bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Elastic-plastic stress distributions and limit angular velocities in rotating hyperbolic annular discs
Authors: Alexandrova N N , Real P M M Vila
Published: April 2007

Plastic analytical stress analysis of a rotating annular disc with its contours being free from the radial pressure and with specifically variable thickness is presented in terms of the Mises-yield criterion and its associated flow rule. The hyperbolic form of thickness variation is considered and optimized towards the maximum rotational speed and favourable stress combinations. Radial and circumferential stress distributions in the disc both in the intermediate elastic-plastic and in the limit plastic states are obtained. As a particular case, limit elastic angular velocity parameter is derived. The influences of rotational speed as well as the disc's thickness profile on the plastic solution and size of elastic-plastic zone are demonstrated and discussed. The results obtained may be used for the correct implementation of numerical codes and preliminary engineering design.
Minimizing the quadratic mean temperature gradient for the heat-conduction problem using the level-set method
Authors: Zhuang C G , Xiong Z H , Ding H
Published: April 2007

This paper presents a numerical algorithm for minimizing the quadratic mean temperature gradient for the heat-conduction problem on the basis of the shape derivative for an elliptical system and the level-set method for a propagating surface. The level-set method as an implicit boundary model is employed to represent the optimal boundaries of heat transfer material. The objective function of the optimization problem is the quadratic mean temperature gradient. The shape of physical domain is treated as the design variable. The material derivative theory of the continuum mechanics and the adjoint method are used to implement the shape sensitivity analysis of the objective function. Since the level-set approach itself cannot generate new holes in the material region, as a remedy, the topological derivative of the elliptic equations that generates new holes to suppress the topological dependence of initialization is introduced. Numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed method is an effective technique for the optimal design of the heat-conduction problem.
An investigation of nanoindentation tests on the single crystal copper thin film via an atomic force microscope and molecular dynamics simulation
Authors: Huo D , Liang Y , Cheng K
Published: April 2007

Nanoindentation tests performed in an atomic force microscope have been utilized to directly measure the mechanical properties of single crystal metal thin films fabricated by the vacuum vapour deposition technique. Nanoindentation tests were conducted at various indentation depths to study the effect of indentation depths on the mechanical properties of thin films. The results were interpreted by using the Oliver-Pharr method with which direct observation and measurement of the contact area are not required. The elastic modulus of the single crystal copper film at various indentation depths was determined as 67.0 > 6.9 GPa on average, which is in reasonable agreement with the results reported by others. The indentation hardness constantly increases with decreasing indentation depth, indicating a strong size effect. In addition to the experimental work, a three-dimensional nanoindentation model of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations with embedded atom method (EAM) potential is proposed to elucidate the mechanics and mechanisms of nanoindentation of thin films from the atomistic point of view. MD simulations results show that due to the size effect no distinct dislocations were observed in the plastic deformation processes of the single crystal copper thin films, which is significantly different from the plastic deformation mechanism in bulk materials.
DNA detection in hair of transgenic mice-a simple technique minimizing the distress on the animals
Authors: Schmitteckert Eva Maria , Prokop Christa-Maria , Hedrich Hans J.
Published: April 2007

The breeding of transgenic animals requires that each individual offspring be analysed for integration of transgenic deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), unless exclusively homozygous animals are mated. The standard protocol for identification of transgenic animals (Hogan et al. 1994) is based on tissue samples and preparation of chromosomal DNA including proteinase K digestion and phenol/chloroform extraction. The procedure described here represents a much simpler and faster method to screen offspring for the transgene DNA. It is based on the use of hair bulbs as sample material, which can be directly used for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) after alkaline lysis. This protocol allows large numbers of animals to be easily screened in a minimum amount of time. A unique advantage though, is the reduction of the distress caused to the animals. With respect to the 3Rs (Replacement, Reduction, Refinement), and because of technical advantages this method may replace ear or tail clipping.
The 51–63 base pair of tRNA confers specificity for binding by EF-Tu
Authors: Sanderson Lee E. , Uhlenbeck Olke C.
Published: April 2007

Elongation factor Tu (EF-Tu) exhibits significant specificity for the different elongator tRNA bodies in order to offset its variable affinity to the esterified amino acid. Three X-ray cocrystal structures reveal that while most of the contacts with the protein involve the phosphodiester backbone of tRNA, a single hydrogen bond is observed between the Glu390 and the amino group of a guanine in the 51–63 base pair in the T-stem of tRNA. Here we show that the Glu390Ala mutation of Thermus thermophilus EF-Tu selectively destabilizes binding of those tRNAs containing a guanine at either position 51 or 63 and that mutagenesis of the 51–63 base pair in several tRNAs modulates their binding affinities to EF-Tu. A comparison of Escherichia coli tRNA sequences suggests that this specificity mechanism is conserved across the bacterial domain. While this contact is an important specificity determinant, it is clear that others remain to be identified.
Of Neural Nets and Brains in Vats: Model Subjects in Galatea 2.2 and Plus
Authors: Bould Mark , Vint Sherryl
Published: April 2007

