from copies which were available free of charge in taverns, clubs, and coffee houses (MacGiolla Phadraig). Coffee houses also kept copies of international newspapers. On 4 May 1706, Francis Dickson notes in the Dublin Intelligence that he held the Paris and London Gazettes, Leyden Gazette and Slip, the Paris and Hague Lettres à la Main, Daily Courant, Post-man, Flying Post, Post-script and Manuscripts in his coffeehouse in Winetavern Street (Kennedy, “Dublin”). Henry Berry’s analysis of shop signs in Dublin identifies 24 different coffee houses in Dublin, with the main clusters in Essex Street near the Custom’s House (Cocoa Tree, Bacon’s, Dempster’s, Dublin, Merchant’s, Norris’s, and Walsh’s) Cork Hill (Lucas’s, St Lawrence’s, and Solyman’s) Skinners’ Row (Bow’s’, Darby’s, and Dick’s) Christ Church Yard (Four Courts, and London) College Green (Jack’s, and Parliament) and Crampton Court (Exchange, and Little Dublin). (see Figure 1, below, for these clusters and the locations of other Dublin coffee houses.) The earliest to be referenced is the Cock Coffee House in Cook Street during the reign of Charles II (1660-85), with Solyman’s (1691), Bow’s (1692), and Patt’s on High Street (1699), all mentioned in print before the 18th century. The name of one, the Cocoa Tree, suggests that chocolate was also served in this coffee house. More evidence of the variety of beverages sold in coffee houses comes from Gilbert who notes that in 1730, one Dublin poet wrote of George Carterwright’s wife at The Custom House Coffee House on Essex Street: Her coffee’s fresh and fresh her tea,Sweet her cream, ptizan, and whea,her drams, of ev’ry sort, we findboth good and pleasant, in their kind. (v. 2 161) Figure 1: Map of Dublin indicating Coffee House clusters 1 = Sackville St.; 2 = Winetavern St.; 3 = Essex St.; 4 = Cork Hill; 5 = Skinner's Row; 6 = College Green.; 7 = Christ Church Yard; 8 = Crampton Court.; 9 = Cook St.; 10 = High St.; 11 = Eustace St.; 12 = Werburgh St.; 13 = Fishamble St.; 14 = Westmorland St.; 15 = South Great George's St.; 16 = Grafton St.; 17 = Kildare St.; 18 = Dame St.; 19 = Anglesea Row; 20 = Foster Place; 21 = Poolbeg St.; 22 = Fleet St.; 23 = Burgh Quay.A = Cafe de Paris, Lincoln Place; B = Red Bank Restaurant, D'Olier St.; C = Morrison's Hotel, Nassau St.; D = Shelbourne Hotel, St. Stephen's Green; E = Jury's Hotel, Dame St. Some coffee houses transformed into the gentlemen’s clubs that appeared in London, Paris and Dublin in the 17th century. These clubs originally met in coffee houses, then taverns, until later proprietary clubs became fashionable. Dublin anticipated London in club fashions with members of the Kildare Street Club (1782) and the Sackville Street Club (1794) owning the premises of their clubhouse, thus dispensing with the proprietor. The first London club to be owned by the members seems to be Arthur’s, founded in 1811 (McDowell 4) and this practice became widespread throughout the 19th century in both London and Dublin. The origin of one of Dublin’s most famous clubs, Daly’s Club, was a chocolate house opened by Patrick Daly in c.1762–65 in premises at 2–3 Dame Street (Brooke). It prospered sufficiently to commission its own granite-faced building on College Green between Anglesea Street and Foster Place which opened in 1789 (Liddy 51). Daly’s Club, “where half the land of Ireland has changed hands”, was renowned for the gambling that took place there (Montgomery 39). Daly’s sumptuous palace catered very well (and discreetly) for honourable Members of Parliament and rich “bucks” alike (Craig 222). The changing political and social landscape following the Act of Union led to Daly’s slow demise and its eventual closure in 1823 (Liddy 51). Coincidentally, the first Starbucks in Ireland opened in 2005 in the same location. Once gentlemen’s clubs had designated buildings where members could eat, drink, socialise, and stay overnight, taverns and coffee houses faced competition from the best Dublin hotels which also had coffee rooms “in which gentlemen could read papers, write letters, take coffee and wine in the evening—an exiguous substitute for a club” (McDowell 17). There were at least 15 establishments in Dublin city claiming to be hotels by 1789 (Corr 1) and their numbers grew in the 19th century, an expansion which was particularly influenced by the growth of railways. By 1790, Dublin’s public houses (“pubs”) outnumbered its coffee houses with Dublin boasting 1,300 (Rooney 132). Names like the Goose and Gridiron, Harp and Crown, Horseshoe and Magpie, and Hen and Chickens—fashionable during the 17th and 18th centuries in Ireland—hung on decorative signs for those who could not read. Throughout the 20th century, the public house provided the dominant “third place” in Irish society, and the drink of choice for itd predominantly male customers was a frothy pint of Guinness. Newspapers were available in public houses and many newspapermen had their own favourite hostelries such as Mulligan’s of Poolbeg Street; The Pearl, and The Palace on Fleet Street; and The White Horse Inn on Burgh Quay. Any coffee served in these establishments prior to the arrival of the new coffee culture in the 21st century was, however, of the powdered instant variety. Hotels / Restaurants with Coffee Rooms From the mid-19th century, the public dining landscape of Dublin changed in line with London and other large cities in the United Kingdom. Restaurants did appear gradually in the United Kingdom and research suggests that one possible reason for this growth from the 1860s onwards was the Refreshment Houses and Wine Licences Act (1860). The object of this act was to “reunite the business of eating and drinking”, thereby encouraging public sobriety (Mac Con Iomaire, “Emergence” v.2 95). Advertisements for Dublin restaurants appeared in The Irish Times from the 1860s. Thom’s Directory includes listings for Dining Rooms from the 1870s and Refreshment Rooms are listed from the 1880s. This pattern continued until 1909, when Thom’s Directory first includes a listing for “Restaurants and Tea Rooms”. Some of the establishments that advertised separate coffee rooms include Dublin’s first French restaurant, the Café de Paris, The Red Bank Restaurant, Morrison’s Hotel, Shelbourne Hotel, and Jury’s Hotel (see Fig. 1). The pattern of separate ladies’ coffee rooms emerged in Dublin and London during the latter half of the 19th century and mixed sex dining only became popular around the last decade of the 19th century, partly infuenced by Cesar Ritz and Auguste Escoffier (Mac Con Iomaire, “Public Dining”). Irish Cafés: From Bewley’s to Starbucks A number of cafés appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, most notably Robert Roberts and Bewley’s, both of which were owned by Quaker families. Ernest Bewley took over the running of the Bewley’s importation business in the 1890s and opened a number of Oriental Cafés; South Great Georges Street (1894), Westmoreland Street (1896), and what became the landmark Bewley’s Oriental Café in Grafton Street (1927). Drawing influence from the grand cafés of Paris and Vienna, oriental tearooms, and Egyptian architecture (inspired by the discovery in 1922 of Tutankhamen’s Tomb), the Grafton Street business brought a touch of the exotic into the newly formed Irish Free State. Bewley’s cafés became the haunt of many of Ireland’s leading literary figures, including Samuel Becket, Sean O’Casey, and James Joyce who mentioned the café in his book, Dubliners. A full history of Bewley’s is available (Farmar). It is important to note, however, that pots of tea were sold in equal measure to mugs of coffee in Bewley’s. The cafés changed over time from waitress- to self-service and a failure to adapt to changing fashions led to the business being sold, with only the flagship café in Grafton Street remaining open in a revised capacity. It was not until the beginning of the 21st century that a new wave of coffee house culture swept Ireland. This was based around speciality coffee beverages such as espressos, cappuccinos, lattés, macchiatos, and frappuccinnos. This new phenomenon coincided with the unprecedented growth in the Irish economy, during which Ireland became known as the “Celtic Tiger” (Murphy 3). One aspect of this period was a building boom and a subsequent growth in apartment living in the Dublin city centre. The American sitcom Friends and its fictional coffee house, “Central Perk,” may also have helped popularise the use of coffee houses as “third spaces” (Oldenberg) among young apartment dwellers in Dublin. This was also the era of the “dotcom boom” when many young entrepreneurs, software designers, webmasters, and stock market investors were using coffee houses as meeting places for business and also as ad hoc office spaces. This trend is very similar to the situation in the 17th and early 18th centuries where coffeehouses became known as sites for business dealings. Various theories explaining the growth of the new café culture have circulated, with reasons ranging from a growth in Eastern European migrants, anti-smoking legislation, returning sophisticated Irish emigrants, and increased affluence (Fenton). Dublin pubs, facing competition from the new coffee culture, began installing espresso coffee machines made by companies such as Gaggia to attract customers more interested in a good latté than a lager and it is within this context that Irish baristas gained such success in the World Barista competition. In 2001 the Georges Street branch of Bewley’s was taken over by a chain called Café, Bar, Deli specialising in serving good food at reasonable prices. Many ex-Bewley’s staff members subsequently opened their own businesses, roasting coffee and running cafés. Irish-owned coffee chains such as Java Republic, Insomnia, and O’Brien’s Sandwich Bars continued to thrive despite the competition from coffee chains Starbucks and Costa Café. Indeed, so successful was the handmade Irish sandwich and coffee business that, before the economic downturn affected its business, Irish franchise O’Brien’s operated in over 18 countries. The Café, Bar, Deli group had also begun to franchise its operations in 2008 when it too became a victim of the global economic downturn. With the growth of the Internet, many newspapers have experienced falling sales of their printed format and rising uptake of their electronic versions. Most Dublin coffee houses today provide wireless Internet connections so their customers can read not only the local newspapers online, but also others from all over the globe, similar to Francis Dickenson’s coffee house in Winetavern Street in the early 18th century. Dublin has become Europe’s Silicon Valley, housing the European headquarters for companies such as Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Paypal, and Facebook. There are currently plans to provide free wireless connectivity throughout Dublin’s city centre in order to promote e-commerce, however, some coffee houses shut off the wireless Internet in their establishments at certain times of the week in order to promote more social interaction to ensure that these “third places” remain “great good places” at the heart of the community (Oldenburg). Conclusion Ireland is not a country that is normally associated with a coffee culture but coffee houses have been part of the fabric of that country since they emerged in Dublin in the 17th century. These Dublin coffee houses prospered in the 18th century, and survived strong competition from clubs and hotels in the 19th century, and from restaurant and public houses into the 20th century. In 2008, when Stephen Morrissey won the coveted title of World Barista Champion, Ireland’s place as a coffee consuming country was re-established. The first decade of the 21st century witnessed a birth of a new espresso coffee culture, which shows no signs of weakening despite Ireland’s economic travails. References Berry, Henry F. “House and Shop Signs in Dublin in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 40.2 (1910): 81–98. Brooke, Raymond Frederick. Daly’s Club and the Kildare Street Club, Dublin. Dublin, 1930. Corr, Frank. Hotels in Ireland. Dublin: Jemma Publications, 1987. Craig, Maurice. Dublin 1660-1860. Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1980. Farmar, Tony. The Legendary, Lofty, Clattering Café. Dublin: A&A Farmar, 1988. Fenton, Ben. “Cafe Culture taking over in Dublin.” The Telegraph 2 Oct. 2006. 29 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1530308/cafe-culture-taking-over-in-Dublin.html›. Gilbert, John T. A History of the City of Dublin (3 vols.). Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978. Girouard, Mark. Victorian Pubs. New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1984. Hardiman, Nodlaig P., and Máire Kennedy. A Directory of Dublin for the Year 1738 Compiled from the Most Authentic of Sources. Dublin: Dublin Corporation Public Libraries, 2000. Huetz de Lemps, Alain. “Colonial Beverages and Consumption of Sugar.” Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present. Eds. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 383–93. Kennedy, Máire. “Dublin Coffee Houses.” Ask About Ireland, 2011. 4 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.askaboutireland.ie/reading-room/history-heritage/pages-in-history/dublin-coffee-houses›. ----- “‘Politicks, Coffee and News’: The Dublin Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century.” Dublin Historical Record LVIII.1 (2005): 76–85. Liddy, Pat. Temple Bar—Dublin: An Illustrated History. Dublin: Temple Bar Properties, 1992. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín. “The Emergence, Development, and Influence of French Haute Cuisine on Public Dining in Dublin Restaurants 1900-2000: An Oral History.” Ph.D. thesis, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, 2009. 4 Apr. 2012 ‹http://arrow.dit.ie/tourdoc/12›. ----- “Ireland.” Food Cultures of the World Encylopedia. Ed. Ken Albala. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2010. ----- “Public Dining in Dublin: The History and Evolution of Gastronomy and Commercial Dining 1700-1900.” International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 24. Special Issue: The History of the Commercial Hospitality Industry from Classical Antiquity to the 19th Century (2012): forthcoming. MacGiolla Phadraig, Brian. “Dublin: One Hundred Years Ago.” Dublin Historical Record 23.2/3 (1969): 56–71. Maxwell, Constantia. Dublin under the Georges 1714–1830. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1979. McDowell, R. B. Land & Learning: Two Irish Clubs. Dublin: The Lilliput P, 1993. Montgomery, K. L. “Old Dublin Clubs and Coffee-Houses.” New Ireland Review VI (1896): 39–44. Murphy, Antoine E. “The ‘Celtic Tiger’—An Analysis of Ireland’s Economic Growth Performance.” EUI Working Papers, 2000 29 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.eui.eu/RSCAS/WP-Texts/00_16.pdf›. Oldenburg, Ray, ed. Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories About The “Great Good Places” At the Heart of Our Communities. New York: Marlowe & Company 2001. Pennell, Sarah. “‘Great Quantities of Gooseberry Pye and Baked Clod of Beef’: Victualling and Eating out in Early Modern London.” Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London. Eds. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. 228–59. Pettigrew, Jane. A Social History of Tea. London: National Trust Enterprises, 2001. Pincus, Steve. “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture.” The Journal of Modern History 67.4 (1995): 807–34. Pitte, Jean-Robert. “The Rise of the Restaurant.” Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present. Eds. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 471–80. Rooney, Brendan, ed. A Time and a Place: Two Centuries of Irish Social Life. Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2006. Tannahill, Reay. Food in History. St Albans, Herts.: Paladin, 1975. Taylor, Laurence. “Coffee: The Bottomless Cup.” The American Dimension: Cultural Myths and Social Realities. Eds. W. Arens and Susan P. Montague. Port Washington, N.Y.: Alfred Publishing, 1976. 14–48. Vickery, Amanda. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. Savouring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300-1789. London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth P, 1983. Williams, Anne. “Historical Attitudes to Women Eating in Restaurants.” Public Eating: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1991. Ed. Harlan Walker. Totnes: Prospect Books, 1992. 311–14. World Barista, Championship. “History–World Barista Championship”. 2012. 02 Apr. 2012 ‹http://worldbaristachampionship.com2012›.AcknowledgementA warm thank you to Dr. Kevin Griffin for producing the map of Dublin for this article.

This article describes the contributions of the Federal Reserve System to the production and distribution of economic data. First, we present a chronological account of those contributions. Next, we describe the origins and evolution of the data information services provided by the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) online database, its partnership with sources, and the profile of its users. Next, we review the data-related educational outreach efforts of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, presenting some evidence of their impact. A summary and several reflections on the future of economic data and education conclude the article. JEL Classifications: N22, E01, A20

ABSTRACT: The aim of this research was to examine the relationship between exchange rate variations and Brazilian export prices for cellulose, which is defined as the exchange rate pass-through, taking the period from January 2000 to March 2019 as a reference. The data were collected on the websites of the Ministry of Development, Industry and Foreign Trade - MDIC, the Institute of Applied Economics - IPEA and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis - FRED. Thus, time series instruments were used, especially the Error Correction Vector Model. Results provided indications that the pass-through degree of exchange rate for cellulose export prices occurred incompletely in the total period and in the second sub-period, and was null in the first sub-period, representing that depreciation of rate exchange rates did not translate into significant competitiveness gains, as they did not significantly reduced export prices.

The American Heart Association launched Mission: Lifeline (M:L) in 2007 with a goal of reducing system barriers to prompt treatment for heart attacks, beginning with the 911 call and continuing through hospital treatment. M:L also encourages regional collaboration and measurement of heart attack systems of care. Regional reports allow hospitals to see blinded comparisons to other hospitals in their region as well as regional, state and national benchmarks. We compared two major metropolitan areas.Data analysis and measurement using Mission: Lifeline (M:L) regional reports created from data in the ACTION Registry-Get With The Guidelines (ARG) national registry, was initiated in Chicago and St. Louis. Measures impacting systems of care, operations and outcomes were shared with hospitals and EMS. Regional reports include de-identified hospital data and state and national benchmarks.Data was shared at regional meetings and opportunities for performance improvement were identified. We reviewed First Medical Contact (FMC) to Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI)and other system measures quarterly from 2010-2015. In order to facilitate regional improvement, system level M:L reports are generated quarterly. This allows hospitals to see blinded comparisons to other hospitals in their region as well as regional, state and national benchmarks.The FMC to PCI and other system measures were examined as indicators of process improvement in Chicago and St. Louis to determine if data sharing activities would impact systems improvement. One obstacle was getting hospitals to meet the data entry deadlines so their data was included in the regional reports. American Heart Association (AHA) staff worked with hospitals to help facilitate this.Data sharing in two EMS major metropolitan regions encouraged collaboration and performance improvement impacting FMC to PCI times and other measures. We saw a marked decrease in FMC to PCI in the first 6 quarters while regions were meeting regularly and initiating PI efforts. When state initiatives in Missouri took priority and the region was not actively meeting, we saw a rise in this measure.

ABSTRACT The objectives of this study were to perform genomic and phenotypic characterization of antimicrobial resistance in Neisseria gonorrhoeae isolates recovered from urine samples from patients in St. Louis, MO, USA. Sixty-four clinical isolates were banked over a 2-year period and subjected to antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) by Kirby-Bauer disk diffusion (penicillin, tetracycline, cefuroxime, and ciprofloxacin) and gradient diffusion (tetracycline, doxycycline, azithromycin, ceftriaxone, cefixime, ciprofloxacin, gemifloxacin, and delafloxacin). The medical records for the patients were evaluated to determine the demographics, location, and prescribed treatment regimen. Isolate draft genomes were assembled from Illumina shotgun sequencing data, and resistance determinants were identified by ResFinder and PointFinder. Of the 64 isolates, 97% were nonsusceptible to penicillin, with resistant isolates all containing the blaTEM-1b gene; 78 and 81% of isolates were nonsusceptible to tetracycline and doxycycline, respectively, with resistant isolates all containing the tet(M) gene. One isolate was classified as non-wild-type to azithromycin, and all isolates were susceptible to ceftriaxone; 89% of patients received this combination of drugs as first-line therapy. Six percent of isolates were resistant to ciprofloxacin, with most resistant isolates containing multiple gyrA and parC mutations. Correlation between disk and gradient diffusion AST devices was high for tetracycline and ciprofloxacin (R2 > 99% for both). The rates of N. gonorrhoeae antibiotic resistance in St. Louis are comparable to current rates reported nationally, except ciprofloxacin resistance was less common in our cohort. Strong associations between specific genetic markers and phenotypic susceptibility testing hold promise for the utility of genotype-based diagnostic assays to guide directed antibiotic therapy. IMPORTANCE Neisseria gonorrhoeae causes the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea, which is most commonly diagnosed using a DNA-based detection method that does not require growth and isolation of N. gonorrhoeae in the laboratory. This is problematic because the rates of antibiotic resistance in N. gonorrhoeae are increasing, but without isolating the organism in the clinical laboratory, antibiotic susceptibility testing cannot be performed on strains recovered from clinical specimens. We observed an increase in the frequency of urine cultures growing N. gonorrhoeae after we implemented a total laboratory automation system for culture in our clinical laboratory. Here, we report on the rates of resistance to multiple historically used, first-line, and potential future-use antibiotics for 64 N. gonorrhoeae isolates. We found that the rates of antibiotic resistance in our isolates were comparable to national rates. Additionally, resistance to specific antibiotics correlated closely with the presence of genetic resistance genes, suggesting that DNA-based tests could also be designed to guide antibiotic therapy for treating gonorrhea.

