bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Using heat treatment effects and EBSD analysis to tailor microstructure of hybrid Mg nanocomposite for enhanced overall mechanical response
Authors: Sankaranarayanan S. , Sabat R. K. , Jayalakshmi S. , Walker Stefan , Suwas S. , Gupta M.
Published: April 2014

In this study, a detailed investigation on the effect of heat treatment on the microstructural characteristics, texture evolution and mechanical properties of Mg–(5·6Ti+2·5B4C)BM hybrid nanocomposite is presented. Optimised heat treatment parameters, namely, heat treatment temperature and heat treatment time, were first identified through grain size and microhardness measurements. Initially, heat treatment of composites was conducted at temperature range between 100 and 300°C for 1 h. Based on optical microscopic analysis and microhardness measurements, it was evident that significant grain growth and reduction in microhardness occurred for temperatures >200°C. The cutoff temperature that caused significant grain growth/matrix softening was thus identified. Second, at constant temperature (200°C), the effect of variation of heat treatment time was carried out (ranging between 1 and 5 h) so as to identify the range wherein increase in average grain size and reduction in microhardness occurred. Furthering the study, the effect of optimised heat treatment parameters (200°C, 5 h) on the microstructural texture evolution and hence, on the tensile and compressive properties of the Mg–(5·6Ti+2·5B4C)BM hybrid nanocomposite was carried out. From electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD) analysis, it was identified that the optimised heat treatment resulted in recrystallisation and residual stress relaxation, as evident from the presence of ∼87 strain free grains, when compared to that observed in the non-heat treated/as extruded condition (i.e. 2·2 times greater than in the as extruded condition). For the heat treated composite, under both tensile and compressive loads, a significant improvement in fracture strain values (∼60 increase) was observed when compared to that of the non-heat treated counterpart, with ∼20 reduction in yield strength. Based on structure–property correlation, the change in mechanical characteristics is identified to be due to: (1) the presence of less stressed matrix/reinforcement interface due to the relief of residual stresses and (2) texture weakening due to matrix recrystallisation effects, both arising due to heat treatment.
De novo genome assembly of the soil-borne fungus and tomato pathogen Pyrenochaeta lycopersici
Authors: Aragona Maria , Minio Andrea , Ferrarini Alberto , Valente Maria Teresa , Bagnaresi Paolo , Orrù Luigi , Tononi Paola , Zamperin Gianpiero , Infantino Alessandro , Valè Giampiero , Cattivelli Luigi , Delledonne Massimo
Published: April 2014

Background

Pyrenochaeta lycopersiciis a soil-dwelling ascomycete pathogen that causes corky root rot disease in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) and otherSolanaceouscrops, reducing fruit yields by up to 75%. Fungal pathogens that infect roots receive less attention than those infecting the aerial parts of crops despite their significant impact on plant growth and fruit production.

Results

We assembled a 54.9MbP. lycopersicidraft genome sequence based on Illumina short reads, and annotated approximately 17,000 genes. TheP. lycopersicigenome is closely related to hemibiotrophs and necrotrophs, in agreement with the phenotypic characteristics of the fungus and its lifestyle. Several gene families related to host–pathogen interactions are strongly represented, including those responsible for nutrient absorption, the detoxification of fungicides and plant cell wall degradation, the latter confirming that much of the genome is devoted to the pathogenic activity of the fungus. We did not find a MAT gene, which is consistent with the classification ofP. lycopersicias an imperfect fungus, but we observed a significant expansion of the gene families associated with heterokaryon incompatibility (HI).