Building on feminist critiques of autobiography, we argue that bringing together sf and life-writing theory can further critique the ideological connection between narrative mode and bourgeois, monadic subjectivity characteristic of much autobiography, as revealed by our reading of non-humans coming to consciousness in Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2 and Joseph McElroy's Plus.
Discourses of Autobiographical Desires: Samuel Delany's Nevèrÿon Series
Authors: Johnston Georgia
Published: April 2007

Science fiction writer, intellectual, and memoirist Samuel Delany reconfigures cultural narratives of sexuality. His science fiction fantasy series Nevèr¨yon and his cultural criticism Times Square Red/Times Square Blue create an intertextual echo. The autobiographical intertextuality helps Delany to foreground a desiring gay fetishistic sexual subject as acceptable and normal, a narrative speech act that changes the terms of narrative and sexuality.
Begin Again: James Tiptree, Jr.'s Opossum Tricks
Authors: Kirkpatrick Kim
Published: April 2007

This article analyzes how Tiptree taught her audience to question gender and age by planting in her readers the idea of the ephemeral nature of division into age groups and gender: it is the reader's decision to see what he or she wants to see, rather than just accepting patriarchal definition.
Days of Past Futures: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go as "Speculative Memoir"
Authors: McDonald Keith
Published: April 2007

This article considers Kazuo Ishiguro's dystopian novel Never Let Me Go as a text which utilizes memoir as a means of presenting a possible future where human rights are decimated, but where human stories remain. The novel is considered as an example of an ongoing science-fictional model where life-writing acts as a window into a world where the individual's experiences guide the reader through the speculative world.
For the Extended Family and the Universe: Judith Merril and Science Fiction Autobiography
Authors: Newell Dianne , Gilley Jenéa Tallentire
Published: April 2007

This article, in exploring why so few SF writers produce compelling or innovative autobiographies, examines Judith Merril's controversial memoir, Better to Have Loved, written in collaboration with her granddaughter, Emily Pohl-Weary. The memoir authorship and form have no equal in SF circles. Merril (1923–1997) was a central, socially radical powerhouse in the extraordinary "man's world" of modern science fiction, tracing her career through New York City, London, Tokyo, and Toronto between the 1940s and 1990s. Her fractured, nonlinear, and collaborative memoir that "tells it like it was" reflects precisely how she interacted with science fiction all her life.
Revisioning Gender: Inventing Women in Ursula K. Le Guin's Nonfiction
Authors: Rashley Lisa Hammond
Published: April 2007

Employing the same narrative techniques of experimentation and play that characterize her fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin has also created a substantial body of nonfiction. This article explores how her nonfiction continually challenges and questions the role of gender in literature and culture, but also in her own life as a woman writing.
Life Writing and Science Fiction: Constructing Identities and Constructing Genres
Authors: Rieder John
Published: April 2007

Each essay in the issue grapples with problems attending the social and literary construction of personal identities. Juxtaposing life writing and science fiction also suggests that generic identities ought to be grasped as complex social practices that connect discourse and power in a variety of ways.
The Gift of Example: Derrida and the Origins of the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Balfour Ian
Published: April 2007

This piece reflects on the status of the example in Derrida's writing, especially the example of Rousseau in Of Grammatology. Whereas Derrida's work is often considered non- or even anti-historical I suggest, rather, that it tends to consider the text as having a complex historicity and temporality, indeed, that it is a kind of event. Reading has to respect both the singulârity of the text as well as what Derrida maintains are the "numerous epochs" (plusieurs ages) of any text. I point also to the fertility of Derrida's writing on the discourse of origins and outline one possible way to extend Derrida's work along those lines.
Subjects/Sovereigns/Rogues
Authors: Aravamudan Srinivas
Published: April 2007

This brief essay evaluates the late Derrida's reflections on sovereignty and democracy. Especially after the Enlightenment, sovereignty, involving the legitimacy of political rule and its enforcement, is often interrogated by democracy, featuring processes of rational and social accountability. Derrida demonstrates that the philosophical theorizations of force and reason can be better understood through the analysis of literary texts on roguery, such as La Fontaine's fable, "Le loup et l'agneau." Following Derrida's lead, we can further analyze political philosophy through fictional and poetical projections about rationality, freedom, and force. Early modern analysts of roguery, such as Hobbes, Defoe, and Montesquieu, also meditated on the difference between the sovereign and the criminal, as well as the human and the bestial. The call to democracy and heterogeneity by Derrida's philosophy could eventually interrupt the disciplinary self-enclosure of eighteenth-century studies in the manner that Echo awakened Narcissus from his reverie.
Derrida's "Eighteenth Century"
Authors: Bennington Geoffrey
Published: April 2007

