Eastern Illinois University

ABSTRACT In Dickens Studies, the year 2024 is marked by interest in (1) Dickens’s lifelong appreciation for, contribution to, and utilization of the arts; (2) his traveling activities, whether undertaken within his native England, Great Britain, Europe, and North America or experienced in the imagination; (3) the identities and responses of his reading publics, those absorbing, engaging with, and even resisting his literary messages and persona during his active career, and ever since, a topic also provoking urgent considerations of how we do and can read Dickens’s dominant cultural works in thoughtful conversation with texts from other cultures; (4) calls in this digital era to fulfill the twentieth-century dream of globalizing Dickens studies, transcending linguistic barriers and traditional centering of scholarship from the Northern Hemisphere; and (5) exploration of Dickens’s evocative powers over Victorian infrastructures and atmospheres, altering the properties of matter, rendering elements symbolic, and exploiting tragedy and comedy in their many cultural aspects to create an unforgettable Dickensian affect, resurrected in Neo-Victorian homages, that can illustrate stark social truths.

This paper investigates the degree of oil prices pass-through to import, producer, and consumer prices in Canada and the United States from 1980 to 2017 using a Structural Vector Auto-Regression (SVAR) model. The results indicate a positive long-run correlation between oil prices and aggregate price levels. The impulse response function reveals a persistent and incomplete pass-through for oil prices, i.e., 0.04 for Canada and 0.25 for the U.S. Greater pass-through exists in an economy with more oil import share. Consistent with the impulse response function, variance decomposition reveals that oil price shocks in the United States are the primary cause of the variation in import and producer prices. However, in Canada, oil price shocks explain the variation in producer and consumer prices.

Arbovirus infection outbreaks are becoming more widely reported in Africa. However, it is still difficult and crucial to better understand arbovirus transmission patterns, disease trends, and burdens. The epidemiology of these infections-dengue virus (DENV), Zika virus (ZIKV), chikungunya virus (CHIKV), West Nile virus (WNV), Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV), and yellow fever virus (YFV)-is unfortunately not well understood. This review provides an epidemiological inventory of DENV, ZIKV, CHIKV, WNV, RVFV, and YFV infections in Africa, with helpful results for risk mapping and upcoming prevention and control initiatives. This systematic review protocol implements the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines and an expert-evaluated design, laboratory assay and reporting evaluation (DARE) concept. Two independent reviewers conducted preliminary literature searches in PubMed in May 2023 to improve search keywords, strategy, and inclusion criteria while considering the context and scientific significance. The final search will be conducted using PubMed, ScienceDirect (SCOPUS), Web of Science Core Collection, African Journal Online, and Google Scholar. Two reviewers will simultaneously and independently conduct searches, screen studies, and extract data. Quality assessment will be performed by two independent epidemiology experts, and discrepancies will be handled by consensus or by consulting a third reviewer. Meta-analysis will be performed to determine the pooled estimate of arboviruses circulation and transmission patterns in Africa. With this review, we want to present an epidemiological inventory with information that will be relevant for risk assessment, future arbovirus infection outbreak prevention, and arbovirus infection outbreak control in Africa. This will include estimating the patterns, trends, and burden of arboviral infection across Africa, as well as identifying the regions with the highest risk of transmission. This will be crucial for developing well-informed policies for epidemic prevention. PROSPERO CRD42023434939.

ABSTRACT Studies have shown that involuntary autobiographical memories often have identifiable cues, which are rooted in a variety of experiences. Studies have also suggested that one’s activities and thoughts may also sometimes be related to these memories. Here, we examined a relatively large diary sample of involuntary memories (N = 123), where participants were asked to record their activities and thoughts along with their involuntary memories, and to decide if these activities and thoughts were related to these memories. The results showed that nearly two-thirds of the recorded involuntary memories were reported to be related to the activities and/or thoughts that coincided with them. Further, independent judges determined that activities and thoughts frequently overlapped conceptually with the memories, resulting in high inter-rater reliability estimates between the judges and the participants. We argue that the results suggest that activities and thoughts may have a priming role in the elicitation of involuntary memories.

Abstract Forgetting, an attendant to culture change, is the stuff of history. When cultural innovations, exchange and adoption occur, previous customs, knowledge, technology and other dimensions of culture are often lost—they are forgotten. This paper considers the phenomenon of forgetting and its permutations—the passive forgetting that is more or less an accepted outcome of change, the unintentional forgetting that is accidental and undesired, and the intentional forgetting of wilful erasure—as a way of contemplating agency and culture loss/change among the Dorset Paleo-Inuit peoples of the central and eastern North American Arctic, and more broadly, in Arctic archaeology.

This paper presents ioa++, a C++ framework that extends the formal I/O automata model to support dynamic composition and concurrency in practical distributed systems. I/O automata provide a rigorous basis for modeling reactive systems with well-defined interfaces and compositional semantics. The ioa++ framework builds on this foundation with runtime support for dynamic system reconfiguration, concurrencyaware scheduling, and non-blocking I/O via POSIX file descriptors. We demonstrate the utility of ioa++ through a layered implementation of a TCP-based leader election protocol using the asynchronous LCR algorithm. Empirical results show that ioa++ achieves near-ideal speedup (up to 1.95× with two threads) when sufficient independent actions exist, and incurs minimal overhead (average dispatch time of 4316ns in single-threaded and 6067ns in multi-threaded settings). The framework is open-source, supports simulation and real deployments, and encourages direct reasoning from code due to its close alignment with formal models. Our work bridges the gap between theoretical models and real-world systems, offering a practical tool for building modular and concurrent distributed software.