Conclusions

TheP. lycopersicidraft genome sequence provided insight into the molecular and genetic basis of the fungal lifestyle, characterizing previously unknown pathogenic behaviors and defining strategies that allow this asexual fungus to increase genetic diversity and to acquire new pathogenic traits.
Systematic review and meta-analysis of the duration of clinical effect of onabotulinumtoxinA in cervical dystonia
Authors: Marsh Wallace A , Monroe Deirdre M , Brin Mitchell F , Gallagher Conor J
Published: April 2014

Background

Botulinum toxins are considered first-line therapy for treatment of cervical dystonia (CD) and must be injected on a repeat basis. Understanding the duration of clinical benefit of botulinum toxins and its impact on health care utilization are thus important in the contemporary environment. However, there is currently no overall consensus on the duration of effect of onabotulinumtoxinA in the treatment of CD. We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis to identify the duration of effect of onabotulinumtoxinA in CD and investigate factors that may influence it.

Methods

A systematic literature search identified prospective or retrospective studies reporting duration of effect of onabotulinumtoxinA for the treatment of CD. Inclusion criteria included peer-reviewed, non-review, English-language articles published between January 1980 and January 2013. A formal meta-analysis using Comprehensive Meta-Analysis Version 2 was conducted to identify the duration of effect of onabotulinumtoxinA in the treatment of CD; both fixed and random effects models were performed. Subgroup analyses were performed to identify factors that influenced the duration of effect of onabotulinumtoxinA.

Results

A total of 18 studies (including >1,900 patients) met the inclusion criteria and were used for the meta-analysis. The mean duration of effect of onabotulinumtoxinA in CD was found to be 93.2 days (95% CI 91.8-94.6 days) for the fixed effects model and 95.2 days (95% CI 88.9-101.4 days) for the random effects model. A meta-regression found that dose of onabotulinumtoxinA and country of origin influenced the duration of effect of onabotulinumtoxinA, whereas quality score of the article and study type did not. In particular, doses ≥180 Units were associated with longer durations of effect than doses <180 Units (107-109 days vs. 86-88 days, respectively; p < 0.01). Limitations included pooling studies that used discrete definitions of duration and had different designs and study quality.

Conclusions

Based on the published literature, the mean duration of effect of onabotulinumtoxinA in CD was 93-95 days (13.2-13.5 weeks). This suggests that, in general, patients with CD treated with onabotulinumtoxinA should require ~4 treatments per year.
Production of recombinant human annexin V by fed-batch cultivation
Authors: Marder Laura S , Lunardi Juleane , Renard Gaby , Rostirolla Diana C , Petersen Guilherme O , Nunes José E S , de Souza Ana Paula D , de O Dias Ana Christina , Chies Jocelei M , Basso Luiz A , Santos Diógenes S , Bizarro Cristiano V
Published: April 2014

Background

Annexin V, a 35.8 kDa intracellular protein, is a Ca+2- dependent phospholipid binding protein with high affinity to phosphatidylserine (PS), which is a well-known hallmark of apoptosis. Annexin V is a sensitive probe for PS exposure upon the cell membrane, and used for detection of apoptotic cells bothin vivoandin vitro. Large-scale production of recombinant human annexin V is worth optimization, because of its wide use in nuclear medicine, radiolabeled with99mTc, for the evaluation of cancer chemotherapy treatments, and its use in identification of apoptotic cells in histologic studies. Here we describe the high-yield production of a tag-free version of human annexin V recombinant protein by linear fed-batch cultivation in a bioreactor.

Results

We cloned the humanANXA5coding sequence into the pET-30a (+) expression vector and expressed rhANXA5 in batch and fed-batch cultures. UsingE. coliBL21 (DE3) in a semi-defined medium at 37°C, pH 7 in fed-batch cultures, we obtained a 45-fold increase in biomass production, respective to shaker cultivations. We developed a single-step protocol for rhANXA5 purification using a strong anion-exchange column (MonoQ HR16/10). Using these procedures, we obtained 28.5 mg of homogeneous, nontagged and biologically functional human annexin V recombinant protein from 3 g wet weight of bacterial cells from bioreactor cultures. The identity and molecular mass of rhANXA5 was confirmed by mass spectrometry. Moreover, the purified rhANXA5 protein was functionally evaluated in a FITC-annexin V binding experiment and the results demonstrated that rhANXA5 detected apoptotic cells similarly to a commercial kit.

