Search

1764 marked both the publication of the first Gothic story, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), and the birth of one of the most popular Gothic writers of the romantic period—Ann Radcliffe. 250 years later, Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, edited by Dale Towshend and Angela Wright, freshly re-examines Radcliffe’s work, looking at the impact and reception of her œuvre and its relationship to the Romantic literary and cultural contexts. If the Gothic was considered as low m...

Forgotten, concealed histories can return with a vengeance to haunt the imagination of a nation. This article explores the seldom-discussed history of the abduction, long-term imprisonment and falsified burial of Lady Grange, who was kidnapped from Edinburgh by allies of her estranged husband, and then slowly transported to St Kilda where she spent the following nine years. It is a tale upon which James Boswell commented when he toured Scotland with Samuel Johnson, and which, in the wake of Boswell's commentary, entered the Gothic imaginary, first through the romances of Ann Radcliffe. Although marital imprisonment was sadly all too widespread during the eighteenth century, with numerous sources to choose from, the history of Lady Grange, blocked for four decades after her death, returned to haunt the pages of romances and periodical articles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After examining what James Boswell wrote about Lady Grange, the article focuses on two romances of Ann Radcliffe, her 1789 The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and her 1790 A Sicilian Romance. The article then looks at William Erskine's 1798 Epistle from Lady Grange and concludes by reflecting upon the unblocking of the story in the nineteenth-century periodical press.

Introduction:\ud Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is difficult to diagnose. An accurate blood biomarker could prompt specialist referral or be deployed in future screening. In earlier retrospective studies, SOMAscan proteomics (Somalogic, Boulder, CO) and fibulin-3 seemed highly accurate, but SOMAscan has not been validated prospectively and subsequent fibulin-3 data have been contradictory.\ud \ud Methods:\ud A multicenter prospective observational study was performed in 22 centers, generating a large intention-to-diagnose cohort. Blood sampling, processing, and diagnostic assessment were standardized, including a 1-year follow-up. Plasma fibulin-3 was measured using two enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (CloudClone [used in previous studies] and BosterBio, Pleasanton, CA). Serum proteomics was measured using the SOMAscan assay. Diagnostic performance (sensitivity at 95% specificity, area under the curve [AUC]) was benchmarked against serum mesothelin (Mesomark, Fujirebio Diagnostics, Malvern, PA). Biomarkers were correlated against primary tumor volume, inflammatory markers, and asbestos exposure.\ud \ud Results:\ud A total of 638 patients with suspected pleural malignancy (SPM) and 110 asbestos-exposed controls (AECs) were recruited. SOMAscan reliably differentiated MPM from AECs (75% sensitivity, 88.2% specificity, validation cohort AUC 0.855) but was not useful in patients with differentiating non-MPM SPM. Fibulin-3 (by BosterBio after failed CloudClone validation) revealed 7.4% and 11.9% sensitivity at 95% specificity in MPM versus non-MPM SPM and AECs, respectively (associated AUCs 0.611 [0.557–0.664], p = 0.0015) and 0.516 [0.443–0.589], p = 0.671), both inferior to mesothelin. SOMAscan proteins correlated with inflammatory markers but not with asbestos exposure. Neither biomarker correlated with tumor volume.\ud \ud Conclusions:\ud SOMAscan may prove useful as a future screening test for MPM in asbestos-exposed persons. Neither fibulin-3 nor SOMAscan should be used for diagnosis or pathway stratification.

Objective: EMS use of lights and sirens has long been employed in EMS systems, despite an increased risk of motor vehicle collisions associated with their use. The specific aims of this study were ...

The Czech Republic spa industry has deep historical roots and traditions. This links to cultural and social life, high quality care and treatments. This research examines the challenges of the spa ...

