Journal articles on the topic 'Mirror washing'

This study aims to provide counseling for kindergarten ABA 48 Semarang children to have healthy and clean hand washing. The method is done through (1) counseling / lecturing, (2) video learning, (3) hands-on practice. Respondents were 23 children. The results obtained 74.0% that children are not accustomed to washing hands according to health protocols and 26% that conforms to health standards. After counseling with three methods there was a change in knowledge and attitudes in washing hands, which from 26% increased to 56.5%. In conclusion, habituation to wash hands according to WHO standards can be successful if through three steps, a mirror, audio visual learning aids and direct practice with running water.

A positive image is very necessary for a company to promote its values and be accepted in society. However, if the positive image narrated is contrary to reality, then the case can be categorized as green-washing, if it concerns the environment, and woke-washing, if it concerns social welfare. Furthermore, literary works as a mirror of society have room to represent green-washing and woke-washing, one of which is in the novel How Beautiful We Were by Mbue. In the novel, green-washing and woke-washing are not just image manipulation for profit but also play a major role in perpetuating eco-apartheid by the American oil company called Pexton which occurred in the village of Kosawa. Based on this case, this research aimed to rigorously analyze the extent of eco-apartheid inflicted upon the affected community. Furthermore, it also attempt to critically uncover the mechanism that not only mask corporate exploitation but also actively reinforce eco-apartheid. Moreover, to achieve this goal, this research uses descriptive qualitative and the concept of levels of marginalization of eco-apartheid, green-washing, and woke-washing. This study used close reading to systematically identify words, phrases, and sentences that revealed different levels of eco-apartheid, green-washing, and woke-washing. The collected data was then analyzed to uncover the extent and deeper mechanisms that allow eco-apartheid to persist based on the theories used. This research finds that the level of marginalization in eco-apartheid has reached the third level. Then, eco-apartheid is maintained through a green-washing mechanism, namely by creating the illusion of concern for environmental pollution and clean water, and a woke-washing mechanism, namely by promoting Pexton's concern for social welfare, offering job opportunities, compensation money and scholarships.

Herein, this study reports the development of a multifunctional conductive antibacterial cotton fabric through the utilization of the natural polyphenol-mediated silver mirror reaction. The experimental results demonstrate that polyphenols can effectively facilitate the deposition of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs), resulting in a uniform and durable hybrid nanocoating on the cotton fabric. The effects of polyphenol’s molecular weights on the coating structures and stabilities have been revealed via two distinct approaches: washing resistance and electrochemical testing systems. It has been concluded that lower-molecular-weight phenols induce a compact and dense coating structure, whereas polyphenols such as tannic acid exhibit relatively high stability, achieving an excellent conductivity of 0.2 S/cm and a good washing resistance of 67% over five cycles. The underlying mechanism has been further confirmed by the cyclic voltammetry measurements, suggesting that polyphenols play a significant role in stabilizing AgNPs and preventing their dissolution. Furthermore, the Ag-doped polyphenol-coated fabrics exhibit notable antibacterial properties. By coupling natural polyphenols with typical silver mirror reactions, this study not only offers a sustainable alternative to synthetic chemicals but also presents a promising method to endow cotton textiles with the dual properties of conductivity and antibacterial activity.

In this study, a low-cost, scalable and robust process is proposed as an innovative method for coating solar mirrors with a self-cleaning, transparent in the full solar range and versatile material based on auxetic aluminum nitrides, previously obtained at the laboratory scale. This work presents the scaling-up of the fabrication process from the laboratory to prototypal scale and the preliminary results of outdoor self-cleaning solar mirror field tests in the demonstrative concentrating solar power (CSP) plant ENEASHIP located in Casaccia (Rome) ENEA Research Center. Prototypes with a size of 50 × 40 cm have shown stability in external conditions: no coating degradation occurred during the test campaign. Their washing restores the initial reflectance affected by soiling and the self-cleaning performance allows for the utilization of a reduced quantity of water for cleaning operations with respect to the uncoated glass of back surface mirrors. A similar self-cleaning AlN coating could be utilized on other solar components affected by soiling, such as the glass envelopes in heat-collecting elements, PV panels and other parts where a self-cleaning performance combined with an optical one is required.

In 1982 McDonnell Douglas Aerospace (MDA) and United Stirling AB (USAB) of Sweden formed a joint venture to develop and market a solar Stirling dish system. Eight modules were built and extensively tested from 1984 to 1988. Power production and daily energy-conversion efficiency as determined by field testing were characterized and modeled into a computer program. Included in this simulation are models of mirror soiling rate, wind spillage loss, mirror washing, and other maintenance outage time, operation and maintenance (O&M) costs, and equipment purchase cost. An economic model of a hybrid (combustion) receiver has been included in the simulation for illustrating the value of using solar energy when available and other fuels such as methane, natural gas, hydrogen, etc. when solar energy is not available or adequate. This paper describes the simulation and presents comparisons of the simulation to test data. The simulation also estimates both the O&M expenses and levelized energy costs for different production volumes.

At the present time, the study of the influence of global warming on the change in the intensity of surface runoff deserves special attention, because the occurrence of landslide processes in complex and heterogeneous regions, which includes the territory of the Lankaran natural region, increased. Due to this, the areas of protected territories, characterized by the intensity of surface washing and the regularity of the manifestation of these processes, have increased. The purpose of the study is to compile a map of the intensity of surface runoff, as well as the regularity of river watersheds in the Lankaran natural region. The conducted zoning of the territory of the Lankaran natural region according to the intensity of washing and its specific distribution characteristics has a special importance in agriculture. A variety of physical and geographical factors allowed us to draw up a map of the surface wash intensity in high altitude zones. An increase in surface runoff from the flat parts to the middle mountain belt has been revealed. The largest amount of surface runoff is observed in rivers with a flood regime in the lower border of the middle mountains, and with a mud regime – higher borders of the middle mountain belt. The intensity of surface runoff within the territory ranges from 0.011 to 0.14 mm/year. The analysis of the map of surface erosion shows that, starting from a height of more than 800 m, the amount of surface erosion gradually decreases from 0.09 mm/year due to the widespread distribution of difficult-to-erode rocks.

Total bacterial count was performed in eighty milk samples and eighty udder swabs collected from 20 cows, to compare the effect of treating udders with wet towel washing (55-60C0), followed by paper towel drying; three concentrations of Iodophre and Hibitane followed by paper towel drying and two concentrations of potassium permanganate followed by paper towel drying with non-treated udders .Results showed that Log10 of CFU/ swab of untreated udders was significantly (p≤ 0.05) differ from those swab samples when udder was treated with wet towel washing (55-60C0), followed by paper towel drying. By using iodophor, there was in asignificant (p≤ 0.05) reduction in the Log10 of CFU/ swab after udder treatment with all used concentrations of iodophor, and there was also proportional reduction in the Log10 CFU/ swab with each increase in the Iodophor concentration (0.1:100, 0.5:100 and 1:100) respectively. The same picture was gained by using Hibitane at concentrations of 0.25%, 0.5% and 1% as Iodophre. Potassium permanganate treatments with its two concentrations showed significant differences in Log10 /swab of udder before and after treatments and between its two concentrations 0.5:1000 and 1:1000.Total bacterial count of milk samples were a mirror of swab samples. From results it is evident that chemical disinfectants or hot water were effective in reducing udder contamination before milking.

ABSTRACT Food safety training does not always result in behavior change, perhaps because of flaws inherent in traditional training designs. New technologies such as augmented reality headsets or head-mounted action cameras could transform the way food safety training is conducted in the food industry. Training conducted with wearable technology presents visual content in the first-person or actor's perspective, as opposed to the traditional third-person or observer perspective. This visual hands-on first-person perspective may provide an effective way of conveying information and encouraging behavior execution because it uses the mirror neuron system. There is little published literature about the impact of perspective on food safety training outcomes, such as motivation. The present study included a repeated-measures design to determine how first- and third-person camera angles affected hand washing training reactions among 108 currently employed restaurant food handlers. Participants were assessed on their posttraining compliance intentions, compliance self-efficacy, perceived utility of the training, overall satisfaction with the training, and video perspective preference. A significant proportion of food handlers (64%) preferred the first-person video perspective (z = 5.00, P < 0.001), and a significant correlation was found between compliance intentions and compliance self-efficacy (r(108) = 0.361, P < 0.001) for the first-person video. No significant differences in video preference were found for demographic variables, including age (χ2 (2, n = 104) = 1.69, P = 0.430), which suggests that the first-person training format appeals to a diverse workforce. These findings support the application of wearable technology to enhance hand washing training outcomes across a wide range of demographic groups. This research lays the framework for future studies to assess the impact of instructional design on compliance concerning hand washing and other food handling behaviors.

AbstractThe International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) was launched into a geosynchronous orbit on 26 January 1978. It is equipped with a 45-cm mirror and spectrographs operating in the far-ultraviolet (1150–2000 Å) and the mid-ultraviolet (1900–3200 Å) wavelength regions. In a low-dispersion mode, the spectral resolution is some 6–7 Å. In a high-dispersion echelle mode, the resolution is about 0.1 Åat the shortest wavelength and about 0.3 Åat the longest. It is a collaborative program among NASA, ESA and the British SERC. The IUE is operated in real time 16 hours a day from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center near Washing ton, D.C. and 8 hours daily from ESA’s Villafranca groundstation near Madrid, Spain. By the end of 1989, 1870 papers, using IUE observations, have been published in refereed journals. During the same period, over 1700 different astronomers from all over the world used the IUE for their research.

The basis for the study is instrumental terrain profiling using level, geobotanical descriptions, GPR studies, soil sections and manual drilling with a soil sampler. The species composition of vegetation indicates very rare and short-term flooding in high water. Vegetation elements of the low floodplain are marked on the areas directly adjacent to the riverbed at altitudes up to 1.5 m above the inter-level level. Further, along the profile, there are no signs of flooding and standing water. In the soil section there are no iron oxide (II and III) and fading of salts in all horizons up to the depth of 150 sm. The borders between horizons are expressed unclear. This indicates sufficient surface moisture and thus washing of the upper horizons of the soil. The floodplain oak forest is in good condition, there are no dry-top trees. This also indicates that the soil and groundwater are not saline. Studies have shown that the location of the groundwater mirror is close to horizontal, and its level exactly corresponds to the water level in the river. This position of the ground water mirror is typical for river floodplains that occupy an intermediate position between the floodplains of humid and arid zones. The relief of the river floodplain was formed in more water years than observed in the late 20th – early 21st centuries. The first floodplain level (low floodplain) has an excess of no more than 1–1.5 meters above the inter-level of the river. In modern hydrological conditions, only this level is guaranteed to flood every spring.

This study presents an automated computer vision system for assessing the cleanliness of plastic mirror caps used in the automotive industry after a washing process. These components are highly visible and require optimal surface conditions prior to painting, making the detection of residual contaminants critical for quality assurance. The system acquires high-resolution monochrome images under various lighting configurations, including natural light and infrared (IR) at 850 nm and 940 nm, with different angles of incidence. Four blob detection algorithms—adaptive thresholding, Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG), Difference of Gaussians (DoG), and Determinant of Hessian (DoH)—were implemented and evaluated based on their ability to detect surface impurities. Performance was assessed by comparing the total detected blob area before and after the cleaning process, providing a proxy for both sensitivity and false positive rate. Among the tested methods, adaptive thresholding under 30° natural light produced the best results, with a statistically significant z-score of +2.05 in the pre-wash phase and reduced false detections in post-wash conditions. The LoG and DoG methods were more prone to spurious detections, while DoH demonstrated intermediate performance but struggled with reflective surfaces. The proposed approach offers a cost-effective and scalable solution for real-time quality control in industrial environments, with the potential to improve process reliability and reduce waste due to surface defects.

Introduction:Personal protective equipment (PPE) is a necessary item in the period of unknown and high risk emerging infectious disease. It is not only the necessary requirement of strict isolation but also the last line of defense to protect medical staff.Aim:To determine the frequency and sites of contamination of personnel during the process of using Chinese PPE.Methods:Recruit 56 health care workers (HCWs) who worked in front-line clinical to test PPE issued by the Chinese Center for Disease Control for preventing Ebola virus. Eight batches of HCWs were divided to conduct simulations of contaminated PPE removal using fluorescent lotion. Then the frequency and sites of contamination of personnel were recorded after removal of contaminated PPE. The method of visual observation was used to determine contamination.Results:The frequency of easily contaminated parts included: left hand and wrist (7 times), left calf (7 times), front chest center, left and right chest (6 times each), and left abdomen (5 times). Mistakes in the process of wearing PPE included: clothing touching the ground (20.00%), N95 air mask tightness not checked (13.33%), glove air-tightness not checked (4.44%), protective clothing zipper not checked (4.44%). Mistakes in doffing PPE included: clothes touching the ground or the inner surface is polluted (20.00%), the wrong method of removing N95 mask (14.44%), touching the pollution goggles mirror with hands (12.22%), incomplete washing steps, insufficient time and frequency of hand hygiene (11.11%).Discussion:It is necessary to carry out training on PPE donning and doffing for Chinese medical workers.

The specific character of unification of taditional folk culture of utilitarianism and aestheticism in the worldview and everyday life of people, indivisibility of life and existence, perceived well by Rostyslav Rybalchenko (1932 – 2019), the outstanding local historian of Slobozhanshchyna, creator of his own skansen and author of a number of books with the detailed description of material world of rural people of Ukraine in the 20th century, are analyzed in the article. Pragmatic and aesthetic unity of rural everyday tasks is described on the specific examples from the book Rostyslav Rybalchenko and His Rural World. For example, white-washing in a Ukrainian house even in the second half of the 20th century has been not only a forced sanitary-hygienic procedure but also a sacral action with a spiritual context. It has been done at least three times a year: before the Feast Day of the Protection of the Mother of God, Christmas and Easter. In such a way the routine task has become the festive one as a holiday starts psychologically not on the very day of the holiday but from the preparation for it. Besides, tidiness inside the house is not only useful, but also beautiful from the aesthetic point of view. Moreover, it has been filled with religious sense and become the equivalent of the Christian’s state of soul before celebrating-commemorating the most significant evangelical events. In the 1950s it has been easy to do the white-washing because there is little furniture in the houses. According to Rybalchenko’s accurate observation, “the fact that the chamber is not cluttered” has also the following sense: “<…> nothing superfluous can press the consciousness, nothing steals the space”, which is usually scarce as poor people’s houses are rather small. The house is the mirror of the soul, which should not be cluttered. The yard, the orchard, the vegetable garden are all space signs which require a special sense in traditional folk culture of Ukrainians. According to R. Rybalchenko, in peasants’ opinion the homestead space has to be clean, tidy, beautiful as well as uncluttered not because otherwise neighbours would gossip but because of the inner necessity of the majority of the owners. Some attributes of the rural space and domestic equipment, the pragmatics of which is inseparable from the aesthetic component, especially those connected with water: the well, the beam, the anchor, etc., are also analyzed in the article.

Itching is a common subjective sensation experienced on the skin and is associated with the desire and impulse to scratch. We tested whether visual cues could generate feelings of itch and provoke a scratch response in healthy volunteers. A secondary aim was to assess whether certain pictures were more effective in evoking sensations of itch. Thirty participants viewed static images that could either be itch-related (i.e., viewing ants or skin conditions) or neutral (viewing butterflies or healthy skin). These were further separated by picture type: ‘skin contact’ (i.e., ants crawling on the skin or a butterfly sitting on the hand); ‘skin response’ (i.e., scratching an insect bite or washing the hands) or ‘no skin’ (simply viewing midges or birds flying). The results indicate that the sensation of itch was successfully generated using itch-related pictures in terms of significantly higher self-reports of itch in answer to the questions ‘how itchy do you feel?’ and ‘how itchy do you think the person in the picture feels?’ compared to viewing neutral pictures (). In addition, participants scratched themselves significantly more when viewing itch-related pictures compared to neutral (). The picture type also had an effect upon these measures with more scratching behaviour recorded when viewing pictures depicting others scratching (). This study demonstrates the impact of visual cues on the sensation of itch and the scratch response and may provide preliminary evidence linking contagious itching to the mirror neuron system and the effectiveness of itch-inducing stimuli as a way to probe social communication.

Since diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) are common among diabetes patients, it is essential to increase patients’ knowledge and self-care practices to ensure early recognition and management and reduce amputation risk. Therefore, the goal of this review was to identify the range and level of knowledge of people with DFUs and the type of self-care they undertake. A literature review was conducted using the electronic databases PubMed and Google scholar with ‘diabetic foot’, ‘selfcare’, ‘practice’ and ‘behaviour’ as searching keywords. The identification and selection process were conducted to sort the eligible papers through the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA). The criteria are the original papers describing knowledge and practice in DFU; reporting knowledge and practice in their non-intervention studies; writing in English language; and publishing between years 2016 and 2022. The eligible papers were assessed using the strength of reporting observational studies in epidemiology (STROBE) checklist for appraising their quality. Twenty-two papers of 2,073 titles met the inclusion criteria and included in the review. The lowest and the highest quality score of included papers based on STROBE checklist are 11 and 26, respectively. The included papers showed various levels of knowledge from good to poor, which prominent the highest percentage are 88% (good knowledge) and 84.8% (poor knowledge). The majority of the foot-care activities found in the reviewed papers involved the following steps: washing, drying, applying moisturiser and trimming nails routinely. Those activity should be followed by checking the feet with a mirror for ulcers, looking for ingrown nails, choosing appropriate footwear, not walking barefoot and routinely consulting a healthcare provider. The knowledge levels were found variable and acceptable. Daily foot care, choosing the right footwear, foot activity and regular health checks should all be used to manage diabetes.

Purpose:The review focused on the management of industrial and communal wastes. Industrial and communal waste management practices are not uniform among countries; urban and rural areas, residential, and industrial sectors, all take different approaches.
 Methodology: Industrial wastes can be classified on basis of their characteristics; Waste in dissolved and pollutant is in liquid form, e.g. dairy industry; Waste in solid form, but a number of pollutants within are in the liquid or fluid form, e.g. washing of minerals or crockery industry or coal.
 Results: Industrial waste is produced as a result of industrial activities, including materials rendered useless during manufacturing process such as that of food and chemical industries, mills, factories, and mining operations. Dirt and gravel, concrete and masonry, solvents, chemicals, scrap lumber, scrap metal, oil, etc. are types of industrial waste. Industrial or community waste may be liquid, solid, or gaseous. It may be absolutely hazardous, mirror entry, or non-hazardous waste. Hazardous waste can be toxic, ignitable, corrosive, radioactive, or reactive. Industrial waste may pollute the soil, the air, or nearby water bodies, ending up in the sea.
 Unique contribution to theory, practice and policy: Waste management is important component in a business' ability to maintain the ISO14001 accreditation. The ISO14001 standard encourages companies to ensure green environment and improve their environmental efficiencies every year by eliminating waste through the resource recovery practices. The principles of waste management puts some factors into consideration such as waste hierarchy, life-cycle of a product, resource efficiency, and polluter-pays principle. Common waste disposal and management methods include incineration, landfill, recycling, re-use, pyrolysis, resource recovery, composting, among others. An important method of waste management in industries and communities is the prevention of waste materials being created, better known as waste reduction. The waste management industry has adopted new technologies such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, GPS, etc., which enable the collection of better quality data without the using estimation or manual data entry.