Conclusions

We describe a new fed-batch method to produce recombinant human annexin V in large scale, which may expand the commercial utilities for rhANXAV to applications such asin vivoimaging studies.
Gender and regional disparities of tuberculosis in Hunan, China
Authors: Chen Mengshi , Kwaku Abuaku Benjamin , Chen Youfang , Huang Xin , Tan Hongzhuan , Wen Shi Wu
Published: April 2014

Introduction

Major efforts have been made to improve the health care system in Hunan province, China. The aims of this study were to assess whether and to what extent these efforts have impacted on gender and regional disparities of Tuberculosis (TB) incidence in recent years, especially for less developed areas.

Methods

We obtained data from the 2005–2009 China Information System for Disease Control and Prevention (CISDCP)to conduct this study in Hunan province. Counties within the province were divided into four regions according to quartiles based on the 2007 per capita GDP. Index of Disparity (ID) and Relative Index of Inequality (RII) were used to measure the disparities of TB incidence in relation to gender and region. Bootstrap technique was used to increase the precision.

Results

The average annual incidence of TB was 111.75 per 100,000 in males and 43.44 per 100 000 in females in Hunan. The gender disparity was stable, with ID from 42.34 in 2005 to 43.92 in 2009. For regional disparity, ID, RII (mean) and RII (ratio) decreased significantly from 2005 to 2009 in males (P < 0.05) but remained stable among the female population.

Conclusions

As interventions such as introduction of the New Rural Cooperative Scheme put in place to reduce health disparities in China, regional disparity in relation to incidence of TB decreased significantly, but the gender disparity remains in the Hunan province.
Spontaneous rupture of hepatic metastasis from small cell neuroendocrine carcinoma of maxillary sinus
Authors: Duan Yun-fei , Tan Yan , Yuan Bo , Zhu Feng
Published: April 2014

Background

Small cell neuroendocrine carcinoma of the maxillary sinus, a rare malignant tumor, has a poor prognosis because of its high incidence of metastasis. Moreover, metastatic cancer-induced hepatic rupture, characterized by hemoperitoneum, is infrequent, although several lines of evidences have reported that a wide variety of other neoplasms can cause this usually fatal manifestation.

Case presentation

We now present the first case of a 49-year-old man with spontaneous rupture of hepatic metastasis from small cell neuroendocrine carcinoma of the maxillary sinus and ultimately resulted in massive intraperitoneal bleeding, which was successfully controlled by subsequent surgery (partial hepatectomy). The postoperative clinical manifestation of the patient was uneventful. He was discharged on the 16th day after operation and without any complication.

Conclusions

Small cell neuroendocrine carcinoma of the maxillary sinus is very scarce and unfortunately has a poor prognosis. It has potential to cause spontaneous metastatic rupture which can elicit fatal hemorrhage. Emergency surgery is effective, although the long-term outcome is still unsatisfactory.
Utility-based resource allocation in high-speed railway wireless networks
Authors: Xu Shengfeng , Zhu Gang , Shen Chao , Lei Yan , Zhong Zhangdui
Published: April 2014

In this paper, we investigate the utility-based resource allocation problem at a base station in high-speed railway (HSR) wireless networks, jointly taking into account the power allocation along the time and the packet allocation among services. The problem to maximize the total utility under the average power constraint is formulated as a mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem. Through the integer constraint relaxation, the MINLP problem can be simplified into a convex optimization problem. The detailed analysis reveals that the relaxed problem can be equivalently decomposed into power allocation problem along the time and packet allocation problem among services, which can reduce the problem size. When the optimality of the relaxed problem is achieved, the power allocation along the time and the packet allocation along the time for each service are both proportionally fair. Since the integer relaxation causes a non-integer solution not implementable in practice, a greedy algorithm is proposed to obtain a near-optimal integer solution of the MINLP problem. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed by simulations under realistic conditions for HSR wireless networks.
A simplified evaluation system of surface-related lung lesions of pigs for official meat inspection under industrial slaughter conditions in Germany
Authors: Steinmann Thorsten , Blaha Thomas , Meemken Diana
Published: April 2014