Derrida writes a good deal about an "Eighteenth Century" he typically puts in scare-quotes, and he puts difficult questions to such a notion of a century and indeed to all historicizing and periodizing concepts. Beginning with explicit remarks about the Eighteenth Century in Of Grammatologie, we show that this is done not with a view to denying or ignoring history, but in the interests of understanding how history is possible at all, and notably how texts in their historicity still remain open for reading today.
Unconditional Translation: Derrida's Enlightenment-to-Come
Authors: Hayes Julie Candler
Published: April 2007

This essay traces the genealogy of Derrida's phrase "Enlightenment to come" (Lumières à venir) in his writings of the 1990s and especially Voyous (2003), looking at his references to both the historical Enlightenment and the "new Enlightenment" and their gradual entwinement with his concept of "democracy to come." More than other forms of the "à venir" that traverse his work, the "Enlightenment to come" focuses on language, specifically on translation. Derrida's reflections on translation, from his early work to the final weeks of his life, point to an understanding of language as dialogue, hospitality, and reconciliation.
To Do Justice to "Rousseau," Irreducibly
Authors: Kamuf Peggy
Published: April 2007

The essay reviews features of Derrida's reading of Rousseau in De la grammatologie. It asks in what sense Derrida does justice to "Rousseau." It is a matter cutting away, of découpage, to reach what is "irreducibly proper," which consists, Derrida demonstrates, in a blind spot. A blindness to the paradoxical "logic" of supplementarity insists across Rousseau's oeuvre no less than through his "life." How can a blind spot be what is most proper? At once it belongs and does not belong to the author's signed work; le supplément is properly intended by his discourse, but in order to become legible this intention has to deviate through a point it cannot intend. This necessary deviation is a condition both of possibility of proper meaning and of its impossibility as proper. To do justice by undoing a text around its blind spot is to respond to this articulation of possibility with impossibility. The essay concludes by taking up Derrida's phrase "The Age of 'Rousseau'" to ask after "The Age of 'Derrida'" now unfolding in the blind spot of its history.
Inheriting Enlightenment, or Keeping Faith with Reason in Derrida
Authors: Saccamano Neil
Published: April 2007

This essay addresses Derrida's relation to the eighteenth century by examining the legacy and future of the Enlightenment as the renewed effort to think religion in deconstruction. By focusing on Derrida's reading of faith and reason as both heterogeneous and inseparable, the essay elaborates how Derrida seeks to understand the combat of religions today in the spirit of Enlightenment without relying solely on the notion of practice of critique as demystification. Such a deconstructive rethinking of a critique of religion also requires Derrida to question the notion of responsibility characterized in the Enlightenment as an ethics and politics of public discourse or communicability.
Determining the Undetermined: Derrida's "University Without Condition"
Authors: Terdiman Richard
Published: April 2007

In "The University Without Condition" Derrida imagines a university-to-come. His projection repeats familiar Enlightenment theses concerning freedom of thought. But his insistence upon the university's exemption from conditions bleeds over into the way he conceptualizes his own argument. He renounces any account of determinations and interests in the formation both of the university and of those who would inhibit its freedom. This leaves him with no means to explain how the university-to-come could be freed from these constraints, and limits him to a technology of miracles as the only cognizable means for achieving the changes he so fervently wishes for.
Fighting Outnumbered: The Impact of the Yom Kippur War on the U.S. Army
Authors: Bronfeld Saul
Published: April 2007

Recent historiography tends to overstate the impact of the Yom Kippur War (1973) on the tactical reforms initiated by General William E. DePuy, the first commander of the U.S. Army's TRADOC (1973–77), while paying insufficient attention to the ways that DePuy used the war's lessons to leverage his legendary effort to rehabilitate the Army. The war's influence on General Donn A. Starry's operational reforms was equally profound, but came by a different route: the reconstructions of the Golan Heights defense and the discussions with his close friends Major General Israel ("Talik") Tal and Major General Moshe ("Musa") Peled provided vital inspiration for the AirLand Battle doctrine.
MacKay's Betrayal: Solving the Mystery of the "Sado Island Prisoner-of-War Massacre"
Authors: Hadley Gregory , Oglethorpe James
Published: April 2007

Betrayal in High Places, a book written in 1996 by the late James MacKay, has created debate among World War II historians and former prisoners of war (POWs) because it claims to reveal suppressed Allied reports of Japanese war atrocities, such as the massacre of 387 American, Australian, British, and Dutch POWs in a gold mine at Aikawa on Sado Island, Japan, in 1945. Our investigation finds that the Sado Island massacre report is an intentional forgery, and that MacKay's book is a spurious historical source. We explain why he sought to deceive the public and contrast his fiction with the historical truth about Sado Island.
Alarm in Washington: A Wartime "Exposé" of Japan's Biological Warfare Program
Authors: Jeans Roger B
Published: April 2007

In the summer of 1944, as the Pacific War entered its final and bloodiest phase, a book purporting to reveal Japan's biological warfare (BW) program, as well as the American government's incompetence in preparing to combat it, was published. After briefly outlining the Japanese and American wartime BW efforts as well as the contents of the book and the background of its author, this article focuses on the alarmed responses to the book of the U.S. government and the media. In closing, the article briefly comments on similarities and differences between the 1944 "alarm" and the 2001 anthrax "scares."
The Prehistory of the General Staff
Authors: Kahn David
Published: April 2007