Noninvasive ventilation (NIV), including bilevel positive airway pressure and continuous positive airway pressure, is a safe and important therapeutic option in the management of prehospital respiratory distress. NAEMSP recommends:NIV should be used in the management of prehospital patients with respiratory failure, such as those with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, and pulmonary edema.NIV is a safe intervention for use by Emergency Medical Technicians.Medical directors must assure adequate training in NIV, including appropriate patient selection, NIV system operation, administration of adjunctive medications, and assessment of clinical response.Medical directors must implement quality assessment and improvement programs to assure optimal application of and outcomes from NIV.Novel NIV methods such as high-flow nasal cannula and helmet ventilation may have a role in prehospital care.

The act of writing letters, rehearsing scenes that precede a calamitous event, can in itself become a form of valuable catharsis. This essay explores the ways in which Mary Shelley’s correspondence rehearses the scenes of her tragic circumstances as much to herself as to her addressee, and investigates how letters became to her a way in which she tested the contours of her grief, replaying the scenes and spaces that came before and after the death of Percy Shelley. Always intrigued by the forms and shortcomings of correspondence, Mary Shelley tested her views on letter-writing both in her frequent correspondence and in her fiction. Her letters and literature, I argue, work in close symbiosis, illustrating everywhere how they inform and converse with each other, from Frankenstein (1818) through to the grief-laden The Last Man (1826) and beyond.

This study has addressed and identified the problems in managing the existing emergency supply chain of Bangladesh in all phases of operation in terms of the primary drivers of the supply chain. It has also attempted to conceptualize and suggest an effective emergency supply chain. In this context, a thorough field investigation in several districts was conducted among the employees of the organizations sharing common information with similar protocols and implications (interoperable). Information was collected from the employees of all the participating organizations involved in disaster management through a semi-structured questionnaire based survey. The respondents addressed and illustrated several interconnected reasons which are inhibiting proper forecasting, procurement, storage, identification of affected people, and distribution. The respondents pointed out that the mismatching of objectives in the different organizations resulted in non-interoperability among the participating organizations. These issues are related to the malfunctioning of management with multidimensional organizational conflicts. Reflecting those issues, an emergency supply chain for disaster management is proposed in this study.

The main objective of this study is to develop the scale items of consumers’ attitudes toward Facebook advertisements and to theorize consumers’ attitudinal behaviour. To undertake this study, a research assistant was appointed, who is also an active member of Facebook, to introduce a message about the product Samsung Tab S, and to pass it to other members of their network. From this experiment, different members of their network participated in generating, passing, and receiving messages to develop a preliminary structured perception which was converted to generate scale items to measure attitude. Then an independent empirical study was conducted among members of a social network to verify and validate these scale items and their underlying constructs. From the findings in this study, it is identified that attitudes toward social network advertisement, i.e., any effort to communicate messages about products among network members, who are also consumers of different products, is formed and persuaded by hedonic motivation (HM), source derogation (SD), self-concept (SC), message informality (MI), and experiential messages (EM).

This essay takes a close look at the way Alain Mabanckou positions himself vis-à-vis discipline and market by way of his negotiations of a range of terms—French, francophone, postcolonial, and world literature—and the ways that such disciplinarity and appeal might be generated in his first major novel, Blue White Red. How Mabanckou picks his way through these intercalating terms speaks to the appeal and centrality of his work in a world literature canon. The authors argue that Mabanckou quite consciously and effectively makes use of the figures of allegory and parable from a distinctly biblical context, mapping the permutations and vicissitudes of his protagonist's rise and fall in fortunes to the life and narrative of Saint Paul—primarily his conversion and his epistolary interventions in the shape of a universal(ized) Christianity. The authors ground this Pauline allegory in Alain Badiou's own mobilization of Saint Paul as the engineer and emissary of a certain kind of antiphilosophical intervention. This parallel thereby foregrounds the liminality of the transnational African emigrant and his or her struggles with identity, citizenship, economics, and esteem in the novelistic form, which is read as a complex cautionary tale about the erosion and challenges to those transnational aspirations of success and seamless transnational citizenship. In this manner, Blue White Red disempowers narratives that blindly valorize emigration, and the text serves as a kind of epistle to those whose aspirations require self-conscious blindness to the complexities and hurdles to effortless movement across borders in the globalized economy.

