Tag: Personality

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Apparent Horizons by Dr Lee Tsang

In mid-2021 The Sciku Project teamed up with the Literature and Science Hub at the University of Liverpool to run the ‘Research in Verse Poetry Competition’, open to staff and postgraduate research students across the university to submit poems about their research subject. The competition saw poems addressing all sorts of topics, ranging from gravity to slavery to life in the lab.

Third prize was won by Dr Lee Tsang for his poem ‘Apparent Horizons’:

Apparent Horizons

I am what I am and what I’m not.
I’m the acts and non-acts of
‘might’ and ‘forgot’.
More than that.
I am the suns I never had.

I’m the light that
moves
both outwards
and in.
I am the Green Ray,
a moment
of fusion where
Apparent Horizons play with time.

As you are to me
I’m the passing cusp of
hopes and fears
for suns untamed.

I am the Light
both extinguished
and aflame.

Background

Dr Lee Tsang is a musician of dual heritage who takes on multiple roles in crossover works. His poem was written while reflecting on complex systems in his own practice, as demonstrated in Twisting Ways (2020, 2020/2021), the latest output from a longstanding partnership with Canadian jazz-classical pianist and composer David Braid. The poem contemplates philosophical and psychological issues relating to agency, identity, and fluid performance/compositional processes in light of Korsyn’s espousal of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence for musical contexts. You can connect with Lee on Twitter here: @l_tsang

Further Reading:

Bloom, H. (1973). Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press.

Korsyn, K. (1991). ‘Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence’, Music Analysis, 10(1/2), pp. 3-72.  

Tsang, L. (2015). David Braid’s ‘Resolute Bay’ with Sinfonia UK Collective. Toronto: K52 Music. Available at: http://www.sinfonia-uk-collective.org/

Tsang, L. (2016). ‘David Braid: Flow’. In Flow: David Braid + Epoque Quartet [CD liner notes]. New York, NY: Steinway & Sons. Available at: http://www.sinfonia-uk-collective.org/flow_albumNotes.pdf

Tsang, L. (2018). David Braid: Corona Divinae Misericordiae [CD, B07KZTWBJL]. Epoque Chamber Orchestra, Patricia O’Callaghan, Elmer Iseler Singers, Sinfonia UK Collective. Toronto: K52 Music.

Tsang, L. (2020). Tsang’s musical poetry (2018-2020) for ‘Twisting Ways’ (Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra 2020). Available at: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/3110815/   

Tsang, L. (2020/2021). ‘The Hand’, ‘Hope Shadow’ and ‘Lydian Sky’, Twisting Ways: The Music of David Braid and Philippe Côté [CD, WJOCD0005]. Winnipeg, MB: Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra.

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Rapport trumps torture.

Interrogation:

it’s not like in the movies.

Rapport trumps torture.

 

In films and tv programs aggression and threats are used in interrogations to get information out of a suspect. This approach is often common in police and armed forces around the world and yet evidence suggests that this it’s not effective.

Christiansen et al (2018), building on the work of Alison & Alison (2017), studied UK police interviews with 48 terrorist detainees across 181 interviews and coded the interpersonal behaviours of both the detainees and the interrogators across the categories authoritative, passive, confrontational and cooperative.

They found that adaptive interviewer behaviour was positively associated with adaptive detainee behaviour, leading indirectly to increased information. The study suggests that the greater the interviewer’s interpersonal skills the more likely the detainee was to respond and the more useful information was obtained. Similarly authoritative and confrontational behaviours resulted in a less cooperative detainee and less useful information. It seems that building a rapport seems more effective that intimidation.

Original research:

Christiansen et al (2018): https://doi.org/10.1111/lcrp.12111

Alison & Alison (2017): http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000064

 

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Foundress

Paper foundress queens

Influence their colony

In character and size.

 

We often look for similarities between ourselves and our parents/children, in the way we look or behave. In paper wasps the personality of the queen influences the size and aggressiveness of the colony they found: Bolder queens tend to produce more workers that as a colony are less likely to attack a simulated agonistic stimulus, however whilst shyer queens tend to produce a more aggressive colony with fewer workers. Wright et al, 2017.