Background

European and national administrative legislation require objective evaluation systems for organ lesions at pig slaughter. These results can be used as basis for herd health improvement programs by farmers and their consulting veterinarians. Various studies have shown that the current evaluation and recording of lesions by authorized meat inspectors are not reliable and produce significant inter-rater disagreement especially for lung lesions in pigs. The objectives of this study were to increase the usability of official meat inspection data by a developed and validated scheme and to analyze potential improvements in the reliability of the proposed system under industrialized slaughter conditions.

Results

A simplified evaluation scheme for surface-related lung lesions was developed based on morphometric evaluations of unaffected lungs with quantitative relationships of each lobe to the whole lung (“Rule of Tens”). Furthermore, a theoretical as well as a hands-on training program for meat inspectors was developed and applied. Based on 5,183 lungs, the authors established a baseline of the inter-rater reliability of current routine assessments of lung lesions as documented by meat inspectors compared with the assessments of an independent veterinarian using the developed simplified evaluation scheme. Most frequent inter-rater disagreements greater than 75% were found for moderate pneumonia. Sources of the deviations most frequently included misinterpretations of technical artifacts, which were erroneously assessed by the meat inspectors as pneumonic lung lesions. Results of the post-training investigation based on 4,646 lungs showed a significantly improved reliability of lung lesion evaluation and the inter-rater agreement increased in all respects. Especially the disagreement of recording moderate cases of pneumonia decreased in total to 15% deviations from reference.

Conclusions

The presented simplified lung evaluation scheme showed its capability to standardize the evaluation of lung lesions according to administrative legislation under industrialial slaughter conditions. The reliability of official meat inspections can be significantly increased with the help of the presented scheme to assess surface-related lung lesions of slaughter pigs. Continuous standardization and optimization can be achieved by personalized training programs in the framework of quality assurance systems for meat inspectors.
Immediate versus delayed integrated point-of-care-ultrasonography to manage acute dyspnea in the emergency department
Authors: Pirozzi Concetta , Numis Fabio G , Pagano Antonio , Melillo Paolo , Copetti Roberto , Schiraldi Fernando
Published: April 2014

Background

Dyspnea is one of the most frequent complaints in the Emergency Department. Thoracic ultrasound should help to differentiate cardiogenic from non-cardiogenic causes of dyspnea. We evaluated whether the diagnostic accuracy can be improved by adding a point-of-care-ultrasonography (POC-US) to routine exams and if an early use of this technique produces any advantage.

Methods

One hundred sixty-eight patients were enrolled and randomized in two groups: Group 1 received an immediate POC-US in addition to routine laboratory and instrumental tests; group 2 received an ultrasound scan within 1 h from the admission to the Emergency Department. The concordance between initial and final diagnosis and the percentage of wrong diagnosis in the two groups were evaluated. Mortality, days of hospitalization in Emergency Medicine department and transfers to other wards were compared. Sensitivity and specificity of the routine protocol and the one including ultrasonography for the diagnosis of the causes of dyspnea were also analyzed.

Results

Eighty-eight patients were randomized in group 1 and 80 in group 2. The concordance rate between initial and final diagnoses was significantly different (0.94 in group 1 vs. 0.22 in group 2, p < 0.005). The percentage of wrong initial diagnosis was 5% in group 1 and 50% in group 2 (p < 0.0001).

