Harvard’s Composite “Class” Pictures

At first glance, John L. Lovell’s Harvard class portraits appear to represent one man and one woman. But instead, these composite photographs personify the “average” appearance of the entire classes of 1887 at Harvard University and the “Annex,” or Boston’s Protestant Brahmin elite. Composite photographs such as these, which held scientific gravity as part of the Harvard-entrenched Positive Eugenics movement, were composed of an incomplete data set. Thus, they offer a revised view of Allan Sekula’s ideas about composite photography’s requisite statistical potency. In addition, the Harvard composites call for a more nuanced articulation of their indexical functions, within the context of late nineteenth-century trends in the production of visual statistics and knowledge.     

“The Caravaggio Within” Nan Goldin’s Gina

This article offers a reading of Nan Goldin’s 1991 photo “Gina at Bruce’s dinner party, NYC”, giving particular attention to the presence within it of a reproduction of Caravaggio’s 1597 “Bacchus”. It considers some similarities and differences between the two images and, drawing on Kierkegaard’s problematizing of the possibility of repetition, suggests that the presence of “Bacchus” within “Gina” questions any uncritical assumption of “origin” or even re-presentation. It also suggests that, when we consider the wider oeuvres of both artists together, the “impossible repetition” that Gina enacts becomes more than a general point about representation and takes on an altogether queerer significance.     

Under Dor Guez’s Bed: Scenes from the “Christian Palestinian Archive”

The impulse for artist Dor Guez’s ongoing Christian Palestinian Archive (CPA) project can be traced to 1948, the year in which Israel was founded as a state and annexed local Palestinian territories, deporting and displacing their residents. These events are regarded as Nakba (catastrophe) by the Arab population. By examining the formation of the CPA Project, the circulation of images in and out of this private archive and Guez’s photographic practices, this essay suggests the CPA does not construct a lost national identity, but rather narrates and maintains images of a private and personal disaster. By so doing, it exposes governmental and authorial mechanisms that excluded these communities and bodies, but have nonetheless failed to prevent their inevitable emergence into the public sphere. This essay also recognises Guez as part of a growing group of Israeli and Palestinian artists who return to the silenced moments of Nakba and undermine systems that preserved prevalent narratives, such as institutional photographic archives and national museums.     

Literature-related discovery: common factors for Parkinson’s Disease and Crohn’s Disease

Literature-related discovery (LRD) is the linking of two or more literature concepts that have heretofore not been linked (i.e., disjoint), in order to produce novel, interesting, and intelligible knowledge (i.e., potential discovery). The mainstream software for assisting LRD is Arrowsmith. It uses text-based linkage to connect two disjoint literatures, and it generates intermediate linking literatures by matching Title phrases from two disjoint literatures (literatures that do not share common records). Arrowsmith then prioritizes these linking phrases through a series of text-based filters. The present study examines citation-based linkage in addition to text-based linkage to link disjoint literatures through a process called bibliographic coupling. Two disjoint literatures were selected for the demonstration: Parkinson’s Disease (PD) (neurodegeneration) and Crohn’s Disease (CD) (autoimmune). Three cases were examined: (1) matching phrases in records with no shared references (text-based linkage only); (2) shared references in records with no matching phrases (citation-based linkage only); (3) matching phrases in records with shared references (text-based and citation-based linkages). In addition, the main themes in the body of shared references were examined through grouping techniques to identify the common themes between the two literatures. All the high-level concepts in the Case 1) records could be found in Case 3) records Some new concepts (at the sub-set level of the main themes) not found in the Case 3) records were identified in the Case 2) records. The synergy of matching phrases and shared references provides a strong prioritization to the selection of promising matching phrases as discovery mechanisms. There were three major themes that unified the PD and CD literatures: Genetics; Neuroimmunology; Cell Death. However, these themes are not completely independent. For example, there are genetic determinants of the inflammatory response. Naturally occurring genetic variants in important inflammatory mediators such as TNF-alpha appear to alter inflammatory responses in numerous experimental and a few clinical models of inflammation. Additionally, there is a strong link between neuroimmunology and cell death. In PD, for example, neuroinflammatory processes that are mediated by activated glial and peripheral immune cells might eventually lead to dopaminergic cell death and subsequent disease progression.     

Migrant Mothers: Richard Harrington’s Indigenous ‘Madonnas’

Canadian photographer Richard Harrington has been recognised since the 1950s for his photographs of the Arctic, and specifically for portraits of the Padleimiut taken at a hunting camp in 1950 during a winter of acute shortages. Three were selected for Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man (1955). Of that group, two focused on motherhood through depictions of childbirth and maternal love; the latter is sometimes referred to as ‘Canada’s Madonna and Child’, making a timeless secular icon from the representation of a crisis. Harrington was a documentary photographer who made his living as a freelance photojournalist specialising in human interest stories and travel features for magazines and newspapers. On assignment in British Columbia for the Hudson’s Bay Company magazine The Beaver, he photographed a First Nations mother and child, an image entitled ‘Madonna of the Peace’. This photograph later graced the cover of a Roman Catholic missionary magazine, Pôle et Tropiques. This article draws parallels between Harrington’s photographs of Indigenous mothers and children and Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, using Harrington’s diaries and community-based research to reconstruct the lives of his subjects, and considering the sacrifice of knowledge to iconicity.     

