Nature,Natives, and Nations: Glorification and Asymmetries in Museum Representation,Fiji and Hawaii

The Fiji Museum and Hawaii's Bishop Museum research and represent local indigenes differently, and more extensively, than they do the culture and history of descendants of plantation laborers. While these museums connect Japanese-Hawaiians and Indo-Fijians to themes of economic struggle and multiculturalism, the erstwhile 'natives'are strongly, if implicitly, connected to 'nature.'Against Foucaultian approaches depicting museums as 'modern' institutions of classification, this argument locates museums with a liberal focus on nature, natives and nations (three conceptions, from the same Latin root, for self-constituting objects) as descendants of imperial museum projects, and finds not classification but glorification originally organizing museum representations. The politics of museum representation concern dilemmas in glorification, not classification. The asymmetries traced here follow local will as well as institutional design.     

Self and world: large scale installations at science museums

This paper describes three examples of illusion installation in a science museum environment from the author's collaboration with the artist and architect. The installations amplify the illusory effects, such as vection (visually-induced sensation of self motion) and motion-induced blindness, to emphasize that perception is not just to obtain structure and features of objects, but rather to grasp the dynamic relationship between the self and the world. Scaling up the size and utilizing the live human body turned out to be keys for installations with higher emotional impact.     

Visitor Circulation and Nonhuman Animal Welfare: An Overlooked Variable?

This article investigates visitor circulation and behaviors within a gallery of primate exhibits in relation to their possible implications for nonhuman animal welfare. When entering a primate house, the majority of visitors (84%) turned right, a pattern upheld throughout all times of the day. These findings demonstrate the existence of the "right-turn" principle, a concept previously identified and investigated in the museum setting. The existence of this circulation pattern in zoos has important implications for the practical management of animal welfare issues because unbalanced or large numbers of visitors at specific enclosures could present a stressful influence. The "direction bias" could not be attributed to demographic or behavioral traits, therefore suggesting that the principle, like similar findings from museum research, generalizes across visitor populations and, therefore, zoos. A visitor sample at another exhibit (located outside the exhibit gallery) did not display a direction bias, suggesting that the marked circulation pattern may be specific to exhibit galleries. The article discusses the significance and consequences of visitor circulation with respect to visitor management and animal welfare.     

A Place Containing Many Places: Museums and the Use of Objects to Represent Place in Melanesia

In this paper I discuss a number of incompatible ways of comprehending object meanings, contrasting western ethnographic museum practice with indigenous, specifically ni-Vanuatu, understandings. I discuss these differences as a way of looking analytically at some of the practices of museum ethnography and material culture studies. There are several aspects to this contrast: here I concentrate on ideas about place. Place is a centrally important concept in Vanuatu, but is not privileged in relation to objects. Western museums, however, use provenance as any ethnographic object's defining characteristic, and have developed a sophisticated, though largely unexamined, set of principles and practices for the attribution of provenance on stylistic grounds. On the basis of provenance identification, museums attribute meaning to objects. When enshrined as professional museum practice, such approaches pose dilemmas for Melanesian museums, and are the subject of debate among Pacific region museum professionals. For ni-Vanuatu, the significance of objects on display may represent not places, but the performance of the skills that reveal the maker's place-based identity.     

Torres Strait Islanders Stories from an Exhibition

Preparations for a centenary exhibition to mark the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait incorporated cross-cultural collaborative work, reflecting the changing roles of museums as sites for contact and research combining curatorial expertise and indigenous knowledge. Specific objects in the collections of the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology continue to be active intermediaries in the relationship between museum staff and Torres Strait Islanders and the museum itself has become an important field site. This paper provides an ethnography of the process of creating the exhibition and explores different ways that many of the objects displayed have resonance for Islanders today.     

Mitochondrial DNA sequence from an enigmatic gorilla population (Gorilla gorilla uellensis)

Although today gorillas are found in only two widely separate, discontinuous western and eastern African populations, rumors of the existence of an additional gorilla population in central Africa have inspired recent unsuccessful field expeditions in search of the "mystery ape" termed Gorilla gorilla uellensis. Such a gorilla population would have considerable conservation and scientific interest, and would presumably have descended from a population of gorillas that was thought to exist until the end of the 19th century on the Uele River in the current-day Democratic Republic of Congo. However, the sole evidence for the existence of these gorillas is three skulls and one mandible brought to the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren, Belgium) in 1898. We determined a mitochondrial DNA sequence from one of these specimens and compared it to sequences from other gorillas. Contrary to expectations, the sequence obtained did not exhibit the phylogenetic distinctiveness typical of a representative of a peripheral isolated population. Rather, the results suggest a scenario in which the museum specimens did not originally derive from the northern Congo, but were brought from the area of current distribution of western gorillas to that location; the subsequent discovery and collection of the specimens there gave rise to the false inference of a local gorilla population.     