Covid-19, a corona virus, has maintained its momentum in spreading among communities. In this context of social crisis, this study seeks to identify the reasons for the partial failure to fulfill the intended goal of lockdown, and to formulate an inclusive behavioral model reflecting comprehensive human behavior and social psychology. In order to answer the research questions, this study has conducted extensive interviews among individuals who were targets of the lockdown system. From this exploratory and qualitative investigation, researchers have recognized four paradigms as the key to understanding human behavior and social psychology in violating lockdown as a social isolation system during this period of crisis. The identified parameters depicting social behavior are: Derogation and Argument (SDA), Tangible Need and Deficiency (TND), Intangible Desire and Expectancy (IDE), and Evaluation of Benefit and Loss (UBL). Finally, as a comprehensive guideline, a grounded theory of the social behavior ‘paradigm for lockdown violation (PLV)’ is explored as the reason for the violation of the social system.

IntroductionVentilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) is a common healthcare-associated infection in the intensive care unit (ICU). Probiotics are defined as live microorganisms that may confer health benefits when ingested. Prior randomised trials suggest that probiotics may prevent infections such as VAP and Clostridioides difficile–associated diarrhoea (CDAD). PROSPECT (Probiotics to Prevent Severe Pneumonia and Endotracheal Colonization Trial) is a multicentre, double-blinded, randomised controlled trial comparing the efficacy of the probiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG with usual care versus usual care without probiotics in preventing VAP and other clinically important outcomes in critically ill patients admitted to the ICU.Methods and analysisThe objective of E-PROSPECT is to determine the incremental cost-effectiveness of L. rhamnosus GG plus usual care versus usual care without probiotics in critically ill patients. E-PROSPECT will be performed from the public healthcare payer’s perspective over a time horizon from ICU admission to hospital discharge.We will determine probabilities of in-ICU and in-hospital events from all patients alongside PROSPECT. We will retrieve unit costs for each resource use item using jurisdiction-specific public databases, supplemented by individual site unit costs if such databases are unavailable. Direct costs will include medications, personnel costs, radiology/laboratory testing, operative/non-operative procedures and per-day hospital ‘hoteling’ costs not otherwise encompassed. The primary outcome is the incremental cost per VAP prevented between the two treatment groups. Other clinical events such as CDAD, antibiotic-associated diarrhoea and in-hospital mortality will be included as secondary outcomes. We will perform pre-specified subgroup analyses (medical/surgical/trauma; age; frailty status; antibiotic use; prevalent vs no prevalent pneumonia) and probabilistic sensitivity analyses for VAP, then generate confidence intervals using the non-parametric bootstrapping approach.Ethics and disseminationStudy approval for E-PROSPECT was granted by the Hamilton Integrated Research Ethics Board of McMaster University on 29 July 2019. Informed consent was obtained from the patient or substitute decision-maker in PROSPECT. The findings of this study will be published in peer-reviewed journals.Trial registration numberNCT01782755; Pre-results.

The relatively ignored ‘dark side’ of reward management is explored here: its under-researched and under-reported unintended and negative outcomes. Informed by a sociologically-derived three-part frame of reference (Vaughan 1999), we consider the dark-side phenomena inherent in normative reward management approaches. While the need to address methodological barriers to relevant empirical research is factored in, the chapter concludes with seven suggested investigative propositions.

Any reader invited to imagine a Gothic novel set in Spain during the Romantic period may be forgiven for picturing lascivious priests, helpless male and female victims, and a harsh, impassive Spanish Inquisition which revels in meting out spectacular punishment to those characters who transgress its strictly encoded Catholic laws. But as this essay argues, representations of Spain in the popular Gothic novel during the Romantic period were more complex than this initial picture suggests due to evolving military alliances and further travel in Spain during this period.

Women Writing the Nation: National Identity, Female Community, and the British-French Connection, 1770–1820, by Leanne Maunu, Lewisburg, Associated UP, 2007, 312 pp. Women Writers and Old Age in Gr...