Background and Purpose Microbiological testing is crucial for quality control in the production of foods and pharmaceuticals. Biochemical identification has been conventionally employed to detect and identify microorganisms. However, it requires time-consuming and labor-intensive processes as well as the skilled operators. To overcome the above problems, we have developed a novel DNA detection system; i.e. the signaling probe-based DNA microarray system towards pathogen detection1). The proposed system, which can eliminate labeling and washing steps, allows a simple and rapid detection of pathogenic bacteria genes. However, the proposed system has been only applied for bacterial gene detection based on 16S rDNA, but not for other pathogens including fungi. In this study, the signaling probe-based DNA microarray system was applied to the detection of three kinds of fungi, Aspergillus niger, Candida albicans, and Chaetomium globosum, common contaminants in food production. Materials and Methods The signaling probe-based DNA microarray is composed of a “fluorescence probe” (35-mer) labeled with Cy3 at the 5’-end and a “quencher probe” (35-mer) labeled with BHQ2 at the 3’-end. The quencher probe includes a detection sequence, which is complementary to the target fragments. Cy3-labeled and BHQ2-labeled probes were immobilized in the same spots. Partial hybridization between these probes makes the fluorophore and quencher molecules in close proximity, resulting in loss of fluorescence due to fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET). When the target fragments are introduced on the signaling probes, the fragments form duplexes with quenching probes by the detection sequence, and fluorescence signal is detectable. In this study, three signaling probe pairs were designed to detect the 18S rDNA genes, which is widely conserved in fungi. Target DNA fragments (245-bp to 247-bp; 18S rDNA) were prepared by asymmetric PCR using the genome from A. niger, C. albicans, and C. globosum. The PCR products were subjected to the signaling probe-based DNA microarray. Hybridization was carried out for 30 min at 60°C. The entire DNA microarray images were visualized in the aqueous solution using our original wide-field imaging system, consisting of a 532 nm laser source, microlens array, dichroic mirror, bandpass filter and CCD camera. The acquired images were processed using Array Pro image analysis software to analyze the fluorescence signals. Results & Discussion To confirm sufficient quenching of Cy3 on the fluorescence probe by BHQ2 on the quencher probe, the FRET-based quenching of the designed probe was investigated. In the absence of target DNA, the spots of the signaling probe exhibited no fluorescence, indicating that hybridization between the signaling probe pairs induced FRET. Next, the detection performance of the signaling probe-based DNA microarray was evaluated by measuring the fluorescence signals in the presence of target DNA. Clear fluorescence signals were observed in all the tested probes after the addition of target DNA. Furthermore, little fluorescence at the background levels were detected when using a control (PCR product of Escherichia coli 16S rDNA). These results suggest that the signaling probe-based DNA microarray can be useful for various pathogens including fungi. In our proposed system, removal of the target DNA solution and washing process were not required for detection because the wide-filed imaging system allowed us to visualize the fluorescence signals from the microarray immersed in the liquid media. The total assay was completed in 95 min. Therefore, the signaling probe-based DNA microarray allows a rapid and simple determination of a wide range of microorganisms. 1) T. Taguchi, et al. Biosens. Bioelectron. 194, 113659 (2021)

In the Syr-Darya River basin on the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan there is an irrigation massif “Golodnaya Steppe”. In its Kazakh part, the agricultural procedure of winter washing of fields is practiced for cleaning from secondary salinization. It is carried out in January-February by flooding saline fields. At the same time, water mirrors are formed on the arable land, which can be recorded using satellite data. In this study, based on satellite information from Landsat 8,9 and Sentinel 1,2 for the period January-February 2016-2022, masks of water mirrors were created, located on irrigated arable land in winter. These masks diagnose seasonal farmers’ activity on cleaning arable land from secondary salinization. Analysis of the field washing frequency in the period 2016-2022 allowed to estimate the average long-term salinity of irrigated arable land in the analyzed region. The data obtained are of interest for the zoning of the territory of the irrigation massif “Golodnaya Steppe” in Kazakhstan according to the level of secondary salinization, which is important for optimizing the work to improve the irrigation and drainage infrastructure.

In the contemporary society a massive amount of data is generated continuously by various means, and they are called Big-Data sets. Big Data has potential and limits which need to be understood by statisticians and statistics consumers, therefore it is a challenge to develop Big-Data Literacy to support the needs of constructive, concerned, and reflective citizens. However, the development of the concept of statistical literacy mirrors the current gap between purely technical and socio-political characterizations of Big Data. In this paper, we review the recent history of the concept of statistical literacy and highlight the need to integrate the new challenges and critical issues from data science associated with Big Data, including ethics, epistemology, mathematical justification, and math washing.
 First published February 2020 at Statistics Education Research Journal Archives

The primary activity of an enterprise, where the wastewater samples have been taken, is applying lacquer coatings to glass and the mirrors production. For washing glass before the application of coatings a suspension of powder based on ceric oxide is prepared, which is used as a polishing solution. The physical and chemical properties of industrial sewage waters, generated after glass polishing, and of the initial and spent polishing powder based on ceric oxide have been researched. The optimal doses of flocculating agents for purifying wastewaters in order to reduce turbidity, suspended solids concentration and dry residue have been determined. After the flocculation the advanced treatment of the water was done, by means of filtering elements with pore size 5 and 1 μm, produced by the Pentek Company. The process scheme of wastewater purification, including the physico-chemical method (flocculation) and mechanical purification method by using bag filters, has been developed.

Considerable progress has been made in the development of numerical methods for the time-harmonic exterior structural acoustics problem involving solution of the coupled Helmholtz equation. In contrast, numerical solution procedures for the transient case have not been studied so extensively. In this paper a finite element formulation is proposed for solution of the time-dependent coupled wave equation over an infinite fluid domain. The formulation is based on a finite computational fluid domain surrounding the structure and incorporates a sequence of boundary operators on the fluid truncation boundary. These operators are designed to minimize reflection of outgoing waves and are based on an asymptotic expansion of the exact solution for the time-dependent problem. In the fluid domain, a mixed two-field finite element approximation, based on a specialization of the Hu-Washizu principle for elasticity, is proposed and employs pressure and displacement potential as independent fields. Since radiation dissipation renders the coupled system nonconservative, a variational formalism based on the Morse and Feshbach concept of a “mirror-image” adjoint system is used. The variational formalism also accommodates viscoelastic dissipation in the structure (or its coatings) and this is considered in the paper. Very accurate results for model problems involving a single layer of fluid elements have been obtained and are discussed in detail.

Giudizi e decisioni che hanno effetti rilevanti sulle vite delle persone sono oggi affidati, in un numero crescente di ambiti, a sistemi di intelligenza artificiale che non funzionano. Tali malfunzionamenti non sono occasionali e non sono scongiurabili con interventi tecnici: essi rivelano, anzi, il funzionamento ordinario dei sistemi di apprendimento automatico, utilizzati impropriamente per compiti che non &egrave; loro possibile svolgere o che sono impossibili <em>tout court</em>. Le decisioni basate su tali sistemi sono costitutivamente discriminatorie, e dunque, in alcuni ambiti, infallibilmente lesive di diritti giuridicamente tutelati, in quanto procedono trattando gli individui in base al loro raggruppamento in classi, costituite a partire dalle regolarit&agrave; rilevate nei dati di partenza. Essendo radicata nella natura statistica di questi sistemi, la caratteristica di dimenticare i &laquo;margini&raquo;&nbsp; &egrave; strutturale: non &egrave; accidentale e non &egrave; dovuta a singoli <em>bias</em> tecnicamente modificabili. Ci si pu&ograve; trovare ai margini dei modelli algoritmici di normalit&agrave; in virt&ugrave; di caratteristiche totalmente irrilevanti, rispetto alle decisioni di cui si &egrave; oggetto. Alla vasta documentazione degli esiti ingiusti, nocivi e assurdi di tali decisioni, le grandi aziende tecnologiche &ndash; paventando un divieto generalizzato &ndash; hanno risposto, in evidente conflitto di interessi, con un discorso sull&rsquo;etica: &egrave; nata cos&igrave;, come operazione di cattura culturale, con l&rsquo;obiettivo di rendere plausibile un regime di mera autoregolazione, l&rsquo;&laquo;etica dell&rsquo;intelligenza artificiale&raquo;. Si tratta di una narrazione che le aziende commissionano e acquistano perch&eacute; &egrave; loro utile come capitale reputazionale, che genera un vantaggio competitivo; &egrave; cio&egrave; un discorso, rispetto al quale le universit&agrave; hanno il ruolo, e l&rsquo;autonomia, di un megafono; &egrave; &laquo;un&rsquo;esca per catturare la fiducia&raquo;&nbsp; dei cittadini: un discorso pubblicitario che, in quanto declamato da altri, non appare neppure come tale. La funzione di tale discorso &egrave; quella di tutelare, legittimandolo, un modello di business - fondato sulla sorveglianza e sulla possibilit&agrave; di esternalizzare impunemente i costi del lavoro, degli effetti ambientali e dei danni sociali- il cui nucleo consiste nella vendita, alle agenzie pubblicitarie, della promessa di un <em>microtargeting</em> fondato sulla profilazione algoritmica. Negli ultimi anni, l&rsquo;opera di demistificazione della natura meramente discorsiva e del carattere strumentale dell&rsquo;&laquo;etica dell&rsquo;intelligenza artificiale&raquo;, che trasforma l&rsquo;etica nella questione della conformit&agrave; procedurale a un &laquo;anemico set di strumenti&raquo; e standard tecnici, &egrave; stata cos&igrave; efficace da indurre molti a liquidare come inutile o dannosa &ndash; in quanto&nbsp; disarmata alternativa al diritto o vuota retorica aziendale &ndash; l&rsquo;intera filosofia morale. Al dissolversi della narrazione sull&rsquo;etica dell&rsquo;intelligenza artificiale, compare il convitato di pietra ch&rsquo;essa aveva lo scopo di tenere alla larga: si sostiene infatti ora, da pi&ugrave; parti, l&rsquo;urgenza che ad intervenire, in modo drastico, sia il diritto. L&rsquo;adozione di sistemi di apprendimento automatico a fini decisionali, in ambiti rilevanti per la vita delle persone, quali il settore giudiziario, educativo o dell&rsquo;assistenza sociale, equivale infatti alla decisione, in via amministrativa, di istituire delle &laquo;zone pressoch&eacute; prive di diritti umani&raquo;. A chi, in nome dell&rsquo;inarrestabilit&agrave; dell&rsquo;innovazione tecnologica, deplori gli interventi giuridici, giova ricordare che il contrasto non &egrave;, in realt&agrave;, tra il rispetto dei diritti umani e un generico principio di innovazione, ma tra il rispetto dei diritti umani e il modello di business dei grandi monopoli del capitalismo intellettuale.

The introduction of Theravada Buddhism has influenced the original narratives of rice origins among ethnic groups such as the Dai, De'ang, and Bulang. There are rich rice origin narratives in the creation epics from the three ethnic groups. This article aims to explore how the incoming Buddhism has enabled three distinct ethnic groups with different languages, cultures, and historical backgrounds to share some similar narratives of rice origin. Taking the ethnographic fieldwork methods, involving participant observation and individual interviews with villagers, to collect and compare both oral and written narratives for analysis, the findings reveal that they share some familiar primarily manifested in three aspects: firstly, these ethnic groups share commonalities in their rice origin narratives, incorporating numerous elements of Buddhism. Buddhism has adapted these narratives by substituting vocabulary and transforming concepts to infuse them with strong Buddhist elements. Secondly, a new type of narrative appeared, where the rice god contends with Buddha and ultimately departs to the Dark World and then be brought back by Buddha. The theme of rice god versus Buddha mirrors the historical struggle between two faiths. Meanwhile, the theme of rice god’s departure to the Dark World and return fundamentally serves as a metaphor for seed germination and growth in the soil, representing a concession made by Buddhism to the worship of the indigenous beliefs. Thirdly, Buddhism actively participates in and promotes rice cultivation, such as monks reciting the Bu Huanghao to request blessings for crop growth, and performing rituals like washing Buddha pagodas to pray for rain. In conclusion, the introduction of Buddhism has significantly influenced local rice narratives, reflecting the conflicts and eventual reconciliation between the rice god and Buddha, as well as the struggle and compromise between traditional beliefs and incoming Buddhism.

Silver compounds are generally insoluble in water. The few soluble silver compounds include, e.g. silver nitrate, silver fluoride, silver perchlorate. These compounds are used in chemical analysis and organic catalysis to produce other silver compounds (e.g. halides), explosives, antiseptics (in medicine ), mirrors; they are also used in classical photographic technique. Soluble silver compounds are irritating and corrosive to the skin and mucous membranes of the eyes; they also cause permanent damage to the eyes and dysfunction of the respiratory and nervous systems. Maximum admissible concentrations (MAC) for soluble silver compounds, expressed as silver, was set at 0,01 mg/m3. The aim of the study was to develop a method for determination of concentrations of soluble silver compounds in the air at workstations in the range from 1/10 to 2 MAC value. The developed method of determination consists in: taking an air sample on a membrane filter, washing out soluble silver compounds from the filter with deionized water and determination of these compounds as silver by flame (air-acetylene) atomic absorption spectrometry (F-AAS). The method enables the determination of silver in the concentration range of 0.070÷2.00 µg/ml. The obtained silver calibration curve is characterized by a correlation coefficient R2 = 1.0000. The limit of silver detection (LOD) is 0.009 µg/ml, the limit of quantification (LOQ) is 0.027 µg/ml, and the recovery rate is 0.99. The developed method allows the determination of soluble silver compounds in the air at workstations in the concentration range of 0.001÷0.028 mg/m3 (for an air sample with a volume of 720 l), which corresponds to 0.1÷2.8 times the MAC value. The method is characterized by good precision and accuracy and meets the requirements of the European standard PN-EN 482 for chemical determination procedures. The method for the determination of soluble silver compounds has been recorded in the form of the analytical procedure set out in the Annex.

The article examines the legal regulation of labor mobility of workers in Ukraine as one of the conditions for the development and functioning of social and labor relations in today's conditions. It is noted that the labor market, as an integral part of the country's economic system, mirrors most of the political and socio-economic processes taking place in the state, and focuses on the most acute problems: high unemployment, increasing structural disparities in employment, uncontrolled outflow of labor force abroad , changes in the quality of the workforce and work motivation, a drop in the level of income of the population. These problems become a significant factor in the deepening of crisis phenomena, hold back structural changes, and their solution creates prerequisites for social and economic growth. In the conditions of martial law in Ukraine, the problem of labor mobility of workers, which forms the basis of ensuring the balance of the labor market, is an integral component of which territorial movements of the population in search of a new place of work are of particular importance. It is noted that today there is a global migratory mobility of the population and large migratory movements of labor resources mainly outside the country, which clearly reflects the situation that has developed in the country on the labor market. The reasons for the activation of labor mobility are: unemployment; inconsistency of employees' wages with their education and qualifications; lack of career growth; impossibility of professional development; competitiveness in the labor market; martial law in the country. It was concluded that in order to increase the level of employment in wartime and the period of economic recovery of the country, it is very important to ensure the mobility of the labor force, which will contribute to strengthening its adaptability, increasing competitiveness, as well as the efficiency of use. In order to preserve the labor force and minimize the process of its washing out of Ukraine, including the outflow of youth, workers with formed qualifications and professional skills, an important task is to create jobs at modernized, restored and newly created enterprises.

The benthic, free-living oyster Texigryphaea was the dominant constituent of many late Albian marine communities in the Texas and southern Western Interior regions. Large topotypic assemblages of three common lower–middle Washita Group species (T. navia and T. pitcheri in Oklahoma and T. tucumcarii in New Mexico) each display considerable morphological variation in valve shape and the proportions and expression of various features. Variation within an assemblage is partly due to ontogenetic changes but is mainly ecophenotypic, with local variation in nature of substrate, water turbulence, length of attachment time, and other factors influencing the final morphology of the mature shell. The T. navia assemblage is distinct in several important morphological characters from the other species, and the differences become more pronounced with growth. Texigryphaea navia appears to have been adapted to relatively firm substrates in moderately agitated conditions, in contrast to the other species, which occupied softer substrates in quieter environments. The essentially contemporaneous T. pitcheri and T. tucumcarii assemblages display much overlap in all measured dimensions of the left valve and in the range of intergrading morphs that compose each assemblage. Accordingly, T. tucumcarii is considered a synonym of T. pitcheri, representing populations of that species that lived in the West Texas-New Mexico area and developed only minor differences from the eastern populations. Within the T. navia topotypic assemblage are specimens intermediate between T. navia and T. pitcheri, and the eastern and western T. pitcheri assemblages contain forms apparently transitional to two other species, T. washitaensis and T. belviderensis. Ecophenotypic variation in the T. pitcheri assemblages appears to be greater than that in European Jurassic Gryphaea species and mirrors to some extent phyletic variation in European Jurassic Gryphaea lineages.

Batteries provide a promising pathway for transitioning from a society heavily reliant on fossil fuels to one that supports sustainable energy generation and transportation. However, the current production of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) pose a sustainability challenge due to their dependence on energy-intensive and critical mineral-dependent cathode manufacturing which results in high greenhouse gas emissions and global supply chain risk for critical minerals.[1] Moreover, a significant number of retired batteries, with a typical service life of 5–10 years, end up in landfills or oceans, exacerbating environmental concerns.[2] In this respect, cathode recycling has emerged as a potential solution to address the sustainability issues of LIBs, including critical metal availability, battery waste, and the carbon footprint of the LIB manufacturing process. However, current cathode recycling technologies, primarily based on pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy methods, are limited to recovering raw metals that necessitate the re-synthesis of cathode materials, leading to significant greenhouse gas emissions and secondary waste streams.[3] As an alternative, direct cathode recycling that utilizes regenerated spent cathode materials in the manufacturing of new batteries, has garnered a great deal of attention.[4] This method eliminates the need for additional purification or resynthesis processes, offering high economic return and environmental benefits. For direct recycling, it is important to replenish consumed Li and restore the structure and chemical state of transition metal atoms (e.g., Ni, Co, and Mn) in cathodes. However, current direct recycling methods, such as solid-state sintering, hydrothermal treatment, and the molten-salt method, still necessitate high energy input due to the requirement for multistep processes and/or thermal annealing at elevated temperatures and pressures for prolonged durations.[1,4] Therefore, it remains a challenge to develop a facile and rapid ambient condition (e.g., 25oC at 1 bar) direct recycling method. Herein, we propose a rapid room-temperature recycling method for spent LiNi0.5Mn0.3Co2O2 (NMC) cathodes, utilizing a Li-rich solvated electron solution. The low reduction potential of the solution accelerates the regeneration kinetics of spent NMC, allowing a complete recycling reaction in just minutes with no residue remaining for additional active material washing. This direct recycling method results in a regenerated NMC cathode that closely mirrors the crystal structure, composition, and chemical states of pristine materials, and delivers energy capacity and cycle life comparable to the original. Notably, the concentration of Li ions and free electrons in the solution can be quantified, enabling precise restoration of depleted Li and lost capacity with near-perfect stoichiometry, which thus achieves a long-standing goal in the recycling process. Altogether, this work paves the way to a more energy-efficient and feasible direct recycling process for spent LIBs. References [1] P. Xu, D. H. Tan, B. Jiao, H. Gao, X. Yu, and Z. Chen, Adv. Funct. Mater., 2213168 (2023). [2] T. Yang, D. Luo, A. Yu, and Z. Chen, Adv. Mat., 2203218 (2023). [3] J. Lin, X. Zhang, E. Fan, R. Chen, F. Wu, and L. Li, Energy Environ. Sci., 16 (3), 745-791 (2023). [4] X. Yu, W. Li, V. Gupta, H. Gao, D. Tran, S. Sarwar, and Z. Chen, Global chall., 6 (12), 2200099 (2022).

