News and Notes

This article contextualises documentary photographs taken of working-class holidaymakers in Blackpool by Humphrey Spender in the late 1930s. Working for Tom Harrisson's northern branch of Mass Observation, Spender recorded how the residents of ‘Worktown’ (Bolton, Lancashire) spent the ‘fifty-second week’ or summer holiday period of each year. Harrisson recruited Spender for this task because his camera was an ideal apparatus for recording the most mundane details of average British lives. Yet these images (indeed, all the photographs taken by Spender for Mass Observation) were used only sparingly by the organisation at the time of their creation. This article examines reasons for this, suggesting that Harrisson's understanding of photographic realism in combination with his perception of national identity served to highlight photography's ability to undermine rather than affirm the goals of Mass Observation as Harrisson had conceived them.     

Eduard Steichen and Maurice Maeterlinck

Abstract

Eduard Steichen (1879-1973) met the Belgian Symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck in 1901, when Steichen was in Europe. Steichen's goal there was to photograph painters and writers whom he personally admired,¹ including Maeterlinck whom Steichen photographed in 1901. Maeterlinck attended Steichen's first one-man exhibition at Maison des Artistes in 1902 and looked favourably on the young artist's work. Maeterlinck and Steichen discussed photography at the time. Steichen thought that Maeterlinck's comments were ‘more considered than any [he] had heard before’ and ‘wondered whether he would put down some of his thoughts’² to be included with reproductions of Steichen's photographs in Camera Work. Steichen felt emphatically that his best photographs should be reproduced with Maeterlinck's statement, and he told Alfred Stieglitz as much.³ The connection between Maeterlinck and Steichen has not gone unnoticed     

Radical and incremental creativity: Antecedents and processes.

This study extends creativity theory and research by differentiating between 2 distinct forms of creative performance: radical and incremental. It also examines the differential effects of certain antecedents on these two forms of creativity. Results demonstrate that intrinsic motivation, problem-driven, and abstract theory-related creative ideas are associated mostly with radical creativity, whereas extrinsic motivation and ideas that are solution-driven and developed on the basis of concrete practices are linked more closely to incremental creativity. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The use of preview wind measurements for blade pitch control

Light detection and ranging systems are able to measure conditions at a distance in front of wind turbines and are therefore suited to providing preview information of wind disturbances before they impact the turbine blades. In this study, preview-based disturbance feedforward control is investigated for load mitigation. Performance is evaluated assuming highly idealized wind measurements that rotate with the blades and compared to performance using more realistic stationary measurements. The results obtained using idealized, “best case” measurements show that excellent performance gains are possible with reasonable pitch rates. However, the results using more realistic wind measurements show that without further optimization of the controller and/or better processing of measurements, errors in determining the shear local to each blade can remove any advantage obtained by using preview-based feedforward techniques.     

Novel triazole-based aluminum complex for ring-opening polymerization of lactones

Novel triazole-based aluminum complex {O,O′-[4,5-P(O)Ph₂tz]-AlMe₂ was studied as the catalyst for the ring-opening polymerization of caprolactone (ε-CL) in chlorobenzene. In the presence of methanol, isopropanol, and bifunctional poly(ethylene glycol), the catalytic system produced polymers with high conversion (81–85 %) but broader distribution (M _w/M _n = 1.5–1.8). The system of catalyst and benzyl alcohol produced relative monodisperse PCLs (M _w/M _n ~ 1.2) with defined molecular weight at 1/1ratio, 60 °C and an initial concentration of ε-CL equal to 0.5 mol/L.     

The chemoselective one-step alkylation and isolation of thiophosphorylated cdk2 substrates in the presence of native cysteine

The elucidation of signalling pathways relies heavily upon the identification of protein kinase substrates. Recent investigations have demonstrated the efficacy of chemical genetics using ATP analogues and modified protein kinases for specific substrate labelling. Here we combine N(6) -(cyclohexyl)ATPγS with an analogue-sensitive cdk2 variant to thiophosphorylate its substrates and demonstrate a pH-dependent, chemoselective, one-step alkylation to facilitate the detection or isolation of thiophosphorylated peptides.     