I sat alone on the beach under the shade of a big umbrella. My husband, Bill, and our three children were in the condo taking a break from the Florida sunshine. Dreamily, I gazed at the vast Gulf of Mexico, the brilliant blue sky stretching endlessly above. I was sitting about 50 feet from the surf, but I couldn't actually see the waves hitting the beach; I was almost blind. It was a windy day in late May and I loved feeling the ocean breeze sweeping over me. I imagined I could hear the waves crashing onto the surf, but the sound was only a memory. I was totally deaf. Although I had a cochlear implant and could hear the waves, the cry of sea gulls, and many other sounds with the technology, I wasn't wearing it at the moment and everything I heard was in my mind. As a child, my understanding of speech was better and my vision was clearer. My diagnosis was optic atrophy at age 5 and my vision gradually degenerated over the years. For unknown reasons, nerve damage caused hearing loss and during my teens, my hearing grew worse and worse until by the time I was ready for college, I was profoundly deaf. I chose to attend Gallaudet University because my high school teachers and my parents felt I would receive better services as a deaf and blind student. I feel it was a very good decision; when I entered Gallaudet, it was like entering a new and exhilarating world. Before attending Gallaudet, while I struggled to cope with hearing loss combined with severely low vision, my world grew smaller and smaller, not being able to communicate efficiently with others. At Gallaudet, I suddenly found I could communicate with almost anybody I met on campus using sign language. Thus, my self-confidence and independence grew as I proceeded to get a college education.It wasn't an easy route to follow. I didn't know Braille at the time and depended on using a CCTV (closed captioned television) electronic aid which magnified text, enabling me to read all my college books. I also relied on the assistance of a class aid who interpreted all my teachers' lectures and class discussions because I was unable to see people's signing unless they signed right in front of my face. It was slow going and often frustrating, trying to keep involved socially and keeping up with my coursework but when I was 13 years old, my vision specialist teacher who had worked with me from 5th grade until I graduated from high school, wrote a note for me saying, "Anything worthwhile seldom comes easy." The phrase stuck in my mind and I tried to follow this philosophy. In 1989 after 7 years of persistence, I graduated with a Bachelor's of Arts degree in psychology. With the B.A. in hand and having developed good communication skills with deaf and deaf-blind people using sign language and ASL (American Sign Language), I was ready to face the world. But I wasn't exactly ready; I knew I wanted a professional job working with deaf-blind people and the way to get there was to earn a master's degree. I applied for admission into Gallaudet's graduate school and was accepted into the vocational rehabilitation counselling program. While I thoroughly enjoyed graduate school experience, I got to work with my class mates one-on-one more often and there were a lot more hands-on activities, it became obvious to me that I wasn't prepared for graduate school. I needed to learn Braille and how to use Braille technology; my vision had worsened a lot since starting college. In addition, I needed a break from school and needed to gain experience in the working world. After completing one and a half years and earning 15 credit hours in the master's program, I left Gallaudet and found a job in Baltimore, Maryland.The job was with a new program for adults who were visually and hearing impaired and mentally disabled. My job was assisting the clients with independent living and work related skills. Most of the other staff were deaf, communicating via ASL. By then, I was skilled using tactile signing, putting my hand on the back of the signer's hand to follow movements by touch, and I made friends with co-workers. I felt grown up and independent working full-time, living in my own apartment, using the subway train and bus to travel to and from work. I didn't have any serious problems living on my own. There was a supermarket up the road to which I could walk or ride a bus. But I needed a taxi ride back to the apartment when I had more groceries than I could carry. I would leave a sign I made out of cardboard and wrote my address in big black numbers, on my apartment door to help the driver find my place. I used a white cane and upon moving to Baltimore, an Orientation and Mobility (O and M) teacher who worked with blind people, showing them how to travel in the city, taught me the route to my work place using the subway and bus. Thus, I was independent and knew my way to work as well as to a nearby shopping mall. One day as I stood on the subway station platform holding my white cane, waiting for my train, the opposite train pulled in. As I stood watching passengers hurrying to board, knowing my train would arrive soon on the other side, a woman ran up to me and started pulling my arm. I handed her my notebook and black marker I used for communicating with people in the public, telling her I couldn't hear and would she please write in large print? She frantically scribbled something, but I couldn't read the note. She then gave me back the pen and pad, grabbed my arm again and started pulling me towards the train. I refused to budge, gesturing towards the opposite tracks, clearly indicating I was waiting for the other train. Finally, she let go, dashed into the train before the doors closed. I watched the train pull away, sadly reflecting that some people who wanted to help, just didn't understand how to approach disabled people. As a deaf-blind traveller, it was my duty to help educate the general public how to assist disabled persons in a humane way. After I established my new life for a few months, Bill was offered a position in the same program and moved to Baltimore to join me. He had worked at the Helen Keller National Centre in New York where I met him while doing a summer internship there three years before. I was thrilled when he got the job working beside me and we got to know each other on a daily basis. We had been dating since we met although I was in college and he was working and living in New York and then Cleveland, Ohio. Bill being hearing and sighted, was skilled in sign language and communication techniques with deaf-blind people. He had a wonderful attitude towards disabled people and made me feel like a normal person who was capable of doing things. We shared a lot and were very comfortable with each other. After nearly six months together in Baltimore, we married in May 1992, several weeks before my 28th birthday.After our first year of marriage living in Maryland, Bill and I moved to Little Rock, Arkansas. We wanted to live closer to my family and parents, Ron and Judy Cummings, who lived in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, 176 miles north of Little Rock. I wanted to go back to school and entered the deaf education program at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock with the goal of becoming a teacher for deaf-blind students. I never dreamed I would have a deaf-blind child of my own one day. My vision and hearing loss were caused by nerve damage and no one else in my family nor Bill's had a similar disability.I was pregnant with our first child when I entered UALR. In spite of my growing belly, I enjoyed the teacher training experience. I worked with a deaf-blind 12-year-old student and her teacher at the Arkansas School for the Deaf; observed two energetic four-year-olds in the pre-school program. But when my son, Joe was born in June 1994, my world changed once again. School became less important and motherhood became the ultimate. As a deaf-blind person, I wanted to be the best mom within my abilities.I decided that establishing good communication with my child was an important aspect of being a deaf-blind mom. Bill was in full agreement and we would set Joe on the kitchen table in his infant carrier, reciting together in sign language, "The three Bears". I could see Joe's tiny fists and feet wave excitedly in the air as he watched us signing children's stories. I would encourage Joe to hold my fingers while I signed to him, trying to establish a tactile signing relationship. But he was almost two years old when he finally understood that he needed to sign into my hands. We were sitting at the table and I had a bag of cookies. I refused to give him one until he made the sign for "cookie" in my hand. I quickly rewarded him with a cookie and he got three or four each time he made the sign in my hand. Today at 16, Joe is an expert finger speller and can effectively communicate with me and his younger deaf-blind brother, Ben.When Joe was two and a half, I decided to explore a cochlear implant. It was 1996 and we were living in Poplar Bluff by then. My cousin, who was studying audiology, told me that people using cochlear implants were able to understand sound so well they didn't need good vision. I made an appointment with the St. Louis cochlear implant program and after being evaluated, I decided to go ahead. I am glad I have a cochlear implant. After months of practice I learned to use the new sound and was eventually able to understand many environmental sounds. I never regained the ability of understanding speech, though, but I could hear people's voices very clearly, the sound of laughter, birds singing, and many more. Being able to hear my children's voices is especially wonderful, even when they get noisy and I get a headache. That fall I went to Leader Dogs School for the Blind (LDSB) where I met Milo, a large yellow Labrador retriever. At LDSB I learned how to care for and work with a dog guide. Having Milo as my companion and guide was like stepping into another new and wonderful world of independence. With Milo, I could walk briskly and feel secure. Milo was a big help as a deaf-blind mom, too. With Milo's guiding help, it was wonderful following my children while they rode tricycles or bikes and the whole family enjoyed going out for walks together. Our second son, Ben, was born in February 1999. He was a perfectly healthy little boy and Bill and I were looking forward to raising two sons. Joe was four and a half years old when Ben was born and was fascinated in his new brother. But when Ben was 5 months old, he was diagnosed with Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis (LCH), a rare childhood disease and in some cases, fatal. It was a long, scary road we followed as Ben received treatment at the children's hospital in St. Louis which involved making the 150 mile trip almost weekly for chemotherapy and doctor check-ups. Through it all, Ben was a happy little boy, in spite of the terrible rash that affected his scalp and diaper area, a symptom of LCH. Bill and I knew that we had to do everything possible to help Ben. When he was a year old, his condition seemed stable enough for me to feel comfortable leaving my family for two months to study Braille and learn new technology skills at a program in Kansas City. My vision had deteriorated to a point where I could no longer use a CCTV.Bill's mom, Marie Reid, who lived in Cleveland, Ohio, made a special trip to stay at our home in Poplar Bluff to help Bill with the boys while I was gone. I was successful at the program, learning Braille, making a change from magnification to Braille technology. Upon returning home, I began looking for a job and found employment as a deaf-blind specialist in a new project in Mississippi. The job was in Tupelo and we moved to northern Mississippi, settling into a new life. We transferred Ben's treatment to St. Judes Children's hospital located in Memphis, 94 miles west of Tupelo. I went to work and Bill stayed home with the boys, which worked well. When Ben had to go to St. Judes every three weeks for chemotherapy, Bill was able to drive him. The treatment was successful, the rash had disappeared and there were no traces of LCH in Ben's blood tests. But when he was almost 3 years old, he was diagnosed with optic atrophy, the same eye disease I suffered from and an audiologist detected signs of inner ear hearing loss.Shocked at the news that our little son would grow up legally blind and perhaps become deaf, Bill and I had to rethink our future. We knew we wanted Ben to have a good life and as a deaf-blind child, he needed quality services. We chose to move to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania because I knew there were good services for deaf-blind people and I could function independently as a stay-home mom. In addition, Cleveland, Ohio, where Marie Reid and several of Bill's siblings lived, was a two hour's drive from Pittsburgh and living near family was important to us. With regret, I left my job opportunity and new friends and we re-located to Pittsburgh. We lived on a quiet street near Squirrel Hill and enrolled Joe into a near-by Catholic school. Ben received excellent early intervention services through the Pittsburgh public school, beginning Braille, using a white cane and tactile signing. The Pennsylvania services for the blind generously purchased a wonderful computer system and Braille display for me to use at home. I was able to communicate with Joe's and Ben's teachers and other contacts using e-mail. Ben's Braille teacher provided us with several print/Braille books which I read to the boys while Ben touched the tactile pictures. I made friends in the deaf and deaf-blind community and our family attended social events. Besides the social benefits of a deaf community, Pittsburgh offered a wonderful interpreting service and I was able to take Ben to doctor appointments knowing an interpreter would meet me at the hospital to assist with communication. I also found people who were willing to help me as volunteer SSPs (support Service Providers), persons whose role is to assist a deaf-blind person in any way, such as shopping, going to the bank, etc. Thus, I was able to function quite independently while Bill worked. Perhaps Bill and I were a bit crazy; after all, we had enough on our plate with a deaf-blind son and a deaf-blind mom, but love is a mysterious thing. In October 2003, Tim was born and our family was complete. Having two school-aged children and a baby on my hands was too much for me to handle alone. Bill was working and busy with culinary arts school. We realized we needed more help with the children, plus the high cost of living in the city was a struggle for us. We decided for the family's best interest, it would be better to move back to Poplar Bluff. After Joe and Ben were out of school in June, my mom flew out to Pittsburgh to escort them back to her home while Bill finished his externship for his culinary arts degree and in the late summer of 2004, we packed up our apartment, said good-bye to Pittsburgh, and drove to Missouri. The move was a good decision in many ways. Poplar Bluff, a rural town in south-eastern Missouri, has been my hometown since I was 10 years old. My extended family live there and the boys are thriving growing up among their cousins. Ben is receiving Braille and sign language services at public school and reads Braille faster than me!While both Bill and I are deeply satisfied knowing our children are happy, we have made personal sacrifices. Bill has given up his career satisfaction as a professional cook, needing to help look after the children and house. I have given up the benefits of city life such as interpreting and SSP services, not to mention the social benefits of a deaf community. But the children's well-being comes first, and I have found ways to fulfil my needs by getting involved with on-line groups for deaf-blind people, including writers and poets. I have taken a great interest in writing, especially children's stories and hope to establish a career as a writer. While I work on my computer, Bill keeps busy engaging the boys in various projects. They have built a screened-in tree house in the backyard where Ben and Tim like to sleep during warm summer nights.“It's almost 5 o'clock," Bill signed into my hand, rousing me from my thoughts. Time to prepare for our homeward journey the next day to Poplar Bluff, Missouri.Christy and Family