Abstract The immune response to platelet factor 4 (PF4)/heparin complexes is a frequent iatrogenic complication of heparin therapy associated with development of heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT). Our recent studies indicate that PF4/heparin complexes potently activate complement (C') in healthy donors and patients receiving heparin therapy. In these studies, we also show that C' mediates selective antigen-binding to circulating B cells via the complement receptor 2, CD21 (Khandelwal, Blood 2016). In the course of performing these studies, we developed a simple enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA)-based technique for measuring C3 subunit generation by protein/heparin complexes in plasma. For this assay, monoclonal antibodies to PF4/heparin (KKO; Arepally, Blood 2000) or protamine (PRT)/heparin complexes (ADA, Lee unpublished data) are incubated overnight on a microtiter plate, followed by washing and blocking with 1% bovine serum albumin (BSA) in phosphate buffered saline (PBS) for 2 hours. To examine C' activation, plasma is incubated with buffer or antigen (PF4, 25µg/mL ± heparin or PRT 31 µg/mL ± 4U/ml heparin) for 60 minutes at 37°C followed by addition of 10mM EDTA to inhibit further C'activation. Plasma containing antigen and activated C' fragments is next added to the antibody coated plate for 1 hour at 40C followed by three washes. C' activation is detected using a biotinylated antibody to C3c (Quidel Corporation, San Diego, CA) followed by streptavidin-HRP (BD Bio Sciences San Jose, CA). Using this assay, we show that plasma incubated with PF4/heparin complexes, but not PF4 alone or heparin alone trigger C' activation as measured by C3 binding (1:50 plasma dilution shown; Figure 1A). Similarly, using ADA, a recently developed monoclonal antibody to PRT/heparin complexes, we show that PRT/heparin complexes, but not PRT alone or heparin alone, robustly activate C' (1:10 plasma dilution shown; Figure 1B). To show that C3 generation is dependent on ultra-large complex (ULC) formation, we performed experiments using a fixed dose of UFH (0. 5 U/mL) and varying doses of PF4 (5-200 µg/mL) or fixed dose of PF4 (25 µg/mL) and varying doses of UFH (0.0005-5.0 U/mL), LMWH (0.01-100 µg/mL) and fondaparinux (0.05-100µg/mL). Consistent with published observations (Khandelwal, Blood 2016), we note that changes in PF4 concentration (Figure 2A) or UFH/LMWH/fondaparinux concentration (Figure 2B) results in a bell-shaped curve of C'activation that mirrors ULC formation. Because the immune response to PF4/heparin is highly variable among heparin-exposed patients, we examined inter-individual variation in C' activation by PF4/heparin complexes. For these studies, we analyzed C' activation using a fixed dose of PF4/heparin (25 µg/mL PF4 and 0.25U/mL heparin) in freshly collected plasma from 10 healthy donors . As shown in Figure 3, we noted that C' activation is highly variable among donors, with some donors showing significant C' activation (donors A,B,C, E ,G,I), while others show minimal C3 generation (donors D,F,H,J) in response to same dose of PF4/heparin complexes. Together, these studies show that the ELISA-based C3 generation assay is a simple, robust assay for detecting C' activation by PF4/heparin or PRT/heparin complexes and can be useful in studying mechanisms of C' activation and biologic effects of commercial heparins. Disclosures Arepally: Biokit: Patents &amp; Royalties.

Sacrificial Tradition and Religion during the Early Iron Age in South Scandinavia – with Special Reference to Settlement SacrificesSacrificial customs and religion during the Early Iron Age (500 BC–400 AD) has occupied archaeologists from the infancy of archaeology. Most would probably agree that the religion was primarily fertility related, originating as it was in the existing peasant society. The literature does not reflect any disagreement about the religion of the Early Iron Age being polytheistic and consequently concerned a variety of gods. However, it is still unknown how the religion was integrated in the everyday life, and under which conditions it was practiced.The research interest and the overall synthesis framework have especially addressed sacrifices in bogs and wetlands (for instance weapon sacrifices, bog bodies, deposited earthenware, anthropomorphic wooden figures, domestic animals, cauldrons, ring sacrifices, etc.). Strongly simplified, the existing consensus may be expressed in one single sentence: The overall society-related sacrificial traditions develop from being almost exclusively connected with wetland areas during the Early Iron Age (until c.400 AD) to being primarily connected with dry land after this time, cf. Fig. 1.The question is whether – based on the intense data collection over the recent decades – archaeology can or should maintain this very simple picture of the development of the sacrificial traditions and the religions during the Iron Age? Is it possible that we – rooted in for instance narrow definitions of sacrificial finds, habitual thinking, and a “delusion” consisting of the numerous well-preserved, well-documented, spectacular, and impressive finds of bog sacrifices – fail to see numerous forms of deposits, which (as opposed to the impressive finds of sacrifices in bogs) are hidden in the archaeological material?The settlements of the Iron Age have been excavated in large numbers over the recent decades, and it is the ritual finds from these localities that provide the background for this article.The ritual deposits from the settlements can be divided into two superior groups distinguished by the physical context. One comprises sacrifices made to constructions, which are characterized by being directly connected to a specific structure; the other encompasses settlement sacrifices that are to a higher degree characterized by an overriding affiliation to the settlement. The establishment of a sacrifice definition suitable for scanning the archaeological material for relevant finds is of vital importance. As the definition should not beforehand restrict the search through the material, it is important not to narrow the basis by concentrating only on the physical characteristics of the individual artefacts. The general idea behind the present presentation is that the different ritual dimensions of a society are internally connected as they function within the same overall conventions and, as a consequence, make up parts of a general mental structure, which can leave physically recognizable traces across the different ritual dimensions, cf. Fig. 2. This principal viewpoint creates a theoretical starting point for my work and the established definition of sacrificial finds: All intentionally deposited objects, which analytically show significant similarities as regards their physical appearance and/or their deposition context with other recognized ritual objects/contexts, and which are closely connected to these in time and space, should, when analysed, be considered sacrificial finds.The British religious historian, Ninian Smart, describes religion as consisting of seven thematically describing situations, which – albeit not completely unconnected – may be described individually:1) A dogmatic and philosophical dimension, comprising doctrine systems.2) A mythical and narrative dimension, comprising tales of the deities, of the creation, etc.3) An ethical and judicial dimension, comprising the consequences of the religion in relation to the shaping of the life of the individual.4) A social and institutional dimension comprising organisations and institutions that tie together the individual religious society.5) An empirical and emotional dimension comprising the individual’s experience of god and the divine.6) A ritual and practical dimension comprising prayer, sacrifices, worship, etc.7) A materiel dimension comprising architecture, art, sacred places, buildings, and iconography.As archaeologists, we have a very limited possibility of investigating the very thoughts behind the practiced religion. It is therefore natural to concentrate to a higher extent on the overall setting for it – the ritual dimension and the materiel dimension respectively. The ritual dimension and in particular its sacrificial aspect is traditionally divided into groups characterised by their significance level within the religion as such.1) The first and most “important” group consists of cult rituals. These are characterized by being calendar rites based on the myths of the religion or the history of the people, and by playing a part in the events of the year.2) The next group comprises transition rites (rite de passage), which follow the life cycle of the individual.3) The last group comprises rites of crises, which serve the purpose of averting danger, illness, etc.It is important to realize that the two first ritual groups are predictable cyclic rituals addressing the gods, the myths, and/or the people/the individual respectively. Only the third and least central group of rituals is determined by non-predictable and “not-always” occurring incidences. On this background, it becomes central to analyse, which category one is facing when one wants to assess its importance for the religion as such, in order to evaluate the primary character of the religion.In an attempt to understand the overall importance of a specific ritual practice, one cannot ignore a very complicated problem, which is to evaluate whether the sacrifices were practiced by single individuals or by a larger group of people as part of more common and society-supporting rituals. The issue of the relation between different sacrifice types and the groups causing these has been addressed repeatedly. Often, narrow physical interpretation frames as to who sacrificed what are advanced (i.e. Fig. 3). However, the question is how suitable are these very narrow and rigid interpretation models? As mentioned above, a sacrifice is defined by the intention (context) that caused it rather than by the specific physical form of the object!The above mentioned methodical and theoretical issues provide the background for the author’s investigation of the archaeological sources, in which he focused especially on the relationship between ritual actions as they are expressed in bog deposits and in burial grounds and measured them against the contemporary finds from the settle­ments.The analysis of the archaeological material is based on those find groups (sacrifices of cauldrons, magnificent chariots, humans, animals, metals, and weapons), which have traditionally been presented as a proof that society supporting and more community influenced ritual sacrifices were carried out beside the bogs.The examination of the material supports that sacrifices of cauldrons, magnificent chariots, humans, animals, and earthenware are found in both settlements and wetlands (Figs. 4-12), and that the deposits seem to follow superior ritual conventions, i.e. Fig. 2. The sacrifices were not made in fixed sacred places but in a momentary sacred context, which returns to its daily secular sphere once the rituals have been carried out. Often, the ceremony consists of a ritual cutting up of the sacrificed object, and the pars pro toto principle occurs completely integrated in connection with both burial customs, wetland sacrifice customs, and settlement sacrifice customs. Sacrifices often occur as an expression of a rite de passage connected to the structures, fields, or infrastructure of the village. However, the repeated finds of earthenware vessels, humans, and animals in both wetland areas and in the villages indicates that fertility sacrifices were made regularly as part of the cyclic agricultural world. This places the find groups in a central position when it comes to understanding the religious landscape of the Early Iron Age. In a lot of respects, the settlement finds appear as direct parallel material to the contemporary wetland-related sacrificial custom and so one must assume that major religious events also took place in the settlements, for instance when a human or a cauldron was handed over to the next world. Both the selection of sacrificial objects, the form of depositing, and the preceding ceremonial treatment seem to follow superior ritual structures applying to both funerary rites and wetland sacrifices in Iron Age society.Often, the individual settlement-related sacrificial find seems to be explained by everyday doings, as largely all sacrifice-related objects of the Early Iron Age have a natural affiliation with the settlement and the daily housekeeping. However, it is clear that if the overwhelming amount of data is made subject to a comprehensive and detailed contextual analysis, settlement related find groups and attached action patterns appear, which have direct parallels in the ritual interpretation platform of the bog context. These parallels cannot be explained by pure practical or coincidence-related explanation models!As opposed to ploughed-up Stone Age axe deposits or impressive bronze depots from the Bronze Age and gold depots from the Late Iron Age, a ploughed-up collection of either earthenware, bones, human parts, etc. are not easily explained as sacrificial deposits. However, much indicates that the sacrificial settlement deposits of the Iron Age were not placed very deeply, and so they occur in the arable soil of later times. We must therefore assume that these very settlement-related sacrificial deposits from the Early Iron Age are extremely underrepresented in the available archaeological material. In order to clarify the sacrifice traditions in the Early Iron Age settlements, it is therefore necessary to have localities, which comply with a very rarely occurring find situation. The sites must have fine preservation conditions for bone material and, equally important, thick, continuously accumulated deposits of culture layers, as these preserve the usually shallowly deposited sacrifices. Further, it would be a great advantage if the site has a high degree of settlement continuity, as under optimal conditions, the investigation should comprise the activities of several centuries on the same spot.The Aalborg area holds Early Iron Age localities, which meet all of the above-mentioned conditions – for instance the settlement mound of Nr. Tranders, from which a few results will be pointed out. Time wise, the locality covers all of the Pre-Roman Iron Age and the fist part of the Early Roman Iron Age. Around ten farm units have been excavated from the settlement, each of which can be traced across a period of several hundred years. The houses were constructed with chalk floors (cf. Fig. 13), which give optimal preservation conditions for bone material, and the culture deposits assumed a thickness of up to 2 metres. Around 150 houses were excavated at this site (cf. Fig. 14). The author systematically checked the comprehensive find material, and starting from the theoretical and methodical approach presented in this article, was able to isolate 393 sacrificial deposits – a very comprehensive material in comparison with the sacrificial wetland sites!In 279 cases, it was possible to isolate sacrifices in connection with constructions. These comprised such different items as Stone Age axes, fossils, dress pins, a bronze fibula, iron knives, iron arrowheads, a bronze ring, an iron axe, various pottery sacrifices, amber, bone stilettos, bone spearheads, a bone arrowhead, complete animal skeletons, animal skulls and jaws, various animal bones, an infant, humane skull fragments, etc. (cf. Fig. 15). Just as the sacrificed objects themselves vary, so does the sacrifice intensity in the different constructions. Thus, houses without any registered construction sacrifices occur, whereas other constructions showed up to 5-15 sacrifices. These intense sacrifice activities are mainly connected with the later settlement phases from the Late Pre-Roman and the Early Roman Iron Age.The most ordinary find groups are different animal bones, pottery, Stone Age axes, fossils, and various pointed or edged tools. It is a characteristic of the construction sacrifices that they almost never show any signs of having been burnt prior to the depositing. The fact that all finds are not comparable merely because they are related to a construction is obvious, as the find group comprises as different objects as a sea urchin and an infant! Whereas the first should probably be considered an amulet, human sacrifices are traditionally considered a far more radical and ultimate act, and thus a sacrifice concerning a wider circle than the individual household. The highly varied sacrifice material causes the traditional link between construction sacrifices and an extremely narrow celebrant group to be reassessed. The excavations at Nr. Tranders also stress the fact that the amount of registered construction sacrifices are highly dependant on the preservation conditions and context registration as well as an open mind towards ritual interpretations in a traditionally secular research setting.In 114 cases, it was possible to determine settlement sacrifices at Nr. Tranders (cf. Fig. 16). The variation between the sacrificed objects closely follows the above described construction sacrifice and bog sacrifice traditions – both as regards temporary intensity in the centuries around the birth of Christ and which objects were deposited. From a superior view, the settlement sacrifices are characterized by often having been deposited in small, independent sacrificial pits, which were merely dug down a few centimetres from the surface level of the time, and rarely more than 25 cm. This very limited deposition depth emphasizes the enormous problems and distorting factors, which are probably the reason why the settlement sacrifices are so anonymous in most Iron Age settlements. They were simply ploughed away! The dominating sacrificial animal in the settlements was the sheep, often a lamb. However, the dog, the horse, and the cow also occur frequently in the material, whereas the pig is rarely included in the finds. To judge from both settlement and structure sacrifices, the distribution of sacrificial animals seem to be a direct mirror image of the life basis of the Early Iron Age society in the Aalborg area.One ritual element in particular, however, fundamentally separates the group of settlement sacrifices from those connected to structures, namely fire. Whereas fire does not seem to be part of the ritual make-up concerning structure sacrifices, both burnt and unburnt sacrifices appear in the settlement sacrifice material (cf. Fig. 17 &amp; 18). This condition is especially obvious when examining the deposited animal and human bones. The two maps on Fig. 19 show the finds of burnt and unburnt bone deposits respectively. On the background of these two plots (x, y, and z coordinates) the following analysis has been made: (interpolation “unburnt”)-(interpolation “burnt”), cf. Fig. 20. The analysis clearly points out that the relation between burnt and unburnt bone deposits is time related: the burnt deposits were made in the time before the birth of Christ, whereas the unburnt deposits were made during the following centuries. If this is related to the contemporary development of the grave custom in North Jutland, it is noteworthy that we can establish an obvious parallel development. Thus, the burial custom also changes around the beginning of the birth of Christ from a cremation grave custom to an inhumation grave custom. This coincidence probably indicates that within the two different religious and ritual contexts, the “ritual language” is to some degree identical when it comes to passing on humans and sacrificial animals.Irrespective of the superior sacrificial context – a bog, a lake, a field, a meadow, a structure, or a settlement – both the sacrifice intensity and the sacrificed objects seem to be based on objects from the daily household. As shown in the case of Nr. Tranders, the sacrifices occur in such large numbers on settlements with optimal preservation conditions that it is impossible to maintain the thesis that the Iron Age people had an especially one-sided preference for performing the sacrificial rituals in connection with wetland areas.As a supplement to the archaeological evidence, archaeologists have often sought support in historical accounts written by Romans in the centuries around the birth of Christ. The Roman historian Tacitus’ description of the religious activities of the Teutons is particularly describing and geographically differentiated. He mentions some general features such as the Teutons mainly worshipping Mercury (Mercury is the god of fertility, shepherds, etc.) and that they consider it a sacred duty even to bring him a human sacrifice on fixed days (i.e. a sacrifice cycle). Hercules and Mars (gods of strength and war) can only be reconciled with the allowed animal sacrifices. Besides, the Teutons consider it incompatible with the grandness of the heavenly powers to close them in behind walls and give them human features (cf. the lacking iconography). Tacitus´ overall description of the religion of the Teutons is thus primarily dealing with fertility sacrifices in relation to Mercury and the sacrifice of humans on certain days, i.e. a sacrifice cycle.More specifically, Tacitus describes the religious practice performed by tribes in South Scandinavia and North Germany at the time immediately succeeding the birth of Christ:“Nor in one of these nations does aught remarkable occur, only that they universally join in the worship of Nerthus; that is to say, the Mother Earth [Nerthus is phonetically concordant with the name Njord, a fertility goddess known from Norse mythology]. Her they believe to interpose in the affairs of man, and to visit countries. In an island of the ocean stands the wood Castum: in it is a chariot dedicated to the Goddess, covered over with a curtain, and permitted to be touched by none but the Priest. Whenever the Goddess enters this her holy vehicle, he perceives her; and with profound veneration attends the motion of the chariot, which is always drawn by yoked cows. Then it is that days of rejoicing always ensue, and in all places whatsoever which she descends to honour with a visit and her company, feasts and recreation abound. They go not to war; they touch no arms; fast laid up is every hostile weapon; peace and repose are then only known, then only beloved, till to the temple the same priest reconducts the Goddess when well tired with the conversation of mortal beings. Anon the chariot is washed and purified in a secret lake, as also the curtains; nay, the Deity herself too, if you choose to believe it. In this office it is slaves who minister, and they are forthwith doomed to be swallowed up in the same lake. Hence all men are possessed with mysterious terror; as well as with a holy ignorance what that must be, which none see but such as are immediately to perish.”Traditionally, the text is solely related to the numerous bog finds from the period. The question is, however, whether this is appropriate? Even a very limited analysis of the content of the text clearly reveals that the described religious exertion and the traces it must have left in the archaeological material can only be partly described from the numerous sacrificial bogs. The account of Nerthus may be split into two separate parts. One part that describes the common religious actions and another part comprising rituals carried out by a narrower group of people. The ritual mentioned with a severely limited circle (priest and slaves) comprises the washing of the goddess’ chariot by a lake and the succeeding sacrifice of the slaves chosen for the task. Far larger does the participant group appear throughout the rest of the Nerthus story. At first, there is a short mentioning of Nerthus driving about to the different tribes! This may be interpreted in such a way that the rituals described comprise actions, which take place where people are primarily moving about, i.e. in the villages! Perhaps the larger settlements of the Early Iron Age play a central part in relation to such common society-supporting ritual traditions. Tacitus decribes the physical context to be able to change its rules and norms at this sudden religious activity (cf. “They go not to war; they touch no arms.”) and in this way change sphere from an everyday, secular context to a religious context – a sacrosanct condition arises. The settlement thus enters different spheres at different times! Tacitus´ account of the execution of and the setting for the practiced ritual structure thus closely follows the structure known from archaeological excavations of bogs and settlements.How, then, does the religious practice of the Early Iron Age – and its sacrificial part in particular – appear on the background of the analyses above? (Fig. 22). May the sacrificial activity in actual fact be divided into two overriding groups, as was previously the tradition – individual structure sacrifices on settlements and both common and individual sacrifices in wetland areas – or is it necessary to revise and differentiate this view of Early Iron Age religion and the sacrificial customs in particular?The very unbalanced picture of the ritual displays of the society, involving chosen bogs as an almost “church-like” forum, is neither expressed in the archaeological material nor in the few written sources. On the contrary, the sacrificial activity appears as a very complex area, completely connected to the time and the regional development of the society of which it was part. Sacrificial objects primarily comprising everyday objects in the form of food, earthenware, animals, and humans did not differ from the secular culture until the actual ritual act took place.Considering the fact that the sacrificial objects comprised a wide range of everyday items, it is perhaps not so strange that the context in which the objects were sacrificed also varied considerably. It thus seems as if the conventional sacrificial customs were attached to the complete active resource area of the settlements, both in the form of wetland areas, and to the same degree of settlements. The conditions concerning burial sites, field systems, grazing areas, border markings, etc. still appear unclear, although it can be established that here, too, ritual activities took place according to the same conventions.The exertion of the rituals constituted a just as varied picture during the Early Iron Age as did the choice of sacrificial objects and place of sacrifice. Thus, we see objects deposited intact, as pars pro toto, smashed, burnt, etc. In spite of this very complex picture, patterns do seem to occur. There are thus strong indications that the rituals connected to settlement sacrifices of humans and animals during the Early Iron Age are closely connected with the rituals attached to the burial custom, and as such mirror a conventional communication form between humans and gods. Conversely, it seems as if structure sacrifices through all of the Early Iron Age primarily occur unburnt and that the ritual make-up connected to the finds of structure sacrifices is thus detached from the previously mentioned types of sacrifice, whereas the actual selection of the sacrificial objects seem to follow the same pattern.It is a characteristic of the ritual environments of the Early Iron Age that they appear momentary and as part of the daily life in the peasant community. Much thus indicates that permanent sacred environments and buildings did not exist to any particularly large degree. This does not imply that people would not return to the same sacred sacrificial places but rather that in between the sacrifices, these places formed part of the daily life, just as all the other parts of the cultural landscape.The examination of both published and unpublished material shows that the settlements were parallel contexts to the wetland areas and that these two contexts probably supplemented each other within the religious landscape of the Early Iron Age. In the light of the sacrificial find material there is no need to make a strong distinction between the religious societal roles of the settlements as opposed to the wetlands. The context (wetland and settlement) cannot in itself be understood as a useful parameter for determining whether we are dealing with large collective society-supporting ritual sites or sites connected to a minor village community. The question is whether the variation of sacrificial contexts should be related to different deities and myths, i.e. the mythical and narrative dimension of the religion, rather than to the size of the group of participants. On a few settlements, metal vessels, chariots, and humans were sacrificed – find types that are traditionally associated with the bogs and with groups of participants from a larger area than the individual settlement. This interpretation should also be applied to the settlements.In spite of the fact that from an overall perspective, the practiced religion in South Scandinavia seems homogenous, there is neither archaeological nor historical evidence for the presence of real ritual and religious units comprising large areas, such as complete provinces. However, we must assume that sacrifices of for instance humans, chariots, cauldrons, and the large weapon accumulations were made by groups of people exceeding the number of inhabitants in a single settlement. We thus have no reason for questioning the traditional concept that chosen wetland areas functioned as sacred places from time to time to major sections of the population – whether the sacrifices were brought about by for instance acts of war or as part of a cyclic ritual. The question is whether the large settlements of the Early Iron Age did not play a similar part to a hinterland consisting of a number of minor settlements, as the comprehensive finds from for instance the settlement mounds near Aalborg seem to indicate.During the Late Roman Iron Age and Early Germanic Iron Age, the previously so comprehensive sacrificial activity connected to the wetlands declined considerably. Parallel to this, the frequent settlement-related fertility sacrifices of bones and earthenware vessels in the Early Iron Age recede into the background in favour of knives, lances, craftsmen’s tools, and prestigious items representing the changed society of these centuries. During the Late Iron Age, the iconographic imagery, after having been throttled down for almost a millennia, regains a central role within the religion. This happens by virtue of a varied imagery on prestigious items such as bracteates and “guldgubber,” cf. Fig. 21. Seen as a whole, it seems as if – parallel to the development of the society during the Late Roman Iron Age and the Early Germanic Iron Age – there is a dimension displacement within the ritual and religious world, which manifests itself in an increased focus on the material dimension. The question is whether this very dimension displacement is not reflecting the religious development from the fertility-related Vanir faith to the more elitist Æsir faith.Jesper HansenOdense Bys Museer Translated by Annette Lerche Trolle