Conclusions

Adding POC-US to routine exams improves the diagnostic accuracy of dyspnea and reduces errors in the Emergency Department.
Myth: A Partial Least Squares Calibration Model Can Never Be More Precise Than the Reference Method…
Authors: Mortensen Peter Paash
Published: April 2014

The Mythbuster column is always watching out for myths, old or new… In this column we get help from a friend and colleague, Peter Paasch Mortensen, who is an experienced industrial chemometrician. Peter has worked for 15 years at Novozymes (Denmark) and is now with Arla Foods (Denmark).
Associations between first-graders’ maths knowledge and their class-teachers’ profiles of ability beliefs and outcome expectations
Authors: Jõgi Anna-Liisa , Aus Kati , Kikas Eve
Published: April 2014

Õpilaste matemaatikateadmised ja nende areng sõltuvad paljudest individuaalsetest teguritest, aga ka õpetajaga seotud asjaoludest. Matemaatikateadmised algklassides määravad suuresti õpilase edasise edukuse matemaatikaga seotud õppeainetes. Õpetajate võimekususkumused ja tulemusootused mõjutavad seda, millised õpetamismeetodid õpetajad valivad ning kuidas õpilaste motivatsiooni suunavad. Algajate õpetajate võimekususkumusi ja tulemusootusi on mõjutanud muu hulgas nii nende varasemad õppimiskogemused kui ka õpetajakoolitus. Artiklis lähtutakse ideest, et õpetajate uskumusi ja tulemusootusi tuleb käsitleda ühtse süsteemina ning erineva uskumuste profiiliga õpetajad avaldavad õpilastele erinevat mõju.
Uuringus osales 298 esimese klassi õpilast ja nende 15 klassiõpetajat, kes võtsid osa kutseaastaprogrammist. Õpilaste teadmisi testiti esimese klassi sügisel ja kevadel. Õpetajate võimekususkumusi ja tulemusootusi uuriti sügisel. Uuringus osalenud õpetajad olid eelneva, kõiki kahel õppeaastal kutseaastaprogrammis osalenud noori õpetajaid hõlmava latentsete profiilide analüüsi tulemusel jaotatud võimekususkumuste ja tulemusootuste alusel kahte rühma: õpetajad, kes pigem ei usu võimekuse sünnipärasusse ja arvavad, et õpilaste head õpitulemused on tingitud õpetaja tööst (nn optimistlike uskumustega õpetajad), ning õpetajad, kes pigem usuvad võimekuse sünnipärasusse ega pea end õpilaste õpitulemuste eest vastutavaks (nn reserveeritud uskumustega õpetajad).
Töös analüüsisime konfiguraalse sagedusanalüüsi abil, kuidas on õpetajate võimekususkumuste ja tulemusootuste profiil seotud õpilaste teadmiste arenguga. Leidsime, et reserveeritud uskumustega õpetajate õpilaste seas on juhuslikust enam neid, kelle nõrgad teadmised kooliaasta alguses teiste lastega võrreldes aasta jooksul oluliselt ei parane, ning juhuslikust vähem õpilasi, kelle nõrgad teadmised kooliaasta alguses paranevad õppeaasta jooksul oluliselt. Optimistlike uskumustega õpetajate klassides oli juhuslikust vähem õpilasi, kes olid kooliaasta alguses küll heade matemaatikateadmistega, kuid kelle teadmised olid kooliaasta lõpus teistega võrreldes nõrgad. Töö tulemused näitavad noorte õpetajate võimekususkumuste mõju õpilaste teadmiste arengule ning juhivad tähelepanu tulevaste õpetajate võimekususkumuste ja nende mõju teadvustamisele õpetajahariduses.
Summary
Relations of reading skills and motivation with teaching styles in first grade
Authors: Soodla Piret , Kikas Eve
Published: April 2014