Swine semantics erupted into a linguistic battle between the two U.S. presidential candidates in the 2008 campaign over a lesser-known colloquialism “lipstick on a pig” reference in a speech by then Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama. This resulted in the Republicans sparring with the Democrats over the identification of the “swine” in question, claiming “sexism” and demanding an apology on behalf of then Governor Sarah Palin, the first female Republican vice presidential candidate. The Republican Party, fearful of being criticised for its own sexist and racist views (Kuhn par. 1), seized the opportunity to attack the Democrats with a proactive media campaign that made the lipstick comment a lead story in the media during a critical time less than two months before the election, derailing more serious campaign issues and focusing attention on Palin, who had just made her national political debut and whose level of experience was widely debated. Leskovec, Backstrom, and Kleinberg conducted a meme-tracking study for analysing news-cycle phrases in approximately 90 million stories from 1.6 million online sites spanning mainstream news to blogs during the final three months of the U.S. presidential election (1). They discovered that “lipstick on a pig” was “stickier” than other phrases and received “unexpectedly high popularity” (4). A simple Google search of “lipstick on a pig” resulted in 244,000 results, with more than half originating in 2008. Obama’s “Lipstick on a Pig” Reference During the final rounds of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s words at a widely televised campaign stop in Lebanon, Virginia, on 9 September, sparked a linguistic debate between the two major American political parties 56 days before Election Day. Obama attempted to debunk McCain’s strategy about change in the following statement:John McCain says he’s about change, too. [...] And so I guess his whole angle is, watch out, George Bush. Except for economic policy, healthcare policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy, and Karl Rove-style politics [...] That’s not change. That’s just calling some—the same thing, something different. But you know [...] you can put [...] lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig (“Obama’s Take”).A reporter from The New York Times commented that it was clear to the audience that Obama’s “lipstick” phrase was a direct reference to McCain’s policies (Zeleny par. 5). Known as a well-educated, articulate speaker, perhaps one considered too professorial for mainstream America, Obama attempted to inject more folksy language and humour into his dialogue with the public. However, the Republicans interpreted the metaphor quite differently. Republicans Claim “Sexism” from a “Male Chauvinist Pig” The Republican contender John McCain and his entourage immediately took offence, claiming that the “pig” in question was a sexist comment referring to Palin, who was introduced on 29 August as the first female vice presidential candidate on the Republican ticket (“VP Pick”). A Republican National Committee spokeswoman quickly told the media, “Sarah Palin’s maverick record of reform doesn’t need any ‘dressing up,’ but the Obama campaign’s condescending commentary deserves some dressing down” (Chozick par. 8). McCain’s camp formed the Palin Truth Squad with 54 Republican women, primarily lawyers and politicians, on the same day as the metaphor was used, to counter negative media and Internet commentary about Palin (Harper A13). Almost immediately after Obama’s “lipstick” comment, McCain’s camp conducted a conference call with journalists and former Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift, a Republican and chair of the Palin Truth Squad, who stated the lipstick comment referred to Palin, “the only one of the four—the presidential and vice presidential candidates—who wears lipstick” (Kornblut and Shear par. 12). Another member of the Squad, Thelma Drake, then a Republican Representative from Virginia, said that “it’s hard for Barack Obama to paint himself as the agent of change if he harbors the same mindset that Palin and millions of women just like her, have been fighting against their whole lives” (Applegate par. 8). Swift and others also claimed Obama was referring to Palin since she had herself used a lipstick metaphor during her Republican National Convention speech, 3 Sepember: “I love those hockey moms. You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick” (“Palin’s Speech” par. 26). The Republicans also created an anti-Obama Web ad with the theme, “Ready to Lead? No. Ready to Smear? Yes,“ (Weisman and Slevin A01) with a compilation of video clips of Palin’s “lipstick” joke, followed by the latter part of Obama's “lipstick” speech, and CBS News anchorwoman, Katie Couric, talking about “sexism” in politics, that latter of which referred to an older clip referring to Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the White House. Both clips on Obama and Couric were taken out of context. CBS retaliated and released a statement that the network “does not endorse any candidate” and that “any use of CBS personnel in political advertising that suggests the contrary is misleading” (Silva par. 8). YouTube pulled the Republican Web ads stating that the cause was “due to a copyright claim” (Silva par. 7). Another porcine phrase became linked to Obama—“male chauvinist pig”—an expression that evolved as an outgrowth of the feminist movement in the 1960s and first appeared with the third word, “pig,” in the media in 1970 (Mansbridge and Flaster 261). BlogHer, a blog for women, posted “Liberal Chauvinist Pigs,” on the same day as Obama's speech, asking: “Does the expression male chauvinist pig come to mind?” (Leary par. 5) Other conservative blogs also reflected on this question, painting Obama as a male chauvinist pig, and chastising both the liberal media and the Democrats for questioning Palin’s credentials as a viable vice presidential candidate. Obama “Sexist Pig Gear” protest tee-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers were sold online by Zazzle.com. Democratic Response to “Controversy” During a campaign stop in Norfolk, Virginia, the day after his “lipstick” comment, Obama called the Republican backlash the “latest made-up controversy by the John McCain campaign” and appealed for a return to more serious topics with “enough” of “foolish diversions” (“Obama Hits”). He stated that the Republicans “seize on an innocent remark, try to take it out of context, throw up an outrageous ad, because they know it’s catnip for the news media” (“Obama Hits”). Obama also referred to the situation as the “silly season of politics” in media interviews (James par. 8). Obama’s spokespeople rallied claiming that McCain played the “gender card about the use of a common analogy” (Kornblut and Shear par. 6). An Obama campaign spokesman distributed to the media copies of articles from a Chicago Tribune story in 2007 in which McCain applied the lipstick analogy about the healthcare strategy of Hillary Clinton, a previous female Democratic presidential contender (Chozick 11). Another Obama spokeswoman said that the porcine expression “was older than my grandfather’s grandfather,” (Zimmer par. 1) which also inspired the media and linguists to further investigate this claim. Evolution of “Lipstick on a Pig” This particular colloquial use of a “pig” evolved from a long history of porcine expressions in American politics. American political discourse has been rich with cultural references to porcine idioms with negative connotations. Pork barrels were common 19th-century household items used to store salt pork, and some plantation owners doled out the large barrels as rewards to slaves who then had to compete with each other to grab a portion (Maxey 693). In post-Civil War America, “pork barrel” became a political term for legislative bills “loaded with special projects for Members of Congress to distribute to their constituents back home as an act of largesse, courtesy of the federal taxpayer” (“Pork Barrel Legislation”). Today, “pork barrel” is widely used in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and other countries (“Definition Pork Barrel”) to refer to “government projects or appropriations yielding rich patronage benefits” (“Pork Barrel”). Conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh coined the term, “porkulus,” as another expression for “pork barrel” by merging the words “pork and “stimulus,” while discussing President Obama’s economic stimulus package in January 2009 (Kuntz par. 1). Ben Zimmer, an American lexicologist, explained that “many porcine proverbs describe vain attempts at converting something from ugly to pretty, or from useless to useful” (par. 2). Zimmer and other writers investigated the heritage of “lipstick on a pig” over the past 500 years from “you can't make a silk purse from a sow’s ear,” “a hog in armour is still a hog,” and “a hog in a silk waistcoat is still a hog.” Zimmer connected the dots between the words “lipstick,” a 19th-century invention, and “pig” to a Los Angeles Times editor in 1926 who wrote: “Most of us know as much of history as a pig does of lipsticks” (par. 3). American Politicians Who Have Smeared “Lipstick on a Pig” Which American politicians had used “lipstick on a pig” before Obama? Both Democrats and Republicans have coloured their speech with this colloquialism to refer to specific issues, not specific people. In 2008, Elizabeth Edwards, wife of presidential hopeful John Edwards, used the porcine expression about McCain’s healthcare proposals at a Democratic campaign event and House Minority Leader John Boehner, a Republican, about weak Republican fundraising efforts during the same month (Covington and Curry par. 7-8). McCain ironically used the term twice to criticise Hillary Clinton’s healthcare proposals as “lipstick on a pig,” while they were both campaigning in 2007 (Covington and Curry par. 6). His statement received limited attention at the time. During a telephone interview in 2007, Obama also had used the pig analogy when referring to an “impossible assignment” George W. Bush gave to General Petraeus, who was then serving as the Multinational Forces Iraq Commander (Tapper par. 15). In 2004, Republican Vice President Richard Cheney applied a regional slant: “As we like to say in Wyoming, you can put all the lipstick you want on a pig, but at the end of the day it's still a pig,” about the national defence record of John Kerry, then a Democratic presidential nominee (Covington and Curry par. 4). A few months earlier that year, John Edwards, Democratic vice presidential candidate, scolded the Bush administration for putting “lipstick on a pig” on “lackluster job-creation numbers” (Covington and Curry par. 3). Representative Charles Rangel, a Democrat, identified the “pig” as a tax bill the same year (Siegel par. 15-16). In 1992, the late Governor of Texas, Ann Richards, a Democrat, who was known for colourful phrases, gave the pig a name when she said: “You can put lipstick on a hog and call it Monique, but it is still a pig,” referring to the Republican administration for deploying warships to protect oil tankers in the Middle East, effectively subsidizing foreign oil (Zimmer par. 4). A year earlier, when she introduced her first budget for Texas, she said: “This is not another one of those deals where you put lipstick on a hog and call it a princess” (Zimmer par. 4). The earliest reputed recorded use of an American politician using the phrase was Texas Democrat Jim Hightower, who applied it to depict the reorganisation of Ronald Reagan's Cabinet in 1986 (Macintyre 16). Time magazine reporters (Covington and Curry par. 2) and Zimmer (par. 3) claimed that a San Francisco radio personality, Ron Lyons, was one of the earliest quoted in print with “lipstick on a pig” about renovation plans for a local park in November 1985 in the Washington Post. Author of the Double-Tongued Dictionary, Grant Barrett, uncovered a 1980 article from a small Washington state newspaper as the earliest written record with an article that stated: “You can clean up a pig, put a ribbon on it’s [sic] tail, spray it with perfume, but it is still a pig” (Guzman par. 7). A book on communication also adopted the pig metaphor in its title in 2006, Lipstick on a Pig: Winning in the No-Spin Era by Someone Who Knows the Game, by Torie Clarke, who previously served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs under Donald Rumsfield during the early years of the G.W. Bush Administration. Media Commentary According to The New York Times (Leibovich and Barrett), “lipstick on a pig” was one of the most popular political buzzwords and phrases of 2008, along with others directly referring to Palin, “Caribou Barbie” and “Hockey Mom,” as well as “Maverick,” a popular term used by both McCain and Palin. Many journalists played on the metaphor to express disdain for negative political campaigns. A Wall Street Journal article asked: “What's the difference between a more hopeful kind of politics and old-fashioned attacks? Lipstick” (Chozick par. 1). International media also covered the Obama-McCain lipstick wars. The Economist, for example, wrote that the “descent of American politics into pig wrestling has dismayed America’s best friends abroad” (“Endless Culture War” par. 6). Bloggers claimed that Obama’s “lipstick” speech was influenced by copy and imagery from two leading American cartoonists. The Free Republic, self-acclaimed to be “the premier online gathering place for independent, grass-roots conservatism” (Freerepublic.com), claimed that Obama plagiarized almost verbatim the language leading into the “pig” comment from a Tom Toles cartoon that ran in the Washington Post on 5 Sepember (see fig. 1).Fig. 1. Toles, Tom. Cartoon. Washington Post. 5 Sep. 2008. 