The persistent existence of the 'gender pay gap' in organisations, and the lack of females at executive level position in Ireland due to motherhood is the context for this paper. In particular, this study seeks to investigate why women's careers are impacted by childbearing. The study investigates if there is a correlation between taking maternity leave, and women's career progression in the work place. The increasing length of maternity leave benefits and flexible work arrangements results in elongated absence of females from the workplace. This leads to stereotypical role emergence by both men and women. Women take on the main responsibilities of home and child rearing, while men maintain and expand their careers. As a result, a marked absence of women exists at senior executives levels in organisations both in Ireland and internationally. Many studies have drawn attention to the challenges faced by women in reaching executive level positions in organisations. There is, however, very limited empirical research conducted with females, their co-workers, and managers, on the behaviour of women returning to the work place post maternity leave. In particular, there is a lack of research on the issues faced by individuals in Irish organisations. A significant finding of this study is that women's careers are impacted by having children, but, more significantly, by their prevailing roles as primary care givers to their families and home responsibilities. Enhancing the relevance of this study, key trends that emerged suggest that women's motivation concerning their current work remains constant, and they become more productive when they return to the workplace after maternity leave. This research found however, that the majority of women, post maternity leave, consciously decide to reduce their career ambitions and progressions, as family now becomes their highest priority. The primary findings of this study will contribute to the limited research in an Irish context of female career progression, and Irish maternity leave. Significantly, the study will contribute to the body of literature on gender 'pay gap', and gender equality, in the workplace and society. This study will be of particular relevance to managers and HR policy makers.

In today¡¯s global environment, the dairy farmer and his herd have lost major importance and influence as a consequence of a variety of factors, among them the Industrial revolution, continued and increasing consumerism, the technological explosion, and the ever-expanding concentration of people in urban areas. This research study examines the Irish dairy industry in its current format. The objective of this study is to look at what dairy farmers need to do to grow and expand their business efficiently and effectively. The major challenge for the industry is to attract a new generation of knowledgeable workers to the land. This needs to be balanced by ensuring that both the deep traditions and the experienced culture of farming generations remain at the heart of agricultural practice. The future of the Irish Dairy industry will be scrutinised over the next few years as reforms take place and economies adjust, amid the expectation that world markets will stabilise. The proposed abolition of milk quotas in 2015 will be one of the most significant landmarks in farming history since Ireland¡¯s entry into the European Union in 1973, and the introduction of milk quotas in 1984. This study also examines whether Ireland will remain on its current trend of a steady decline of individuals holding farms, and if the industry will become a gathering of ¡°multi-nationals¡±, similar to other commodity markets. Can the Irish dairy farming community formalise a strategy together to ensure that all members make a substantial contribution and have an input in its future success? After an extensive review of the relevant pertinent literature, a qualitative methodology was applied for this current research. Face to face interviews were conducted with relevant and appropriate people, including the current Irish Minister for Agriculture, Mr. Simon Coveney T.D. Nine interviews were completed for the purpose of this study, and contributors were purposely chosen because of their expertise in the area. The study reveals that the outlook for the Irish dairy industry is a positive one, but it will be important for the industry to closely examine comparative situations, in particular to give attention to the New Zealand model. Findings suggest that dairying post 2015 can do the same for rural Ireland as it did for the South Island of New Zealand 20 years ago. Caution must also be exercised that Ireland does not experience the same social implications as the New Zealanders did. This study has found that grass-based milk production is an area where Ireland has a real, sustainable, competitive, and international advantage. The focus and ambition of the future should be for the dairy industry to turn the land of green hills and mountains into the land of the green ¡®notes¡¯, preferably euro notes. This study will benefit the dairy industry, farming organisations, entrepreneurs, legislators and political leaders in analysing the industry and determining its future.