The modern general staff evolved only after three preconditions of modern life came into being: secularization, bureaucracy, and management. Secularization provided control. Bureaucracy rationalized endeavor. Management overcame specialization.
The Limits to Revolutions in Military Affairs: Maurice of Nassau, the Battle of Nieuwpoort (1600), and the Legacy
Authors: Parker Geoffrey
Published: April 2007

"Revolutions in Military Affairs" (RMAs) currently interest both historians and strategic analysts, but how exactly do they occur, why do they prove so decisive, and what (if any) are their limits? This essay seeks answers through the detailed study of one critical element of an earlier "Revolution in Military Affairs"—infantry volley fire—tracing its invention, first in Japan in the 1560s and then in the Dutch Republic in the 1590s, and its first use in combat at the battle of Nieuwpoort in 1600 by a Dutch army commanded by Maurice of Nassau. It then examines the current RMA in the light of that case study.
Strategic Geography and the Spanish Habsburg Monarchy's Failure to Recover Portugal, 1640-1668
Authors: White Lorraine
Published: April 2007

In a war lasting almost twenty-eight years (1640–68), Spanish forces endeavoured to recover Portugal for the Spanish Habsburg monarchy. This article examines the war in terms of strategic geography, a crucial but rather neglected dimension of early modern military history. Drawing comparisons with Alba's successful 1580 campaign to annex Portugal, it shows how geographic and climatic factors influenced the conduct of the 1640–68 war in terms of strategy, tactics, and logistics. It also reveals how these factors contributed to the outcome of the war and to Spain's military failure against its smaller neighbour.
Zulfikar Ghose's The Triple Mirror of the Self and Cosmopolitan Authentication
Authors: Brouillette Sarah
Published: April 2007

Zulfikar Ghose's critical reception has focused on the relationship between authorial biography and authenticity. The Triple Mirror of the Self (1992) refracts this focus, and can be read as the author's interested response to his own exclusion from emerging canons of postcolonial literature. The novel depicts the relationship between postcolonial textual production and Anglo-American reception in a way that emphasizes how its parameters exclude Ghose's own works. It then stages the author's rejection of the expectation that he will act as an interpreter of an authenticated location related to the place of his birth.
Blood and Soil in Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces: The Pastoral in Holocaust Literature
Authors: Coffey Donna
Published: April 2007

Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces diverges from earlier literature of the Holocaust in its engagement with the pastoral tradition. While the pastoral had been appropriated by the Nazis as part of their Blood and Soil ideology, Michaels reclaims and revises the pastoral and its sister genre, the elegy. She creates a traumatic pastoral focused on geological cataclysm and redefines Blood and Soil through images of soil soaked with blood. Michaels allows an anthropomorphized nature to grieve, but by presenting images of infertility rather than fertility she refuses the traditional compensatory apparatus of the elegy.
Making Modern Parents in Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" and Viña Delmar's Bad Girl
Authors: Gillette Meg
Published: April 2007

The question "How should we talk about abortion?" drives two of the most popular fictional abortion narratives of the 1920s: Ernest Hemingway's now canonical "Hills Like White Elephants" (1927) and Viña Delmar's once best-selling novel Bad Girl (1928). In both, a crisis of communication organizes a crisis of reproduction as the characters' emotionally awkward speech forestalls the realization of the modern nuclear family. As these works propose, modernism's impersonal aesthetic ideal is modernity's domestic disaster, and so diagnosed, they seek an alternative literary performance that would transform their New Women into New Mothers and their modernist Bad-Boys into All-American Dads.
Memory, Memorialization, and the Transformation of Johannesburg: Ivan Vladislavić's The Restless Supermarket and Propaganda by Monuments
Authors: Graham Shane (Shane Dwight)
Published: April 2007

In three short stories—"Propaganda by Monuments," "The WHITES ONLY Bench," and "Courage"—and in his novel The Restless Supermarket , Ivan Vladislavic dramatizes the problems facing South African culture in its attempts to memorialize a violent and traumatic past. These texts suggest a skepticism about the capacity of monuments and memorials to convey an authentic past. Restless Supermarket in particular reveals the complex ways in which memory and consciousness are mapped onto space and place in the aftermath of apartheid, and explores the spatio-temporal implications of postmodern "urban palimpsests" for the inscription of memory and identity.
Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone and the Ludic in African American Historical Fiction
Authors: Haddox Thomas F. (Thomas Fredrick)
Published: April 2007

Alice Randall's novel The Wind Done Gone, a parodic revision of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind , has been billed as a work of revisionist history that challenges familiar notions about life on plantations. Yet its use of a fictive source and its therapeutic ethos suggest that it may be more accurately described as an example of what Teresa L. Ebert has called "ludic" postmodernism—a mode of thinking whose privileging of difference and performativity offers psychological satisfactions at the expense of a truer and more transformative history.
"Treblinka, A Rather Musical Word": Carole Maso's Post-Holocaust Narrative
Authors: Silbergleid Robin
Published: April 2007