Covid 19 – living the experience As I sit at my desk at home in suburban Brisbane, following the dictates on self-isolation shared with so many around the world, I am forced to contemplate the limits of human prediction. I look out on a world which few could have predicted six months ago. My thoughts at that time were all about 2020 as a metaphor for perfect vision and a plea for it to herald a new period of clarity which would arm us in resolving the whole host of false divisions that surrounded us. False, because so many appear to be generated by the use of polarised labelling strategies which sought to categorise humans by a whole range of identities, while losing the essential humanity and individuality which we all share. This was a troublesome trend and one which seemed reminiscent of the biblical tale concerning the tower of Babel, when a single unified language was what we needed to create harmony in a globalising world. However, yesterday’s concerns have, at least for the moment, been overshadowed by a more urgent and unifying concern with humanity’s health and wellbeing. For now, this concern has created a world which we would not have recognised in 2019. We rely more than ever on our various forms of electronic media to beam instant shots of the streets of London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Hong Kong etc. These centres of our worldly activity normally characterised by hustle and bustle, are now serenely peaceful and ordered. Their magnificent buildings have become foregrounded, assuming a dignity and presence that is more commonly overshadowed by the mad ceaseless scramble of humanity all around them. From there however the cameras can jump to some of the less fortunate areas of the globe. These streets are still teeming with people in close confined areas. There is little hope here of following frequent extended hand washing practices, let alone achieving the social distance prescribed to those of us in the global North. From this desk top perspective, it has been interesting to chart the mood as the crisis has unfolded. It has moved from a slightly distant sense of superiority as the news slowly unfolded about events in remote Wuhan. The explanation that the origins were from a live market, where customs unfamiliar to our hygienic pre-packaged approach to food consumption were practised, added to this sense of separateness and exoticism surrounding the source and initial development of the virus. However, this changed to a growing sense of concern as its growth and transmission slowly began to reveal the vulnerability of all cultures to its spread. At this early stage, countries who took steps to limit travel from infected areas seemed to gain some advantage. Australia, as just one example banned flights from China and required all Chinese students coming to study in Australia to self-isolate for two weeks in a third intermediate port. It was a step that had considerable economic costs associated with it. One that was vociferously resisted at the time by the university sector increasingly dependent on the revenue generated by servicing Chinese students. But it was when the epicentre moved to northern Italy, that the entire messaging around the event began to change internationally. At this time the tone became increasingly fearful, anxious and urgent as reports of overwhelmed hospitals and mass burials began to dominate the news. Consequently, governments attracted little criticism but were rather widely supported in the action of radically closing down their countries in order to limit human interaction. The debate had become one around the choice between health and economic wellbeing. The fact that the decision has been overwhelmingly for health, has been encouraging. It has not however stopped the pressure from those who believe that economic well-being is a determinant of human well-being, questioning the decisions of politicians and the advice of public health scientists that have dominated the responses to date. At this stage, the lives versus livelihoods debate has a long way still to run. Of some particular interest has been the musings of the opinion writers who have predicted that the events of these last months will change our world forever. Some of these predictions have included the idea that rather than piling into common office spaces working remotely from home and other advantageous locations will be here to stay. Schools and universities will become centres of learning more conveniently accessed on-line rather than face to face. Many shopping centres will become redundant and goods will increasingly be delivered via collection centres or couriers direct to the home. Social distancing will impact our consumption of entertainment at common venues and lifestyle events such as dining out. At the macro level, it has been predicted that globalisation in its present form will be reversed. The pandemic has led to actions being taken at national levels and movement being controlled by the strengthening and increased control of physical borders. Tourism has ground to a halt and may not resume on its current scale or in its present form as unnecessary travel, at least across borders, will become permanently reduced. Advocates of change have pointed to some of the unpredicted benefits that have been occurring. These include a drop in air pollution: increased interaction within families; more reading undertaken by younger adults; more systematic incorporation of exercise into daily life, and; a rediscovered sense of community with many initiatives paying tribute to the health and essential services workers who have been placed at the forefront of this latest struggle with nature. Of course, for all those who point to benefits in the forced lifestyle changes we have been experiencing, there are those who would tell a contrary tale. Demonstrations in the US have led the push by those who just want things to get back to normal as quickly as possible. For this group, confinement at home creates more problems. These may be a function of the proximity of modern cramped living quarters, today’s crowded city life, dysfunctional relationships, the boredom of self-entertainment or simply the anxiety that comes with an insecure livelihood and an unclear future. Personally however, I am left with two significant questions about our future stimulated by the events that have been ushered in by 2020. The first is how is it that the world has been caught so unprepared by this pandemic? The second is to what extent do we have the ability to recalibrate our current practices and view an alternative future? In considering the first, it has been enlightening to observe the extent to which politicians have turned to scientific expertise in order to determine their actions. Terms like ‘flattening the curve’, ‘community transmission rates’, have become part of our daily lexicon as the statistical modellers advance their predictions as to how the disease will spread and impact on our health systems. The fact that scientists are presented as the acceptable and credible authority and the basis for our actions reflects a growing dependency on data and modelling that has infused our society generally. This acceptance has been used to strengthen the actions on behalf of the human lives first and foremost position. For those who pursue the livelihoods argument even bigger figures are available to be thrown about. These relate to concepts such as numbers of jobless, increase in national debt, growth in domestic violence, rise in mental illness etc. However, given that they are more clearly estimates and based on less certain assumptions and variables, they do not at this stage seem to carry the impact of the data produced by public health experts. This is not surprising but perhaps not justifiable when we consider the failure of the public health lobby to adequately prepare or forewarn us of the current crisis in the first place. Statistical predictive models are built around historical data, yet their accuracy depends upon the quality of those data. Their robustness for extrapolation to new settings for example will differ as these differ in a multitude of subtle ways from the contexts in which they were initially gathered. Our often uncritical dependence upon ‘scientific’ processes has become worrying, given that as humans, even when guided by such useful tools, we still tend to repeat mistakes or ignore warnings. At such a time it is an opportunity for us to return to the reservoir of human wisdom to be found in places such as our great literature. Works such as The Plague by Albert Camus make fascinating and educative reading for us at this time. As the writer observes Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow, we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise. So it is that we constantly fail to study let alone learn the lessons of history. Yet 2020 mirrors 1919, as at that time the world was reeling with the impact of the Spanish ‘Flu, which infected 500 million people and killed an estimated 50 million. This was more than the 40 million casualties of the four years of the preceding Great War. There have of course been other pestilences since then and much more recently. Is our stubborn failure to learn because we fail to value history and the knowledge of our forebears? Yet we can accept with so little question the accuracy of predictions based on numbers, even with varying and unquestioned levels of validity and reliability. As to the second question, many writers have been observing some beneficial changes in our behaviour and our environment, which have emerged in association with this sudden break in our normal patterns of activity. It has given us the excuse to reevaluate some of our practices and identify some clear benefits that have been occurring. As Australian newspaper columnist Bernard Salt observes in an article titled “the end of narcissism?” I think we’ve been re-evaluating the entire contribution/reward equation since the summer bushfires and now, with the added experience of the pandemic, we can see the shallowness of the so-called glamour professions – the celebrities, the influencers. We appreciate the selflessness of volunteer firefighters, of healthcare workers and supermarket staff. From the pandemic’s earliest days, glib forays into social media by celebrities seeking attention and yet further adulation have been met with stony disapproval. Perhaps it is best that they stay offline while our real heroes do the heavy lifting. To this sad unquestioning adherence to both scientism and narcissism, we can add and stir the framing of the climate rebellion and a myriad of familiar ‘first world’ problems which have caused dissension and disharmony in our communities. Now with an external threat on which to focus our attention, there has been a short lull in the endless bickering and petty point scoring that has characterised our western liberal democracies in the last decade. As Camus observed: The one way of making people hang together is to give ‘em a spell of the plague. So, the ceaseless din of the topics that have driven us apart has miraculously paused for at least a moment. Does this then provide a unique opportunity for us together to review our habitual postures and adopt a more conciliatory and harmonious communication style, take stock, critically evaluate and retune our approach to life – as individuals, as nations, as a species? It is not too difficult to hypothesise futures driven by the major issues that have driven us apart. Now, in our attempts to resist the virus, we have given ourselves a glimpse of some of the very things the climate change activists have wished to happen. With few planes in the air and the majority of cars off the roads, we have already witnessed clearer and cleaner air. Working at home has freed up the commuter driven traffic and left many people with more time to spend with their family. Freed from the continuing throng of tourists, cities like Venice are regenerating and cleansing themselves. This small preview of what a less travelled world might start to look like surely has some attraction. But of course, it does not come without cost. With the lack of tourism and the need to work at home, jobs and livelihoods have started to change. As with any revolution there are both winners and losers. The lockdown has distinguished starkly between essential and non-essential workers. That represents a useful starting point from which to assess what is truly of value in our way of life and what is peripheral as Salt made clear. This is a question that I would encourage readers to explore and to take forward with them through the resolution of the current situation. However, on the basis that educators are seen as providing essential services, now is the time to turn to the content of our current volume. Once again, I direct you to the truly international range of our contributors. They come from five different continents yet share a common focus on one of the most popular of shared cultural experiences – sport. Unsurprisingly three of our reviewed papers bring different insights to the world’s most widely shared sport of all – football, or as it would be more easily recognised in some parts of the globe - soccer. Leading these offerings is a comparison of fandom in Australia and China. The story presented by Knijnk highlights the rise of the fanatical supporters known as the ultras. The origin of the movement is traced to Italy, but it is one that claims allegiances now around the world. Kniijnk identifies the movement’s progression into Australia and China and, in pointing to its stance against the commercialisation of their sport by the scions of big business, argues for its deeper political significance and its commitment to the democratic ownership of sport. Reflecting the increasing availability and use of data in our modern societies, Karadog, Parim and Cene apply some of the immense data collected on and around the FIFA World Cup to the task of selecting the best team from the 2018 tournament held in Russia, a task more usually undertaken by panels of experts. Mindful of the value of using data in ways that can assist future decision making, rather than just in terms of summarising past events, they also use the statistics available to undertake a second task. The second task was the selection of the team with the greatest future potential by limiting eligibility to those at an early stage in their careers, namely younger than 28 and who arguably had still to attain their prime as well as having a longer career still ahead of them. The results for both selections confirm how membership of the wealthy European based teams holds the path to success and recognition at the global level no matter what the national origins of players might be. Thirdly, taking links between the sport and the world of finance a step further, Gomez-Martinez, Marques-Bogliani and Paule-Vianez report on an interesting study designed to test the hypothesis that sporting success within a community is reflected in positive economic outcomes for members of that community. They make a bold attempt to test their hypothesis by examining the relationship of the performance of three world leading clubs in Europe - Bayern Munich, Juventus and Paris Saint Germain and the performance of their local stock markets. Their findings make for some interesting thoughts about the significance of sport in the global economy and beyond into the political landscape of our interconnected world. Our final paper comes from Africa but for its subject matter looks to a different sport, one that rules the subcontinent of India - cricket. Norrbhai questions the traditional coaching of batting in cricket by examining the backlift techniques of the top players in the Indian Premier league. His findings suggest that even in this most traditional of sports, technique will develop and change in response to the changing context provided by the game itself. In this case the context is the short form of the game, introduced to provide faster paced entertainment in an easily consumable time span. It provides a useful reminder how in sport, techniques will not be static but will continue to evolve as the game that provides the context for the skilled performance also evolves. To conclude our pages, I must apologise that our usual book review has fallen prey to the current world disruption. In its place I would like to draw your attention to the announcement of a new publication which would make a worthy addition to the bookshelf of any international sports scholar. “Softpower, Soccer, Supremacy – The Chinese Dream” represents a unique and timely analysis of the movement of the most popular and influential game in the world – Association Football, commonly abbreviated to soccer - into the mainstream of Chinese national policy. The editorial team led by one of sports histories most recognised scholars, Professor J A Mangan, has assembled a who’s who of current scholars in sport in Asia. Together they provide a perspective that takes in, not just the Chinese view of these important current developments but also, the view of others in the geographical region. From Japan, Korea and Australia, they bring with them significant experience to not just the beautiful game, but sport in general in that dynamic and fast-growing part of the world. Particularly in the light of the European dominance identified in the Karog, Parim and Cene paper this work raises the question as to whether we can expect to see a change in the world order sooner rather than later. It remains for me to make one important acknowledgement. In my last editorial I alerted you to the sorts of decisions we as an editorial and publication team were facing with regard to ensuring the future of the journal. Debates as to how best to proceed while staying true to our vision and goals are still proceeding. However, I am pleased to acknowledge the sponsorship provided by The University of Macao for volume 42 and recognise the invaluable contribution made by ISCPES former president Walter Ho to this process. Sponsorship can provide an important input to the ongoing existence and strength of this journal and we would be interested in talking to other institutions or groups who might also be interested in supporting our work, particularly where their goals align closely with ours. May I therefore commend to you the works of our international scholars and encourage your future involvement in sharing your interest in and expertise with others in the world of comparative and international sport studies, John Saunders, Brisbane, May 2020

The severe soiling of reflectors deployed in arid and semi arid locations decreases their reflectance and drives down the yield of the concentrating solar power (CSP) plants. To alleviate this issue, various sets of methods are available. The operation and maintenance (O&amp;M) staff should opt for sustainable cleaning methods that are safe and environmentally friendly. To restore high reflectance, the cleaning vehicles of CSP plants must adapt to the constraints of each technology and to the layout of reflectors in the solar field. Water based methods are currently the most commonly used in CSP plants but they are not sustainable due to water scarcity and high soiling rates. The recovery and reuse of washing water can compensate for these methods and make them a more reasonable option for mediterranean and desert environments. Dry methods, on the other hand, are gaining more attraction as they are more suitable for desert regions. Some of these methods rely on ultrasonic wave or vibration for detaching the dust bonding from the reflectors surface, while other methods, known as preventive methods, focus on reducing the soiling by modifying the reflectors surface and incorporating self cleaning features using special coatings. Since the CSP plants operators aim to achieve the highest profit by minimizing the cost of cleaning while maintaining a high reflectance, optimizing the cleaning parameters and strategies is of great interest. This work presents the conventional water-based methods that are currently used in CSP plants in addition to sustainable alternative methods for dust removal and soiling prevention. Also, the cleaning effectiveness, the environmental impacts and the economic aspects of each technology are discussed.

Technoeconomic analysis (TEA) is commonly used to determine economic viability of power-generating technologies, including concentrating solar power (CSP) and thermal (CST) production plants. Levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) and analogous measures provide an estimate of long-term costs for operating power plants over their designed lifetimes by accounting for revenues and costs in a time-discounted manner. While these measures are effective when assessing a technology’s total lifecycle costs and productivity under various designs, TEA of candidate incremental technology improvements from the lens of LCOE can be limited when required investment and LCOE impacts are small. In this work, we propose a novel metric for TEA of a plant component technology that recasts relative changes in levelized system costs into component-specific capital cost budgets. This measure, which we refer to as the equivalent breakeven installed cost, is the maximum budget for the technology component that leads to improved levelized costs. We illustrate the usefulness of this metric using the example of candidate heliostat improvements for a CSP tower plant. Here, the results suggest that a reduction in mirror washing costs yield a total plant O&amp;M cost of $37/kWe-yr, which is a breakeven proposition if the average reflectance is reduced from 0.90 to 0.85 as a result of the cost savings.

ABSTRACT The Gram-negative oral pathobiont Fusobacterium nucleatum can traverse to extra-oral sites such as placenta and colon, promoting adverse pregnancy outcomes and colorectal cancer, respectively. How this anaerobe sustains many metabolically changing environments enabling its virulence potential remains unclear. Informed by our genome-wide transposon mutagenesis, we report here that the highly conserved R hodobacter n itrogen- f ixation (Rnf) complex, encoded by the rnfCDGEAB gene cluster, is key to fusobacterial metabolic adaptation and virulence. Genetic disruption of the Rnf complex via non-polar, in-frame deletion of rnfC (Δ rnfC ) abrogates polymicrobial interaction (or coaggregation) associated with adhesin RadD and biofilm formation. The defect in coaggregation is not due to reduced cell surface of RadD, but rather an increased level of extracellular lysine, which binds RadD and inhibits coaggregation. Indeed, removal of extracellular lysine via washing Δ rnfC cells restores coaggregation, while addition of lysine inhibits this process. These phenotypes mirror that of a mutant (Δ kamA ) that fails to metabolize extracellular lysine. Strikingly, the Δ rnfC mutant is defective in ATP production, cell growth, cell morphology, and expression of the enzyme MegL that produces hydrogen sulfide (H 2 S) from cysteine. Targeted metabolic profiling demonstrated that catabolism of many amino acids, including histidine and lysine, is altered in Δ rnfC cells, thereby reducing production of ATP and metabolites including H 2 S and butyrate. Most importantly, we show that the Δ rnfC mutant is severely attenuated in a mouse model of preterm birth. The indispensable function of Rnf complex in fusobacterial pathogenesis via modulation of bacterial metabolism makes it an attractive target for developing therapeutic intervention. IMPORTANCE This paper illuminates the significant question of how the oral commensal Fusobacterium nucleatum adapts to the metabolically changing environments of several extra-oral sites such as placenta and colon to promote various diseases as an opportunistic pathogen. We demonstrate here that the highly conserved R hodobacter n itrogen- f ixation complex, commonly known as Rnf complex, is key to fusobacterial metabolic adaptation and virulence. Genetic disruption of this Rnf complex causes global defects in polymicrobial interaction, biofilm formation, cell growth and morphology, hydrogen sulfide production, and ATP synthesis. Targeted metabolomic profiling demonstrates that the loss of this respiratory enzyme significantly diminishes catabolism of numerous amino acids, which negatively impacts fusobacterial virulence as tested in a preterm birth model in mice.

