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This chapter derives the equation of radiative transfer for an excited gas sample. The terms source function and optical thickness are also defined, and the effects of self absorption are considered. The formation of absorption lines is explained and measurements of the product of atomic density, oscillator strength, and sample length are discussed. Applications to the measurement of the abundance of chemical elements in stellar and terrestrial sources are outlined.

This chapter explores the idea of communal agency as a cooperative, coordinated, purposeful interaction of individuals embedded in community, social, and cultural life. A brief account is provided of a growing concern about the educational and social consequences of self-absorption and self-interest. Central to several recent attempts to redirect the work of educational psychologists toward a more sociocultural orientation is the idea of a communal agent—a socially formed yet self-interpreting and self-regulating initiator of his or her own choices and actions in interaction with others. An example of educating for communal agency is given based on the ideas of George Herbert Mead, who emphasized the social nature of education and the critical role of teachers as mediators between student development and social processes.

The use of translation, mythology, quotation, allusion, and other forms of encounter with earlier texts or other cultures are a familiar feature of Modernist writing, and they have been widely recognized as complicating the relations between texts and time, temporality and form, progress and reaction. This chapter examines the work of three writers — Ezra Pound, Mary Butts, and T. S. Eliot — in each of whom the fantasy of a destructively self-absorbed modern culture stimulated a conservative literary impulse, which nevertheless in each case took a radical literary form. Counter to that self-absorption they created something deliberately indigestible against which the organism of a culture could redefine itself in discomfort. In their work a version of the historical past haunts or constitutes or defines a dense and inadequate modernity through synchronic (poetic) re-presentation (Pound), by the pathos of lost moral and existential coherence (Eliot), and by the continuing but underestimated presence of powerful forces (Mary Butts).

This chapter discusses the account of Kim Kirim. He played a major role in the directions taken by modern Korean poetry from the 1930s onward. These included developments away from what Kim saw as the previous decade's vague sentimentalism and self-absorption and toward new constructivist and other avant-garde techniques, modernism's materialist belief in the objective structure of language, and dedication to the integration of feeling and progressive cultural critique. His theoretical works first appeared in periodicals beginning in 1930. Among these, the most important titles were Poetics and The Understanding of Poetry. The chapter reviews his Soliloquies of ‘Pierrot’: Fragmentary Notions Regarding ‘Poésie’, which predated his more systematic treatises.

This chapter outlines the interaction of radiation with matter and plasmas. The interaction of radiation fields, in general, with material particles inside a plasma is treated in detail. For a quantitative evaluation of the radiation emitted by a plasma, one needs to take account of its optical thickness for the radiation that it can emit. If the plasma is optically thick (fully-opaque), then it emits as a black body, and the resulting energy loss can be important. To evaluate the radiated power in an optically thin plasma on the other hand, one needs to proceed to a detailed analysis of processes responsible for the emission of radiation. In all the cases, coupling of radiation with matter must also be taken into account as the radiation emitted by some internal parts of the plasma can be absorbed in its external layers, and the resulting emission in the external vacuum depends upon these phenomena of self-absorption.