30 July 2010 Another cartoon by R. J. Matson appeared in the St. Louis Post Dispatch (see fig. 2) four days before Obama’s speech that depicted Palin not just as a pig wearing lipstick, but as one using pork barrel funding. The cartoon’s caption provides an interpretation of Palin's lipstick analogy: “Question: What’s the Difference Between a Hockey Mom Reformer and a Business-As-Usual Pork Barrel-Spending Politician? Answer: Lipstick.” Newsbusters.org blogger stated: “It’s not too far-fetched to say Team Obama is cribbing his stump speech laugh lines from the liberal funnies” (Shepherd par. 3). Fig 2. Matson, R. J. Cartoon. St. Louis Post Dispatch. 5 Sep. 2008. 30 July 2010 . A porcine American character known for heavy makeup and a starring role as one of the Muppets created by puppeteer Jim Henson in the 1970s, Miss Piggy still remains an American icon. She commented on the situation during an interview on the set of “Today,” an American television program. When the interviewer asked, “Were you surprised by all the hubbub this election season over your lipstick practices?,” Miss Piggy’s response was “Moi will not dignify that with a response” (Raphael par. 6-7). Concluding Comments The 2008 U.S. presidential election presented new players in the arena: the first African-American in a leading party and the first female Republican. During a major election, words used by candidates are widely scrutinised and, in this case, the “lipstick on a pig” phrase was misconstrued by the opposing party, known for conservative values, that latched onto the opportunity to level a charge of sexism against the more liberal party. Vocabulary about gender, like language about race, can become a “minefield” (Givhan M01). With today’s 24/7 news cycle and the blogosphere, the perceived significance of a political comment, whether innocent or not, is magnified through repeated analysis and commentary. The meme-tracking study by Leskovec, Backstrom, and Kleinberg observed that 2.5 hours was the typical time lag between stories originating in mainstream media and reaching the blogosphere (8); whereas only 3.5 percent of the stories began in blogs and later permeated into traditional media (9). An English author of the history of clichés and language, Julia Cresswell, stated that the “lipstick” term “seems to be another candidate for clichéhood” (61). Although usage of clichés can prove to cause complications as in the case of Obama’s lipstick reference, Obama was able to diffuse the Republican backlash quickly and make a plea to return to serious issues affecting voters. David Greenberg analysed Obama’s presidential win and explained: And although other factors, especially the tanking economy, obviously contributed more directly to his November victory, it would be a mistake to overlook the importance of his skill at mastering the politics of negative attacks. When Obama went negative against others, he carefully singled out aspects of his opponents’ characters that, he argued, American politics itself had to transcend; he associated his foes with the worst of the old politics and himself with the best of the new. When others fired at him, in contrast, he was almost always able to turn the criticisms back upon them—through feigned outrage, among other tactics—as perpetuating those selfsame blights on our politics (70). References Applegate, Aaron. “Rep. Drake Criticizes Obama for ‘Lipstick on a Pig’ Remark.” Virginia Pilot 10 Sep. 2008. 28 Jul. 2010. Chozick, Amy. “Obama Puts Different Twist on Lipstick.” Wall Street Journal 9 Sep. 2008. 30 Jul. 2010. Covington, Marti, and Maya Curry. “A Brief History of: ‘Putting Lipstick on a Pig.’” Time 11 Sep. 2008. 17 May 2010. Cresswell, Julia. “Let’s Hear it for the Cliché.” British Journalism Review 19.57 (2008): 57-61. “Endless Culture War.” The Economist 4 Oct. 2008: ABI/INFORM Global, ProQuest. 30 Jul. 2010. “Definition Pork Barrel.” Webster’s Online Dictionary. 30 Jul. 2010. freerepublic.com. “Welcome to Free Republic.” Free Republic 2009. 30 Jul. 2010. Givhan, Robin. “On the Subject of Race, Words Get in the Way.” Washington Post 20 Jan. 2008: M01. Greenberg, David. “Accentuating the Negative.” Dissent 56.2 (2009): 70-75. Guzman, Monica. “‘Lipstick on a Pig’ Finds Origin in Tiny State Newspaper.” Seattlepi.com 10 Sep. 2008. 17 May 2010. Harper, Jennifer. “Obama Comment Offends GOP Women; ‘Palin Truth Squad’ Sent Out to Counter ‘Lipstick on a Pig’ Remark.” Washington Times 10 Sep. 2008: A13. Huston, Warner Todd. “Did Obama Steal His Lip Stick on a Pig From a Political Cartoon?” Newsbusters.org 10 Sep. 2008. 15 Jul. 2010 . James, Frank. “Barack Obama on David Letterman.” Chicago Tribune 11 Sep. 2008. 15 Jul. 2010 http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/09/barack_obama_on_david_letterma.html>. Kornblut, Anne E., and Michael D. Shear. “McCain Camp Sees an Insult in a Saying.” Washington Post 10 Sep. 2008. 30 Jul. 2010 AR2008090903531.html>. Kuhn, David P. “GOP Fears Charges of Racism, Sexism.” Politico.com 23 Feb. 2008. 4 Oct. 2010. Kuntz, Tom. “Porkulus.” NYTimes.com 8 Feb. 2009. 30 Jul. 2010. Leary, Anne. “Liberal Chauvinist Pigs.” BlogHer 9 Sep. 2008. 2 Oct. 2010. Leibovich, Mark, and Grant Barrett. “The Buzzwords of 2008.” New York Times 21 Dec. 2008. 29 Jul. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/ref/weekinreview/buzzwords2008.html>. Leskovec, Jure, Lars Backstrom, and Jon Kleinberg. “Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle.” ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Paris, 28 Jun. 2009. 30 Jul. 2010 . Macintyre, Ben. “US Politics is Littered with Dawgs, Crawdaddys and Pigs in Lipstick.” The Times [London] 27 Sep. 2008: 16. Mansbridge, Jane, and Katherine Flaster. “Male Chauvinist, Feminist, Sexist, and Sexual Harassment: Different Trajectories in Feminist Linguistic Innovation.” American Speech 80.3 (Fall 2005): 256-279. Maxey, Chester Collins. “A Little History of Pork.” National Municipal Review, Volume VIII. Concord: Rumford Press, 1919. Google Books. 30 Jul. 2010. “Obama Hits Back Against McCain Campaign.” MSNBC 10 Sep. 2008. Televised Speech. 18 May 2010. “Obama’s Take on McCain's Version of Change.” CNN 9 Sep. 2009. YouTube.com. 17 May 2010. “Palin’s Speech at the Republican National Convention.” New York Times 3 Sep. 2008. 17 May 2010. “Pork Barrel.” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary 2010. 30 Jul. 2010. “Pork Barrel Legislation.” C-SPAN Congressional Glossary. c-span.org. 17 May 2010. Raphael, Rina. “Miss Piggy: Obama Should Make Poodle First Pet” Today 13 Nov. 2008. MSNBC.com. 29 Jul. 2010. Shepherd, Ken. “Palin Shown As Lipsticked Pig in Cartoon Days Before Obama Remark.” NewsBusters.org 11 Sep. 2008. 30 Jul. 2010 . Siegel, Robert. “Putting Lipstick on a Pig.” National Public Radio 10 Sep. 2008. 16 Jul. 2010. Silva, Mark. “Katie Couric's 'Lipstick' Rescue: CBS.” Chicago Tribune 11 Sep. 2008. 30 Jul. 2010. Tapper, Jack. “A Piggish Debate: Power, Pop, and Probings from ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper.” ABC News 9 Sep. 2008. 29 Jul. 2010. “VP Pick Palin Makes Appeal to Women Voters.” NBC News, msnbc.com, and Associated Press 28 Aug. 2008. 30 Jul. 2010. Weisman, Jonathan, and Peter Slevin. “McCain Camp Hits Obama on More Than One Front.” Washington Post 11 Sep. 2008: A04. Zeleny, Jeff. “Feeling a Challenge, Obama Sharpens His Silver Tongue.” New York Times 10 Sep. 2008. 27 Jul. 2010. Zimmer, Ben. “Who First Put ‘Lipstick on a Pig’?” The Slate 10 Sep. 2008. 17 May 2010.

Sam bo chinh (Abelmoschus sagittifolius (Kurz) Merr.) is a precious medicinal plant that has been exploited and planted in Vietnam for a long time. However, the morphological characteristics of this plant is easy to confuse with other species of the same genus. In addition, the microscopic characteristics and medicinal powder composition of this medicinal plant have not been comprehensively described. The present investigation was aimed to determine the morphological and microscopic characters of Sam bo chinh using comparative morphology, anatomical research and medicinal powder analysis. The complete description of morphological and microscopic characteristics reported in this study will serve as valuable data for the conservation and development of this species in Vietnam. Keywords Morphology, microscopic characteristics, medicinal plant, Abelmoschus sagittifolius. References [1] The International Plant Names Index and World Checklist of Selected Plant Families 2021, http://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:558042-1, (accessed on: 7th May 2021).[2] P. H. Ho, Medicinal Plants in Vietnam, Tre Publishing House, Ho Chi Minh, 2006, pp. 112 (in Vietnamese).[3] D. H. Bich et al., Medicinal Plants and Medicinal Animals in Vietnam, Science and Technics Publishing House, Hanoi, 2006, pp. 690-693 (in Vietnamese).[4] Ministry of Health, Vietnamese Pharmacopoeia V, Medical Publishing House, Hanoi, 2018, pp. 1310-1311 (in Vietnamese).[5] G. L. D. Chen, Y. Y. Liu, G. X. Ma, W. Zheng, X. B. Sun, X. D. Xu, A New Cadinane Sesquiterpenoid Glucoside with Cytotoxicity from Abelmoschus sagittifolius, Natural Product Research, Vol. 33, 2019, pp. 1699-1704, https://doi.org/10.1080/14786419.2018.1431635.[6] D. T. Vui, Study Chemical Composition and Pharmacological Effects towards The Treatment Gastric Ulcers of The Roots of Abelmoschus sagittifolius (Kurz) Merr. Malvaceae, Doctoral Thesis, National Institute of Medicinal Materials, Hanoi, 2007 (in Vietnamese).[7] D. T. Xuyen, Some New Information on The Genus Abelmoschus Medic. in Vietnam, Scientific Report on Ecology and Biological Resources, The First National Conference, Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources, Hanoi, 2005 (in Vietnamese).[8] N. N. Thin, Methods of Plant Research, Vietnam National University Press, Hanoi, 2007 (in Vietnamese).[9] N. Ba, Plant Morphology, Vietnam Education Publishing House, Hanoi, 2006 (in Vietnamese).[10] N. V. Than, Testing Medicinal Herbs by Microscopic Method, Science and Technics Publishing House, Hanoi, 2003 (in Vietnamese).[11] P. H. Raven, H. D. W. Zhengyi, Flora of China, Science Press (Beijing) & Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis), China and USA, 2007, pp. 283-285.[12] Abelmoschus moschatus (L.) Medik, http://uphcm.edu.vn/caythuoc/index.php?q=book/export/html/298, (accessed on: May 25th, 2020) (in Vietnamese)

Abstract There are no validated criteria for diagnosing chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or traumatic encephalopathy syndrome, in a living person. The purpose of this study is to examine symptom reporting resembling the research criteria for traumatic encephalopathy syndrome in men and women from the US general population. This is a retrospective analysis of publicly available data from a cross-sectional epidemiological study. The National Comorbidity Survey Replication was designed to examine the prevalence and correlates of mental disorders in the USA. The study included a nationally representative sample of 9282 adults (4139 men and 5143 women). An in-person interview and survey were conducted in the homes of men and women from the general population. The study was conducted with participants residing in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, San Francisco, Washington DC, Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Boston, Nassau-Suffolk NY, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Atlanta. Symptoms from the research criteria for the diagnosis of traumatic encephalopathy syndrome were applied to men and women in the general population and in sub-groups of people with health problems and mental health problems. A small percentage of the US general population met symptom criteria for traumatic encephalopathy syndrome (6.6–11.9%, depending on the definition applied). People with chronic pain were much more likely to meet criteria (i.e. 14.8–30.5%), and two out of three people who have experienced suicidality in the past year met symptom criteria for traumatic encephalopathy syndrome (65.2–72.2%). The majority of women with a mood disorder and chronic pain met criteria (62.7–89.8%). This is the largest study, to date, examining the aspects of the research criteria for the diagnosis of traumatic encephalopathy syndrome in the general population, and the first study to examine these criteria in women. This study has important clinical and public health implications. The potential rate for misdiagnosing traumatic encephalopathy syndrome in adults who are experiencing chronic pain, idiopathic mental health problems or both is high.

