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The article discusses the challenges of witnessing the Anthropocene, in the context of catastrophic planetary events. It discusses the dominance of aerial imagery in representing ecological catastrophes like climate change; witnessing in the Anthropocene extends beyond human perspectives; encompassing non-human sentience, material entities and poetic language; inclusive & ethical forms of testimony and role of poetics in forging connections across species in the context of environmental trauma.

In a collaboration with Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children's Books, university students and primary school children were brought together through methods of intergenerational practice (IGP). Across consecutive academic years, the project has seen 136 students embark on an exploration of geographies of gender and generation with 120 primary school children. By utilising creative learning in teaching the project addresses threshold concepts in understanding, in this case, IGP (methods of intentional age integration). The purpose of this paper is to analyse the promotion of IGP through emergent critical reflections. These reflections are situated within academic debate on the use of IGP in children's and young people's geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented on witnessing and testimony in the broader context of late modernity's profound changes in the natural world and in human–nonhuman relations. Topics include recognizing plants, objects, or animals as endowed with capacity for bearing witness to history; and re-framing the topography of witnessing as a space of sharing, co-belonging, reciprocity, and messy affects and entanglements.

The purpose of this explanatory mixed methods study was to understand how 9th grade honors and general education language arts students made course enrollment decisions through the lens of the Expectancy-Value (E-V) theory. A survey was administered to 9th grade students (N = 118) attending a public high school with the overall mean score indicating fairly high reading motivation. A point biserial correlation analysis was conducted next to determine any significant correlations between course selection and the E-V expectancies for success and task values. Attainment was the only task value reporting a positive and statistically significant correlation. Six students with either high, medium, or low reading motivation were interviewed from which four themes emerged: expectancy for success and reader identity, utility and usefulness of reading in the future, cost and enjoyment associated with reading, and attainment and course enrollment decisions. Implications and recommendations for educators and researchers are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Militarized perception is always leaking into public culture, from the aerial prospect of balloon flight to the soldier's helmet camera. Increasingly, the mode of militarized perception most powerfully emergent in Anglo-American everyday life is that of the militarized drone: flattened, loitering, zooming, networked. This mode of perception is enacted by a logistic assemblage that is military in origin, one in which remote sensors, signal flows and autonomous processes work across complex human-machine networks. The paper tracks this new form of everyday militarism across four scenes of cultural life: the Predator on display in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum; the DJI Spark consumer selfie drone; recreational use of drones in Sydney, Australia; and the activist deployment of drones as witnesses in Hagit Keysar's artwork 'No Fly Zone: Jerusalem.' In doing so, the paper traces the forms and dynamics of drone perception to argue that an emergent 'drone culture' can be seen in the manifestation in everyday life of modes of perception distinct to the remote sensing apparatus of the militarized drone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 21 May 2016, an asylum seeker named Shabaz Saleh Al-Aziz had been in and out of a Netto supermarket in Arnsdorf, a village in Saxony in the East of Germany. For both the communities that Weber analyses and the multi-layered witnessing of "Again/Noch Einmal", embodied testimony comes together with mediation and vulnerability in the formation of witnessing communities. Witnessing Communities If witnessing is the formation of relations between the body of the witness and the event they experience, then testimony seeks to forge those relations into witnessing communities. Every witness needs another witness, the community of co-witnesses is central to the practice of witnessing. [Extracted from the article]

While not explicitly concerned with climate change, the works share an aesthetic resonance with the photographs of Edward Burtynsky their abstraction is continually resolving into its constituent elements, what might well be wastescapes of the Anthropocene coming into focus as fragments of text, of meaning, that no longer cohere. These images attest to catastrophic human intervention in the natural world, but also to the problematic tension between human capacity and aesthetics, between the technical and the beautiful.[24] PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 1 Edward Burtynsky, Morenci Mine #2, Clifton, Arizona, USA, 2012. Assembling these images into a cohesive set of relations with computer models, satellite images and cartographic overlays brings the scalar relations of extraction to the fore. PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 7 Trevor Paglen, The Last Pictures Artifact, Golden disk, 8 × 8 × ½ in. © Trevor Paglen, courtesy the Artist, Metro Pictures, New York, Altman Siegel, San Francisco. [Extracted from the article]