Yuyanapaq no entra: ritual dimensions of post‐transitional justice in Peru

The anthropology of transitional justice has emphasized the ritual aspects of truth commissions but offered less analysis of the conventions through which narratives produced by such institutions come to be viewed over time. A controversy in Peru that centred on a new national museum's possible incorporation of a photo exhibit (Yuyanapaq) created by the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2001‐3) provides an opportunity to explore this problematic. Documenting the disagreements that ultimately led to Yuyanapaq's exclusion from the museum, I suggest that an emphasis on ritual outcomes – including perceived shortcomings and failures – is useful for understanding the long‐term trajectory of national reconciliation initiatives.     

Art/Artefact/Commodity: Installation design and the exhibition of Oceanic things at two New York museums in the 1940s

This article documents some of the experimentation in museum installation designs for the exhibition of non‐Western objects during the 1930s and 1940s. This is a period in which ethnographic artefacts were being displayed as artworks in natural history museums and in which the exhibition of such objects in art museums drew on techniques characteristic of not only natural history museums, but also commercial urban window displays (which were themselves enjoying a period of dazzling exuberance). The article focuses on one collection of Pacific Islands objects now housed at the Buffalo Museum of Science and on the installation designs of René d’Harnoncourt and Trevor Thomas. It responds to the provocation of Alfred Gell’s influential writings on art and agency, specifically, his conception of art as entrapment and enchantment—his claim that artworks captivate, and thus exert a kind of (secondary) agency on people (patients).     

A Voting-Based Sequential Pattern Recognition Method

We propose a novel method for recognizing sequential patterns such as motion trajectory of biological objects (i.e., cells, organelle, protein molecules, etc.), human behavior motion, and meteorological data. In the proposed method, a local classifier is prepared for every point (or timing or frame) and then the whole pattern is recognized by majority voting of the recognition results of the local classifiers. The voting strategy has a strong benefit that even if an input pattern has a very large deviation from a prototype locally at several points, they do not severely influence the recognition result; they are treated just as several incorrect votes and thus will be neglected successfully through the majority voting. For regularizing the recognition result, we introduce partial-dependency to local classifiers. An important point is that this dependency is introduced to not only local classifiers at neighboring point pairs but also to those at distant point pairs. Although, the dependency makes the problem non-Markovian (i.e., higher-order Markovian), it can still be solved efficiently by using a graph cut algorithm with polynomial-order computations. The experimental results revealed that the proposed method can achieve better recognition accuracy while utilizing the above characteristics of the proposed method.     

Visitor circulation and nonhuman animal welfare: an overlooked variable?

This article investigates visitor circulation and behaviors within a gallery of primate exhibits in relation to their possible implications for nonhuman animal welfare. When entering a primate house, the majority of visitors (84%) turned right, a pattern upheld throughout all times of the day. These findings demonstrate the existence of the “right-turn ”principle, a concept previously identified and investigated in the museum setting. The existence of this circulation pattern in zoos has important implications for the practical management of animal welfare issues because unbalanced or large numbers of visitors at specific enclosures could present a stressful influence. The “direction bias ”could not be attributed to demographic or behavioral traits, therefore suggesting that the principle, like similar findings from museum research, generalizes across visitor populations and, therefore, zoos. A visitor sample at another exhibit (located outside the exhibit gallery) did not display a direction bias, suggesting that the marked circulation pattern may be specific to exhibit galleries. The article discusses the significance and consequences of visitor circulation with respect to visitor management and animal welfare.     

Measuring the Outcome of Biomedical Research: A Systematic Literature Review

Background

There is an increasing need to evaluate the production and impact of medical research produced by institutions. Many indicators exist, yet we do not have enough information about their relevance. The objective of this systematic review was (1) to identify all the indicators that could be used to measure the output and outcome of medical research carried out in institutions and (2) enlist their methodology, use, positive and negative points.