IntroductionMusically-inclined people often speak about the soundtrack of their life, with certain songs indelibly linked to a specific moment. When hearing a particular song, it can “easily evoke a whole time and place, distant feelings and emotions, and memories of where we were, and with whom” (Lewis 135). Music has the ability to provide maps to real and imagined spaces, positioning people within a larger social environment where songs “are never just a song, but a connection, a ticket, a pass, an invitation, a node in a complex network” (Kun 3). When someone is lost in the music, they can find themselves transported somewhere else entirely without physically moving. This can be a blessing in some situations, for example, while living in a disaster zone, when almost any other time or place can seem better than the here and now. The city of Christchurch, New Zealand was hit by a succession of damaging earthquakes beginning with a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in the early hours of 4 September 2010. The magnitude 6.3 earthquake of 22 February 2011, although technically an aftershock of the September earthquake, was closer and shallower, with intense ground acceleration that caused much greater damage to the city and its people (“Scientists”). It was this February earthquake that caused the total or partial collapse of many inner city buildings, and claimed the lives of 185 people. Everybody in Christchurch lost someone or something that day: their house or job; family members, friends, or colleagues; the city as they knew it; or their normal way of life. The broken central city was quickly cordoned off behind fences, with the few entry points guarded by local and international police and armed military personnel.In the aftermath of a disaster, circumstances and personal attributes will influence how people react, think and feel about the experience. Surviving a disaster is more than not dying, “survival is to do with quality of life [and] involves progressing from the event and its aftermath, and transforming the experience” (Hodgkinson and Stewart 2). In these times of heightened stress, music can be a catalyst for sharing and expressing emotions, connecting people and communities, and helping them make sense of what has happened (Carr 38; Webb 437). This article looks at some of the ways that popular songs and musical memories helped residents of a broken city remember the past and come to terms with the present.BackgroundExisting songs can take on new significance after a catastrophic event, even without any alteration. Songs such as Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? and Prayer for New Orleans have been given new emotional layers by those who were displaced or affected by Hurricane Katrina (Cooper 265; Sullivan 15). A thirty year-old song by Randy Newman, Louisiana, 1927, became something of “a contemporary anthem, its chorus – ‘Louisiana, they’re trying to wash us away’ – bearing new relevance” (Blumenfeld 166). Contemporary popular songs have also been re-mixed or revised after catastrophic events, either by the original artist or by others. Elton John’s Candle in the Wind and Beyonce’s Halo have each been revised twice by the artist after tragedy and disaster (Doyle; McAlister), while radio stations in the United States have produced commemorative versions of popular songs to mark tragedies and their anniversaries (Beaumont-Thomas; Cantrell). The use and appreciation of music after disaster is a reminder that popular music is fluid, in that it “refuses to provide a uniform or static text” (Connell and Gibson 3), and can simultaneously carry many different meanings.Music provides a soundtrack to daily life, creating a map of meaning to the world around us, or presenting a reminder of the world as it once was. Tia DeNora explains that when people hear a song that was once heard in, and remains associated with, a particular time and place, it “provides a device for unfolding, for replaying, the temporal structure of that moment, [which] is why, for so many people, the past ‘comes alive’ to its soundtrack” (67). When a community is frequently and collectively casting their minds back to a time before a catastrophic change, a sense of community identity can be seen in the use of, and reaction to, particular songs. Music allows people to “locate themselves in different imaginary geographics at one and the same time” (Cohen 93), creating spaces for people to retreat into, small ‘audiotopias’ that are “built, imagined, and sustained through sound, noise, and music” (Kun 21). The use of musical escape holes is prevalent after disaster, as many once-familiar spaces that have changed beyond recognition or are no longer able to be physically visited, can be easily imagined or remembered through music. There is a particular type of longing expressed by those who are still at home and yet cannot return to the home they knew. Whereas nostalgia is often experienced by people far from home who wish to return or those enjoying memories of a bygone era, people after disaster often encounter a similar nostalgic feeling but with no change in time or place: a loss without leaving. Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ to represent “the form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at home” (35). This sense of being unable to find solace in one’s home environment can be brought on by natural disasters such as fire, flood, earthquakes or hurricanes, or by other means like war, mining, climate change or gentrification. Solastalgia is often felt most keenly when people experience the change first-hand and then have to adjust to life in a totally changed environment. This can create “chronic distress of a solastalgic kind [that] would persist well after the acute phase of post-traumatic distress” (Albrecht 36). Just as the visible, physical effects of disaster last for years, so too do the emotional effects, but there have been many examples of how the nostalgia inherent in a shared popular music soundtrack has eased the pain of solastalgia for a community that is hurting.Pop Songs and Nostalgia in ChristchurchIn September 2011, one year after the initial earthquake, the Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) announced a collaboration with Christchurch hip hop artist, Scribe, to remake his smash hit, Not Many, for charity. Back in 2003, Not Many debuted at number five on the New Zealand music charts, where it spent twelve weeks at number one and was crowned ‘Single of the Year’ (Sweetman, On Song 164). The punchy chorus heralded Scribe as a force to be reckoned with, and created a massive imprint on New Zealand popular culture with the line: “How many dudes you know roll like this? Not many, if any” (Scribe, Not Many). Music critic, Simon Sweetman, explains how “the hook line of the chorus [is now] a conversational aside that is practically unavoidable when discussing amounts… The words ‘not many’ are now truck-and-trailered with ‘if any’. If you do not say them, you are thinking them” (On Song 167). The strong links between artist and hometown – and the fact it is an enduringly catchy song – made it ideal for a charity remake. Reworded and reworked as Not Many Cities, the chorus now asks: “How many cities you know roll like this?” to which the answer is, of course, “not many, if any” (Scribe/BNZ, Not Many Cities). The remade song entered the New Zealand music charts at number 36 and the video was widely shared through social media but not all reception was positive. Parts of the video were shot in the city’s Red Zone, the central business district that was cordoned off from public access due to safety concerns. The granting of special access outraged some residents, with letters to the editor and online commentary expressing frustration that celebrities were allowed into the Red Zone to shoot a music video while those directly affected were not allowed in to retrieve essential items from residences and business premises. However, it is not just the Red Zone that features: the video switches between Scribe travelling around the broken inner city on the back of a small truck and lingering shots of carefully selected people, businesses, and groups – all with ties to the BNZ as either clients or beneficiaries of sponsorship. In some ways, Not Many Cities comes across like just another corporate promotional video for the BNZ, albeit with more emotion and a better soundtrack than usual. But what it has bequeathed is a snapshot of the city as it was in that liminal time: a landscape featuring familiar buildings, spaces and places which, although damaged, was still a recognisable version of the city that existed before the earthquakes.Before Scribe burst onto the music scene in the early 2000s, the best-known song about Christchurch was probably Christchurch (in Cashel St. I wait), an early hit from the Exponents (Mitchell 189). Initially known as the Dance Exponents, the group formed in Christchurch in the early 1980s and remained local and national favourites thanks to a string of hits Sweetman refers to as “the question-mark songs,” such as Who Loves Who the Most?, Why Does Love Do This to Me?, and What Ever Happened to Tracey? (Best Songwriter). Despite disbanding in 1999, the group re-formed to be the headline act of ‘Band Together’—a multi-artist, outdoor music event organised for the benefit of Christchurch residents by local musician, Jason Kerrison, formerly of the band OpShop. Attended by over 140,000 people (Anderson, Band Together), this nine-hour event brought joy and distraction to a shaken and stressed populace who, at that point in time (October 2010), probably thought the worst was over.The Exponents took the stage last, and chose Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait) as their final number. Every musician involved in the gig joined them on stage and the crowd rose to their feet, singing along with gusto. A local favourite since its release in 1985, the verses may have been a bit of a mumble for some, but the chorus rang out loud and clear across the park: Christchurch, In Cashel Street I wait,Together we will be,Together, together, together, One day, one day, one day,One day, one day, one daaaaaay! (Exponents, “Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait)”; lyrics written as sung)At that moment, forming an impromptu community choir of over 100,000 people, the audience was filled with hope and faith that those words would come true. Life would go on and people would gather together in Cashel Street and wait for normality to return, one day. Later the following year, the opening of the Re:Start container mall added an extra layer of poignancy to the song lyrics. Denied access to most of the city’s CBD, that one small part of Cashel Street now populated with colourful shipping containers was almost the only place in central Christchurch where people could wait. There are many music videos that capture the central city of Christchurch as it was in decades past. There are some local classics, like The Bats’ Block of Wood and Claudine; The Shallows’ Suzanne Said; Moana and the Moahunters’ Rebel in Me; and All Fall Down’s Black Gratten, which were all filmed in the 1980s or early 1990s (Goodsort, Re-Live and More Music). These videos provide many flashback moments to the city as it was twenty or thirty years ago. However, one post-earthquake release became an accidental musical time capsule. The song, Space and Place, was released in February 2013, but both song and video had been recorded not long before the earthquakes occurred. The song was inspired by the feelings experienced when returning home after a long absence, and celebrates the importance of the home town as “a place that knows you as well as you know it” (Anderson, Letter). The chorus features the line, “streets of common ground, I remember, I remember” (Franklin, Mayes, and Roberts, Space and Place), but it is the video, showcasing many of the Christchurch places and spaces only recently lost to the earthquakes, that tugs at people’s heartstrings. The video for Space and Place sweeps through the central city at night, with key heritage buildings like the Christ Church Cathedral, and the Catholic Basilica lit up against the night sky (both are still damaged and inaccessible). Producer and engineer, Rob Mayes, describes the video as “a love letter to something we all lost [with] the song and its lyrics [becoming] even more potent, poignant, and unexpectedly prescient post quake” (“Songs in the Key”). The Arts Centre features prominently in the footage, including the back alleys and archways that hosted all manner of night-time activities – sanctioned or otherwise – as well as many people’s favourite hangout, the Dux de Lux (the Dux). Operating from the corner of the Arts Centre site since the 1970s, the Dux has been described as “the city’s common room” and “Christchurch’s beating heart” by musicians mourning its loss (Anderson, Musicians). While the repair and restoration of some parts of the Arts Centre is currently well advanced, the Student Union building that once housed this inner-city social institution is not slated for reopening until 2019 (“Rebuild and Restore”), and whether the Dux will be welcomed back remains to be seen. Empty Spaces, Missing PlacesA Facebook group, ‘Save Our Dux,’ was created in early March 2011, and quickly filled with messages and memories from around the world. People wandered down memory lane together as they reminisced about their favourite gigs and memorable occasions, like the ‘Big Snow’ of 1992 when the Dux served up mulled wine and looked more like a ski chalet. Memories were shared about the time when the music video for the Dance Exponents’ song, Victoria, was filmed at the Dux and the Art Deco-style apartment building across the street. The reminiscing continued, establishing and strengthening connections, with music providing a stepping stone to shared experience and a sense of community. Physically restricted from visiting a favourite social space, people were converging in virtual hangouts to relive moments and remember places now cut off by the passing of time, the falling of bricks, and the rise of barrier fences.While waiting to find out whether the original Dux site can be re-occupied, the business owners opened new venues that housed different parts of the Dux business (live music, vegetarian food, and the bars/brewery). Although the fit-out of the restaurant and bars capture a sense of the history and charm that people associate with the Dux brand, the empty wasteland and building sites that surround the new Dux Central quickly destroy any illusion of permanence or familiarity. Now that most of the quake-damaged buildings have been demolished, the freshly-scarred earth of the central city is like a child’s gap-toothed