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"Distant reading," according to Audrey Jaffe, is the visual metaphor used by Franco Moretti "to describe a literary analysis that relies on data rather than the close reading of texts" ( 1 02) . Such distance can be either spatial or temporal . Although Moretti's version of distance seems to be mainly temporal, Jaffe's version seems largely spatial. As a historian I can relate particularly to Moretti's version of the metaphor, which evokes the losses and gains temporal distance gives to the study of any past, where gains from knowing large outcomes are balanced by loss of fine detail. While we are all of necessity "distant readers" of Victorian Britain, literature scholars are perhaps more comfortable with the gains, the privileged position of knowing what the Victorians did not"how

Censoring Queen Victoria: How Two Gentlemen Edited a Queen and Created an Icon, by Yvonne M. Ward. London, Oneworld Publications, 2014. 208 pp. 16.99 [pounds sterling], $22.99 US (cloth). We don't lack books on Queen Victoria, but this one is original, engagingly written, and short. And its subtitle is commendably accurate. Shortly after Queen Victoria's death a Memorial Committee was given the task of commemorating her life. Its secretary was the court's go-to man for all matters requiring tact, discretion, and connections--that ultimate insider, Lord Esher. Hitherto no monarch had ever received an official biography, and yet, at the end of the great century of tombstone biographies, not to give one to the queen who gave her name to an epoch was surely unthinkable. But Esher was against an official life, and one can understand why. For a start, who would write it? Who could be trusted to write it--to the taste of her son, now Edward VII? Esher's solution was to publish her correspondence. This would result in a book with no apparent author, one which would recount Queen Victoria's life in her own voice and the voices of those who knew her. What could be more authentic, and authoritative? Gently and impersonally steering the reader through the queen's life would be the editors, who chose the appropriate letters, and the appropriate parts of those letters. Who better for that delicate task than Lord Esher himself? But being a busy man, he needed someone to do actual work of combing through the queen's enormous correspondence and writing up the notes and the continuity. For this he chose another gentleman of impeccable establishment credentials--Arthur Benson, a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, an Eton housemaster, and a popular author of ghost stories. Ward's biographical sketches of these men are fascinating. Both were homosexual, and though they were both closeted, Ward views their sexual orientation as relevant to understanding the approach they took to the queen's life. Her view is that this orientation affected their ability to appreciate the nature of her marriage and its implications for her queenship. Perhaps, but I am not persuaded that had both editors been heterosexual the work they produced would have been significantly different. Had they been women--of whatever sexual orientation--that might well have made a difference. The two editors had a good working relationship on the whole. Esher was the dominant partner (there appears to have been no sexual relationship between them: the great love of Lord Esher, for whom marriage was the best closet, was his youngest son Maurice). Benson, the experienced author, was particularly concerned that their book be interesting to the general reader as well as useful to the historian, and he appears often to have argued for inclusion of material that illustrated Queen Victoria's personality and character against Esher who was concerned above all with strict propriety and opposed to the inclusion of what he considered trivial--often of course the best indicator of personality. …

The time course of perception and retrieval of object features was investigated. Participants completed a perceptual matching task and 2 recognition tasks under time pressure. The recognition tasks imposed different retention loads. A stochastic model of feature sampling with a Bayesian decision component was used to estimate the rate of feature perception and the rate of retrieval of feature information. The results demonstrated that retrieval rates did not differ among object features if only a single object was held in memory. If 2 objects were retained in memory, differences among retrieval rates of features emerged, indicating that features that were quickly perceived were also quickly retrieved. The results from the 2-object retention condition are compatible with process reinstatement models of retrieval.

1650-19^0. London: Chatto &Windus, 1982. Freeman, Sarah. Mutton and Oysters: The Victorians and Their Food. London: Victor Gollanz, 1989. "Gas Companies and the Utilization of Gas for Cooking," Journal of Gas Lighting 23 May 1882: 929. "Gas Exhibition." Journal of Gas Liahtina 2 Feb. 1892: 2ic. Goodall, Francis. Burning to Serve: Selling Gas in Competitive Markets. Ashbourne, Derbyshire: Landmark. 1999.

Biomimetic tactile sensors often need a large amount of training to distinguish between a large number of different classes of stimuli. But when stimuli vary in one continuous property such as sharpness, it is possible to reduce training by using a discrimination approach rather than a classification approach. By presenting a biomimetic tactile sensing device, the TacTip, with a single exemplar of edge sharpness, the sensor was able to discriminate between unseen stimuli by comparing them to the trained exemplar. This technique reduces training time and may lead to more biologically relevant models of perceptual learning and discrimination.