AbstractFogged surfaces, such as bathroom mirrors, quickly become a nuisance in everyday life, but are particularly problematic in safety‐relevant and medical areas. Present approaches are often based on hydrophilic coatings, which can prevent fogging, but are not very durable. Surface‐attached polymer networks that can be quickly and easily prepared from thin films of prepolymers by photochemical activation using brief irradiation with ambient light are presented. This novel photoreactive copolymer contains ionic, hydrophilic repeating units and hydrophilic nitro‐substituted phenyl diazo ester moieties. The diazo groups in the prepolymer films form carbenes after excitation, which then bind to adjacent chains and to the substrate by C,H insertion cross–linking (CHic). The resulting surfaces exhibit excellent anti‐fogging properties as they allow water to condense into a uniform thin film. The substrates remain highly transparent, even after frequent washing. In addition, the polymers can also be easily applied to previously damaged coatings by soiling in order to fully restore the anti‐fog properties. Due to the solubility of the prepolymers in water, the easy cross–linking in sunlight, the durability of the coating, and the possibility of damage repair, the polymers are suitable for easy‐use scenarios by non‐professionals, which offers great potential for such an approach.

Primary mucinous ovarian cancer is a rare type of epithelial ovarian cancer. In this comprehensive review we discuss management recommendations for the treatment of mucinous ovarian cancer. Although most tumors are stage I at diagnosis, 15–20% are advanced stage at diagnosis. Traditionally, patients with primary mucinous ovarian cancer have been treated similarly to those with the more common serous ovarian cancer. However, recent studies have shown that mucinous ovarian cancer is very different from other types of epithelial ovarian cancer. Primary mucinous ovarian cancer is less likely to spread to lymph nodes or the upper abdomen and more likely to affect younger women, who may desire fertility-sparing therapies. Surgical management of mucinous ovarian cancer mirrors surgical management of other types of epithelial ovarian cancer and includes a bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy and total hysterectomy. When staging is indicated, it should include pelvic washing, omentectomy, and peritoneal biopsies; lymph node evaluation should be considered in patients with infiltrative tumors. The appendix should be routinely evaluated intra-operatively, but an appendectomy may be omitted if the appendix appears grossly normal. Fertility preservation can be considered in patients with gross disease confined to one ovary and a normal-appearing contralateral ovary. Patients with recurrent platinum-sensitive disease whose disease distribution suggests a high likelihood of complete gross resection may be candidates for secondary debulking. Primary mucinous ovarian cancer seems to be resistant to standard platinum-and-taxane regimens used frequently for other types of ovarian cancer. Gastrointestinal cancer regimens are another option; these include 5-fluorouracil and oxaliplatin, or capecitabine and oxaliplatin. Data on heated intra-peritoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) for mucinous ovarian cancer are scarce, but HIPEC may be worth considering. For patients with recurrence or progression on first-line chemotherapy, we advocate enrollment in a clinical trial if one is available. For this reason, it may be beneficial to perform molecular testing in all patients with recurrent or progressive mucinous ovarian cancer.

Pope Francis — the first pope from the Global South, the first Jesuit, and the first to bear the name of St Francis of Assisi — carried into the papacy a disarming humility and an uncompromising moral conscience, shaped by the struggles and hopes of South America. For twelve years, he was not only a reformer within the Church but one of the world’s most trusted moral voices — confronting poverty, injustice, war, and exclusion without flinching. The farewell he received on 26 April 2025 bore witness to the breadth of his impact: over 250,000 mourners filled St Peter’s Square, with thousands more lining the streets of Rome. Leaders from across political and ideological divides gathered, and even groups historically opposed to the Church, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, issued condolence messages. It was not diplomacy that drew them together, but a shared recognition of a conscience that refused to be silenced by politics or prejudice. Francis’s life invites us to walk the path of justice, compassion, and peace. He did not merely point to a better way — he walked it first. A Papacy Rooted in Simplicity From the moment he chose the name Francis — invoking the saint of poverty and peace — Pope Francis challenged the world’s notions of power, wealth, and status. His papacy stood as a living reminder that leadership, at its best, is rooted not in spectacle but in service. His decision to forgo the Apostolic Palace for the modest Domus Sanctae Marthae, to wear plain cassocks, and to travel in a Ford Focus rather than a papal limousine were not mere gestures. They were reflections of a spirituality that placed humility and human dignity at the centre of public life. His drive for Vatican reform — demanding transparency, enforcing financial accountability, and insisting that the Church embody justice in its structures — reflected the same moral clarity. In an age obsessed with image and dominance, Francis modelled a radically different path: true authority flows not from grandeur, but from solidarity; not from distance, but from closeness to the vulnerable. His life challenges all leaders to rediscover the moral power of simplicity, integrity, and authentic service. A Voice for Our Common Home In ‘Laudato Si’ (2015), Pope Francis offered one of the most radical teachings of modern papal history — an ecological encyclical grounded in the conviction that "the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor" are one and the same. He challenged the world to see environmental destruction not as a distant scientific concern, but as a moral failure intimately tied to economic injustice, corporate greed, and indifference to the vulnerable. For Francis, ecological degradation was inseparable from the exploitation of the poor. He refused the false choice between development and preservation, insisting instead on an "integral ecology" — a vision where environmental, social, and spiritual health must rise together, or fall together. ‘Laudato Si’ is an appeal to build an economy of care, a politics of stewardship, and a spirituality of interconnection that honours life in all its fragile, interwoven forms. Voice of the Marginalised Pope Francis warned consistently against the "globalization of indifference" — a world numbed to suffering and blind to injustice. He sought not merely to advocate for the poor, but to reposition them at the moral centre of global conscience. This vision came alive through initiatives like the World Meeting of Popular Movements (WMPM), launched in 2014, which gathered slum dwellers, farmers, fisherfolk, and informal workers across continents. Francis affirmed their struggles as sacred rights — championing "Techo, Tierra, Trabajo" (Housing, Land, and Work) as essential pillars of dignity. In a world that discarded its most vulnerable, he called for a universal basic income and condemned economic systems that idolized profit. His solidarity extended beyond economics. He embraced LGBTQ+ persons, prisoners, the differently abled, and those battling addiction — not as exceptions, but as integral members of the human family. His gestures, like washing the feet of migrants and prisoners, proclaimed that the Church must kneel before the wounded, not preach from a distance. Francis’s legacy leaves a challenge far greater than philanthropy: to uphold justice for those underprivileged. Listening to Indigenous Wisdom Although many previous papacies emphasized mission and conversion, Pope Francis reoriented the Church’s relationship with Indigenous peoples. He recognized them as custodians of ancestral wisdom and long-denied rights. In 2015, standing on Bolivian soil, he offered one of the Church’s most direct acknowledgements of colonial violence: “Many grave sins were committed... in the name of God,” he said — seeking forgiveness not just for history’s wrongs, but for patterns of exploitation that still endure. This reckoning deepened with the Amazon Synod of 2019, where bishops, theologians, and Indigenous leaders gathered in Rome to address deforestation, extractive industries, cultural erasure, and climate collapse. Indigenous voices — often speaking in native languages — were treated not as ceremonial participants, but as witnesses reshaping the Church’s moral vision. Francis did not simply advocate for Indigenous rights; he repositioned their wisdom at the heart of the Church’s moral vision. He leaves behind an appeal — to governments, corporations, and religious institutions alike — to move from gestures of repentance to structures of shared responsibility, and to recognise that humanity’s future survival is inseparable from the survival of its first peoples. Welcoming the Stranger: Refugee Crisis and Syrian Appeal Many leaders hardened their borders and their rhetoric during the refugee crisis, but Pope Francis stood for openness, compassion, and shared humanity. His response — especially to the plight of Syrian refugees — was grounded in the radical belief in every person's dignity. In 2015, as millions fled violence, he issued an urgent appeal: "May every parish, every religious community, every monastery, every sanctuary in Europe take in one refugee family." It was not a gesture of sentiment, but a call to convert empathy into shelter, compassion into policy. His visit to the Greek island of Lesbos in 2016 became a global symbol. Amid the desperation of refugee camps, he welcomed twelve Syrian Muslim refugees onto the papal plane, offering not a photo opportunity, but protection and care. It was a quiet yet forceful rebuke to rising nationalism and fear. He warned that societies which close their doors to migrants risk closing their hearts to humanity itself. His life leaves us a test: will we continue to view the displaced as burdens to be managed, or will we dare to see them as neighbours? Bridges Across Faith and Humanity At a time when religious divisions were deepened by some, Pope Francis chose a different path — one of dialogue, humility, and fraternity. In 2019, he became the first pope to visit the Arabian Peninsula, signing the Document on Human Fraternity with Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb of Al-Azhar in Abu Dhabi. "God does not want religions to fight each other," he declared — offering a vision of shared dignity over supremacy. His 2021 visit to Iraq carried the same spirit. In Najaf, he met Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, one of Shia Islam’s most revered clerics, in a quiet but powerful gesture of theological respect. In 2024, Pope Francis kissed the hand of Grand Imam Nasaruddin Umar, the leader of Jakarta’s Istiqlal Mosque, in a gesture of mutual respect and interfaith solidarity.​ "Istiqlal Joint Declaration 2024," a document promoting religious harmony, environmental protection, a stand against violence and extremism was signed by both the leaders. In Bangladesh (2017), he broke protocol to name and embrace Rohingya refugees — affirming their humanity where political leaders remained silent. Whether in Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Morocco, or Bahrain, his message was unwavering: dialogue is not weakness, but an act of moral courage. Francis’s outreach was not confined to religious divides alone. He addressed an extraordinary letter to La Repubblica, an Italian secular newspaper, affirming that conscience — not dogma — is the first guide for those seeking the good. “God’s mercy has no limits if one turns to Him with a sincere and contrite heart,” he wrote — an invitation that extended beyond believers to all who strive for justice and compassion. His passing was mourned not only within the Catholic Church but across the broader human family — by Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, and agnostics alike. In life and in death, he stood as a rare moral voice who spoke across the fractures of faith and ideology. Will we continue to build walls of fear, or will we dare to see in every stranger a fellow bearer of sacred dignity? Moral Stand Against War and Violence Pope Francis consistently raised a deeper moral alarm — refusing to normalise war, the arms trade, and militarised politics. He condemned the global arms industry, branding weapons manufacturers “merchants of death.” He exposed how militarism perpetuates poverty and displacement, warning that every bomb dropped is a meal not served, a home not built. During the war in Ukraine, he called the invasion “a cruel and senseless war,” urging moral clarity alongside humanitarian compassion. Yet he also warned: peace without justice is unsustainable, and justice without mercy risks becoming vengeance. His stance remained uncompromising during the violence in Gaza and Israel. In his Easter messages of 2024 and 2025, he called for humanitarian corridors, an immediate ceasefire, and diplomacy grounded in human dignity. “Enough,” he declared. “War is always a defeat.” In Nagasaki, he declared that not only the use but even the possession of nuclear weapons is morally unacceptable. Will the world’s powers continue worshipping the machinery of destruction, or choose the more difficult, life-affirming path of peace? India’s Struggles and the Echo of Conscience Pope Francis never visited India, but his moral voice resonated across its spiritual and social landscape. In a country scarred by religious polarization, widening inequalities, and political manipulation, his call for justice, dialogue, and human dignity rang out not as distant rhetoric but as urgent moral witness. His simplicity recalled the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi — a leadership grounded in humility rather than spectacle. His insistence on dignity for the marginalised echoed the vision of Dr B.R. Ambedkar. His openness to religious pluralism carried forward the ideals of Swami Vivekananda, who affirmed the sacredness of all faiths. At a time when dissent is stifled, democratic institutions weakened, and mistrust weaponized for political gain, Francis’s life offers a difficult mirror to Indian society. Will faith continue to be a tool of exclusion, or become a force for justice, equality, and the protection of the vulnerable? A Dream That Must Not Die Pope Francis showed a form of leadership rare in an age of spectacle and cynicism. His strength lay not in power, but in moral clarity — the belief that justice, mercy, and dignity must shape the soul of public life. Across twelve years, he redefined what it meant to be a global spiritual leader. He confronted inequality without rancour, bridged religious divides without compromise, and stood with the wounded without retreat. Whether facing war, ecological collapse, or the abandonment of the poor, he responded not with detachment, but with the courage of conscience. Today, in a world fractured by fanaticism, indifference, and manipulated truths, his life invites us not to choose the easier path of silence and division, but to bear the world’s wounds, walk with the broken, and speak peace where silence tempts. His legacy is not just a memory, but a fragile hope — a hope that there will be others like him.