This article draws on doctoral research that explored methods of making theatre that use hybrid performance practices to provide equality of participation in theatrical events for deaf and hearing people. The social and political contexts of the deaf and hearing communities in the UK demonstrate hierarchical power dynamics resulting in the ongoing oppression of deaf people by the hearing hegemony. In the theatre this is expressed through the use of the sign language interpreted performance as the primary means of encouraging deaf people to participate in theatre, despite deaf spectators considering them ineffective. The research involved ten actors (half self-identifying as deaf and half as hearing) who devised performances intended to be equally accessible to deaf and hearing people. These performances were shown to a mixed audience, who gave feedback in focus groups. In this article I discuss the nine performance pieces created, analysing them within three theoretical frameworks: materiality, with a focus on the hybridity of their corporeality and linguality; multilingualism; and cross-culturality. The analysis reveals that in the interest of offering equality of participation, the actors maximised the potential for hybridity made possible by the range of linguistic and cultural identities within the ensemble. Despite this, the majority of the devised scenes were not perceived by the spectators as being equally accessible to deaf and hearing people. Deaf people preferred pieces in which language access was not compromised, and which portrayed aspects of the deaf experience. By contrast hearing spectators were more concerned with issues of quality rather than the effectiveness of hybridity in promoting equality or participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to examine any relationships between students' perceptions of the effects of school uniforms and student socioeconomic status. A survey was administered to 182 students in a charter school to gather perception information, and a separate survey was administered to parents to gather socioeconomic status information. An examination of individual survey items revealed older students were more likely to report that school uniforms help to reduce bullying and teasing, and some students of high socioeconomic status reported that uniforms help reduce arguments with parents about clothing. Student responses on 10 survey items were grouped into one factor called School Climate, reflecting student perceptions on how uniforms affect the school's climate. Analyses revealed no significant relationships between the School Climate factor and socioeconomic status. However, Hispanic students reported a significantly more positive response overall than non-Hispanic students. These findings suggest students of various socioeconomic status perceive school uniforms similarly, but older students could be more likely to associate uniforms with a reduction in bullying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infection of wild red grouse Lagopus lagopus scotica by Cryptosporidium baileyi was first diagnosed in 2010. Within three years, signs of infection were reported from grouse on half of all grouse moors in northern England, bringing severe concerns of economic losses to grouse shooting. A total of 45,914 red grouse shot from 10 moors in northern England between 2013 and 2018 were visually screened for signs of respiratory cryptosporidiosis. Prevalence varied with age, being twice as high in juveniles (4.5%) as in adults (2.4%). It also varied nine-fold between moors and three-fold between years. Prevalence was highest in grouse shot later in the shooting season. Our results are consistent with the concept that disease incidence is highest in naïve juveniles that have previously not been exposed to infection, with prevalence dropping as birds develop immunity. We found no evidence of increased prevalence over time, and fears of escalated disease prevalence, bringing with it increased mortality and lowered productivity, that may have significant impacts on the economic viability of shoots, have not yet been realized. We recommend continued annual screening for clinical signs amongst shot birds, better hygiene associated with potential reservoirs of infection, and practices that both improve the detection and selective culling of diseased individuals and generally reduce overall grouse densities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bermudagrass (Cynodon spp.) is a warm season turfgrass that spreads by stolons and rhizomes. The present study aimed to increase knowledge on development of stolons and rhizomes in fertile ('LaPaloma' and 'Yukon') and sterile ('Patriot' and 'Tifway') cultivars of bermudagrass. A plot trial was established in May 2013 in Legnaro, northeastern Italy. Fertile cultivars were seeded while sterile cultivars were established by vegetative plugs. Turf samples were collected from autumn 2013 until summer 2015 on March, July, and October. Total length of stolons and rhizomes was measured and total dry weight was determined. The concentration of starch in stolons and rhizomes in October was also determined. The stolon and rhizome density per unit area, the rhizome specific weight, and the rhizome/stolon length and weight ratios were calculated. Sterile cultivars had higher stolon and rhizome density compared to fertile cultivars for both length. In all cultivars, the production of stolons was favoured over that of rhizomes and rhizomes began to develop more in the second season after establishment. Cultivars did not differ significantly in starch content, indicating no relationship between stolon and rhizome density and