Y’s，“运动”永不停息的专卖店

在过去的30年里面．山本耀司保持了他作为日本最有个性的时尚设计师的地位：他所设计的服饰带有极其明显的个人标志性．这使得他的作品与他的同胞——三宅一生的作品大不相同。当山本计划在东京开设他的服饰品牌Y＇s“即得”系列的旗舰专卖店时．他找到了居住在伦敦的设计师隆·阿拉德（Ron Arad）．这也是山本第一次将设计工作委托给他人来完成。”在此之前．我一直要求我所有卖场的设计师们都尽量能够少做一些设计性的工作．”[第一段]     

Garfield’s demon and “surprising” or “unexpected” results in science

The relative occurrence of the words “surprising” and “unexpected” in the titles of scientific papers was 11 times more common in 2001–2005 than in 1900–1955. However, papers which had titles containing one of these words did not receive enhanced numbers of citations. Both words (and also adjectives “unusual” and “unfortunately”) are used significantly more frequently in science than in social sciences and humanities. The distribution of the statements of surprise is not random in scientific literature (chemistry journals ranked highest in the number of papers claiming “surprising” or “unexpected” results) and may reflect the level of maturity of a discipline.     

Young’s modulus and Poisson’s ratio of concrete at high temperatures: Experimental investigations

When exposed to fire, Young’s modulus of concrete degrades. Thus, exact knowledge of temperature-dependent reduction is important to determine the fire-resistance of concrete or composite members. Nevertheless, existing material properties for the Young’s and shear modulus of concrete are linked with some incertitudes.In addition, normative regulations lack information on the temperature-dependent Poisson’s ratio. In an attempt to overcome some of the existing uncertainties, experimental work was conducted to investigate elastic material properties of fire-exposed concrete. For this purpose, the Impulse Excitation Technique was used as an innovative testing technique. Based on experimental results, the authors propose new elastic material formulations for fire-exposed concrete.     

f-Value: measuring an article’s scientific impact

The f-value is a new indicator that measures the importance of a research article by taking into account all citations received, directly and indirectly, up to depth n. The f-value considers all information present in a Citation Graph in order to produce a ranking of the articles. Apart from the mathematical equation that calculates the f-value, we also present the corresponding algorithm with its implementation, plus an experimental comparison of f-value with two known indicators of an article’s scientific importance, namely, the number of citations and the Page Rank for citation analysis. Finally, we discuss the similarities and differences among the indicators.     

A new author’s productivity index: p-index

In this paper a new author’s productivity index is introduced, namely the golden productivity index. The proposed index measures the productivity of an individual researcher evaluating the number of papers as well as the rank of co-authorship. It provides an efficient method to measure the author’s contribution in articles writing, compared to other ordinary methods. It gives emphasis to the first authors contributions due to the fact that traditionally the rank of each author shows the magnitude of his contribution in the article.     

Owner’s Risk Allocation and Contractor’s Role Behavior in a Project: A Parallel-mediation Model

Risk allocation decisions are of critical importance in project management. The present study proposes an explanation for how risk allocation in a contract motivates a contractor to cooperate with a project owner. Theories of risk allocation and trust were used to motivate the research. Using a survey methodology, we collected data concerning 124 construction projects in China. We found that risk allocation influenced the contractor’s role behavior through the contractor’s feeling of being trusted but not the contractor’s trust in the owner. Feeling of being trusted partially mediated the effect of risk allocation on the contractor’s in-role (i.e., contractual) behavior and fully mediated the effect on extra-role behavior. The study introduces a social and psychological view of the impacts of risk allocation to the project and engineering management literature. We contribute to theory by arguing and demonstrating the mediating effect of trust on the relationship between risk allocation and contractor behavior. From a practical standpoint, we conclude that contractual risk allocation has a significant impact on building a trusting relationship between owners and contractors and that contractors who feel trusted perform both contractually mandated actions and actions external to the contract more diligently, resulting in the likelihood of improved outcomes for both parties.     

On Hirsch’s h,Egghe’s g and Kosmulski’s h(2)

In recent issues of the ISSI Newsletter, Egghe [2006a] proposed the g-index and Kosmulski [2006] the h(2)-index, both claimed to be improvements on the original h-index proposed by Hirsch [2005]. The aim of this paper is to investigate the inter-relationships between these measures and also their time dependence using the stochastic publication/citation model proposed by Burrell [1992, 2007a]. We also make some tentative suggestions regarding the relative merits of these three proposed measures.     

Yesterday’s dreams and today’s reality in telecommunications

Twenty-five years ago the telecommunications industry had its vision of the future. There were three dreams that, given the right technology, they could achieve: (1) the Dick Tracy wristwatch phone; (2) the Picturephone; and (3) the set-top box for the home television which could access an information store maintained by the telephone company. None of these dreams turned out as planned, but it is interesting to compare the original concepts with what has actually transpired in the last quarter-century. Today, having achieved some form of each of these three dreams, it seems as if, looking ahead to tomorrow’s technology, the industry has no similar vision.