Methodology

We have searched 3 databases (Pubmed, Scopus, Web of Science) using the following keywords: [Research outcome* OR research output* OR bibliometric* OR scientometric* OR scientific production] AND [indicator* OR index* OR evaluation OR metrics]. We included articles presenting, discussing or evaluating indicators measuring the scientific production of an institution. The search was conducted by two independent authors using a standardised data extraction form. For each indicator we extracted its definition, calculation, its rationale and its positive and negative points. In order to reduce bias, data extraction and analysis was performed by two independent authors.

Findings

We included 76 articles. A total of 57 indicators were identified. We have classified those indicators into 6 categories: 9 indicators of research activity, 24 indicators of scientific production and impact, 5 indicators of collaboration, 7 indicators of industrial production, 4 indicators of dissemination, 8 indicators of health service impact. The most widely discussed and described is the h-index with 31 articles discussing it.

Discussion

The majority of indicators found are bibliometric indicators of scientific production and impact. Several indicators have been developed to improve the h-index. This indicator has also inspired the creation of two indicators to measure industrial production and collaboration. Several articles propose indicators measuring research impact without detailing a methodology for calculating them. Many bibliometric indicators identified have been created but have not been used or further discussed.     

Effectiveness of social hygiene and organized preventive measures in dysentery in preschool institutions]

The work presents the data on the development and realization of the complex of social and hygienic, as well as organizational and preventive measures for dysentery control at institutions for children of preschool age in one of the regions of our country. This complex comprises the improvement of "epidemiological" knowledge of the staff, preventive orientation in the work of the epidemiological section of the local Sanitary Epidemiological Station, the spread of sanitary and hygienic knowledge children and in their families, the improvement of material and technical equipment of children's institutions. The complex proved to be highly effective: at institutions for children of preschool age morbidity -ate in dysentery decrease 4--5 times, and its specific falue dropped from 40% to 5.4%, the frequency of positive results given by tests for the presence of intestinal microflora in washings from various objects decreased more than 25 times. Morbidity rate at institutions for children of preschool age decreased 4--5 times as compared with that among children not attending such institutions. The above data suggest the necessity of introducing this experience in other regions of our country.     

The Curatorial Voice: U.S. Institutions Exhibit the Ancient Andes

Two new exhibits on ancient Andean civilizations are open in the United States. Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas is a large traveling exhibition and Tiwanaku: Ancestors of the Inca is a smaller temporary exhibition that is not traveling. Both introduce North American audiences to objects and information that have never been exhibited in the United States and each includes some extraordinary artifacts. The two exhibits differ in many ways: Machu Picchu emphasizes information, archaeological science, and cultural history, whereas Tiwanaku focuses on art style and objects. The curatorial voice and point of view are strong in each exhibit, as is the institutional perspective of its originiating museum. In this respect these exhibits differ significantly from contemporary ones on ancient North America, which generally include the voices and points of view of descendant communities and others.     

The program of Founding Research Centers for Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases: the present status and future prospects

The program of Founding Research Centers for Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases was commenced in 2005 with an outline for Japanese universities and research institutions to establish bilateral collaboration research bases in countries where emerging and reemerging infections are breaking out or will likely break out. So far, six universities and two institutions are participating in the program and ten collaboration bases have been established in six countries (five in Asia and one in Africa). Each research base aims to contribute to the security and safety of the partner and own countries by facilitating better understanding of infectious diseases, technology innovation in diagnosis, therapy and prevention, and human resources development. The experiences of the Reseau International des Instituts Pasteur (RIIP), France, and the Wellcome Trust Southeast Asian Tropical Medicine Research Units (Oxford Network), United Kingdom, which appear to share similar missions, suggest that infectious diseases research that is based on overseas research bases can produce first-time results through the building of long-term mutual trust with the counterparts. By referring to these networks as models, Japan's program should be implemented over the long run but not be based on a short-time perspective. Thus, secure funding is a major issue.     

Fragment-based learning of visual object categories

When we perceive a visual object, we implicitly or explicitly associate it with a category we know. It is known that the visual system can use local, informative image fragments of a given object, rather than the whole object, to classify it into a familiar category. How we acquire informative fragments has remained unclear. Here, we show that human observers acquire informative fragments during the initial learning of categories. We created new, but naturalistic, classes of visual objects by using a novel "virtual phylogenesis" (VP) algorithm that simulates key aspects of how biological categories evolve. Subjects were trained to distinguish two of these classes by using whole exemplar objects, not fragments. We hypothesized that if the visual system learns informative object fragments during category learning, then subjects must be able to perform the newly learned categorization by using only the fragments as opposed to whole objects. We found that subjects were able to successfully perform the classification task by using each of the informative fragments by itself, but not by using any of the comparable, but uninformative, fragments. Our results not only reveal that novel categories can be learned by discovering informative fragments but also introduce and illustrate the use of VP as a versatile tool for category-learning research.     