carbohydrate reserve accumulations. Abbreviations: LD: length density per unit area; WD: weight density per unit area; SW: specific weight; LR: rhizome-to-stolon length ratio; WR: rhizome-to-stolon weight ratio; TS: total starch per unit area [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2017 election of Hong Kong's chief executive has been the catalyst for recent campaigns for social justice. The date marks twenty years since the handover of British colonial rule to China (through the 1984 Sino–British Joint Declaration) and democracy itself is again being questioned. Ultimately, Hong Kongers are concerned with universal suffrage and specifically that the chief executive is elected from just 1,200 members of an electoral committee in a city of more than 7 million people (Census 2011). Occupy Hong Kong took hold of several areas of the city in 2014, with campaigners employing the use of nonviolence and civil disobedience to challenge social and political injustice; their mantra was “Occupy Central with Love and Peace” (OCLP). Through a postcolonial lens, this article analyzes the political engagement of fifteen white Hong Kong city workers. The biographies of the research participants differ: Some are permanent residents1who are the children of pre-1997 expatriates,2and others more contemporary economic migrants. Underpinning this research is the Cantonese termgweilo, which is particularly useful in explaining “whiteness” in Hong Kong, and I use it to investigate claims about their apparent apathy. Its nuanced definitions and meanings are especially significant in the postcolonial era and contribute to broader discussions of citizenship and social justice in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disappearances keep appearing in the digital sphere: video circulates of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) beheading of a kidnapped journalist; MH370 vanishes into sky yet its real and imagined journeys are traced ceaselessly; friends learn someone close to them has died when Facebook ‘memorializes’ their page. Each is different: a lost airplane, unreported boat people and a deceased life. In the work of trauma studies scholars such as Cathy Caruth [1996.Unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative, and history. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press] and Shoshana Felman and D. Laub [1992.Testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. New York: Routledge], such events are felt but unrecognized, known to have happened but unable to be represented. Yet these are traumas that can be experienced with intensity and immediacy in the mediated worldings of the digital. They are encounters with radical absence. Affect theory offers the means to conceptualize this ‘vicarious trauma’ [Kaplan 2005,Trauma culture: the politics of terror and loss in media and literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, p. 87]; it bridges the conceptual gap between an event that happened and the meaning it contains. Since affect is ‘the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other’ [Massumi 2002,Parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 35], it offers a way of understanding trauma in keeping with the digital: fluid, moving, changeable, multitudinous and even contagious. This paper traces the contours of encounters with video beheadings, the vanishing of MH370, and markers of digital death as encounters with radical absence that are emblematic of the complexity of traumatic affect and mediated trauma in the digital sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Several proposals for addressing religious literacy or including religious content in American public schools point to potential advantages for intellectual and moral development. These proposals include moral arguments, which suggest that religious literacy is an individual and social good. Although the proposals selected for this analysis span the previous two decades, it appears that little progress has been made toward addressing religious literacy in American public school contexts. In this theoretical article, I examine several of these proposals using a philosophical contrast between weak and strong relationality. It is argued that although these proposals include strong relational assumptions, weak relational assumptions remain that could inhibit the successful implementation of these proposals—or perhaps even undermine their ultimate goals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

‘I know where she went, it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it. No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting, let’s not talk’. That’s Donald Trump, discussing Hilary Clinton taking a bathroom break. It is just one of the many things which disgust him. While his rhetoric about other races and religions steers clear of the word, his imagery evokes the rejection or ejection characteristic of disgust: deporting illegal immigrants, a wall on the Mexican border, a ban on Muslim travel. This paper argues that the affirmation, amplification and circulation of disgust is one of the primary affective drivers of Trump’s political success. In doing so, Trump capitalizes on the tendency of political conservatives to be more intensely moved by disgust. Discarding, ejecting or blocking the sticky, disgusting object becomes a visceral and even contagious necessity. Sharing that recoil, as Trump does with his most passionate supporters, can forge an intense, enduring and binding relation. While the dynamics of disgust are most evident in the crowds at his rallies, it is also mediatized and transmitted through broadcast and social media. As the Trump era unfolds, it is crucial to understand disgust