This paper argues that Carole Maso's novel AVA demands to be read not only as an instance of ecriture feminine but also as a piece of post-Holocaust literature. This reading refocuses attention on one of the novel's major themes and helps to rethink the contested category of post-Holocaust fiction itself. AVA demonstrates the profound effect the Holocaust has had on American art since the end of World War II, illustrating the extent to which the terms "postmodern" and "post-Holocaust" have become synonymous. It also contributes to an understanding of contemporary American cultural production as melancholic.
From Virtue to Virtual: DeLillo's Cosmopolis and the Corruption of the Absent Body
Authors: Valentino Russell Scott
Published: April 2007

This essay argues that Don DeLillo's 2003 novel Cosmopolis presents a critique of the world of cyber capital that invokes and is framed by the long-standing Euro-American republican contrast of virtue and corruption. As always in such discourse, corruption endangers the republic, but in the increasingly mediated reality of the kosmou polites, the traditional counterweight of virtue is left with no ground on which to stand. DeLillo's book thereby takes a political turn, evoking, in the manner of the Menippean satire, a fantastical, dream-like vision of both individual and political illness.
From Transit to Transitoire: The Omnibus and Modernity
Authors: Belenky Masha
Published: April 2007

The Parisian omnibus, introduced in 1828, served as a powerful symbol of urban and social change throughout the nineteenth century. The new conveyance heralded a radical transformation of Paris into the "capital of modernity" in the 1850s and 1860s. This essay considers the ambivalent and often contradictory attitudes toward the omnibus in the nineteenth-century cultural imagination by exploring representations of the omnibus as a social space in Zola's Au Bonheur des dames (1883) and in Maupassant's "Le Père" (1883). In Au Bonheur des dames, the omnibus embodies anxieties and dangers of modernity. Maupassant's "Le Père" illustrates how the meeting of sexes in the erotically charged space of the omnibus engenders social disruption.
La Théorie du signe d'Hippolyte Taine
Authors: Gaulin Morgan
Published: April 2007

The emergence of an energetic movement of criticism oriented towards the status of language brought Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) to publish De l'Intelligence (1870), his philosophical treatise. In his philosophy of language, Taine adopted Condillac's concept of sign. Images, which are a specific type of signs, permit us to imagine things that are not immediately available for experience. Those images, produced by our imagination, help us to understand what Taine called names. Taine defined common names as being twofold. They are general in that they are suited for all the types of objects they refer to (i.e., the name "wheel" stands for all possible wheels). Common names are also in that they designate something universal and, thus, common to all the types of objects they refer to. Is it possible, asked Taine, to experience that universal something, which he defines as being the idea of a thing ? No, argued Taine, since the general idea of a thing comes from the very definition of this thing. (In French) (MG)
Maturity and Modernity in Fromentin's Dominique
Authors: MacKenzie Robin
Published: April 2007

This article examines the thematic tension in Fromentin's Dominique between maturity (the conventional telos of the roman d'apprentissage) and modernity, as described by theorists from Benjamin to Moretti. The three principal male figures illustrate this tension in contrasting ways. Dominique's much-vaunted achievement of maturity depends on a complete withdrawal from modern urban existence and is, moreover, questioned by the otherwise uncritical frame narrator. Olivier, who thrives in the modern city, suffers mental collapse and attempts suicide when he returns to the ancestral estate. Augustin, married and successful by the end of the novel, goes some way to resolving the tension but lacks the emotional and aesthetic sensitivity to act as a satisfactory model of maturity. Dominique, then, supports Franco Moretti's claim that conventional models of maturity are incompatible with the centrifugal and dissipative energies of modernity and takes its place alongside L'Education sentimentale in the mid-century crisis of the psychological novel. (RM)
The Secret Self: A Reading of Musset's André del Sarto
Authors: McCready Susan
Published: April 2007

The prose drama André del Sarto occupies a transitional position within Musset's dramatic œuvre, crowning the œuvres de jeunesse while announcing the masterpieces of 1833 and 1834. Situating the play within the larger romantic trends of the Restoration, the article focuses on the impulses which inform the hero's actions throughout the play and which finally bring him to suicide. Drawing on the theoretical work of Bataille, Girard and psychoanalyst Andras Zempléni, the essay illuminates the hero's romantic obsession with his image of the world and with his self-image, an obsession shared by Musset throughout his own life and career. (SM)
Alphonse de Lamartine's Toussaint Louverture and the Staging of White Masculinity
Authors: Flannigan Arthur
Published: April 2007