Authors: Laurent Dembélé, Jean-François Franetich, Audrey Lorthiois, Audrey Gego, Georges Snounou &amp; Dominique Mazier ### Abstract The dormant liver stages, hypnozoites, of some malaria parasite species were not amenable to in vitro studies because primary hepatocyte cultures could not be maintained beyond 10-14 days. In this protocol we describe a co-culture system where primary simian hepatocyte could be maintained for a month or more through co-cultivation with an immortalised liver derived cell line, Hepa-RG. The hepatocytes can be infected with Plasmodium sporozoites and the persisting hypnozoites can then observed and investigated. ### Introduction Infection by malaria is initiated by the deposition of sporozoites in the skin from the salivary of an infected Anopheles mosquito during its blood meal. These sporozoites then make their way to the liver where they immediately develop in hepatocytes to produce the merozoite forms that invade red blood cells, thus staring the cycle of multiplication that causes disease and allows transmission to mosquitos. In a few of the parasite species that infect primates, the development of some of the hepatic parasites is arrested early after invasion, to resume only months or years later (1-3). During this time these quiescent parasites are insusceptible to all anti-malarial drugs except for primaquine. The activation of these dormant forms, known as hypnozoites, causes a relapse episode thereby increasing the morbidity of the infection and its potential to transmit. In humans, two species Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium ovale are capable of forming hypnozoites, and this considerably hampers efforts to control and eventually eliminate them. Searching for drugs active against hypnozoites suitable for mass deployment is a urgent requirement because primaquine administration can lead to potentially severe haemolysis in persons with glucose-6-phosphate deficiency, a genetic trait common in populations living the areas endemic for vivax and ovale malaria. At present, screening for hypnozoitocidal activity can only be done one experimentally infected hosts, which must be followed for many months after drug administration. Since the 1950’s, the P. cynomolgi-infected rhesus monkey, an excellent model for P. vivax, has been used to test for efficacy (4). Given the costs and ethical limitations inherent to research on primates, screening is restricted to very few compounds indeed. Moreover, there is very little known about the biological processes associated with quiescence and activation of hypnozoites that could help narrow down the molecules to test. Clearly, in vitro cultivation of hypnozoites would make it possible to envisage more efficient and cost-effective screening strategies. We had previously demonstrated that hypnozoite-like forms could be obtained in cultured primary simian hepatocytes infected with P. cynomolgi sporozoites (5). However confirmation that these were indeed hypnozoites, and optimal use for screening assays, were hampered by the characteristic short durations (10-14 days at most) of primary hepatocyte cultures. Here we describe protocols in which the co-culture of simian primary hepatocytes with a HepaRG cell line allows to maintain the cultures for about a month, during which hypnozoites resulting from an initial infection with P. cynomolgi sporozoites can be enriched and observed to activate and develop into mature forms. It is likely that these protocols would also be suitable for the cultivation of P. vivax hypnozoites in human primary hepatocytes. ### Materials 1. Sterile Ca2+- and Mg2+- free PBS pH 7,4 (Gibco cat. no. 10010015) - 0,25% Trypsin-EDTA (1X), Phenol Red (Gibco cat. no. 25200056) - Culture medium: - William’s E medium with no Glutamine (Gibco cat. no. 22551022) - 10% Foetal Bovine Serum (Perbio); batch quality checked before use - 1% L-Glutamine (200 mM) (Gibco cat. no. 25030024) - 1% Penicillin–Streptomycin (10,000 U per mL–10 mg per mL) (Gibco cat. no. 15140122) - 5µg per mL Insulin (Sigma, cat. no. I5500) - 5×10-5 M hydrocortisone hemisuccinate (Upjohn Laboratories SERB) - L15 medium: - Leibovitz’s L-15 medium (Gibco cat. no. 11415049) - 10% Foetal Bovine Serum - 1% Penicillin–Streptomycin (10,000 U per mL–10 mg per mL) (Gibco cat. no. 15140122) - 1/1,000 Fungizone (Gibco cat. no. 15202690) - 40 % iso-osmotic Percoll: - 36 ml Percoll (GE Healthcare Life Sciences cat. no. 17-0891-01) - 4 ml Sterile PBS 10X pH 7,4 (Gibco cat. no. 70011-036) - 60 ml William’s E medium (Gibco cat. no. 22551022) - Trypan Blue Solution 0.4% (Gibco cat. no. 15250061) - 70% Ethanol - Matrigel (BD Biosciences cat. no. 354234); the batch quality checked before use - Atovaquone (Sigma cat. no. A7986): dissolved in DMSO at 10 mg per mL and heated at 60 °C until complete dissolution. Stock aliquots at –20 °C - 4% PFA (paraformaldehyde) in PBS, pH 7 - 1% Triton X100 in PBS - Antibody recognizing P. cynomolgi (or P. vivax): we use a mouse serum raised against PfHSP70 that cross-react with the homologous protein from all Plasmodium species tested. Alternatively any antibodies that bind to Plasmodium liver stages can be used (some are commercially available). - Alexa Fluor 488 goat anti-mouse IgG (H+L) (Invitrogen cat. no. A11029) ### Equipment 1. Cell culture equipment - 50 ml polypropylene conical tubes (Falcon cat. no. 352070) - Haemocytometer - Collagen I 48-well Multiwell Plates (BD Biosciences cat. no. 354505) - Petri dish 60 mm (Falcon cat. No. 353004) - Needle 25G 5/8 0,50×16mm (Terumo cat. no. 050102) - Cell strainer 40 µM (Falcon cat. no. 352340) - Teflon/glass Potter-Elvehjem type homogenizer - Fluorescence microscope - Dissecting stereomicroscope - Biosafety hood - Refrigerated centrifuges for 50 mL and 1.5 or 2.0 mL tubes - Water bath - Incubator at 37 °C with 5% CO2 and saturated in humidity ### Procedure **Co-culture of primary hepatocytes with GFP-HepaRG cells (Figure 1)** 1. Grow GFP-HepaRG cells in a 25 cm2 flask in culture medium until sub-confluence - a. Rinse 3 times with 5 mL of sterile PBS - b. Add 2 mL of 0.25% trypsin-EDTA pre-warmed at 37 °C and return to the incubator for 1 to 2 minutes - c. When cells begin to detach knock the flask sharply once so as to detach all the cells and rapidly add 8 mL of culture medium - d. Transfer into a 50 mL tube and centrifuge at 500 x g 3 min at RT - e. Remove the supernatant and re-suspend the cells in 3 mL of culture medium - f. Count the number of viable cells (Trypan Blue dye exclusion) using a haemocytometer - g. Adjust the concentration of the cell suspension to 0.35 million of viable cells per mL - Preparation of the primary hepatocytes (three options) - ➢ Option 1 – Freshly isolated hepatocytes: these are obtained from a liver piece by a modified two-step collagenase perfusion protocol (6,7) - a. Determine the number of cells and their viability, which should be &gt; 80% in order to proceed to the next step, using a haemocytometer - b. Adjust the volume of the cell preparation to 0.8 million of viable cells per mL - ➢ Option 2 – Cryopreserved simian primary hepatocytes: these are isolated from the livers of Macaca fascicularis and are then stored frozen in aliquots of 50 millions of cells. - a. Use a 15 mL tube containing 10 mL of culture medium at 4°C - b. Remove a cryovial of primary hepatocytes from the liquid nitrogen tank and immediately place it in a water bath at 37°C, and keep it there until the cells are nearly thawed (ice crystals should still be visible) - c. Remove the tube immediately from the water bath, wipe with a tissue soaked in 70% ethanol and transfer to a biosafety hood - d. Carefully decant the hepatocytes into the 10 mL culture medium at 4°C. Rinse the empty cryovial with the medium - e. Mix gently by inverting the tube 2-3 times and proceed immediately to the next step - f. Centrifuge at 200 x g for 3 min at room temperature - g. Carefully remove the supernatant and re-suspend the cells in 10 mL of 40 % iso-osmotic Percoll and then centrifuge at 900 x g for 3 min at room temperature - h. Determine the number of cells and their viability, which should be &gt; 90% in order to proceed to the next step, using a haemocytometer - i. Adjust the volume of the cell suspension to 0.8 million of viable cells per mL - ➢ Option 3 – Purchased cryopreserved hepatocytes: - a. Thaw the cells according to the manufacturer’s recommendations - b. Adjust the volume of the cell suspension to 0.8 million of viable cells/mL - Deposit 20 µL of HepaRG cells (7,000 cells) in the centre of each well of a collagen I-coated 48 wells plate format (P48) - Add 250 µL of hepatocytes (200,000 cells) to each of the well with HepaRG cells - Immediately transfer the plate into the incubator and do not disturb until the cells are attached - Replace the culture medium the next day prior to infection. Microscopic examination under fluorescence microscopy should permit observation of a small number of fluorescent GFP-HepaRG cells (present at a 1:30 ratio) within the hepatocyte monolayer. **Isolation of sporozoites from infected mosquitoes** Plasmodium cynomolgi (M strain) sporozoites can be obtained from Anopheles stephensi salivary glands infected 14–35 days earlier by membrane-feeding on the blood of a P. cynomolgi-infected Macaca mulatta (8). A variety of suitable Anopheles and P. cynomolgi lines are available at Malaria Research and Reference Reagent Resource Center (MR4) (http://www.mr4.org/) 1. Prepare 3 Petri dishes with 8 mL of L15 medium - Kill mosquitoes in 70% ethanol - Rapidly wash them in the first Petri dish - Repeat the washing by dipping in the second and then the third Petri dishes - Align the mosquitoes on a sterile glass slide under a stereomicroscope - Under a stereomicroscope and using needles, separate the head of the mosquitoes from the thorax that is simultaneously carefully pressed to extrude the salivary glands - Remove the salivary glands with the L15 medium to the homogenizer placed on ice - Homogenize the salivary glands - Filter the suspension through a 40 µM cell strainer in a 50 mL tube placed on ice - Centrifuge to recover the sporozoites at 16,000 x g 3 minutes at 4 °C - Discard the supernatant and re-suspend the sporozoites in culture medium - Count the number of sporozoites in a haemocytometer and adjust the concentration to 800 000 sporozoites per mL - Keep on ice until use **Infection of the co-culture cells by P. cynomolgi (Figure 2)** 1. Rinse the co-cultured cells with 300 µL of culture medium per well - Remove the wash culture medium and replace with 125 µL of culture medium per well - Add 125 µL of sporozoites per well (100,000 sporozoites) - Centrifuge the plate at 900 x g 10 min at 4 °C without brake - Carefully remove the plate from the centrifuge and return it to the incubator for 3-4 hours - Optional: go to “Matrigel cover for long-term cultures” - Wash the infected cells three times with 300 µL of culture medium per well - Remove the wash culture medium before adding 300 µL of fresh culture medium per well and replace the plate in the incubator - Change the medium every 48 hours **Matrigel cover for long term studies (optional part)** 1. Thaw Matrigel on ice - For each well: - a. Carefully remove the medium after the 3-4 hours of incubation - b. Rinse the infected cells three times with 300 µL of culture medium per well - c. Remove the wash culture medium - d. Pipette 100 µL of Matrigel using a cold tip and gently overlay the cells in each well - When Matrigel covers all the wells, return the plate to the incubator for 30 minutes to allow the Matrigel to gel. - Add 300 µL of culture medium to each well and replace the plate in the incubator - Every 48 hours, carefully aspirate the medium, taking care to not disturb the Matrigel, and replace it with 300 µL of fresh culture medium **Treatment with Atovaquone to eliminate schizonts** 1. At day 5 post-infection, fix 3 wells for parasite immunostaining (see “Fixation and parasite immunostaining”) so as to evaluate the proportion of schizonts versus hypnozoites - Prepare sufficient atovaquone solution for 3 days of treatment (300 µL per well per day) - a. Dilute the atovaquone in culture medium to a final concentration of 551 nM (~202.13 ng per mL) - b. Prepare three 400 µl aliquots (one per day) and store at 4 °C - At days 5, 6 and 7, treat each well with atovaquone - a. Carefully remove the culture medium - b. Add 300 µL of the atovaquone in culture medium to each well - At day 8 fix 3 treated and three untreated wells for parasite immunostaining (see “Fixation and parasite immunostaining”) in order to confirm that the schizonts have been eliminated and that hypnozoites are present in sufficient numbers - If this is the case, then the infected co-culture is suitable for further experimentation - Continue to change the culture medium every 48 hours until the end of the experiment **Fixation and immunostaining of parasites** 1. Remove the medium and the Matrigel by aspiration - Add 200 µL of 4% PFA to each well to fix the cells by incubation at RT for 15 minutes - Rinse 3 times with 300 µL of PBS - Add 200 µL of 0.1% Triton X100 and incubate at RT for 10 minutes - Rinse 3 times with 300 µL of PBS - To each well add 150 µL of mouse polyclonal serum raised against PfHSP70 (1/2,000 dilution), or alternatively use other suitable antibodies at the appropriate dilution, or stain with Giemsa 9 - Incubate for 45 minutes at 37°C - Rinse 3 times with 300 µL of PBS - To each well add 150 µL of Alexa Fluor 488 goat anti-mouse IgG (H+L) diluted 1/600 - Incubate for 45 minutes at 37°C - Rinse 3 times with 300 µL of PBS - Enumerate the parasites under a fluorescence microscope at a 200X magnification **Critical steps** - The homogeneity of cell plating is of the most importance. - Mosquito dissection should be performed as cleanly as possible. The use of highly infected mosquitoes (&gt;20 000 sporozoites per mosquito) is advisable in order to minimize bacterial and fungal contamination. Prior training on uninfected mosquitoes is highly recommended. - Efficient removal of mosquito debris during the washing steps prior to adding Matrigel. This can be achieved most optimally by using a Percoll (10) or an Accudenz (11) cushion to purify the sporozoites. - Keep Matrigel on ice to avoid untimely polymerization. - Infected co-cultured cells: avoid shaking that might perturb the cells during handling, and changes to the temperature the cultures during medium addition. - Good fixation relies on a total removal of Matrigel. ### Timing - Preparation of co-cultured cells requires around 2 hours. - The full procedure, including counting, for sporozoite isolation from 100 mosquitoes generally necessitates 2 hours when 2 trained technicians carry out the dissection. - Infection of the co-cultures requires one hour followed by an additional 3-4 hours for the co-incubation of cells and sporozoites. - Matrigel cover requires 1.5 h including the incubation step (for one 48 wells culture plate) ### Troubleshooting - Hepatocyte density: hepatocytes need to be highly confluent in order to thrive, particularly for long-term cultures (hepatocyte differentiation relies in large part on establishing good intercellular junctions). It is advisable to determine the optimal cell density for seeding on the plates selected for the cultivation. - Should the viability of the hepatocytes be lower than 90%, it might be more difficult to reach adequate hepatocyte density. In order to eliminate dead cells (thus increasing the proportion viable) one can add a Percoll purification step prior to plating: re-suspend the hepatocyte suspension in 10 ml column of 40 % iso-osmotic Percoll, and then centrifuge at 900 x g for 3 min at RT without brake; remove the supernatant and the interphase containing dead cells; suspend the pellet of viable hepatocytes in 20 ml culture medium and centrifuge again at 200 x g for 1 min at RT; discard the supernatant and suspend the cells in a known volume of culture medium; enumerate the cells and determine the proportion viable (Trypan blue dye exclusion) using a haemocytometer; adjust density to 0.8 million of viable cells per mL. - Contamination of the cultures is often due to inadequate care (sloppy sterile technique) during mosquito dissection or mosquito contamination during breeding. - The wounding due to the cell traversal activity of sporozoites can lead to a degradation of the cell layer in the co-cultures. The effect should be minor when 100,000 sporozoites or less are used to infect each well. ### Anticipated Results - Following the 3-day atovaquone treatment (usually Day 8 post-infection), the number of maturing hepatic schizonts should diminish by &gt;80%, and the number of hypnozoites should be similar to that in the untreated wells - One week after atovaquone treatment (usually Day 15 post-infection), a proportion of the hypnozoites should have activated to resume development, and consequently the number of hepatic schizonts observed should mirror the decrease in the number of hypnozoites - In the absence of a Matrigel layer, merosomes should be detectable in the culture medium from D8 post-infection in co-cultures not treated with atovaquone, or from Day 16 post-infection onward in atovaquone-treated co-culture (8 days after the end of treatment) ### References 1. Krotoski, W.A., et al. Observations on early and late post-sporozoite tissue stages in primate malaria. II. The hypnozoite of Plasmodium cynomolgi bastianellii from 3 to 105 days after infection, and detection of 36- to 40-hour pre-erythrocytic forms. *American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene* 31, 211-225 (1982). - Krotoski, W.A., et al. Observations on early and late post-sporozoite tissue stages in primate malaria. I. Discovery of a new latent form of Plasmodium cynomolgi (the hypnozoite), and failure to detect hepatic forms within the first 24 hours after infection. *American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene* 31, 24-35 (1982). - Cogswell, F.B. The hypnozoite and relapse in primate malaria. *Clinical Microbiology Reviews* 5, 26-35 (1992). - Schmidt, L.H., Fradkin, R., Genther, C.S., Rossan, R.N. &amp; Squires, W.L. Plasmodium cynomolgi infections in the rhesus monkey. I. The characteristics of untreated sporozoite-induced and trophozoite-induced infections. *American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene* 31, 612-645 (1982). - Dembélé, L., et al. Towards an in vitro model of Plasmodium hypnozoites suitable for drug discovery. *PLoS ONE* 6, e18162 (2011). - Seglen, P.O. Preparation of isolated rat liver cells. *Methods in Cell Biology* 13, 29-83 (1976). - Knobeloch, D., et al. Human hepatocytes: isolation, culture, and quality procedures. *Methods in Molecular Biology* 806, 99-120 (2012). - Voorberg-van der Wel, A., et al. Transgenic fluorescent Plasmodium cynomolgi liver stages enable live imaging and purification of malaria hypnozoite-forms. *PLoS ONE* 8, e54888 (2013). - Mazier, D., et al. Cultivation of the liver forms of Plasmodium vivax in human hepatocytes. *Nature* 307, 367-369 (1984). - Siau, A., et al. Temperature shift and host cell contact up-regulate sporozoite expression of Plasmodium falciparum genes involved in hepatocyte infection. *PLoS Pathogens* 4, e1000121 (2008). - Kennedy, M., et al. A rapid and scalable density gradient purification method for Plasmodium sporozoites. *Malaria Journal* 11, 421 (2012). ### Acknowledgements This work was in part supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR-10-BLAN-0726, MATURE), by a translational research grant (WT078285) from the Wellcome Trust, and by a grant from the Medicines for Malaria Venture to the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases (Singapore) and the Biomedical Primate Research Centre (The Netherlands). ### Figures **Figure 1: Cultured Cells**  Cultured primary Macaca fascicularis hepatocytes and GFP-HepaRG cells lines individually (upper panels) and as a co-culture (lower panel) **Figure 2: Schematic diagram of the long-term primary hepatocyte cultures**  ### Associated Publications Laurent Dembélé, Jean-François Franetich, Audrey Lorthiois, Audrey Gego, Anne-Marie Zeeman, Clemens H M Kocken, Roger Le Grand, Nathalie Dereuddre-Bosquet, Geert-Jan van Gemert, Robert Sauerwein, Jean-Christophe Vaillant, Laurent Hannoun, Matthew J Fuchter, Thierry T Diagana, Nicholas A Malmquist, Artur Scherf, Georges Snounou, and Dominique Mazier. Persistence and activation of malaria hypnozoites in long-term primary hepatocyte cultures, *Nature Medicine* [doi:10.1038/nm.3461](http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nm.3461) *Source: [Protocol Exchange](http://www.nature.com/protocolexchange/protocols/2779). Originally published online 11 February 2014*.

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The use of RFID (radio frequency identification), also called “smart tags”, is on the rise in the retail industry. In short, RFID are tiny microchips using short range radio signals to emit information and can be used to tag goods, buildings, cars, pets, people etc. Unlike bar-code scanners, which must be held directly in front of the item being scanned, one of the benefits of RFID tags is that they can be scanned from a distance. It is expected that RFID will eventually replace the bar code and its use is likely to save companies like Wal-Mart, Procter &amp; Gamble and Gillette millions of dollars as they can track every bottle of shampoo or packet of razor blades from the factory floor to the store shelf (Baard, “Lawmakers”). &#x0D; &#x0D; Most agree that using RFID to track goods from the point of manufacture to the location of sale in order to prevent goods being lost, stolen or handled inappropriately, is acceptable and not cause for privacy concerns. But as marketers often take every opportunity to learn more about consumers and their purchasing behaviours, some fear that tags embedded in clothing, membership cards, mobile phones etc. may be scanned inappropriately and used to target individuals with cleverly tailored marketing messages. In the effort to provide a more customised experience, business is at risk of becoming increasingly intrusive – something that will not be universally acceptable. But is it all bad? Privacy concerns aside, smart tags can add new functions as well as enable a whole range of innovative products and services when joined with other technologies.&#x0D; &#x0D; RFID beyond Traditional Value Chain Management&#x0D; &#x0D; Prada is often mentioned as an example of how RFID can be taken beyond the traditional value chain management. Prada has implemented some ground-breaking technology in their Manhattan (New York) store, all based around RFID. RF-receivers automatically detect and scan garments brought into the dressing room. Via a touch screen the customers view tips on how to mix and match, access information about available sizes, colours, fabrics and styles, and watch video clips of models wearing the very outfit they are trying on (Grassley, ”Prada’s”). Eventually customers will be able to create virtual closets and store information about what they have tried on or bought on their Prada Web account (”Prada’s”). Customers’ details, including notes made by sales assistants, e.g. preferences, can be stored automatically in customer cards, readable by sales assistants’ handhelds or at the cash register (”Prada’s”) – information that could be used by the assistant to spur further sales by suggesting for example: “Last time you were here, you bought a black skirt. We have a sweater that matches that skirt” (Batista).&#x0D; &#x0D; Another example is Precision Dynamics Corp (PDC), which developed an automatic identification wristband incorporating RFID technology. One application is the AgeBand which is used to verify the bearer’s age when purchasing alcohol. ID is checked when entering the venue and the customer receives a plastic wristband printed with personal details that cannot be removed without being damaged or destroyed (Swedberg). The embedded chip can be linked to a customer’s credit card number or a cash deposit to pay for purchases while on the premises. “It is also an easy way to collect statistics for marketing”, says PDC’s senior marketing communications specialist, Paula Maggio (qtd. in Swedberg). &#x0D; &#x0D; Although the RFID clearly provides benefits and new opportunities to business operations, there is an argument over whether consumers will ultimately gain or suffer when smart tags become more commonplace. Certainly it may be convenient to have smart hangers that project virtual clothes onto a customer’s reflection in the mirror so they can try on a range of outfits without having to remove their clothes, but the collection of personal information necessary to provide this convenience also raises complex privacy issues.&#x0D; &#x0D; Fear of Intrusive Marketing&#x0D; &#x0D; Hesseldahl believes that our homes, workplaces, shops, malls, cars, trains, planes and bicycles will all be environments that constantly notice who we are and what we are doing, and which – according to a detailed profile of our habits – will try to service us in ways we can hardly even imagine today (25). This may be helpful to us in many ways, but there are concerns that organisations will use RF-technology to connect product information to individuals in order to create personal profiles which can then be used for pin-pointed marketing purposes, or even for tracking individuals, without their knowledge or consent. A possible scenario is one where consumers are bombarded with intrusive advertising based on what they are wearing, what they are purchasing, their history of past purchases, demographics and more.&#x0D; &#x0D; “Kill Machines”&#x0D; &#x0D; Fearing that the technology will be abused, many privacy advocates suggest that RFID must only be used to keep track of goods in the supply chain and thus be deactivated as soon as they leave the store. For example, consumer organisations such as CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering), the American Civil Liberties Union, and Electronic Frontiers Australia, lobby for the obligatory deactivation of the tags at the point of purchase.&#x0D; &#x0D; But companies such as Procter &amp; Gamble and Wal-Mart would prefer to keep the tags active after checkout, rather than disabling them with so called “kill machines”, so they can match the unique codes emitted by RF-tags to shopper’s personal information (Baard “Watchdog”). They will want to use RF technology to support the sales process and to provide the consumer with new and better services than what is otherwise possible. And without doubt, if the tags are deactivated some genuinely helpful applications would be lost to the consumer, e.g. being able to call your refrigerator from the supermarket to check if you need milk or your washing machine alerting you if you have accidentally put a delicate garment in your white wash.&#x0D; &#x0D; Looking at the Bright Side&#x0D; &#x0D; Privacy concerns aside, RFID technology, in fact, has the potential to empower consumers as it will put more information about products at consumers’ fingertips. Consumers will for example be able to go into competing supermarkets and scan items with an RF-receiver embedded in their mobile phone, record prices, store and process the information to evaluate which store offers better value. The information can then be shared with other shoppers via the Internet, and suddenly we have a powerful “shopping bot” which transcends the online world. Consequently, RFID has the potential to make competition between retailers tougher than ever before and to benefit consumers through lower and more transparent pricing. &#x0D; &#x0D; In addition, RFID tags may also make possible faster and more accurate services, particularly in supermarkets. Shopping carts are mounted with computers which automatically register all items put into the cart and enable the customer to keep track of items, their prices and their total amount (Blau). RFID can also be used to find the location of items in the store and show more detailed information on a product (origin, use by date, content etc.) and as the customer passes through the checkout, all purchases are registered automatically in a matter of seconds. &#x0D; &#x0D; Privacy Protection&#x0D; &#x0D; In Australia, the Privacy Amendment (Private Sector) Act 2000, with its ten National Privacy Principles (NPP), has been highly criticised over the last few years as being much to open for interpretation and thus difficult to reinforce. In short, the NPP allows for marketers to use non-sensitive personal information for direct marketing purposes without seeking the individual’s consent if it is impracticable to do so (“Guidelines”). That is, as long as they make available a privacy policy explaining why the data is collected and who will have access, they ensure that the data is correct and up to date, protected from unauthorised access, and that individuals are given access to their data upon request (“Guidelines”). &#x0D; &#x0D; In 2003 the Spam Act was introduced in order to take a tougher stand on the escalating problem with massive amounts of unsolicited emails filling up inboxes, threatening the whole concept of the Internet and its many benefits. In essence, the Spam Act will not allow commercial electronic messages to be sent without the recipient’s prior consent or without a possibility to unsubscribe (“Spam”). &#x0D; &#x0D; In the same manner that the Spam Act was passed to regulate the collection of Internet users’ contact information, it may become necessary to regulate the collection and use of data obtained via RFID if the NPP are deemed inadequate. The difficulty will be to do so and at the same time safeguard many of the positive side-effects the technology may have for businesses and consumers. &#x0D; &#x0D; As argued by Roger Clarke, privacy has to be balanced against many other, often competing interests: “The privacy interest of one person may conflict with that of another person, or of a groups of people, or of an organisation, or of society as a whole. Hence: Privacy Protection is a process of finding appropriate balances between privacy and multiple competing interests.” It is therefore recommended that legislators and policy makers keep up with the development and undertake significant research into both sides before any legislation is passed so that the best interests of consumers and business are catered for. &#x0D; &#x0D; Can There Be a Win-Win Situation?&#x0D; &#x0D; Although business can expect some significant gains from the use of RFID, particularly through a more effective value chain management but also from more substantial and better quality business intelligence, consumers may in fact be the real winners as new and better business concepts, products and services are made available. Further, with the increased transparency in business, consumers can use the vast amounts of information available to find the best products and services, at the best price, and from the best provider. With the aid of smart software, such as search agents, it will be a rather effortless task and will provide consumers with a real advantage. But this assumes consumers are aware of the benefits and how they can be exploited, and have the means to do so – something that will require some skill, interest, money and time.&#x0D; &#x0D; Consumers will also have to give up some privacy in order to take full advantage of the new technology. For the industry, the main challenge will be communicating what these advantages are, as acceptance, adoption and thus also return on investment will depend upon it. For legislators and policy makers, the major dilemma will be to provide a regulatory framework that is flexible but distinct, and that will prevent abuse and at the same time enable positive outcomes for both business and consumers. A fine line that should be treaded wisely in order to create a future where everyone can gain from the benefits of using this technology. &#x0D; &#x0D; References&#x0D; &#x0D; Baard, Mark. “Lawmakers Alarmed by RFID Spying.” Wired News 26 Feb. 2004. 9 Mar. 2004 http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,62433,00.html&gt;. Baard, Mark. ”Watchdog Push for RFID Laws.” Wired News 5 Apr. 2004. 6 Apr. 2004 http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,62922,00.html&gt;. Batista, Elisa. ”What Your Clothes Say about You.” Wired News 12 Mar. 2003. 8 Mar. 2004 http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,58006,00.html&gt;. Blau, John. ”Så fungerar det digitala snabbköpet.” PC för Alla 1 (2004). 8 Mar. 2004 http://www.idg.se/ArticlePages/200402/27/20040227165630_IDG. se760/20040227165630_IDG.se760.dbp.asp&gt;. Clarke, Roger. Beyond the OECD Guidelines: Privacy Protection for the 21st Century. 4 Jan. 2000. 15 Mar. 2004 http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/DV/PP21C.html&gt;. Grassley, Tanya. ”Retailers Outfit Stores with Tech.” Wired News 18 Dec. 2002. 8 Mar. 2004 http://www.wired.com/news/holidays/0,1882,56885,00.html&gt;. “Guidelines to the National Privacy Principles.” The Office of the Federal Privacy Commissioner 2001. 4 Apr. 2004 http://www.privacy.gov.au/publications/nppgl_01.html#sum&gt;. Hessledahl, Peter. Den globale organisme. Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 2002. 24 Apr. 2004 http://www.global-organisme.dk/e-bog/den_globale_organisme.pdf&gt;. ”Prada’s Smart Tags Too Clever?” Wired News 27 Oct. 2002. 9 Mar. 2004 http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,56042,00.html&gt;. “Spam” DCITA 2004. 4 Apr. 2004 http://www2.dcita.gov.au/ie/trust/improving/spam&gt;. Swedberg, Claire. ”Putting Drinks on the Cuff.” RFID Journal 15 Jun. 2004. 15 Jun. 2004 http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/987/1/1/&gt;.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Citation reference for this article&#x0D; &#x0D; MLA Style&#x0D; Melchior, Angelika. "Tag &amp; Trace Marketing." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/03-melchior.php&gt;. APA Style&#x0D; Melchior, A. (Aug. 2005) "Tag &amp; Trace Marketing," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; from &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/03-melchior.php&gt;. &#x0D;