as a mode of affective politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Capsule:Conservation programmes for Black GrouseTetrao tetrixneed to consider managements that increase invertebrates for chicks. Aims:To compare invertebrates in chick diet between habitat and region and to relate abundance of preferred invertebrates to Black Grouse breeding success. Methods:Chick faeces were collected from roosts in the Pennines (northern England) and Perthshire (Scottish Highlands) to identify invertebrates eaten. Larval abundance was determined by sweep netting (Pennines) and related to Black Grouse breeding success. Results:Invertebrates were recovered out of 98 faecal samples from 63 broods. Ants were more numerous in chick diet in Perthshire, with larvae (both sawflies and moths) more numerous in the Pennines. Sawfly larval abundance was positively correlated with Black Grouse breeding success in the Pennines. Conclusions:Management for Black Grouse should promote high invertebrate abundance to maintain high breeding success. This may be achieved through creating low-intensity grazed moorland fringes to encourage Bilberry, and associated moth caterpillars, adjacent to areas of higher grazing intensity to retain grasses and rushes that host sawfly larvae. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present research, comprised of two studies, examines the features and factor structure of the Teacher Caring Questionnaire, a measure of teacher caring developed in the Zhejiang province of China. In the first study, features of teacher caring were derived from open-ended teacher and student descriptions of caring teacher behaviour. A second sample of teachers then rated the necessity of each of the features as an aspect of teacher caring. In the second study, the development of a self-report questionnaire based on these eight features is described, and its factor structure examined through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. This process resulted in six initial factors, which were subsequently combined into three higher order factors, which appear to best capture the instrument’s structure. Internal consistency estimates for the three resulting subscales were calculated for five samples, and test–retest reliability calculated for Sample 5. Support for the convergent, discriminant and predictive validity of the measure were examined through correlations with conceptually similar measures, andt-tests comparing subscale scores for participants who indicated willingness to provide help (or not) under different conditions. Our analyses suggest that the Teacher Caring Questionnaire holds promise as a measure of teacher caring in the Zhejiang province. Furthermore, our method might inform similar efforts to develop context-grounded measures, as well as efforts to examine the cultural relevance of existing measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK is one of the main sources of funding for postgraduate study in human geography. For some years now, the ESRC has offered funded students the opportunity to apply to undertake a short internship in a government department or with a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). This paper provides a collective reflection from the perspective of four former postgraduates who completed different ESRC supported internships in the UK. We discuss the enhancement of writing skills for diverse audiences, the advancement of knowledge in diverse subject areas, and the opening up of employment opportunities as key benefits of participating in the ESRC internship scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Historically, movement noise or variability is considered to be an undesirable property of biological motor systems. In particular, noise is typically assumed to degrade the emergence and stability of rhythmic motor synchronization. Recently, however, it has been suggested that small levels of noise might actually improve the functioning of motor systems and facilitate their adaptation to environmental events. Here, the authors investigated whether noise can facilitate spontaneous rhythmic visuomotor synchronization. They examined the influence of internal noise in the rhythmic limb movements of participants and external noise in the movement of an oscillating visual stimulus on the occurrence of spontaneous synchronization. By indexing the natural frequency variability of participants and manipulating the frequency variability of the visual stimulus, the authors demonstrated that both internal and external noise degrade synchronization when the participants’ and stimulus movement frequencies are similar, but can actually facilitate synchronization when the frequencies are different. Furthermore, the two kinds of noise interact with each other. Internal noise facilitates synchronization only when external noise is minimal and vice versa. Too much internal and external noise together degrades synchronization. These findings open new perspectives for better understanding the role of noise in human rhythmic coordination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In answering the question of ‘how will you ensure confidentiality?’ we are asked to anonymise transcripts (as well as photos, images, artefacts); participants names are to be changed with pseudonyms used throughout; when particular sensitivities arise, we are to age-band people and change place names; where appropriate, family relationships should not be revealed; where necessary, identity characteristics within transcripts should be removed. This is what the ethical researcher is told to adhere to. Building on previous work in social and cultural geography [Mattingly, D. (2001). Place, teenagers and representations: Lessons from a community theatre project.Social & Cultural Geography,2, 445–459; Ní Laoire, C. (2007). To name or not to name: Reflections on the use of anonymity in an oral archive of migrant life narratives.Social & Cultural Geography,8, 373–390], and drawing empirically from the verbatim play I commissioned based on my research, I put forward the case for theatre as a ‘safe space’ for participant narratives negotiated within the political arena of representation. In this article, I use my intergenerational research with 38 men of Irish descent to argue that an/the ethical focus should not remain on participant protection through the removal of ‘revealing’ information but instead we should be pursuing options and avenues for ‘safe spaces’ to voice participant stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this single case study of a school and university collaborative project, positioning theory was used to deconstruct the metaphors expressed in descriptions of roles of 23 participants. Present in the metaphors were discrepancies in understandings of collaboration that revealed ways that collaboration was inhibited as participants positioned themselves and others. Differences in expectations that emerged in metaphor suggested passive compliance, division in power, and reinforcement of limiting roles. These findings suggest that the examination of metaphors in interview data might be used as a formative assessment in collaborative endeavours, leading to productive dialogue for clarification and resolving potential conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

CapsuleA survey in 2014 of male Black Grouse in England showed a continuation of declines in North Northumberland and increases in the North Pennines and Yorkshire Dales. AimsTo survey the abundance and range of Black Grouse males in northern England. MethodsMales attending leks were surveyed in spring 2014 and numbers compared with previous surveys in 1998, 2002 and 2006. ResultsAbundance increased from 773 males in 1998 to 1437 in 2014 and range from 74 occupied 5 × 5-km grid squares in 1998 to 108 in 2014. ConclusionWhilst numbers and range of Black Grouse in England have increased overall, the species has practically disappeared from North Northumberland, causing a 34 km gap to develop in the range, potentially preventing interchange between the English and Scottish populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to further understandings of performances of family position, place and masculinity in what I call ‘embodied intergenerationality'. I build on research with 38 men across three generations within 19 families of Irish descent to discuss masculinity, intergenerationality and place. These men are living, or have recently lived, in the region known as Tyneside, in the North East of England. Secondary to this contribution is an acknowledgement of the significance of changing positionalities as research insider and participant observer by addressing both intersectional and intergenerational identities involved in geographic research. The article therefore responds to recent work in the discipline which has called for more critical attention towards experiences in the field, with its central contribution – embodied intergenerationality – advancing knowledge of masculinities and place for those who analyse masculinities within the research encounter. This work explores the performances and relationalities of masculinities amongst men of Irish descent on Tyneside as well as between the participants and the researcher. In working with men of different ages both within and between families, I draw conclusions on masculinity, intergenerationality and place: the roles of researcher and participant can become embodied as ‘son' and ‘father' in the research encounter and where the research takes place matters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent research suggests that the different components of eye movements (fixations, saccades) are not strictly separate but are interdependent processes. This argument rests on observations that gaze-step sizes yield unimodal distributions and exhibit power-law scaling, indicative of interdependent processes coordinated across timescales. The studies that produced these findings, however, employed complex tasks (visual search, scene perception). Thus, the question is whether the observed interdependence is a fundamental property of eye movements or emerges in the interplay between cognitive processes and complex visual stimuli. In this study, we used a simple eye movement task where participants moved their eyes in a prescribed sequence at several different paces. We outlined diverging predictions for this task for independence versus interdependence of fixational and saccadic fluctuations and tested these predictions by assessing the spectral properties of eye movements. We found no clear peak in the power spectrum attributable exclusively to saccadic fluctuations. Furthermore, changing the pace of the eye movement sequence yielded a global shift in scaling relations evident in the power spectrum, not just a localized shift for saccadic fluctuations. These results support the conclusion that fixations and saccades are interdependent processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ABSTRACT. Complex patterns of interlimb coordination, such as multifrequency relationships of 1:2, 2:3, or 3:4, are difficult to perform intentionally without extensive practice. The current study investigated whether these patterns might nonetheless occur spontaneously given an appropriate balance between the movement frequencies, or oscillatory periods, of an individual's movements and a visual-environmental stimulus. In