Modelling habitat-suitability using museum collections: an example with three sympatric Apodemus species from the Alps

Aim, Location Although the alpine mouse Apodemus alpicola has been given species status since 1989, no distribution map has ever been constructed for this endemic alpine rodent in Switzerland. Based on redetermined museum material and using the Ecological-Niche Factor Analysis (ENFA), habitat-suitability maps were computed for A. alpicola , and also for the co-occurring A. flavicollis and A. sylvaticus .
Methods In the particular case of habitat suitability models, classical approaches (GLMs, GAMs, discriminant analysis, etc.) generally require presence and absence data. The presence records provided by museums can clearly give useful information about species distribution and ecology and have already been used for knowledge-based mapping. In this paper, we apply the ENFA which requires only presence data, to build a habitat-suitability map of three species of Apodemus on the basis of museum skull collections.
Results Interspecific niche comparisons showed that A. alpicola is very specialized concerning habitat selection, meaning that its habitat differs unequivocally from the average conditions in Switzerland, while both A. flavicollis and A. sylvaticus could be considered as 'generalists' in the study area.
Main conclusions Although an adequate sampling design is the best way to collect ecological data for predictive modelling, this is a time and money consuming process and there are cases where time is simply not available, as for instance with endangered species conservation. On the other hand, museums, herbariums and other similar institutions are treasuring huge presence data sets. By applying the ENFA to such data it is possible to rapidly construct a habitat suitability model. The ENFA method not only provides two key measurements regarding the niche of a species (i.e. marginality and specialization), but also has ecological meaning, and allows the scientist to compare directly the niches of different species.     

Explaining Differences in Repatriation Experiences: The Discovery of Coupled and Decoupled Systems

We report the results of a four-year, multiphase study on the overseas assignment at General Motors Corporation (GM). Our objective is to explain variation in the repatriation experiences of International Service Personnel (ISPs). While our principal focus is the documentation of an inductive discovery process facilitated through interviews with a wide variety of GM employees, we also present a preliminary test of an explanatory hypothesis. The hypothesis states that variation in repatriation experiences is related directly to variation in the structure and ideology of organizational units that send and receive ISPs. Units with direct linkages between GM's domestic and overseas operations (coupled systems) are associated with a pro-international ideology and positive ISP repatriation experiences. Units with no administrative or operational linkages between the domestic and overseas arenas (decoupled systems) are associated with an anti-international ideology and negative ISP repatriation experiences. Our findings suggest that the structural and ideological properties of organizational units affect both repatriation from overseas assignments and ISP career paths.     

Articulated Knowledges: Environmental Forms after Universality's Demise

Critiques of universalism require rethinking when confronted with environmental political arenas, in which the very concepts of "universality" and "particularity" are in a constant process of self-conscious deployment. In this article, I attend to the analytic and political implications of such deployments in a recent incinerator controversy in Hong Kong. I suggest that an aesthetic of local appropriateness and its formal requirement of simultaneous universal and particular truth value normalize the politics of environmental expertise such that the only legible form for counterknowledge is one of articulated knowledges. To understand how the knowledges emergent in an NGO–village collaboration were scaled, linked, and mobilized, I analyze a translation of expert knowledge and the event's metapragmatic effects. A subsequent account of unarticulated knowledges emphasizes the political-economic conditions that limit whose knowledges can count as particular in articulations of counterexpertise.     

Steady diversification of derived liverworts under Tertiary climatic fluctuations

Tropical forests contain the majority of extant plant diversity and their role as a cradle and/or museum of biodiversity is an important issue in our attempts to assess the long-term consequences of global climate change for terrestrial biomes. Highly diverse groups of liverworts are an often ignored but extremely common element in rainforests, and thus their evolution may shed light on the ecological robustness of rainforest biomes to climate fluctuations. We record a remarkable constant accumulation of diversity through time for the most species-rich family of liverworts, Lejeuneaceae, inferred by divergence time estimates. The observed pattern supports the recently developed concept of a dual role of the tropics as both a museum and a cradle of biodiversity.