“Victorians Like Us” was a project carried out by the English Culture Research Group of The University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies. The four conferences organised between 2012 and 2018 and ...held at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities in Lisbon gave visibility to the project. They all promoted discussion on a wide variety of topics pertaining to ideological, social, and cultural settings and encompassing all facets of the Victorian era. The topics fostered a critical and creative dialogue on Victorianism and our current age. This introduction first sets the context for the present issue of Anglo-Saxonica, which comprises expanded versions of papers delivered at the Victorians Like Us III conference, and then briefly describes their main topics and goals.
How did Renaissance theatre create its powerful effects with so few resources? In The Shakespearean Stage Space, Mariko Ichikawa explores the original staging of plays by Shakespeare and his ...contemporaries to build a new picture of the artistry of the Renaissance stage. Dealing with problematic scenes and stage directions, Ichikawa closely examines the playing conditions in early modern playhouses to reveal the ways in which the structure of the stage was used to ensure the audibility of offstage sounds, to control the visibility of characters, to convey fictional locales, to create specific moods and atmospheres and to maintain a frequently shifting balance between fictional and theatrical realities. She argues that basic theatrical terms were used in a much broader and more flexible way than we usually assume and demonstrates that, rather than imposing limitations, the bare stage of the Shakespearean theatre offered dramatists and actors a variety of imaginative possibilities.
This study examines the agenda-setting power of fake news and fact-checkers who fight them through a computational look at the online mediascape from 2014 to 2016. Although our study confirms that ...content from fake news websites is increasing, these sites do not exert excessive power. Instead, fake news has an intricately entwined relationship with online partisan media, both responding and setting its issue agenda. In 2016, partisan media appeared to be especially susceptible to the agendas of fake news, perhaps due to the election. Emerging news media are also responsive to the agendas of fake news, but to a lesser degree. Fake news coverage itself is diverging and becoming more autonomous topically. While fact-checkers are autonomous in their selection of issues to cover, they were not influential in determining the agenda of news media overall, and their influence appears to be declining, illustrating the difficulties fact-checkers face in disseminating their corrections.
Influenza virus infections are believed to spread mostly by close contact in the community. Social distancing measures are essential components of the public health response to influenza pandemics. ...The objective of these mitigation measures is to reduce transmission, thereby delaying the epidemic peak, reducing the size of the epidemic peak, and spreading cases over a longer time to relieve pressure on the healthcare system. We conducted systematic reviews of the evidence base for effectiveness of multiple mitigation measures: isolating ill persons, contact tracing, quarantining exposed persons, school closures, workplace measures/closures, and avoiding crowding. Evidence supporting the effectiveness of these measures was obtained largely from observational studies and simulation studies. Voluntary isolation at home might be a more feasible social distancing measure, and pandemic plans should consider how to facilitate this measure. More drastic social distancing measures might be reserved for severe pandemics.
The use of leaderboards is a common approach to the gamification of employee performance, but little is known about the specific mechanisms and mediating processes by which leaderboards actually ...affect employee behavior. Given the lack of research in this domain, this study proposes goal-setting theory, one of the most well-established motivational theories in psychology, as a framework by which to understand these effects. In this study, a classic brainstorming task is gamified with a leaderboard in order to explore this. Participants were randomly assigned to four classic levels of goal-setting (do-your-best, easy, difficult and impossible goals) plus a leaderboard populated with initials and scores representing identical goal-setting conditions. The presence of a leaderboard was successful in motivating participants to performance levels similar to that of difficult and impossible goal-setting, suggesting participants implicitly set goals at or near the top of the leaderboard without any prompting to do so. Goal commitment, a common individual difference moderator in goal-setting theory, was also assessed and behaved similarly in the presence of the leaderboard as when traditional goals were provided. From these results, we conclude that goal-setting theory is valuable to understand the success of leaderboards, and we recommend further exploration of existing psychological theories, including goal-setting, to better explain the effects of gamification.
•Goal-setting theory was offered as an explanatory framework for leaderboards.•An experiment found addition of a leaderboard on a task increased performance.•Leaderboards performed similarly to traditional difficult and impossible goals.•Individual goal commitment moderated the success of leaderboards as with goals.•Goal-setting and other psychological theories should be explored in gamification.