order to test this, participants swung a fixed-period wrist-pendulum while observing an oscillating computer-generated stimulus. Results indicated that at given differences in period, 1:2, 2:3, and 3:4 coordination patterns emerged between the participant and stimulus. This suggests that large period differences do not altogether prevent the emergence of rhythmic visuomotor coordination, but instead provide the opportunity for complex patterns of coordination to emerge spontaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, there has been renewed interest in the area of school to university transitions within geography. This article focuses upon one aspect of these transitions, namely the induction programmes offered by universities to their new undergraduates. It argues in favour of extending the length of the induction period currently offered by many institutions and incorporating student voices into the induction process through peer mentoring. In making this argument, the article reports upon the new Extended Induction to Geography programme that Newcastle University piloted for the first time in 2011-2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing is an affective process. When the writer writes creatively it is ‘theaffectiveresponse in the word choice and its resonance for the text's forms and patterns, and other words around it, that determine language use’ (Freiman 2009: 5). Yet this resonance does not occur solely within the text, nor even between text and reader. Writing entails not only theexpressionof affect, but the writer'sexperienceof it. Or, as Elspeth Probyn (2010: 86) puts it, as we write ‘affects can seem to get into our bodies’. Such contagious affect becomes ‘not a representation of the other, but arendering’ (Gibbs 2010: 193). Not only does the writer create the body of the text, the text changes the writing body – particularly when the writing itself is intensely affective. Drawing on the affect theories of Gilles Deleuze and Silvan Tomkins, this paper theorises these affective relations of writer and traumatic text. What emerges is a theoretical yet visceral account of transformative resonance of affect in the co-constitutive encounter of writing body and body of text. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Capsule Female Black Grouse demonstrated fidelity to breeding areas, selecting nest-sites in taller, more dense vegetation, with nest success related to concealment. Aim To investigate the fidelity to breeding areas and nesting habitat preferences of female Black Grouse. Methods Nest habitat data were collected from radio-tagged females and related to measures from random sites and in relation to nest success. To explore fidelity to breeding areas, distances between consecutive nests were assessed. Results Females preferred to select nest-sites in tall rushes, which provided greater vertical cover and concealment. Successful nests were in vegetation with greater concealment than those that failed. Females exhibited fidelity to their breeding areas whether successful or not, nesting on average within 225 m of the previous year's nest. Conclusion The availability of tall nesting cover is important to breeding Black Grouse even in areas with low densities of generalist predators. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, Jim Jarmusch's film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) is examined in order to question contemporary media. Jarmusch's film is interesting for its treatment of communication and the ways it is being shaped by modern media technology. The film is about a contract hit man for the Mafia who lives according to the Way of the Samurai, through which he has established a lifestyle fundamentally at odds with the contemporary mediatised world. Jarmusch appears to view communication as more than transmission of and interaction with information. His film suggests that it occurs in subtleties of gesture and allusion and in what is left unspoken as much, if not more than, in what is fully articulated. From this starting point, the extent to which the contemporary media really comprise means of communication or in fact serve to obscure true communication between people is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have demonstrated that a person's rhythmic movements can become unintentionally entrained to another person's rhythmic movements or an environmental event. There are indications, however, that in both cases the likelihood of entrainment depends on the difference between the uncoupled periods of the two rhythms. The authors examined the range of period differences over which unintentional visual coordination might occur in 16 participants (Experiment 1) and 15 participants (Experiment 2). Cross-spectral coherence analysis and the distribution of continuous relative phase revealed that visual entrainment decreased as the difference between participants' preferred period and the experimenter-determined period of the environmental stimulus increased. The present findings extend the dynamical systems perspective on person-environment coupling and highlight the significance of period difference to the emergence of unintentional coordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the global spread of the H5N1 influenza virus. Evidence indicates that the virus is being spread by wild waterbirds in the Anatidae family of ducks, geese and swans as they migrate to Europe and Africa from their spring summer breeding grounds in Russia and other parts of the northern hemisphere to escape the winter freeze. The movement of wild birds from the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere and back again every year has become a conveyor belt for avian flu.