Preface 1. Gothic and Romantic engagements: the critical reception of Ann Radcliffe, 1789-1850 Dale Townshend and Angela Wright 2. Ann Radcliffe, precursors and portraits Joe Bray 3. Ann Radcliffe and Romantic print culture Edward Jacobs 4. Ann Radcliffe and politics James Watt 5. Ways of seeing in Ann Radcliffe's early fiction: The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and A Sicilian Romance (1790) Alison Milbank 6. The heroine, the abbey and popular Romantic textuality: The Romance of the Forest (1791) Diane Long Hoeveler 7. Popular Romanticism and the problem of belief: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) Robert Miles 8. Transnational aesthetics in Ann Radcliffe's A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 [. . .] (1795) JoEllen DeLucia 9. Recovering the Walpolean Gothic: The Italian: Or, the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1796-7) Jerrold E. Hogle 10. Ann Radcliffe beyond the grave: Gaston de Blondeville and its accompanying texts Samuel Baker 11. Ann Radcliffe's poetry: the poetics of refrain and inventory Jane Stabler 12. Ann Radcliffe and Romantic-era fiction Sue Chaplin 13. 'A portion of the name': stage adaptations of Radcliffe's fiction, 1794-1806 Diego Saglia.

Rack well you hero's nerves and heart, And let your heroine take her part; Her fine blue eyes were made to weep, Nor should she ever taste of sleep; Ply her with terrors day or night, And keep her always in a fright, But in a carriage when you get her, Be sure you fairly overset her; If she will break her bones – why let her: Again, if e'er she walks abroad, Of course you bring some wicked lord, Who with three ruffians snaps his prey, And to a castle speeds away; Those close confin'd in haunted tower, You leave your captive in his power, Till dead with horror and dismay, She scales the walls and flies away. (Mary Alcock, ‘A Receipt for Writing a Novel’, in Poems ) Published in 1799, Mary Alcock's parodic recipe for novel-writing repeats much-echoed commonplace assumptions about the comparative youth, fair complexion, victimisation, nervous constitution and tendency to flight that characterised the Gothic heroine of the 1790s. In playful tone, Alcock's recipe endows the heroine with the superhuman abilities of scaling walls and fleeing tyranny, underlining at the same time the unrealistic expectations that author and reader project onto a heroine. Still, despite the humorous vein, there is something disturbing about the way in which her poem conflates the role of Gothic authorship with the fictional role of villain. The imagined addressee of this poem (‘you’) holds the heroine captive, like the villain, subjects her to a carriage crash, kidnap, imprisonment and perpetual flight. It is an astute conflation on the part of Alcock, suggesting that any female author's exploitation of a heroine involves, in turn, an abrogation of femininity on their part. In other words, exploiting a heroine for commercial gain is a masculine pursuit, unsuitable for proper women writers. Of course, Alcock did this in the spirit of parody, in order to distance herself critically from the commercial exploitation of the Gothic heroine. Her recipe was one in a long line of parodies that targeted the unimaginative regurgitation of a heroine as virtuous and blue-eyed. ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ (Anon. 1798), ‘The Terrorist System of Novel Writing’ (Anon. 1797) and Alcock's ‘Recipe’ all reproduced the stable set of ingredients for composing a Gothic novel, implying that if any author or reader was naive enough to devour these recipes, then they must already be lacking in imagination and enterprise.

Support seeking is one of a variety of coping strategies used to manage stress, and has been found to have beneficial effects. However, young people, including those who have offended (committed/been convicted of a criminal offence) do not tend to seek support for their difficulties. This is particularly concerning given the high levels of mental health problems identified in young people who have offended. Despite these findings, little research has been conducted into support seeking in this population. To address this gap in the literature it was thought important to explore support seeking in this population by asking the following research question: 'What are the perceptions of support seeking in young people attending a youth offending team?' Semi-structured interviews were carried out with six males (aged 13-18), recruited from a youth offending team. Interviews were audio taped, transcribed and analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. The analysis yielded four master themes; Youth Offending Team Prompting Reflection, Damaged Self, Complexity of Relationships and Internal Conflicts. Generally participants perceived support seeking as beneficial, but barriers (including their perceptions of their self and others) meant that they did not tend to view it as a viable coping strategy for them. These perceptions may be common to the general population of young people but possibly exaggerated in young people who have offended, potentially as they are likely to have had particularly high levels of negative or traumatic experiences. Interventions aimed at addressing these barriers may help young people who have offended to seek support.