Though ostensibly a play about Haiti and about black masculinity, Lamartine's Toussaint Louverture puts white masculinity center stage. A reading of the five-act drama informed by a psychoanalytic theory of hegemonic masculinity reveals that Toussaint's black body functions in the text as a fetish and that a white masculine anxiety subtends the very notion of a racial difference grounded in the body. Moreover, a consideration of how the presumptive nineteenth-century readers understood this text and how the 1850 spectators experienced the premiere blackface performance of the drama suggests further how gender and race intersected within the prevailing ideology of the period. (AFS-A)
Mallarmé et l'écriture du corps
Authors: Sipe Daniel
Published: April 2007

This article is an analysis of the representation of the female body in Stéphane Mallarmé's first published poem, "Placet" (1862). The author argues that Mallarmé's use of an anachronistic sonnet form and its depiction of a gallant seduction obfuscate a series of underlying textual operations which serve to subjugate and expose its female recipient. Here the surreptitious blurring of the various "degrees of visibility" contained in the poem call into question the commonly held notion of Mallarmé's "discreet eroticism." This discussion serves as a springboard to a more general reconsideration of Mallarméan poetics and the critical matrices which are frequently used to analyze it. Looking specifically at psychoanalytic theory (often employed to explain both the poet's eroticism and his approach to language), the author contends that this model cannot fully account for Mallarmé's representational project. The author posits instead a phenomenological reading of his "corporal writing." (In French) (ds)
Poetics and Poetry: Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Poe, and Mallarmé's "Eternal Logic"
Authors: Touya de Marenne Eric
Published: April 2007

This article explores the extent to which the radical transformation of music envisaged by Wagner in the second half of the nineteenth century announced what Nietzsche later described as the fundamental crisis of modernity. It also examines how Mallarmé responded to the musician who wanted to impose limits to the poetic art, and how the French poet's views on the subject had in fact been influenced by Poe and Baudelaire. Through the new path he foresaw beyond the crisis of literature and poetry, Mallarmé conceived of a "logic" that, he suggested, was "eternal," to counter the musician's claims and, along with them, challenge and oppose from a poetic perspective, the philosophical ideals of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. (etm)
Visions de Paris: Béraud et Zola – confrontations
Authors: Wetherill Peter Michael
Published: April 2007

Writing and painting offer incompatible perspectives. This fact is still widely ignored. Literally or otherwise, they have no acceptable common vocabulary. The present article explores this by comparing a scene by Jean Béraud (1849-1935) with an "identical" situation at the beginning of Nana. The same topography produces very different messages, diegesis being virtually excluded from painting (except when a specific anecdote or myth is referred to). The latter is in fact a space to be completely filled in with detail whilst literary narrative, naming things and defining their dynamic status in time, is inevitably full of holes. Painting is passive and immobile, spatially confined, and, beyond the precision of visual detail, inevitably opaque. The spectator must try to fill in the gaps. This is far from literature's approach : never a direct visual equivalent of the original scene. Different forms of theatrality result : Béraud's socially representative group invites us to all sorts of guessing games, whereas Zola's text is full of precise explanation: values and behaviour are meticulously explored, extending beyond the novel's text to the Rougon-Macquart cycle as a whole. (In French) (PMW)
The Uncreated Artwork in Mirbeau's Dans le ciel
Authors: Ziegler Robert
Published: April 2007

Serially published in L'Echo de Paris between September 1892 and May 1893, Octave Mirbeau's unfinished novel Dans le ciel offers the author's clearest reflection on artistic expression as an impossible ideal. The novel shows that beauty untranslated into imagery is located in the creative process itself: in the moment of inspiration or in the suffering of the artist incapable of giving form to his vision. Referred to in the title, the sky is a topological representation of the artist's brain, blue space seething with inchoate ideas, vaporous cloud-things shredding into evanescent shapes that break apart in the air. The journey traced in Mirbeau's novel maps the broken passage from conception to expression – from an artist's idea to the object embodying it. Between head and hand – between heaven and earth – the transmission of beauty involves disconnection and loss. A panoramic display of fantastic potential unconcretized in images and unbounded by frames, the sky is a painting of the dynamics of change. (rz)
Increases in BMD Correlate With Improvements in Bone Microarchitecture With Teriparatide Treatment in Postmenopausal Women With Osteoporosis
Authors: Chen Peiqi , Miller Paul D , Recker Robert , Resch Heinrich , Rana Asad , Pavo Imre , Sipos Adrien A
Published: April 2007

Increases in BMD are correlated with improvements in 2D and 3D trabecular microarchitecture indices with teriparatide treatment. Therefore, improvements in trabecular bone microarchitecture may be one of the mechanisms to explain how BMD increases improve bone strength during teriparatide treatment.

Introduction: Bone strength is determined by BMD and other elements of bone quality, including bone microarchitecture. Teriparatide treatment increases BMD and improves both cortical and trabecular bone microarchitecture. Increases in lumbar spine (LS) BMD account for ∼30–41% of the vertebral fracture risk reduction with teriparatide treatment. The relationship between increases in BMD and improvements in cortical and trabecular microarchitecture has not yet been studied.