smile. Wandering around the city and forgetting what used to occupy an empty space, wanting to visit a shop or bar before remembering it is no longer there, being at the Dux but not at the Dux – these are the kind of things that contributed to a feeling that local music writer, Vicki Anderson, describes as “lost city syndrome” (“Lost City”). Although initially worried she might be alone in mourning places lost, other residents have shared similar experiences. In an online comment on the article, one local resident explained how there are two different cities fighting for dominance in their head: “the new keeps trying to overlay the old [but] when I’m not looking at pictures, or in seeing it as it is, it’s the old city that pushes its way to the front” (Juniper). Others expressed relief that they were not the only ones feeling strangely homesick in their own town, homesick for a place they never left but that had somehow left them.There are a variety of methods available to fill the gaps in both memories and cityscape. The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HITLab), produced a technological solution: interactive augmented reality software called CityViewAR, using GPS data and 3D models to show parts of the city as they were prior to the earthquakes (“CityViewAR”). However, not everybody needed computerised help to remember buildings and other details. Many people found that, just by listening to a certain song or remembering particular gigs, it was not just an image of a building that appeared but a multi-sensory event complete with sound, movement, smell, and emotion. In online spaces like the Save Our Dux group, memories of favourite bands and songs, crowded gigs, old friends, good times, great food, and long nights were shared and discussed, embroidering a rich and colourful tapestry about a favourite part of Christchurch’s social scene. ConclusionMusic is strongly interwoven with memory, and can recreate a particular moment in time and place through the associations carried in lyrics, melody, and imagery. Songs can spark vivid memories of what was happening – when, where, and with whom. A song shared is a connection made: between people; between moments; between good times and bad; between the past and the present. Music provides a soundtrack to people’s lives, and during times of stress it can also provide many benefits. The lyrics and video imagery of songs made in years gone by have been shown to take on new significance and meaning after disaster, offering snapshots of times, people and places that are no longer with us. Even without relying on the accompanying imagery of a video, music has the ability to recreate spaces or relocate the listener somewhere other than the physical location they currently occupy. This small act of musical magic can provide a great deal of comfort when suffering solastalgia, the feeling of homesickness one experiences when the familiar landscapes of home suddenly change or disappear, when one has not left home but that home has nonetheless gone from sight. The earthquakes (and the demolition crews that followed) have created a lot of empty land in Christchurch but the sound of popular music has filled many gaps – not just on the ground, but also in the hearts and lives of the city’s residents. 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IntroductionIn March 2015, I visited the Lambing Flat Folk Museum (established 1967) in the “cherry capital of Australia”, the town of Young, New South Wales, in preparation for a student excursion. Like other Australian folk museums, this museum focuses on the ordinary and the everyday of rural life, and is heavily reliant on local history, local historians, volunteers, and donated objects for the collection. It may not sound as though the Lambing Flat Folk Museum (LFFM) holds much potential for a fashion curator, as fashion exhibitions have become high points of innovation in exhibition design. It is quite a jolt to return to old style folk museums, when travelling shows such as Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2011 – V&A Museum 2015) or The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier (V&A Museum 2011­ – NGV 2014) are popping up around the globe. The contrast stimulated this author to think on the role and the power of curators. This paper will show that the potential for fashion as a vehicle for demonstrating ideas other than through rubrics of design or history has been growing. We all wear dress. We express identity, politics, status, age, gender, social values, and mental state through the way we dress each and every day. These key issues are also explored in many museum exhibitions.Small museums often have an abundance of clothing. For them, it is a case of not only managing and caring for growing collections but also curating objects in a way that communicates regional and often national identity, as well as narrating stories in meaningful ways to audiences. This paper argues that the way in which dress is curated can greatly enhance temporary and permanent exhibitions. Fashion curation is on the rise (Riegels Melchior). This paper looks at why this is so, the potential for this specialisation in curation, the research required, and the sensitivity needed in communicating ideas in exhibitions. It also suggests how fashion curation skills may facilitate an increasing demand.Caring for the AudienceThe paper draws on a case study of how Chinese people at the LFFM are portrayed. The Chinese came to the Young district during the 1860s gold rush. While many people often think the Chinese were sojourners (Rolls), that is, they found gold and returned to China, many actually settled in regional Australia (McGowan; Couchman; Frost). At Young there were riots against the Chinese miners, and this narrative is illustrated at the museum.In examining the LFFM, this paper points to the importance of caring for the audience as well as objects, knowing and acknowledging the current and potential audiences. Caring for how the objects are received and perceived is vital to the work of curators. At this museum, the stereotypic portrayal of Chinese people, through a “coolie” hat, a fan, and two dolls dressed in costume, reminds us of the increased professionalisation of the museum sector in the last 20 years. It also reminds us of the need for good communication through both the objects and texts. Audiences have become more sophisticated, and their expectations have increased. Displays and accompanying texts that do not reflect in depth research, knowledge, and sensitivities can result in viewers losing interest quickly. Not long into my visit I began thinking of the potential reaction by the Chinese graduate students. In a tripartite model called the “museum experience”, Falk and Dierking argue that the social context, personal context, and physical context affect the visitor’s experience (5). The social context of who we visit with influences enjoyment. Placing myself in the students’ shoes sharpened reactions to some of the displays. Curators need to be mindful of a wide range of audiences. The excursion was to be not so much a history learning activity, but a way for students to develop a personal interest in museology and to learn the role museums can play in society in general, as well as in small communities. In this case the personal context was also a professional context. What message would they get?Communication in MuseumsStudies by Falk et al. indicate that museum visitors only view an exhibition for 30 minutes before “museum fatigue” sets in (249–257). The physicality of being in a museum can affect the museum experience. Hence, many institutions responded to these studies by placing the key information and objects in the introductory areas of an exhibition, before the visitor gets bored. As Stephen Bitgood argues, this can become self-fulfilling, as the reaction by the exhibition designers can then be to place all the most interesting material early in the path of the audience, leaving the remainder as mundane displays (196). Bitgood argues there is no museum fatigue. He suggests that there are other things at play which curators need to heed, such as giving visitors choice and opportunities for interaction, and avoiding overloading the audience with information and designing poorly laid-out exhibitions that have no breaks or resting points. All these factors contribute to viewers becoming both mentally and physically tired. Rather than placing the onus on the visitor, he contends there are controllable factors the museum can attend to. One of his recommendations is to be provocative in communication. Stimulating exhibitions are more likely to engage the visitor, minimising boredom and tiredness (197). Xerxes Mazda recommends treating an exhibition like a good story, with a beginning, a dark moment, a climax, and an ending. The LFFM certainly has those elements, but they are not translated into curation that gives a compelling narration that holds the visitors’ attention. Object labels give only rudimentary information, such as: “Wooden Horse collar/very rare/donated by Mr Allan Gordon.” Without accompanying context and engaging language, many visitors could find it difficult to relate to, and actively reflect on, the social narrative that the museum’s objects could reflect.Text plays an important role in museums, particularly this museum. Communication skills of the label writers are vital to enhancing the museum visit. Louise Ravelli, in writing on museum texts, states that “communication needs to be more explicit and more reflexive—to bring implicit assumptions to the surface” (3). This is particularly so for the LFFM. Posing questions and using an active voice can provoke the viewer. The power of text can be seen in one particular museum object. In the first gallery is a banner that contains blatant racist text. Bringing racism to the surface through reflexive labelling can be powerful. So for this museum communication needs to be sensitive and informative, as well as pragmatic. It is not just a case of being reminded that Australia has a long history of racism towards non-Anglo Saxon migrants. A sensitive approach in label-writing could ask visitors to reflect on Australia’s long and continued history of racism and relate it to the contemporary migration debate, thereby connecting the present day to dark historical events. A question such as, “How does Australia deal with racism towards migrants today?” brings issues to the surface. Or, more provocatively, “How would I deal with such racism?” takes the issue to a personal level, rather than using language to distance the issue of racism to a national issue. Museums are more than repositories of objects. Even a small underfunded museum can have great impact on the viewer through the language they use to make meaning of their display. The Lambing Flat Roll-up Banner at the LFFMThe “destination” object of the museum in Young is the Lambing Flat Roll-up Banner. Those with a keen interest in Australian history and politics come to view this large sheet of canvas that elicits part of the narrative of the Lambing Flat Riots, which are claimed to be germane to the White Australia Policy (one of the very first pieces of legislation after the Federation of Australia was The Immigration Restriction Act 1901).On 30 June 1861 a violent anti-Chinese riot occurred on the goldfields of Lambing Flat (now known as Young). It was the culmination of eight months of growing conflict between European and Chinese miners. Between 1,500 and 2,000 Europeans lived and worked in these goldfields, with little government authority overseeing the mining regulations. Earlier, in November 1860, a group of disgruntled European miners marched behind a German brass band, chasing off 500 Chinese from the field and destroying their tents. Tensions rose and fell until the following June, when the large banner was painted and paraded to gather up supporters: “…two of their leaders carrying in advance a magnificent flag, on which was written in gold letters – NO CHINESE! ROLL UP! ROLL UP! ...” (qtd. in Coates 40). Terrified, over 1,270 Chinese took refuge 20 kilometres away on James Roberts’s property, “Currawong”. The National Museum of Australia commissioned an animation of the event, The Harvest of Endurance. It may seem obvious, but the animators indicated the difference between the Chinese and the Europeans through dress, regardless that the Chinese wore western dress on the goldfields once the clothing they brought with them wore out (McGregor and McGregor 32). Nonetheless, Chinese expressions of masculinity differed. Their pigtails, their shoes, and their hats were used as shorthand in cartoons of the day to express the anxiety felt by many European settlers. A more active demonstration was reported in The Argus: “ … one man … returned with eight pigtails attached to a flag, glorifying in the work that had been done” (6). We can only imagine this trophy and the de-masculinisation it caused.The 1,200 x 1,200 mm banner now lays flat in a purpose-built display unit. Viewers can see that it was not a hastily constructed work. The careful drafting of original pencil marks can be seen around the circus styled font: red and blue, with the now yellow shadowing. The banner was tied with red and green ribbon of which small remnants remain attached.The McCarthy family had held the banner for 100 years, from the riots until it was loaned to the Royal Australian Historical Society in November 1961. It was given to the LFFM when it opened six years later. The banner is given key positioning in the museum, indicating its importance to the community and its place in the region’s memory. Just whose memory is narrated becomes apparent in the displays. The voice of the Chinese is missing.Memory and Museums Museums are interested in memory. When visitors come to museums, the work they do is to claim, discover, and sometimes rekindle memory (Smith; Crane; Williams)—-and even to reshape memory (Davidson). Fashion constantly plays with memory: styles, themes, textiles, and colours are repeated and recycled. “Cutting and pasting” presents a new context from one season to the next. What better avenue to arouse memory in museums than fashion curation? This paper argues that fashion exhibitions fit within the museum as a “theatre of memory”, where social memory, commemoration, heritage, myth, fantasy, and desire are played out (Samuels). In the past, institutions and fashion curators often had to construct academic frameworks of “history” or “design” in order to legitimise fashion exhibitions as a serious pursuit. Exhibitions such as Fashion and Politics (New York 2009), Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism (Oslo 2014) and Fashion as Social Energy (Milan 2015) show that fashion