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The use of the family home as a setting for television sitcoms (situation comedies) has long been recognised for its ability to provide audiences with an identifiable site of ontological security (much discussed by Giddens, Scannell, Saunders and others). From the beginnings of American sitcoms with such programs as Leave it to Beaver, and through the trail of The Brady Bunch, The Cosby Show, Roseanne, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and on to Home Improvement, That 70s Show and How I Met Your Mother, the US has led the way with screenwriters and producers capitalising on the value of using the suburban family dwelling as a fixed setting. The most obvious advantage is the use of an easily constructed and inexpensive set, most often on a TV studio soundstage requiring only a few rooms (living room, kitchen and bedroom are usually enough to set the scene), and a studio audience. In Singapore, sitcoms have had similar successes; portraying the lives of ‘ordinary people’ in their home settings. Some programs have achieved phenomenal success, including an unprecedented ten year run for Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd from 1996-2007, closely followed by Under One Roof (1994-2000 and an encore season in 2002), and Living with Lydia (2001-2005). This article furthers Blunt and Dowling’s exploration of the “critical geography” of home, by providing a focused analysis of home-based sitcoms in the nation-state of Singapore. The use of the home tells us a lot. Roseanne’s cluttered family home represents a lived reality for working-class families throughout the Western world. In Friends, the seemingly wealthy ‘young’ people live in a fashionable apartment building, while Seinfeld’s apartment block is much less salubrious, indicating (in line with the character) the struggle of the humble comedian. Each of these examples tells us something about not just the characters, but quite often about class, race, and contemporary societies. In the Singaporean programs, the home in Under One Roof (hereafter UOR) represents the major form of housing in Singapore, and the program as a whole demonstrates the workability of Singaporean multiculturalism in a large apartment block. Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd (PCK) demonstrates the entrepreneurial abilities of even under-educated Singaporeans, with its lead character, a building contractor, living in a large freestanding dwelling – generally reserved for the well-heeled of Singaporean society. And in Living with Lydia (LWL) (a program which demonstrates Singapore’s capacity for global integration), Hong Kong émigré Lydia is forced to share a house (less ostentatious than PCK’s) with the family of the hapless Billy B. Ong. There is perhaps no more telling cultural event than the sitcom. In the 1970s, The Brady Bunch told us more about American values and habits than any number of news reports or cop shows. A nation’s identity is uncovered; it bares its soul to us through the daily tribulations of its TV households. In Singapore, home-based sitcoms have been one of the major success stories in local television production with each of these three programs collecting multiple prizes at the region-wide Asian Television Awards. These sitcoms have been able to reflect the ideals and values of the Singaporean nation to audiences both at ‘home’ and abroad. This article explores the worlds of UOR, PCK, and LWL, and the ways in which each of the fictional homes represents key features of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Singapore. Through ownership and regulation, Singaporean TV programs operate as a firm link between the state and its citizens. These sitcoms follow regular patterns where the ‘man of the house’ is more buffoon than breadwinner – in a country defined by its neo-Confucian morality, sitcoms allow a temporary subversion of patriarchal structures. In this article I argue that the central theme in Singaporean sitcoms is that while home is a personal space, it is also a valuable site for national identities to be played out. These identities are visible in the physical indicators of the exterior and interior living spaces, and the social indicators representing a benign patriarchy and a dominant English language. Structure One of the key features of sitcoms is the structure: cold open – titles – establishing shot – opening scene. Generally the cold opening (aka “the teaser”) takes place inside the home to quickly (re)establish audience familiarity with the location and the characters. The title sequence then features, in the case of LWL and PCK, the characters outside the house (in LWL this is in cartoon format), and in UOR (see Figure 1) it is the communal space of the barbeque area fronting the multi-story HDB (Housing Development Board) apartment blocks. Figure 1: Under One Roof The establishing shot at the end of each title sequence, and when returning from ad breaks, is an external view of the characters’ respective dwellings. In Seinfeld this establishing shot is the New York apartment block, in Roseanne it is the suburban house, and the Singaporean sitcoms follow the same format (see Figure 2). Figure 2: Phua Chu Kang External Visions of the Home This emphasis on exterior buildings reminds the viewer that Singaporean housing is, in many ways, unique. As a city-state (and a young one at that) its spatial constraints are particularly limiting: there simply isn’t room for suburban housing on quarter acre blocks. It rapidly transformed from an “empty rock” to a scattered Malay settlement of bay and riverside kampongs (villages) recognisable by its stilt houses. Then in the shadow of colonialism and the rise of modernity, the kampongs were replaced in many cases by European-inspired terrace houses. Finally, in the post-colonial era high-rise housing began to swell through the territory, creating what came to be known as the “HDB new town”, with some 90% of the population now said to reside in HDB units, and many others living in private high-rises (Chang 102, 104). Exterior shots used in UOR (see Figure 3) consistently emphasise the distinctive HDB blocks. As with the kampong housing, high-rise apartments continue notions of communal living in that “Living below, above and side by side other people requires tolerance of neighbours and a respect towards the environment of the housing estate for the good of all” (104). The provision of readily accessible public housing was part of the “covenant between the newly enfranchised electorate and the elected government” (Chua 47). Figure 3: Establishing shot from UOR In UOR, we see the constant interruption of the lives of the Tan family by their multi-ethnic neighbours. This occurs to such an extent as to be a part of the normal daily flow of life in Singaporean society. Chang argues that despite the normally interventionist activities of the state, it is the “self-enforcing norms” of behaviour that have worked in maintaining a “peaceable society in high-rise housing” (104). This communitarian attitude even extends to the large gated residence of PCK, home to an almost endless stream of relatives and friends. The gate itself seems to perform no restrictive function. But such a “peaceable society” can also be said to be a result of state planning which extends to the “racial majoritarianism” imposed on HDB units in the form of quotas determining “the actual number of households of each of the three major races [Chinese, Malay and Indian] … to be accommodated in a block of flats” (Chua 55). Issues of race are important in Singapore where “the inscription of media imagery bears the cultural discourse and materiality of the social milieu” (Wong 120) perhaps nowhere more graphically illustrated than in the segregation of TV channels along linguistic / cultural lines. These 3 programs all featured on MediaCorp TV’s predominantly English-language Channel 5 and are, in the words of Roland Barthes, “anchored” by dint of their use of English. Home Will Eat Itself The consumption of home-based sitcoms by audiences in their own living-rooms creates a somewhat self-parodying environment. As John Ellis once noted, it is difficult to escape from the notion that “TV is a profoundly domestic phenomenon” (113) in that it constantly attempts to “include the audiences own conception of themselves into the texture of its programmes” (115). In each of the three Singaporean programs living-rooms are designed to seat characters in front of a centrally located TV set – at most all the audience sees is the back of the TV, and generally only when the TV is incorporated into a storyline, as in the case of PCK in Figure 4 (note the TV set in the foreground). Figure 4: PCK Even in this episode of PCK when the lead characters stumble across a pornographic video starring one of the other lead characters, the viewer only hears the program. Perhaps the most realistic (and acerbic) view of how TV reorganises our lives – both spatially in the physical layout of our homes, and temporally in the way we construct our viewing habits (eating dinner or doing the housework while watching the screen) – is the British “black comedy”, The Royle Family. David Morley (443) notes that “TV and other media have adapted themselves to the circumstances of domestic consumption while the domestic arena itself has been simultaneously redefined to accommodate their requirements”. Morley refers to The Royle Family’s narrative that rests on the idea that “for many people, family life and watching TV have become indistinguishable to the extent that, in this fictional household, it is almost entirely conducted from the sitting positions of the viewers clustered around the set” (436). While TV is a central fixture in most sitcoms, its use is mostly as a peripheral thematic device with characters having their viewing interrupted by the arrival of another character, or by a major (within the realms of the plot) event. There is little to suggest that “television schedules have instigated a significant restructuring of family routines” as shown in Livingstone’s audience-based study of UK viewers (104). In the world of the sitcom, the temporalities of characters’ lives do not need to accurately reflect that of “real life” – or if they do, things quickly descend to the bleakness exemplified by the sedentary Royles. As Scannell notes, “broadcast output, like daily life, is largely uneventful, and both are punctuated (predictably and unpredictably) by eventful occasions” (4). To show sitcom characters in this static, passive environment would be anathema to the “real” viewer, who would quickly lose interest. This is not to suggest that sitcoms are totally benign though as with all genres they are “the outcome of social practices, received procedures that become objectified in the narratives of television, then modified in the interpretive act of viewing” (Taylor 14). In other words, they feature a contextualisation that is readily identifiable to members of an established society. However, within episodes themselves, it as though time stands still – character development is almost non-existent, or extremely slow at best and we see each episode has “flattened past and future into an eternal present in which parents love and respect one another, and their children forever” (Taylor 16). It takes some six seasons before the character of PCK becomes a father, although in previous seasons he acts as a mentor to his nephew, Aloysius. Contained in each episode, in true sitcom style, are particular “narrative lines” in which “one-liners and little comic situations [are] strung on a minimal plot line” containing a minor problem “the solution to which will take 22 minutes and pull us gently through the sequence of events toward a conclusion” (Budd et al. 111). It is important to note that the sitcom genre does not work in every culture, as each locale renders the sitcom with “different cultural meanings” (Nielsen 95). Writing of the failure of the Danish series Three Whores and a Pickpocket (with a premise like that, how could it fail?), Nielsen (112) attributes its failure to the mixing of “kitchen sink realism” with “moments of absurdity” and “psychological drama with expressionistic camera work”, moving it well beyond the strict mode of address required by the genre. In Australia, soap operas Home and Away and Neighbours have been infinitely more popular than our attempts at sitcoms – which had a brief heyday in the 1980s with Hey Dad..!, Kingswood Country and Mother and Son – although Kath and Kim (not studio-based) could almost be counted. Lichter et al. (11) state that “television entertainment can be ‘political’ even when it does not deal with the stuff of daily headlines or partisan controversy. Its latent politics lie in the unavoidable portrayal of individuals, groups, and institutions as a backdrop to any story that occupies the foreground”. They state that US television of the 1960s was dominated by the “idiot sitcom” and that “To appreciate these comedies you had to believe that social conventions were so ironclad they could not tolerate variations. The scripts assumed that any minute violation of social conventions would lead to a crisis that could be played for comic results” (15). Series like Happy Days “harked back to earlier days when problems were trivial and personal, isolated from the concerns of a larger world” (17). By the late 1980s, Roseanne and Married…With Children had “spawned an antifamily-sitcom format that used sarcasm, cynicism, and real life problems to create a type of in-your-face comedy heretofore unseen on prime time” (20). This is markedly different from the type of values presented in Singaporean sitcoms – where filial piety and an unrelenting faith in the family unit is sacrosanct. In this way, Singaporean sitcoms mirror the ideals of earlier US sitcoms which idealise the “egalitarian family in which parental wisdom lies in appeals to reason and fairness rather than demands for obedience” (Lichter et al. 406). Dahlgren notes that we are the products of “an ongoing process of the shaping and reshaping of identity, in response to the pluralised sets of social forces, cultural currents and personal contexts encountered by individuals” where we end up with “composite identities” (318). Such composite identities make the presentation (or re-presentation) of race problematic for producers of mainstream television. Wong argues that “Within the context of PAP hegemony, media presentation of racial differences are manufactured by invoking and resorting to traditional values, customs and practices serving as symbols and content” (118). All of this is bound within a classificatory system in which each citizen’s identity card is inscribed as Chinese, Malay, Indian or Other (often referred to as CMIO), and a broader social discourse in which “the Chinese are linked to familial values of filial piety and the practice of extended family, the Malays to Islam and rural agricultural activities, and the Indians to the caste system” (Wong 118). However, these sitcoms avoid directly addressing the issue of race, preferring to accentuate cultural differences instead. In UOR the tables are turned when a none-too-subtle dig at the crude nature of mainland Chinese (with gags about the state of public toilets), is soon turned into a more reverential view of Chinese culture and business acumen. Internal Visions of the Home This reverence for Chinese culture is also enacted visually. The loungeroom settings of these three sitcoms all provide examples of the fashioning of the nation through a “ubiquitous semi-visibility” (Noble 59). Not only are the central characters in each of these sitcoms constructed as ethnically Chinese, but the furnishings provide a visible nod to Chinese design in the lacquered screens, chairs and settees of LWL (see Figure 5.1), in the highly visible pair of black inlaid mother-of-pearl wall hangings of UOR (see Figure 5.2) and in the Chinese statuettes and wall-hangings found in the PCK home. Each of these items appears in the central view of the shows most used setting, the lounge/family room. There is often symmetry involved as well; the balanced pearl hangings of UOR are mirrored in a set of silk prints in LWL and the pair of ceramic Chinese lions in PCK. Figure 5.1: LWL Figure 5.2: UOR Thus, all three sitcoms feature design elements that reflect visible links to Chinese culture and sentiments, firmly locating the sitcoms “in Asia”, and providing a sense of the nation. The sets form an important role in constructing a realist environment, one in which “identification with realist narration involves a temporary merger of at least some of the viewer’s identity with the position offered by the text” (Budd et al. 110). These constant silent reminders of the Chinese-based hegemon – the cultural “majoritarianism” – anchors the sitcoms to a determined concept of the nation-state, and reinforces the “imaginative geographies of home” (Blunt and Dowling 247). The Foolish “Father” Figure in a Patriarchal Society But notions of a dominant Chinese culture are dealt with in a variety of ways in these sitcoms – not the least in a playful attitude toward patriarchal figures. In UOR, the Tan family “patriarch” is played by Moses Lim, in PCK, Gurmit Singh plays Phua and in LWL Samuel Chong plays Billy B. Ong (or, as Lydia mistakenly refers to him Billy Bong). Erica Sharrer makes the claim that class is a factor in presenting the father figure as buffoon, and that US sitcoms feature working class families in which “the father is made to look inept, silly, or incompetent have become more frequent” partly in response to changing societal structures where “women are shouldering increasing amounts of financial responsibility in the home” (27). Certainly in the three series looked at here, PCK (the tradesman) is presented as the most derided character in his role as head of the household. Moses Lim’s avuncular Tan Ah Teck is presented mostly as lovably foolish, even when reciting his long-winded moral tales at the conclusion of each episode, and Billy B. Ong, as a middle-class businessman, is presented more as a victim of circumstance than as a fool. Sharrer ponders whether “sharing the burden of bread-winning may be associated with fathers perceiving they are losing advantages to which they were traditionally entitled” (35). But is this really a case of males losing the upper hand? Hanke argues that men are commonly portrayed as the target of humour in sitcoms, but only when they “are represented as absurdly incongruous” to the point that “this discursive strategy recuperates patriarchal notions” (90). The other side of the coin is that while the “dominant discursive code of patriarchy might be undone” (but isn’t), “the sitcom’s strategy for containing women as ‘wives’ and ‘mothers’ is always contradictory and open to alternative readings” (Hanke 77). In Singapore’s case though, we often return to images of the women in the kitchen, folding the washing or agonising over the work/family dilemma, part of what Blunt and Dowling refer to as the “reproduction of patriarchal and heterosexist relations” often found in representations of “the ideal’ suburban home” (29). Eradicating Singlish One final aspect of these sitcoms is the use of language. PM Lee Hsien Loong once said that he had no interest in “micromanaging” the lives of Singaporeans (2004). Yet his two predecessors (PM Goh and PM Lee Senior) both reflected desires to do so by openly criticising the influence of Phua Chu Kang’s liberal use of colloquial phrases and phrasing. While the use of Singlish (or Singapore Colloquial English / SCE) in these sitcoms is partly a reflection of everyday life in Singapore, by taking steps to eradicate it through the Speak Good English movement, the government offers an intrusion into the private home-space of Singaporeans (Ho 17). Authorities fear that increased use of Singlish will damage the nation’s ability to communicate on a global basis, withdrawing to a locally circumscribed “pidgin English” (Rubdy 345). Indeed, the use of Singlish in UOR is deliberately underplayed in order to capitalise on overseas sales of the show (which aired, for example, on Australia’s SBS television) (Srilal). While many others have debated the Singlish issue, my concern is with its use in the home environment as representative of Singaporean lifestyles. As novelist Hwee Hwee Tan (2000) notes: Singlish is crude precisely because it’s rooted in Singapore’s unglamorous past. This is a nation built from the sweat of uncultured immigrants who arrived 100 years ago to bust their asses in the boisterous port. Our language grew out of the hardships of these ancestors. Singlish thus offers users the opportunity to “show solidarity, comradeship and intimacy (despite differences in background)” and against the state’s determined efforts to adopt the language of its colonizer (Ho 19-20). For this reason, PCK’s use of Singlish iterates a “common man” theme in much the same way as Paul Hogan’s “Ocker” image of previous decades was seen as a unifying feature of mainstream Australian values. That the fictional PCK character was eventually “forced” to take “English” lessons (a storyline rapidly written into the program after the direct criticisms from the various Prime Ministers), is a sign that the state has other ideas about the development of Singaporean society, and what is broadcast en masse into Singaporean homes. Conclusion So what do these home-based sitcoms tell us about Singaporean nationalism? Firstly, within the realms of a multiethnic society, mainstream representations reflect the hegemony present in the social and economic structures of Singapore. Chinese culture is dominant (albeit in an English-speaking environment) and Indian, Malay and Other cultures are secondary. Secondly, the home is a place of ontological security, and partial adornment with cultural ornaments signifying Chinese culture are ever-present as a reminder of the Asianness of the sitcom home, ostensibly reflecting the everyday home of the audience. The concept of home extends beyond the plywood-prop walls of the soundstage though. As Noble points out, “homes articulate domestic spaces to national experience” (54) through the banal nationalism exhibited in “the furniture of everyday life” (55). In a Singaporean context, Velayutham (extending the work of Morley) explores the comforting notion of Singapore as “home” to its citizens and concludes that the “experience of home and belonging amongst Singaporeans is largely framed in the materiality and social modernity of everyday life” (4). Through the use of sitcoms, the state is complicit in creating and recreating the family home as a site for national identities, adhering to dominant modes of culture and language. References Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Budd, Mike, Steve Craig, and Clay Steinman. Consuming Environments: Television and Commercial Culture. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1999. Chang, Sishir. “A High-Rise Vernacular in Singapore’s Housing Development Board Housing.” Berkeley Planning Journal 14 (2000): 97-116. Chua, Beng Huat. “Public Housing Residents as Clients of the State.” Housing Studies 15.1 (2000). Dahlgren, Peter. “Media, Citizenship and Civic Culture”. Mass Media and Society. 3rd ed. Eds. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch. London: Arnold, 2000. 310-328. Ellis, John. Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. London: Routledge &amp; Kegan Paul, 1982. Hanke, Robert. “The ‘Mock-Macho’ Situation Comedy: Hegemonic Masculinity and its Reiteration.” Western Journal of Communication 62.1 (1998). Ho, Debbie G.E. “‘I’m Not West. I’m Not East. So How Leh?’” English Today 87 22.3 (2006). Lee, Hsien Loong. “Our Future of Opportunity and Promise.” National Day Rally 2004 Speech. 29 Apr. 2007 http://www.gov.sg/nd/ND04.htm&gt;. Lichter, S. Robert, Linda S. Lichter, and Stanley Rothman. Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture. Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1994. Livingstone, Sonia. Young People and New Media: Childhood and the Changing Media Environment. London: Sage, 2002 Morley, David. “What’s ‘Home’ Got to Do with It? Contradictory Dynamics in the Domestication of Technology and the Dislocation of Domesticity.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (2003). Noble, Greg. “Comfortable and Relaxed: Furnishing the Home and Nation.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 16.1 (2002). Rubdy, Rani. “Creative Destruction: Singapore’s Speak Good English Movement.” World Englishes 20.3 (2001). Scannell, Paddy. “For a Phenomenology of Radio and Television.” Journal of Communication 45.3 (1995). Scharrer, Erica. “From Wise to Foolish: The Portrayal of the Sitcom Father, 1950s-1990s.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 45.1 (2001). Srilal, Mohan. “Quick Quick: ‘Singlish’ Is Out in Re-education Campaign.” Asia Times Online (28 Aug. 1999). Tan, Hwee Hwee. “A War of Words over ‘Singlish’: Singapore’s Government Wants Its Citizens to Speak Good English, But They Would Rather Be ‘Talking Cock’.” Time International 160.3 (29 July 2002). Taylor, Ella. “From the Nelsons to the Huxtables: Genre and Family Imagery in American Network Television.” Qualitative Sociology 12.1 (1989). Velayutham, Selvaraj. “Affect, Materiality, and the Gift of Social Life in Singapore.” SOJOURN 19.1 (2004). Wong, Kokkeong. Media and Culture in Singapore: A Theory of Controlled Commodification. New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2001. Images Under One Roof: The Special Appearances. Singapore: Television Corporation of Singapore. VCD. 2000. Living with Lydia (Season 1, Volume 1). Singapore: MediaCorp Studios, Blue Max Enterprise. VCD. 2001. Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd (Season 5, Episode 10). Kuala Lumpur: MediaCorp Studios, Speedy Video Distributors. VCD. 2003. &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Citation reference for this article&#x0D; &#x0D; MLA Style&#x0D; Pugsley, Peter. "At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms: Under One Roof, Living with Lydia and Phua Chu Kang." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/09-pugsley.php&gt;. APA Style&#x0D; Pugsley, P. (Aug. 2007) "At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms: Under One Roof, Living with Lydia and Phua Chu Kang," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; from &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/09-pugsley.php&gt;. &#x0D;