This study investigated the effect of stimulus presentation probability on accuracy and response times in an absolute identification task. Three schedules of presentation were used to investigate the interaction between presentation probability and stimulus position within the set. Data from individual participants indicated strong effects of presentation probability on both proportion correct and response times. The effects were moderated by the ubiquitous stimulus position effect. The accuracy and response time data were predicted by an exemplar-based model of perceptual cognition (Kent & Lamberts, 2005). The bow in discriminability was also attenuated when presentation probability for middle items was relatively high, an effect that will constrain future model development. The study provides evidence for item-specific learning in absolute identification. Implications for other theories of absolute identification are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Three experiments investigated whether retrieval of information about different dimensions of a visual object varies as a function of the perceptual properties of those dimensions. The experiments involved two perception-based matching tasks and two retrieval-based matching tasks. A signal-to-respond methodology was used in all tasks. A stochastic feature-sampling model was applied to the results from individual participants to estimate the speed of feature perception and the speed of feature information retrieval. Generally, the speed at which dimensions were retrieved was linearly related to the speed at which they were perceived. Features that were quickly perceived were also quickly retrieved. The data have implications for theories of perception and memory.

A four-part experiment was carried out to study the relationship between the time course of object-feature perception and the time course of retrieval of object information from memory. The experiment consisted of 2 perceptual matching tasks, and 2 perceptual recognition tasks. In all 4 tasks, participants provided speeded judgments of the identity of 2 objects. A stochastic feature-sampling model was used to estimate the time needed for feature perception and the time needed for retrieval of feature information. No evidence was found for a systematic relationship between perception times and retrieval times for individual features. Indeed, the model applications indicated that retrieval times were constant for different features, whereas perception rates varied across the features.

It is now well established that the time course of perceptual processing influences the first second or so of performance in a wide variety of cognitive tasks. Over the last 20 years, there has been a shift from modeling the speed at which a display is processed, to modeling the speed at which different features of the display are perceived and formalizing how this perceptual information is used in decision making. The first of these models (Lamberts, 1995) was implemented to fit the time course of performance in a speeded perceptual categorization task and assumed a simple stochastic accumulation of feature information. Subsequently, similar approaches have been used to model performance in a range of cognitive tasks including identification, absolute identification, perceptual matching, recognition, visual search, and word processing, again assuming a simple stochastic accumulation of feature information from both the stimulus and representations held in memory. These models are typically fit to data from signal-to-respond experiments whereby the effects of stimulus exposure duration on performance are examined, but response times (RTs) and RT distributions have also been modeled. In this article, we review this approach and explore the insights it has provided about the interplay between perceptual processing, memory retrieval, and decision making in a variety of tasks. In so doing, we highlight how such approaches can continue to usefully contribute to our understanding of cognition.

Although the western world is the most technologically advanced civilization to date, it is also the most addicted, obese, medicated, and in-debt adult population in history. Experts had predicted that the 21st century would be a time of better health and prosperity. Although wealth has increased, our quest to quell health problems using a pathogenic approach without understanding the interconnectedness of everyone and everything has damaged personal and planetary health. While current efforts help identify and eliminate causes of problems, they do not facilitate the creation of health and well-being as would be done with a salutogenic approach. Sociologist Aaron Antonovsky coined the term salutogenesis in 1979. It is derived from salus, which is Latin for health, and genesis, meaning to give birth. Salutogenesis, the study of the origins and creation of health, provides a method to identify an interconnected way to enhance well-being. Salutogenesis provides a framework for a method of practice to improve health promotion efforts. This article illustrates how quality management methods can be used to guide health promotion efforts focused on improving health beyond the absence of disease.

We study some economic consequences of aging in a general equilibrium overlapping generations model in which agents make optimal retirement decisions. The transitional dynamics of the economy are sensitive to the nature of the aging process, that is, the balance of declining fertility and rising longevity. Population aging unambiguously increases capital intensity in the long-run, but a rise in longevity that improves the health of the population will delay retirement and consequently decrease capital intensity in the short-run. The joint long-run effect of declining fertility and rising longevity on capital intensity is more than additive.

Masculinity and fashion are awkward companions. The very phrase ‘men’s fashions’ verges on oxymoron since fashion has long been gendered feminine. Fashion connotes instability, irrationality, and willing submission to the dictates of its mysterious and arbitrary authorities. These are hardly characteristics one associates with conventional notions of manliness, least of all during the Victorian period when gender definitions were particularly polarized. We all have a vivid mental image of the hyper-differentiated gender distinctions of Victorian dress — women’s colourfully curvaceous with the aid of crinoline and corsetry, men’s drably linear from stove-pipe hat to spats. Thorstein Veblen famously based his economic theory of conspicuous consumption on the excesses of Victorian women’s fashion. The curves and colours varied; waistline and necklines fluctuated, but the demands it made on quantities of costly fabric, and on the time of both maker and wearer, remained symbolically high so as to advertise the status of the woman who wore and the man who paid for its excess. In contrast, men’s dress particularly after the era of the Dandy ended around 1840 is generally thought of as being fairly stable in appearance, conveying the impression of seriousness and sobriety appropriate to the bourgeois male while emphasising the functionality and mobility of the arms and legs as opposed to the immobilizing implications of women’s dress.

