Search

The extensive use of the images of flowers in Katherine Mansfield's literary works to depict women's sexual longing and ecstasy is discussed. She also uses the narrator's commentary in a manner of ventriloquism to convey her female protagonists' imaginative and communicative inadequacy to express their social and sexual desires.

Introduction: Several ECG markers are postulated to represent underlying atrial remodelling and have been associated with ischemic stroke. P-wave terminal force in lead V1 (PTFV1) is one such marker. We examined the factors that contribute to the reliability of PTFV1 and its association with ischemic stroke.Material and Methods: Four hundred and thirty-five patients that presented with an ischemic stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA) were identified through a prospectively maintained multi-site institutional stroke database. Control group consisted of age matched patients without prior history of an ischemic stroke or TIA. All patients underwent a 12-lead ECG and 24-hour Holter monitoring during the study period to exclude atrial fibrillation.Results: Morphology consistent with PTFV1 occurred commonly in both the stroke/TIA and control groups. There was no significant difference in the median PTFV1 value between the stroke 3.96 mV ms [Interquartile range (IQR) 2.78-5.58] and control 4.23 mV ms [IQR 2.91-5.57] groups. Measurements of PTFV1 demonstrated excellent intra-observer reliability on assessment of the same P-wave (Intra class correlation (ICC) 0.91, p < 0.001) with narrow limits of agreement 2.21 to -2.95 mV ms. A change in the P wave assessed led to a significant reduction in reliability (ICC 0.79, p < 0.001). Inter-observer, inter P-wave assessment demonstrated further reduction in reliability (ICC 0.68, p < 0.002) with wide limits of agreement 6.17 to -5.78 mV ms, indicating significant under and overestimation of PTFV1.Conclusion: The utility of PTFV1 as a clinical marker for ischemic stroke is limited by the reduction in reliability associated with inter-observer and inter P-wave measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The southeastern tip of the Peninsula de Nicoya, Costa Rica, on the Caribbean plate margin lies inboard of the rough bathymetric terrain on the subducting Cocos plate and along the landward projection of the convergence vector for the Fisher seamount group. The southern tip of the peninsula has nearly orthogonal coastlines and extensive, well-preserved, Holocene marine terraces, and is ideally situated to evaluate the spatial distribution of forearc deformation in response to seamount subduction. Two marine terraces that yielded 35 radiocarbon dates give information on the rates, style, and timing of deformation along 40 km of coastline. Ages range from 3.5 to 7.4 ka for a higher terrace and from 0.3 to 2.9 ka for a lower terrace. A maximum uplift rate is ~6.0 m/k.y, along the southeastern tip of the peninsula. Uplift rates decrease linearly to [is less than] 1.0 m/k.y, along both orthogonal coastlines and thus landward from the Middle America Trench and away from the line of subducting seamounts. The ~400 [km.sup.2] region along the tip of the peninsula can be approximated as a rotating block with an angular rotation rate of 0.02 [degrees]/k.y. about an axis with an azimuth of 80 [degrees]. Given the modern elevation and dip of the late Quaternary Cobano surface, this style of deformation is limited to a duration of 100-200 k.y. Deformation is occurring in response to seamount bypass or underplating onto the Caribbean plate margin. Keywords: Costa Rica, marine terrace, Quaternary, tectonism, seamounts.

This article questions the assumption that empathy is a positive, politically beneficial emotion through two examples of poetry about deaths with sensitive political dimensions. I begin by returning to the origins of ‘empathy’ in English, as written about by Vernon Lee in the earlytwentieth- century, to show how far the word has drifted from Lee’s sense of it as an embodied aesthetic response to an artwork. Rob Halpern’s book of poems Common Room refuses imaginative empathy with its subject, a dead Guantánamo Bay detainee, and yet, I show, surprisingly aligns with Lee’s sense of empathy through the author’s erotic and imaginative response to the man’s autopsy report. What results in this revivification of Lee’s empathy is a violation of the religious beliefs of the detainee. In contrast, Andrea Brady’s poem ‘Song for Florida 2’ takes up a more contemporary sense of empathy in its focus upon the killing of the unarmed teen Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012. Brady’s poem presents several possibilities for empathising with Martin’s mother - by imagining being her, or imagining similarly losing a son - but eventually draws back from this as a limit. Empathy here risks erasing the specificity of the racialized context which led to Martin’s unjust death. The white poet’s son cannot ‘replace’, even imaginatively, the black mother’s son without effacing the difference which saw Martin targeted in the first place. Brady’s poem, I argue, marks how empathy can violate through supplanting the grief and political context for that grief of the person to whom empathy is extended. What is needed instead of empathy is a commitment to political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]