Materials and Methods: The relationship between increases in BMD and improvements in cortical and trabecular microarchitecture after teriparatide treatment was assessed using data from a subset of patients who had areal BMD measurements and structural parameters from transiliac bone biopsies in the Fracture Prevention Trial. 2D histomorphometric and 3D μCT parameters were measured at baseline and 12 (n = 21) or 22 (n = 36) mo. LS BMD was assessed at baseline and 12 and 18 mo, and femoral neck (FN) BMD was measured at baseline and 12 mo. Pearson correlation was performed to assess the relationship between actual changes in BMD and actual changes in microarchitectural parameters.

Results: Changes in LS BMD at 12 mo were significantly correlated with improvements in trabecular bone structure at 22 mo: 2D bone volume (r = 0.45, p = 0.02), 2D mean wall thickness (r = 0.41, p = 0.03), 3D bone volume (r = 0.48, p = 0.006), 3D trabecular thickness (r = 0.44, p = 0.01), 3D trabecular separation (r = −0.37, p = 0.04), 3D structural model index (r = −0.54, p = 0.001), and 3D connectivity density (r = 0.41, p = 0.02). Changes in LS BMD at 18 mo had similar correlations with improvements in bone structure at 22 mo. Changes in FN BMD at 12 mo were significantly correlated with changes in 2D mean wall thickness (r = 0.56, p = 0.002), 3D bone volume (r = 0.51, p = 0.004), 3D trabecular thickness (r = 0.44, p = 0.01), 3D trabecular separation (r = −0.46, p = 0.01), and 3D structural model index (r = −0.55, p = 0.001).

Conclusions: Increases in BMD are correlated with improvements in trabecular microarchitecture in iliac crest of patients with teriparatide treatment. Therefore, improvements in trabecular bone microarchitecture may be one of the mechanisms to explain how BMD increases improve bone strength during teriparatide treatment.
Patient-Centered Communication Survey of Nursing Homes and Rehabilitation Centers
Authors: Skinder-Meredith Amy , Bye Lynn , Bulthuis Kari , Schueller Angie
Published: April 2007

A surge of research has recently been published on the importance of patient-centered communication (P-CC). However, patients with communication disorders are rarely considered in these discussions. Health care workers in long-term care facilities (L-TCFs) and rehabilitation centers were surveyed in order to: (1) assess the level of P-CC used with people with communication disorders versus those without communication disorders; (2) identify the tools and strategies currently used by health care providers in long-term care facilities and rehabilitation centers to enhance P-CC with people with communication disorders; (3) assess the perceived level of effectiveness of these tools and strategies; and (4) identify the tools desired by health care providers in these settings. The results regarding P-CC levels were fairly consistent across settings. Health care providers reported that they achieve slightly higher P-CC with patients without communication disorders than with those with communication disorders. Respondents in both settings used similar tools and strategies, but the reported level of effectiveness varied greatly between the two settings, with rehabilitation centers indicating better success than L-TCFs. Interestingly, rehabilitation center respondents were more interested in obtaining additional tools than were L-TCF respondents, but the types of tools desired were similar.
Psychiatric Diagnosis as a Precursor to Research Diffi culties in Mental Health
Authors: Russell Denise
Published: April 2007

The starting point for most mental health research is psychiatric diagnosis. If diagnoses are controversial or unreliable, then the results of the research will be difficult to interpret and its value will be undercut. The most widely used system of psychiatric diagnosis is found in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This article looks at the conceptual core of diagnosis in the latest manual, examines the definition of mental disorder, and exposes some key underlying conceptual issues especially with regard to the notions of “distress,” “impairment,” and “dysfunction.” The role of subjectivity and values in the application of these concepts is also stressed and discussed in relation to specific mental disorders.
Fabrication and Characterization of Polymer/Liquid Crystal Composite Diffractive Optics by Multiphoton Methods
Authors: Xie A. , Ito T. , Higgins D. A.
Published: April 2007

Direct‐write multiphoton photolithography is used to prepare electrically switchable diffraction gratings having spacings as small as 4 μm. Surface‐relief gratings are written into poly(methyl methacrylate) films using a sample‐scanning confocal microscope and are characterized by using contact‐mode atomic force microscopy. The resulting polymeric channels are filled with nematic liquid crystals (LCs) and sandwiched between indium tin oxide‐coated coverslips to obtain functional devices. These devices exhibit diffraction efficiencies approaching 30 %. Microscopic LC organization and field‐induced reorientation dynamics within these devices are characterized by static and dynamic polarization‐dependent multiphoton excited fluorescence microscopy. LCs are found to align predominantly along the channel axis, but exhibit some disorder near the channel walls, resulting from nanometer‐scale polymer surface roughness. LC reorientation in response to an electric field is rapid (<1 ms) and uniform, whereas field‐free LC relaxation is relatively slow (>20 ms). Both reorientation and relaxation are influenced by orientationally anchored LCs near the channel walls.
Proposal to reimburse occupational medicine disease and injury claims through third party health insurance
Authors: Ramsey Scott , Rosenstock Linda
Published: April 2007

The current system of compensation for the medical costs of occupational illnesses and injuries, a component of health insurance coverage for most workers in the United States, has recently come under scrutiny in the national health care reform debate. The cost of treatment of these conditions is significant, and there exist numerous disincentives for physicians and patients to use the workers' compensation system. Physicians who treat workers with occupationally related diseases may find compensation for a condition is disputed at the same time that it is excluded from payment by third party insurance coverage, leaving the patient selectively uninsured for at least some medical care services. In addition, most workers' compensation programs have been designed in a way that discourages efficient resource use by providers and claimants.