Electronic and magnetic properties of SnO<Subscript>2</Subscript>/CrO<Subscript>2</Subscript> thin superlattices

In this article, using first-principles electronic structure calculations within the spin density functional theory, alternated magnetic and non-magnetic layers of rutile-CrO₂ and rutile-SnO₂ respectively, in a (CrO₂) _n (SnO₂) _n superlattice (SL) configuration, with n being the number of monolayers which are considered equal to 1, 2, ..., 10 are studied. A half-metallic behavior is observed for the (CrO₂) _n (SnO₂) _n SLs for all values of n. The ground state is found to be FM with a magnetic moment of 2 μ_B per chromium atom, and this result does not depend on the number of monolayers n. As the FM rutile-CrO₂ is unstable at ambient temperature, and known to be stabilized when on top of SnO₂, the authors suggest that (CrO₂) _n (SnO₂) _n SLs may be applied to spintronic technologies since they provide efficient spin-polarized carriers.     

Factors affecting the behavior and effectiveness of phospholipid bilayer coatings for capillary electrophoretic separations of basic proteins

Phospholipid bilayer coatings can prevent adsorption of cationic proteins on the surface of fused silica capillaries used in capillary electrophoresis. However, the performance of such bilayer coatings is strongly dependent on solution conditions. The factors affecting the rate of formation of phospholipid bilayer coatings were investigated using the double-chained zwitterionic 1,2-dimyristoyl-sn-glycero-phosphocholine (DMPC, C(14)) as a model phospholipid. The effectiveness of these coatings for CE separations of model cationic lysozyme, cytochrome c, ribonuclease A, and alpha-chymotrypsinogen A was also assessed. Increasing the ionic strength of a 0.1 mM DMPC solution reduced capillary coat times from >2 hours in 2.5 mM Tris (pH 7.4) buffer to 3.4 min in 40 mM Tris and dramatically improved separation performance such that > or =1.4 x 10(5) plates/m were observed in capillaries coated for 5 min with 0.1 mM DMPC in 20 mM Tris-HCl (pH 7.4). The presence of Ca(2+) in the coating solution also increases the rate of formation of the phospholipid bilayer coating. The type of vesicle strongly affects its adsorption rate onto the silica surface. The time required to coat the capillary was 7.2 min for small unilamellar vesicles (SUVs) and 22.5 min for large unilamellar vesicles and excessively long for multilamellar vesicles. Highest efficiency protein separations were achieved with bilayer coatings prepared from SUVs. The coating rate was enhanced by using greater DMPC concentrations and unaffected by pH. The type of buffer present in the DMPC coating solution affects the coating behavior, with HEPES buffer yielding a faster coat time than either Tris or phosphate buffers. Histone H1 was separated on a 0.1 mM DMPC-coated capillary.     

Attention orienting effects of hesitations in speech: Evidence from ERPs.

Filled-pause disfluencies such as um and er affect listeners' comprehension, possibly mediated by attentional mechanisms (J. E. Fox Tree, 2001). However, there is little direct evidence that hesitations affect attention. The current study used an acoustic manipulation of continuous speech to induce event-related potential components associated with attention (mismatch negativity [MMN] and P300) during the comprehension of fluent and disfluent utterances. In fluent cases, infrequently occurring acoustically manipulated target words gave rise to typical MMN and P300 components when compared to nonmanipulated controls. In disfluent cases, where targets were preceded by natural sounding hesitations culminating in the filled pause er, an MMN (reflecting a detection of deviance) was still apparent for manipulated words, but there was little evidence of a subsequent P300. This suggests that attention was not reoriented to deviant words in disfluent cases. A subsequent recognition test showed that nonmanipulated words were more likely to be remembered if they had been preceded by a hesitation. Taken together, these results strongly implicate attention in an account of disfluency processing: Hesitations orient listeners' attention, with consequences for the immediate processing and later representation of an utterance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Analysis of light detection and ranging wind speed measurements for wind turbine control

Light detection and ranging (LIDAR) systems are able to measure the speed of incoming wind before it reaches a wind turbine rotor. These preview wind measurements can be used in feedforward control systems designed to reduce turbine structural loads. However, the degree to which such preview‐based control techniques can reduce loads by reacting to turbulence depends on how accurately the incoming wind field can be measured. This study examines the accuracy of different measurement scenarios that rely on coherent continuous‐wave or pulsed Doppler LIDAR systems, in terms of root‐mean‐square measurement error, to determine their applicability to feedforward control. In particular, the impacts of measurement range, angular offset of the LIDAR beam from the wind direction, and measurement noise are studied for various wind conditions. A realistic simulation case involving a scanning LIDAR unit mounted in the spinner of a MW‐scale wind turbine is studied in depth, with emphasis on preview distances that provide minimum measurement error for a specific scan radius. Measurement error is analyzed for LIDAR‐based estimates of point wind speeds at the rotor as well as spanwise averaged blade effective wind speeds. The impact of turbulence structures with high coherent turbulent kinetic energy on measurement error is discussed as well. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.