can explore deeper social concerns and political issues.The Rise of Fashion CuratorsThe fashion curator is a relative newcomer. What would become the modern fashion curator made inroads into museums through ethnographic and anthropological collections early in the 20th century. Fashion as “history” soon followed into history and social museums. Until the 1990s, the fashion curator in a museum was seen as, and closely associated with, the fashion historian or craft curator. It could be said that James Laver (1899–1975) or Stella Mary Newton (1901–2001) were the earliest modern fashion curators in museums. They were also fashion historians. However, the role of fashion curator as we now know it came into its own right in the 1970s. Nadia Buick asserts that the first fashion exhibition, Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton, was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, curated by the famous fashion photographer Cecil Beaton. He was not a museum employee, a trained curator, or even a historian (15). The museum did not even collect contemporary fashion—it was a new idea put forward by Beaton. He amassed hundreds of pieces of fashion items from his friends of elite society to complement his work.Radical changes in museums since the 1970s have been driven by social change, new expectations and new technologies. Political and economic pressures have forced museum professionals to shift their attention from their collections towards their visitors. There has been not only a growing number of diverse museums but also a wider range of exhibitions, fashion exhibitions included. However, as museums and the exhibitions they mount have become more socially inclusive, this has been somewhat slow to filter through to the fashion exhibitions. I assert that the shift in fashion exhibitions came as an outcome of new writing on fashion as a social and political entity through Jennifer Craik’s The Face of Fashion. This book has had an influence, beyond academic fashion theorists, on the way in which fashion exhibitions are curated. Since 1997, Judith Clark has curated landmark exhibitions, such as Malign Muses: When Fashion Turns Back (Antwerp 2004), which examine the idea of what fashion is rather than documenting fashion’s historical evolution. Dress is recognised as a vehicle for complex issues. It is even used to communicate a city’s cultural capital and its metropolitan modernity as “fashion capitals” (Breward and Gilbert). Hence the reluctant but growing willingness for dress to be used in museums to critically interrogate, beyond the celebratory designer retrospectives. Fashion CurationFashion curators need to be “brilliant scavengers” (Peoples). Curators such as Clark pick over what others consider as remains—the neglected, the dissonant—bringing to the fore what is forgotten, where items retrieved from all kinds of spheres are used to fashion exhibitions that reflect the complex mix of the tangible and intangible that is present in fashion. Allowing the brilliant scavengers to pick over the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life can make for exciting exhibitions. Clothing of the everyday can be used to narrate complex stories. We only need think of the black layette worn by Baby Azaria Chamberlain—or the shoe left on the tarmac at Darwin Airport, having fallen off the foot of Mrs Petrov, wife of the Russian diplomat, as she was forced onto a plane. The ordinary remnants of the Chinese miners do not appear to have been kept. Often, objects can be transformed by subsequent significant events.Museums can be sites of transformation for its audiences. Since the late 1980s, through the concept of the New Museum (Vergo), fashion as an exhibition theme has been used to draw in wider museum audiences and to increase visitor numbers. The clothing of Vivienne Westwood, (34 Years in Fashion 2005, NGA) Kylie Minogue (Kylie: An Exhibition 2004­–2005, Powerhouse Museum), or Princess Grace (Princess Grace: Style Icon 2012, Bendigo Art Gallery) drew in the crowds, quantifying the relevance of museums to funding bodies. As Marie Riegels Melchior notes, fashion is fashionable in museums. What is interesting is that the New Museum’s refrain of social inclusion (Sandell) has yet to be wholly embraced by art museums. There is tension between the fashion and museum worlds: a “collision of the fashion and art worlds” (Batersby). Exhibitions of elite designer clothing worn by celebrities have been seen as very commercial operations, tainting the intellectual and academic reputations of cultural institutions. What does fashion curation have to do with the banner mentioned previously? It would be miraculous for authentic clothing worn by Chinese miners to surface now. In revising the history of Lambing Flat, fashion curators need to employ methodologies of absence. As Clynk and Peoples have shown, by examining archives, newspaper advertisements, merchants’ account books, and other material that incidentally describes the business of clothing, absence can become present. While the later technology of photography often shows “Sunday best” fashions, it also illustrates the ordinary and everyday dress of Chinese men carrying out business transactions (MacGowan; Couchman). The images of these men bring to mind the question: were these the children of men, or indeed the men themselves, who had their pigtails violently cut off years earlier? The banner was also used to show that there are quite detailed accounts of events from local and national newspapers of the day. These are accessible online. Accounts of the Chinese experience may have been written up in Chinese newspapers of the day. Access to these would be limited, if they still exist. Historian Karen Schamberger reminds us of the truism: “history is written by the victors” in her observations of a re-enactment of the riots at the Lambing Flat Festival in 2014. The Chinese actors did not have speaking parts. She notes: The brutal actions of the European miners were not explained which made it easier for audience members to distance themselves from [the Chinese] and be comforted by the actions of a ‘white hero’ James Roberts who… sheltered the Chinese miners at the end of the re-enactment. (9)Elsewhere, just out of town at the Chinese Tribute Garden (created in 1996), there is evidence of presence. Plaques indicating donors to the garden carry names such as Judy Chan, Mrs King Chou, and Mr and Mrs King Lam. The musically illustrious five siblings of the Wong family, who live near Young, were photographed in the Discover Central NSW tourist newspaper in 2015 as a drawcard for the Lambing Flat Festival. There is “endurance”, as the title of NMA animation scroll highlights. Conclusion Absence can be turned around to indicate presence. The “presence of absence” (Meyer and Woodthorpe) can be a powerful tool. Seeing is the pre-eminent sense used in museums, and objects are given priority; there are ways of representing evidence and narratives, and describing relationships, other than fashion presence. This is why I argue that dress has an important role to play in museums. Dress is so specific to time and location. It marks specific occasions, particularly at times of social transitions: christening gowns, bar mitzvah shawls, graduation gowns, wedding dresses, funerary shrouds. Dress can also demonstrate the physicality of a specific body: in the extreme, jeans show the physicality of presence when the body is removed. The fashion displays in the museum tell part of the region’s history, but the distraction of the poor display of the dressed mannequins in the LFFM gets in the way of a “good story”.While rioting against the Chinese miners may cause shame and embarrassment, in Australia we need to accept that this was not an isolated event. More formal, less violent, and regulated mechanisms of entry to Australia were put in place, and continue to this day. It may be that a fashion curator, a brilliant scavenger, may unpick the prey for viewers, placing and spacing objects and the visitor, designing in a way to enchant or horrify the audience, and keeping interest alive throughout the exhibition, allowing spaces for thinking and memories. Drawing in those who have not been the audience, working on the absence through participatory modes of activities, can be powerful for a community. Fashion curators—working with the body, stimulating ethical and conscious behaviours, and constructing dialogues—can undoubtedly act as a vehicle for dynamism, for both the museum and its audiences. 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07–259Abasi, Ali R., Nahal Akbari & Barbara Graves (U Ottawa, Canada), Discourse appropriation, construction of identities, and the complex issue of plagiarism: ESL students writing in graduate school. Journal of Second Language Writing (Elsevier) 15.2 (2006), 102–117.07–260Brantmeier, Cindy (Washington U, St Louis, USA), Toward a multicomponent model of interest and L2 reading: Sources of interest, perceived situational interest, and comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language (U Hawaii, USA) 18.2 (2006), 89–115.07–261Bremner, Stephen (City U Hong Kong, China), Politeness, power, and activity systems: Written requests and multiple audiences in an institutional setting. Written Communication (Sage) 23.4 (2006), 397–423.07–262Cargill, Margaret (U Adelaide, Australia) & Patrick O'Connor, Developing Chinese scientists' skills for publishing in English: Evaluating collaborating-colleague workshops based on genre analysis. 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ObjectiveTo evaluate Arizona’s arboviral syndromic surveillance protocol in Maricopa County.IntroductionTimely identification of arboviral disease is key to prevent transmission in the community, but traditional surveillance may take up to 14 days between specimen collection and health department notification. Arizona state and county health agencies began monitoring National Syndromic Surveillance Program BioSense 2.0 data for patients infected with West Nile virus (WNV), St. Louis encephalitis virus (SLEV), chikungunya, or dengue virus in August 2015. Zika virus was added in April 2016. Our novel methods were presented at the International Society for Disease Surveillance 2015 Annual Conference. [1] Twice per week, we queried patient records from 15 Maricopa County BioSense-enrolled emergency department and inpatient hospitals for chief complaint keywords and discharge diagnosis codes. Our “Case Investigation Decision Tree” helped us determine whether records had a high or low degree of evidence for arboviral disease and necessitated further investigation. This study evaluated how Arizona’s protocol for conducting syndromic surveillance compared to traditional arboviral surveillance in terms of accuracy and timeliness in Maricopa County from August 2015 through December 2016.MethodsWe followed guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to evaluate two major attributes of the protocol: accuracy [measured as positive predictive value (PPV) and sensitivity] and timeliness. [2] Arizona’s Medical Electronic Disease Surveillance Intelligence System (MEDSIS) was considered the “gold standard” system and BioSense was the test system. PPV was calculated as the proportion of records identified by BioSense that were reported to MEDSIS, regardless of final case classification. Sensitivity was the proportion of confirmed or probable cases in MEDSIS identified by BioSense. Though not all MEDSIS cases were seen at BioSense-reporting facilities, the sensitivity demonstrates how each query contributed to arboviral surveillance overall. We assessed timeliness in two ways: (1) the difference between the date when keywords or diagnosis codes were first identified by BioSense and the date the same patient was first reported to MEDSIS; and (2) the difference between the date the BioSense record was first reviewed by the Maricopa County Department of Public Health (MCDPH) syndromic surveillance team and the date the same patient was first investigated through MEDSIS by the MCDPH disease investigators. We assessed whether timeliness was affected by the method in which a record was identified in BioSense (i.e., chief complaint keyword or discharge diagnosis code).ResultsThe arboviral syndromic surveillance queries identified 62 records during the evaluation period (Table). For each arboviral query, the proportion of BioSense records that were also reported through MEDSIS ranged from 25.0% to 32.4%, except chikungunya, which had a PPV of 0%. BioSense records that had a high degree of evidence for arboviral disease tended to have a higher PPV compared to those with low evidence. BioSense records that were not already reported to MEDSIS met neither clinical nor exposure criteria for the arboviral diseases and were not deemed a public health risk. The sensitivities of the WNV and Zika queries to detect confirmed or probable cases in MEDSIS were 8.2% and 5.6%, respectively, while SLEV, chikungunya, and dengue queries were 0%. On average, patients were reported to MEDSIS 7 days prior to BioSense identifying keywords or diagnosis codes. In addition, MEDSIS cases were investigated by MCDPH disease investigators 10 days prior to MCDPH syndromic surveillance team review of BioSense records, on average. The average time between MEDSIS report date and BioSense identification date was shorter for BioSense records identified by chief complaint keywords than by diagnosis codes (4 and 8 days after MEDSIS, respectively).ConclusionsArizona’s arboviral syndromic surveillance protocol provided MCDPH with situational awareness, but BioSense data were not available more quickly than traditional mandated reporting. Through this process, we reviewed patient records that mentioned arboviral diseases and confirmed that these reportable conditions were captured in our traditional surveillance system. The decision tree was effective at prioritizing records for further investigation. Timeliness may be improved by updating the queries to include more chief complaint keywords and reviewing BioSense more than twice per week. MCDPH plans to evaluate Arizona’s updated arboviral syndromic surveillance protocol, which was adapted for BioSense Platform’s Electronic Surveillance System for Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE).References1. White, J. R., Imholte, S., & Collier, K. (2016). Using Syndromic Surveillance to Enhance Arboviral Surveillance in Arizona. Online J Public Health Inform, 8(1), e81.2. German, R. R., et al. (2001). Updated guidelines for evaluating public health surveillance systems: recommendations from the Guidelines Working Group. MMWR Recomm Rep, 50(RR-13), 1-35.

1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. 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