Until the mid 1980s, Bordo writes, anorexia was considered only in pathological terms (45-69). Since then, many theorists such as Malson and Orbach have described how the anorexic individual is formed in and out of culture, and how, according to this line of argument, eating disorders exist in a spectrum of “dis-order” that primarily affects women. This theoretical approach, however, has been criticised for leaving open the possibility of a more general pathologising of female media consumers (Bray 421). There has been some argument, too, about how to read the agency of the anorexic individual: about whether she or he is protesting against or operating “as if in collusion with,” as Bordo puts it (177), the system of power relations that orients us, as she writes, to the external gaze (27). Ferreday argues that what results from this “spectacular regime of looking” (148) is that western discourse has abjected not only the condition of anorexia but also the anorectic, which in practical terms means that, among other measures, the websites and blogs of anorectics are constantly being removed from the Internet (Dias 36). How, then, might anorexia operate in relation to itself?In the clinical fields the subjectivity of the anorectic has become an important area of study. Norwegian eating disorder specialist Skårderud has discussed what he calls an anorectic’s “impaired mentalisation,” which describes a difficulty, as a result of transgenerationally transmitted attachment patterns, in regulating the self in terms of “understanding other people’s mind, one’s own mind and also minding one’s own body” (86). He explains: “Not being able to feel themselves from within, the patients are forced to experience the self from without” (86). While a Foucauldian approach to eating disorders like Bordo’s might be considered a useful tool for analysing this externalised aspect of the anorexic predicament, anorectics’ difficulty with feeling “themselves from within” remains unexamined in this model. Ferreday has described the efforts, in more recent discourse, to engage with the subjective experience of “anorexic embodiment” (140). She is conscious, however, that an enduring preoccupation with “the relation between bodies and images” has made the relations between embodied selves “almost entirely under-theorized”, and an understanding of the lived experience of eating disorders too often reduced to the totalising representations of “abject spectacle” or “heroic myth” (153). In this context Ferreday has welcomed the publication of Warin’s ethnographic study Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia for providing a point of access to the subjective experience of anorectics. One important aspect of Warin’s findings, though, remains unremarked upon in Ferreday’s review: this is Warin’s astonishing conclusion from her investigations that anorexic practices successfully “removed the threat of abjection” for her participants (127). It is exactly at this point in the current debate about eating disorders and subjectivity, and the role of abjection in that subjectivity, that I wish to draw upon the Gothic. As Hogle maintains, abjection has a significant role to play in the Gothic. Like Warin, he refers to Kristeva’s notion of the abject when he describes the “throwing off” whereby we might achieve, in Hogle’s paraphrasing of Kristeva, “a oneness with ourselves instead of an otherness from ourselves in ourselves” (“Ghost” 498-499). He describes how the Gothic becomes a “site of ‘abjection’” (“Cristabel” 22), where it “depicts and enacts these very processes of abjection, where fundamental interactions of contrary states and categories are cast off into antiquated and ‘othered’ beings” (“Ghost” 499). This plays out, he writes, in a process of what he calls a “re-faking of fakery” that serves “both to conceal and confront some of the more basic conflicts in Western culture” (“Ghost” 500). Here, Hogle might be describing how the abject anorexic body functions in the “spectacular regime of looking” that comprises western discourse, as Ferreday has portrayed it. Skårderud, however, as noted above, has suggested that the difficulty experienced by those with eating disorders is a difficulty that involves a regulation of the self that is understood to occur prior to the more organised possibility of casting off contrary states onto “othered” beings. In short, the eating disordered individual seems to be already an embodied site of abjection, which suggests, in light of Hogle’s work on abjection in the Gothic, that eating disordered experience might be understood as in some way analogous to an experience of the Gothic. Following Budgeon, who has stressed the importance of engaging with individual “accounts of embodiment” as means of moving beyond the current representation-bound impasses in our thinking about eating disorders (51), in this paper I will be touching briefly on “pro-ana” or pro-anorexic Internet material before proceeding to a more detailed analysis of Marya Hornbacher's Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. Punter, drawing on trauma theorists Abraham and Torok through Derrida, writes that “Gothic tests what it might be like to be a shell […] a shell which has been filled to the brim with something that looks like ourselves but is irremediably other, to the point that we are driven out, exiled from our home, removed from the body” (Pathologies16). In response, I will be suggesting that the eating disordered voice enacts the Gothic by dramatising “what it might be like to be a shell” since that embodied voice finds itself to be the site of abjection: the site where behind its distractingly visible “shell”, the ego, using anorexic idealisation, is compelled to use anorexic practices that “throw off” in an effort to achieve an ever-elusive sense of oneness. Due to Punter's long familiarity and shared vocabulary with a wide range of post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, I will be particularly referring to his evocations of the Gothic, which he has characterised as a “kind of cultural threshold” (Introduction 9), to demonstrate how an examination of eating disordered experience alongside the Gothic might promise a more nuanced access to eating disordered subjectivity than has been available hitherto. Marya Hornbacher maintains in her memoir Wasted that anorectics, far from hating food, are in fact thinking about it constantly (151). If anorectics always think about food, the visual content of their Internet sites might seem to suggest otherwise: that their thoughts are mostly occupied by bodies—particularly thin, emaciated bodies—which form the material that these sites call “thinspiration” for the “pro-ana” writer and reader. Thinspiration, although not yet recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary, is understood to designate inspiring words or images of thinness that, further to Hornbacher's observations, might be understood as helping the food-obsessed anorectic to manage that obsession. Many pro-ana sites have their own thinspiration pages which, aside from the disturbing frame of the pro-ana verbal content that can include specifying dangerous techniques for abstaining, vomiting and purging, might be little more distressing to a viewer than any readily accessible fashion imagery. On the pro-ana site, however, whether mixed among the seemingly ordinary images or in a section all on its own,the spectre of the walking dead will often intrude. A “pro ana thinspiration” Google image search might yield, similarly, a small cadaverous corner to the purportedly inspiring imagery. It might also yield a tweeted response, from a pro-ana tweeter, to what might have been similar images of thinspiration which, far from affording inspiration, seem to have prompted intense anxiety: “I see the pictures I put up, then I see the morning thinspo everyone tweets, and I just feel gross ..[sic]”. This admission of despair sends a fearful, anxious affect loose among the otherwise serene uniformity of the “thinspo” imagery from which it had ricocheted, apparently, in the first place. Thinspiration, it seems, might threaten just as often as it assists the eating disordered subject to achieve self-regulation through their anorexic practices and, as this screen shot suggests, the voice can offer the researcher a small but potent insight into the drama of the eating disordered struggle.Psychologists Goldsmith and Widseth have stated that Hornbacher’s Wasted “gives the reader a feel for what it is like to live in an anorexic client’s head” (32). Although the book was a bestseller, newspaper reviews, on the whole, were ambivalent. There was a sense of danger inherent in the turbulent, “lurid” details (Zitin), and unresolved nature of the narrative (MacDonald). Goldsmith and Widseth even refer to Hornbacher's reported relapse and rehospitalisation that followed a “re-immersing” in “the narrative” of her own book (32). Kilgour has observed that the Gothic is a space where effects come into being without agents and creations prosper without their creators (221). While Radcliffe's novels might tend to contradict this claim, it is important to note that it is at the borders between explication and a seeming impossibility of explication that the Gothic imaginary draws its power. Miles, for example, has argued that Radcliffe is concerned not so much with dispelling the supernatural per se but with “‘equivocal phenomena of the mind’” (99-102). In Wasted, Hornbacher writes of her fear of “unsafe” foods whose uncanny abilities include the way they “will not travel through my body in the usual biological fashion but will magically make me grow” (20). Clearly, Hornbacher is not referring here to reasoned premises. Her sense, however, of the ambiguous nature of foodstuffs bears an important relation to Radcliffe's “equivocal phenomena”, and indeed the border-defying aspects of Kristevan abjection. In Abject Relations, Warin discovered that her anorexic participants shared what seemed to be magical beliefs in the ability of foodstuffs to penetrate the body through skin or through the nose via smells (106-127). The specific irrationality of these beliefs were not at issue except that they prompted the means, such as the washing of hands after touching food or shoving towels under doors to impede the intrusion of smells that, along with the anorexic practices of starving, purging and vomiting, served to protect these participants from abjection. When Hornbacher describes her experience of bulimia, the force, textures and sheer weight of the food that she eats in unimaginable, enormous quantities so that it bursts the sewer and floods the basement as vomit (223) become all the more disconcerting when the disgusting effects, whose course through the sewer system cannot be ignored, are preceded by evocations of occasions when she anxiously searches for, buys, consumes and vomits or purges food: “one day you find yourself walking along, and you impulsively stop in a restaurant, order an enormous dinner, and puke in the woods” (120-1). Hornbacher’s eating disorder in fact is figured as an insidious double: “It and I live in an uncomfortable state of mutual antagonism. That is, to me, a far cry better than once upon a time, when it and I shared a bed, a brain, a body” (4). This sense of the diabolical double is most evident when the narrative is traversed by the desperation of an agitated protagonist who seems to be continually moving between the constricted upper spaces of dormitories, rooms and bathrooms, and gaping, sewerage filled basements, and whose identity as either the original or the double to that original is difficult to determine. For Hornbacher, even at the end of her memoir when she is presented as almost recovered from her eating disorders, the protagonist not only continues to be doubled, but also exists in fragments: she speaks to herself "as if [she] were a horse", speaking "severely to [her] heart" who will pull her down "by the hair" into a nightmarish sleep (288-289). Punter has elaborated on the way dream landscapes in the Gothic open space into paradoxically constricted but labyrinthine infinities that serve to complicate what he has referred to as the two dimensions of our quotidian experience (Pathologies 123). In Wasted, beds give way to icy depths of watery sleeps, and numerous mirrors either fragment the body into parts or alienated other selves, or yield so that the narrator might step, suddenly, into “the neverworld” (10). Out of the two in the doubling, it is not so much the eating disorder—the “It”—but the “I” that becomes most monstrous as occasionally this “I” escapes onto the empty streets where, glimpsed crouching, anxious and confused in a beam of headlights, she reminds us of Frankenstein’s creature on the mountainsides or in the wastes since, as her capacity to articulate is lost in that moment, she becomes an “othered” object in the landscape (173). When, one winter, Hornbacher develops an obsession with running up and down the hall at her school at five am, she sprouts fine fur all over her translucent white skin and begins “to look a bit haunted” (109); later, in a moment of horrifying self-awareness, she realises that she “looked like a monster, most of [her] hair gone, [her] skin the gray color of rotten meat” (266). Punter writes that it is in the “dizzying heights and depths” of the Gothic that such agitation can become frantic: “in vertigo, the sense that there is indeed nowhere to go, not up, not down, and also that staying where you are has its own imponderable but terrible dangers” (Pathologies 10). Hornbacher states that the “worst night of [her] entire life” was spent with “the old familiar adrenaline rush pumping through [her] [….] running through the town, stopping here and there and eating and throwing up in alleyways and eating and blacking out” (273). This ceaseless, anxious, movement, where it is not clear who or what is doing the pursuing, but clear that it is a flight from the condition of abjection, is echoed in the very structure of Hornbacher’s memoir, which moves back and forth in time, seemingly at random, always searching for the decisive event that might, at last, explain or give a definitive beginning point to her disorders. Not only is the “beginning” of the disorders—an ultimate explanation or initiating event—sought but never found, but the narrative also concludes with an Afterword in which the narrator is, demonstrably, yet to recover, and even as she lies in bed next to her husband, is unable to rest (289). As Punter writes: “In Gothic, we do not directly ask, What happened? We ask, Where are we, where have we come from—not in the sense of a birth question, but as a question of how it is that we have ‘come adrift’” (Pathologies 209)—a question which, as Hornbacher finds, she is unable to answer, but nonetheless is obsessed with pursuing—to the point where the entire narrative seems to participate in the very pursuit that comprises the agitated perambulations of her eating disordered body. Although the narrator in Hornbacher’s Wasted, is strikingly alone—even at the end of the memoir, when she is represented as married, her husband is little more than a comforting body—throughout the text she is haunted by the a/effects of others. Hornbacher’s family is shown to be a community where the principle of nurturing is turned on its head. The narrator’s earliest evocation of herself presents a monstrous inversion of the expected maternal relationship: “My mother was unable to breast-feed me because it made her feel as if she were being devoured” (12). The mother’s drive to restrict her own eating is implicated in the narrator’s earliest difficulties with food, and the mother’s denials and evasions make it all the harder for the narrator to make any sense of her own experience (156). A fear of becoming fat haunts all of the family on her mother’s side (137, 240-1); the father, conversely, is figured in terms of excess (22). When the two grandmothers care for the narrator, behind their contradictory attentions towards the young Hornbacher—one to put her on a diet, the other to feed her up (24)—lies a dearth of biographical material. The narrator’s attempts to make sense of her predicament, where her assertion, “there were no events in my life that were overly traumatic” (195), sounds the edges of this void and only serves to signal that this discomforting contested empty space is traversed, as Punter might suggest, by “the hidden narrative of abuse” (Pathologies 15). Certainly the vague awareness of a great-grandmother who, “a hefty person, was mocked” (98) hints at the kind of emotional trauma that might be considered too abject to be remembered. Punter observes that in the Gothic we are in the wake of the effects of events that we cannot know have even happened (Pathologies 208), and the remains of history that assault us “are not to be obviously or readily learned from; for they are the remains of the body, they are the imaginary products of vulnerability and fragility, they are the ‘remains’ of that which still ‘remains to us’; or not” (Pathologies 12). Hornbacher’s sense of disassociation from her self as a body, and the specificity of her own feelings, which she is only ever able to describe as “pissed or fine” (203), evokes an over-smooth shell, like the idealised images of thinspiration that both belie and reveal their anxious nether sides. Even at the conclusion of the memoir, the narrator still does not “yet” know what it might mean for her to be “well” or “normal” (283). Hornbacher writes: “I always had this mental image of me, spilling out of the shell of my skin, flooding the room with tears” (25). In eating disorders, the self, which has never been whole and entire, or self-regulated in Skårderud’s terms, struggles to self-regulate against the ever threatening encroachment of the abject in a way that suggests essentially Gothic scenarios; in eating disordered self-narratives like Hornbacher’s Wasted, this struggle is evident in the very Gothic dynamics of the text. Without the Gothic, which affords us a means of perceiving eating disordered subjectivity in all of its detailed and dramatic dimensions—a subjectivity that theorists to date have found difficult to grasp—neither the abjection inherent in the “spilling” nor the anxious idealisation of the very somatic sense of the ego in the “shell” in Hornbacher's statement can be, I would suggest, sufficiently understood. ReferencesAbraham, Nicolas, Maria Torok, and Nicholas T. Rand. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Tr. Nicholas T. Rand. Vol. 1, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Bray, Abigail. “The Anorexic Body: Reading Disorders.” Cultural Studies 10.3 (1996): 413-29. Budgeon, Shelley. “Identity as an Embodied Event.” Body and Society 9.1 (2003): 35-55. Dias, Karen. “The Ana Sanctuary: Women's Pro-Anorexia Narratives in Cyberspace.” Journal of International Women's Studies 4.2 (2003): 31-45. Ferreday, Debra. “Anorexia and Abjection: A Review Essay.” Body and Society 18.2 (2012): 139-55. Goldsmith, Barbara L., and Jane C. Widseth. “Digesting Wasted.” Journal of College Student Psychotherapy 15.1 (2000): 31-34. Hogle, Jerrold E. “‘Cristabel’ as Gothic: The Abjection of Instability.” Gothic Studies 7.1 (2005): 18-28. Hogle, Jerrold E. “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection.” A New Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012: 496-509. Hornbacher, Marya. Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998. Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London: Routledge, 1995. MacDonald, Marianne. “Her Parents Always Argued at Meal Times. So, Perched in Her High Chair, She Decided Not to Eat. At all. Marianne MacDonald reviews Wasted: Coming Back from an Addiction to Starvation.” The Observer: Books, 22 Mar. 1998: 016. Malson, Helen. “Womæn under Erasure: Anorexic Bodies in Postmodern Context.” Journal of Community &amp; Applied Social Psychology 9.2 (1999): 137-53. Orbach, Susie. Bodies. London: Profile Books, 2009. Orbach, Susie. Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age. New York: Norton, 1986. Punter, David. Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law. Houndsmill: MacMillan P, 1998. Punter, David. Introduction. A New Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2012: 1-9. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (the 1818 Text). Ed. James Rieger. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974. Skårderud, Finn. “Bruch Revisited and Revised.” European Eating Disorders Review 17.2 (2009): 83-88. Warin, Megan. Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia. New Brunswick: Rutgers U P, 2010. Zitin, Abigail. “The Hungry Mind.” The Village Voice: Books, 3 Feb. 1998: 135.