How and why the presence of a person directly affects the perception and action of another person is a phenomenon that has been approached in a limited and piecemeal fashion within psychology. This kind of diffuse strategy has failed to capture the jointness of perception and action within and between people. In contradistinction, the authors offer a perspective that retains both integrally social features (e.g., involves interaction) and yet adequately exploits the current state of knowledge regarding the ecological properties of perception–action, while at the same time drawing on aspects of dynamic systems theory. In this article the authors review the best attempts to examine how one individual affects another's perceptions and actions in the emergence of a social unit of action. Two important approaches, the individual-level and cognitive dynamics approaches, have yielded insights that derive in significant degree from principles of ecological psychology and/or dynamical systems theory. Prototypic of the individual-level approach is a focus on what can be perceived by coactors with the aim of uncovering how the dispositional qualities (affordances) of another person are informationally specified during social interaction. In contrast, the cognitive dynamics approach simulates dynamical characteristics of cognition and psychological influence with the aim of uncovering how cooperative interaction emerges out of its component parts. The authors argue that these approaches involve, respectively, insufficient mutuality and insufficient embodiment. Consequently, a social synergy perspective is discussed that approaches the problem of socially cooperative interaction at the relational, nonreductive level, using novel methods to examine how social perception and action emerge through self-organizing processes. The coupling of Gibson's ideas with those of Bernstein forms a natural basis for looking at the traditional psychological topics of perceiving, acting, and knowing as activities of ecosystems rather than isolated animals. (Shaw, Mace, & Turvey, 2001, p. xiv) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capsule Dietary differences between sexes and seasons reflected diversity in plant availability and habitat preferences. Aims To analyse Black Grouse diet through the identification of plant and invertebrate material found in the crop. Methods Crops were dissected and the content categorized into plant species and components (i.e. leaf, stem, flower, fruit and seed). Multivariate analysis was used to test for seasonal, sex- or location-related differences in the diet. Results Plant fragments accounted for 98% of the diet and included 53 plant species or taxa. Invertebrates made up the remaining 2%. Diet varied significantly between seasons and sexes. Both sexes ate more ericaceous shrubs in autumn and winter, with females eating more than males. The plant parts eaten varied seasonally. In summer, fruits, flowers and seeds were favoured over leaves, which dominated in winter. Conclusions With few trees, birds were reliant upon Heather in autumn and winter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic and geopolitical landscape of Asia has changed dramatically in recent years, providing Australia with an unprecedented opportunity to become an integral and significant player in a wider Indo-Pacific region as it charts its future and seeks to manage tensions while shaping a new architecture of cooperation. Late in 2004 at their annual summit, leaders of ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations, agreed to create a new forum—the East Asian Summit—and hold the first meeting of heads of government of participating countries in Kuala Lumpur in December this year. The summit seems destined to become a regular event and thus the policy-guiding core of any future East Asian or Indo-Pacific community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent discussion of the evolution of the amniotic egg (Laurin and Reisz, 1997) was criticized by Wilkinson and Nussbaum (1998), and these criticisms provoked a rebuttal (Laurin et al., 2000). Here we show that the objections raised by Laurin et al. (2000) do not substantiate the conclusions of Laurin and Reisz (1997). Wealso discuss additional evidence on the ancestral ontogeny of caecilians from the literature. This evidence is inconsistent with the view that extended embryo retention is the ancestral condition for caecilians and that it is a parsimonious interpretation of the condition of the ancestral amniote as argued by Laurin and Reisz (1997) and by Laurin et al. (2000). The available data are more consistent with the traditional hypothesis that the amniotic egg originated as an adaptation of eggs to the terrestrial environment. We also discuss problems in the definition of ontogenetic characters reflecting variation with respect to extended embryo retention, and we present new observations on the early development of the caecilian Gegeneophis ramaswamii Taylor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses Georges Bataille's vision of excess at the root of economic well-being. Conformist indulgence in the expansion of computer technology and the cultural values it has engendered; Consumption celebrated by Bataille in his notion of expenditure; Bataille's celebration of excess only as a manifestation of a human will to lose.

The article discusses the history of Czech surrealism from its beginnings in the 1920s through the division of Czechoslovakia into two republics. Defining figures of the movement in the 1930s included the Prague-based artists sculptor Toyen and painter Jindrich Styrsky. The connection of Czech surrealism to structuralist thought is also explored.