We propose allowing health care providers to bill third party health insurers for all care, including work‐related diseases and injuries. Insurers, in turn, would bill workers' compensation programs for associated treatment costs. The potential advantages of such a system include reductions in inefficiency and unfair burdens placed on providers and patients, in reporting bias, and in administrative costs balanced against the risks of insurers excluding workers in high risk occupations from obtaining low cost health insurance and shifting away from employers the administrative burden for workers' compensation.
Occupational exposure to chlorinated aliphatic hydrocarbons and risk of astrocytic brain cancer
Authors: Heineman Ellen F. , Cocco Pierluigi , Gómez Manuel R. , Dosemeci Mustafa , Stewart Patricia A. , Hayes Richard B. , Zahm Shelia Hoar , Thomas Terry L. , Blair Aaron
Published: April 2007

Chlorinated aliphatic hydrocarbons (CAHs) were evaluated as potential risk factors for astrocytic brain tumors. Job‐exposure matrices for six individual CAHs and for the general class of organic solvents were applied to data from a case‐control study of brain cancer among white men. The matrices indicated whether the CAHs were likely to have been used in each industry and occupation by decade (1920‐1980), and provided estimates of probability and intensity of exposure for “exposed” industries and occupations. Cumulative exposure indices were calculated for each subject.

Associations of astrocytic brain cancer were observed with likely exposure to carbon tetrachloride, methylene chloride, tetrachloroethylene, and trichloroethylene, but were strongest for methylene chloride. Exposure to chloroform or methyl chloroform showed little indication of an association with brain cancer. Risk of astrocytic brain tumors increased with probability and average intensity of exposure, and with duration of employment in jobs considered exposed to methylene chloride, but not with a cumulative exposure score. These trends could not be explained by exposures to the other solvents.
Occupational exposure to chlorinated aliphatic hydrocarbons: Job exposure matrix
Authors: Gomez M. R. , Cocco P. , Dosemeci M. , Stewart P. A.
Published: April 2007

A job exposure matrix combining features to increase the accuracy of exposure assessment was developed to evaluate cancer risks from workplace exposures to six chlorinated aliphatic hydrocarbons (CAHs). A detailed description of the matrix is provided to satisfy the need for more in‐depth discussion of exposure assessment methods than is typical in today's epidemiologic literature. The matrix assigns semiquantitative estimates of the probability and intensity of exposure to each four‐digit Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) and Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) code potentially associated with exposure to each CAH. The matrix also accounts for the changing patterns of use of the CAHs by decade from the 1920s to the 1980s. An algorithm combines these parameters to assign each study subject a unique lifetime probability of exposure and an estimated score of cumulative exposure for each CAH. These assignments can then become the subjects of analyses. The ability of the matrix to reduce the number of false positive exposure assessments is discussed and illustrated. A companion paper describes the detailed epidemiologic findings of this application of the matrix.
Mortality studies of machining fluid exposure in the automobile industry III: A case‐control study of larynx cancer
Authors: Eisen Ellen A. , Tolbert Paige E. , Hallock Marilyn F. , Monson Richard R. , Smith Thomas J. , Woskie Susan R.
Published: April 2007

A case‐control study of larynx cancer was conducted within a cohort of automobile workers exposed to metal working fluids, commonly referred to as machining fluids (MF). Results are based on 108 cases of larynx cancer and 5:1 matched controls. Risks associated with specific types of MF, as well as specific components of the fluids were evaluated. Based on a retrospective exposure assessment, lifetime exposures to straight and soluble fluids, grinding particulate, biocides, selected metals, sulfur, and chlorine were examined. Exposure to asbestos and acid mists at two of the three study sites was also characterized.

Results suggest that straight mineral oils are associated with almost a two‐fold excess in larynx cancer risk. There was also evidence of an association with elemental sulfur, commonly added to straight MF to improve the integrity of the materials under extreme pressure and heat. It is not clear whether sulfur is causally related to an excess relative risk of larynx cancer or whether the observed association is the result of unmeasured confounding by another contaminant or process feature. For example, the high stress operations that require MF enriched with sulfur are also more likely to produce polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) during the process. Thus, the observed association with sulfur may be due to an association with PAH.

The finding of excess risk of laryngeal cancer associated with MF is consistent with several previous reports in the literature. This is the first study, however, to distinguish straight mineral oils from other types of MF. Based on these findings, a general reduction in concentrations of straight mineral oil particulate in occupational environments would be prudent.