Parthenocarpy is one of the most important agronomic traits for fruit yield in cucumbers. However, the precise gene regulation and the posttranscriptional mechanism are elusive. In the presented ...study, one parthenocarpic line DDX and non-parthenocarpic line ZK were applied to identify the microRNAs (miRNAs) involved in parthenocarpic fruit formation. The differential expressed miRNAs among parthenocarpic fruit of forchlorfenuron (CPPU) treated ZK (ZK-CPPU), pollinated ZK (ZK-P), non-pollinated DDX (DDX-NP) were compared with the non-parthenocarpic fruits of non-pollinated ZK (ZK-NP). It indicated 98 miRNAs exhibited differential expression were identified. Notably, a significant proportion of these miRNAs were enriched in the signal transduction pathway of plant hormones, as identified by the KEGG pathway analysis. qRT-PCR validation indicated that CsmiR156 family was upregulated in the ZK-NP while downregulated in ZK-CPPU, ZK-P, and DDX-NP at 1 day after anthesis. Meanwhile, the opposite trend was observed for CsmiR164a. In ZK-CPPU, ZK-P, and DDX-NP, CsmiRNA156 genes (CsSPL16 and CsARR9-like) were upregulated while CsmiRNA164a genes (CsNAC6, CsCUC1, and CsNAC100) were downregulated. The GUS and dual luciferase assay validated that CsmiR156a inhibited while CsmiR164a induced their target genes' transcription. This study presents novel insights into the involvement of CsmiR156a and CsmiR164a in the CK-mediated posttranscriptional regulation of cucumber parthenocarpy, which will aid future breeding programs.
•CPPU promotes parthenocarpic fruit setting.•MiR156a negatively regulate cucumber parthenocarpy.•SPL16-like and ARR9-like were induced in response to CPPU.•MiR164a expression triggered under CPPU in ZK-NP.•NAC genes were upregulated in ZK-NP in the absence of CPPU.
InThe Stage Life of Props,Andrew Sofer aims to restore to certain props the performance dimensions that literary critics are trained not to see, then to show that these props are not just ...accessories, but time machines of the theater.Using case studies that explore the Eucharistic wafer on the medieval stage, the bloody handkerchief on the Elizabethan stage, the skull on the Jacobean stage, the fan on the Restoration and early eighteenth-century stage, and the gun on the modern stage, Andrew Sofer reveals how stage props repeatedly thwart dramatic convention and reinvigorate theatrical practice.While the focus is on specific objects, Sofer also gives us a sweeping history of half a millennium of stage history as seen through the device of the prop, revealing that as material ghosts, stage props are a way for playwrights to animate stage action, question theatrical practice, and revitalize dramatic form.Andrew Sofer is Assistant Professor of English, Boston College. He was previously a stage director.
This article examines the conditions under which the European Parliament (EP) effectively exercises its informal agenda setting powers to directly influence the content of the European Union's policy ...agenda through the use of ‘own initiative reports’ or EPOIR. We test three models of EPOIR influence (salience, linkage and ideology) utilizing a newly created dataset of all substantive references to EPOIR within Commission pre‐legislative communications and legislative proposals produced between 2000 and 2017. These references serve as the dependent variable in our analysis, which seeks to identify the traits of EPOIR that increase their likelihood of exerting agenda influence. Our findings suggest not only that EPOIR can and do help to shape the EU policy agenda, but that salience and inter‐institutional linkage are the most effective attributes in explaining when this type of EP agenda setting effort via EPOIR is most likely to be successful.
Intermedia agenda setting is a widely used theory to explain how content transfers between news media. The recent digitalization wave, however, challenges some of its basic presuppositions. We ...discuss three assumptions that cannot be applied to online and social media unconditionally: one, that media agendas should be measured on an issue level; two, that fixed time lags suffice to understand overlap in media content; and three, that media can be considered homogeneous entities. To address these challenges, we propose a “news story” approach as an alternative way of mapping how news spreads through the media. We compare this with a “traditional” analysis of time-series data. In addition, we differentiate between three groups of actors that use Twitter. For these purposes, we study online and offline media alike, applying both measurement methods to the 2014 Belgium election campaign. Overall, we find that online media outlets strongly affect other media that publish less often. Yet, our news story analysis emphasizes the need to look beyond publication schemes. “Slow” newspapers, for example, often precede other media’s coverage. Underlining the necessity to distinguish between Twitter users, we find that media actors on Twitter have vastly more agenda-setting influence than other actors do.
PDF