On Christmas day, 1866, there arrived in London a man who claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the long lost eleventh baronet and head of an ancient English county family.1 He had long been presumed dead, shipwrecked off the coast of Brazil twelve years previously. At the time of his presumed death in 1854 he was not yet Sir Roger, for his father did not die until 1862, whereupon the inheritance that would have been his passed to his dissipated and reckless younger brother, who managed to spend himself twice into bankruptcy before dying in February, 1866, passing the baronetcy to a posthumous son who would be born that summer. Meanwhile the dowager Lady Tichborne had never reconciled herself to her eldest son1 s presumed death. Fortified by the assurances of a clairvoyant, who said he was still alive, she advertised in the agony column of The Times and contacted a missing persons agency. In due course, from the wild Australian outback there emerged a claimant to the identity, title, and fortune of the lost Sir Roger. Even on so little information, anyone unfamiliar with the story will have begun to develop expectations. It is all so redolent of the commonplaces of the sensation novel, which was enjoying its moment of greatest notoriety at this very time. The claimant would surely be either the true Sir Roger, still bearing, despite all his vicissitudes, the unmistakeable lineaments of an English gentleman, or else some smooth talking, presentable and plausible rogue?a clever con man, bearing a physical resemblance to the lost baronet, who had carefully researched and memorized details of his family and background. What he surely would not be was the fat, uncouth, ill-spoken and quintessentially vulgar ex-butcher from Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, who in fact presented himself to claim what he preposterously called his birthright. The only surviving member of Roger's immediate family was his mother, the dowager, who immediately acknowledged the Claimant as her

There is increasing evidence to suggest that mental simulations underlie many cognitive processes. We review results from three rapidly developing research areas suggesting that simulations underlie information retrieval. First, neuroimaging work indicates that cortical circuits that were activated during encoding are reactivated during retrieval. Second, retrieval is aided by behavioural re-enactment of processes involved in encoding, including re-enactment of encoding eye movements. Third, the time courses of encoding of visual features and the retrieval of information about those features are related. Overall, the evidence suggests that the often observed interactions between encoding and retrieval result from a cognitive system that, at least partially, reactivates processes that were involved in encoding to retrieve information.

Is the relationship between the current account balance and the terms of trade affected by the persistence of terms of trade shocks? In intertemporal models of the current account that incorporate a consumption-smoothing and an investment response to shocks, the effect of the terms of trade on external balances is predicted to be dependent on the duration of terms of trade shocks. Using a median-unbiased estimator, an unbiased model-selection rule, and terms of trade data for 128 countries over the period 1960-99 we identify two groups of countries - those that typically experience temporary terms of trade shocks and those that typically experience permanent terms of trade shocks. The results from panel-data regressions of the two groups of countries support the theoretical predictions of the intertemporal approach to the current account. We find that the greater (lesser) the persistence of the terms of trade shock, the more (less) the investment effect dominates the consumption-smoothing effect on saving, so that the current account balance moves in the opposite (same) direction as that of the shock.

What follows is a meditation on the idea of the average in Victorian England and its implications for the way in which Victo rian intellectuals conceived ofthe individual and his, and less often, her, relation to society. It is not a social historian's attempt to syn thesize an average Victorian on the basis of statistical data. Nor is it a proposal to nominate some actual person for the title of "average Victorian." G.M. Young, who had Victorian England in his bones and at his fingertips, once wrote an essay titled "The Greatest Victo rian, " by which he meant, as he put it, not Victorianorum maximus, but Victorianum maxime -not "the greatest of Victorians," but "the most Victorian ofthe Victorians." He awarded the title to Walter Bagehot (Victorian Essays 126). Bagehot was hardly the average Victorian, but the distinction Young made does go to the heart of an issue which, as I hope to show, concerned the Victorians: what was the relation between the average, mean, and normal-statistical notions and the typical, characteristic, or quintessential nonstatistical notions but still related to the average in ways at once obvious, and yet elusive. The question is perhaps even more important today than it was a century ago. Thus, a primary concern of Michel Foucault, one which informs all his writings and provides a central current in his thought, was the question of what relationship "real" people bear to the norms, averages, types, and other constructive apparatus of the modern statistical state and its eager handmaiden, social science. "Strange bedfellows, G.M. Young and Michel Foucault," the reader might mutter. But then averages make strange bedfellows: indeed that is precisely their purpose.

The main sources of sketches for Elgar's Second Symphony are the two Stuart-Wortley volumes in the care of the Elgar Birthplace Trust. Each is bound in black calf-skin, and measures 26 by 31.5 cm. They are entitled as follows, firstly, (S-W/B): Original Manuscript Sketches/for Symphony No. 2/by/Sir Edward Elgar//Short Score/As given by him to Mrs Charles Stuart-Wortley/March 1911 /♦/Bequeathed by her to the/Elgar Birthplace/Broad Heath, Worcester/1936.