Töö eesmärk oli analüüsida, kas ja kuidas erinevad esimese klassi laste lugemisoskus ja motivatsioon lapsekeskse, õpetajakeskse ja laps-domineeriva kasvatusstiiliga õpetajate klassides. Uuringus osalesid 440 õpilast ja nende õpetajad (N = 21). Esimese klassi alguses ja lõpus hinnati laste lugemistehnilisi oskusi ning motivatsiooni (huvi ja tajutud võimekust), klassi lõpus ka loetu mõistmist. Igas klassis vaadeldi kolme õppetundi, klassitegevused kodeeriti vaatlusmõõdiku ECCOM abil (Stipek & Byler, 2005). Vaatlustulemuste alusel jaotati õpetajad lapsekeskse (n = 8), õpetajakeskse (n = 7) ja laps-domineeriva (n = 6) kasvatusstiiliga õpetajateks. Õpetajate lapsekeskne kasvatusstiil seostus positiivselt ning õpetajakeskne ja laps-domineeriv stiil negatiivselt laste lugemisoskuse ja -huviga. Uurimuse tulemused täiendavad varasemaid teadmisi õpetaja tegevuste ja laste oskuste ja motivatsiooni seostest ning neil on praktiline väärtus õpetajakoolituses.
Summary
Psychometric properties of the Polish version of the Body Attitude Test
Authors: Brytek-Matera Anna , Probst Michel
Published: May 2014

Aim of the study

Polish studies have not been focused on measures which assess attitude toward one’s own body. The purpose of the study was to develop the Polish version of the Body Attitude Test (BAT) and examine its reliability.

Subject or material and methods

The study included 48 patients with anorexia nervosa, 39 patients with bulimia nervosa as well as 115 female university students. The mean age was 18.69 years (SD = 3.52) in women with anorexia, 22.28 years (SD = 3.79) in women with bulimia as well as 20.53 years (SD = 1.79) in women without a current eating disorder. The mean duration of illness was 3.31 years (SD = 2.71) in patients with anorexia and 5.10 years (SD = 2.92) in patients with bulimia, respectively.

Results

The BAT demonstrates satisfactory levels of internal reliability (α = .892). The BAT was strongly related with the Eating Disorder Inventory subscales: drive for thinness (r = .687, p < .001), ineffectiveness (r=.643, p<.001) and body dissatisfaction (r=.634, p<.001) and the Self-Esteem Inventory subscale: familial self-esteem (r=-.601, p<.001). Women with eating disorders presented more negative body experience than women without a current eating disorder. In addition, patients with bulimia had more negative appreciation of their body size in comparison with patients with anorexia.

Discussion

The results support the criterion validity of the BAT which is able to differentiate clinical from non-clinical subjects.

Conclusions

The Polish version of the BAT could be used as an appropriate measure assessing subjective attitude towards the body in women with and without eating disorders in Poland.
An International Termite Field Test of Wood Treated with Insecticides in a Buffered Amine Oxide Carrier
Authors: Morris Paul Ian , Grace J. Kenneth , Yoshimura Tsuyoshi , Tsunoda Kunio
Published: April 2014

A buffered amine oxide carrier has shown promise to deeply penetrate dry lumber with insecticides for termite control without using pressure treatment. Pine sapwood from trees attacked by mountain pine beetle (MPB) has increased permeability. In this study, short lengths of heavily blue stained, post-MPB lodgepole pine lumber (Pinus contorta) were treated with the buffered amine oxide carrier to borate levels less than the retentions recommended for protection against attack by the Formosan subterranean termite (average, 0.5% mass/mass boric acid equivalent ), with and without the addition of organic insecticides. Additional samples were pressure treated with alkaline copper quaternary type D carbonate (ACQ-D) and disodium octaborate tetrahydrate (DOT). The boards were installed in field tests in Hawaii and Japan at sites with confirmed populations of Formosan subterranean termites. They were inspected after 2 and 5 years. Dip plus kiln-conditioning treatment with imidacloprid, permethrin plus imidacloprid, and permethrin provided good protection to post-MPB lodgepole pine lumber against termite attack over 5 years in Hawaii and Japan. Dip plus kiln-conditioning treatment with the buffered amine oxide alone provided no protection because of the low loading of borate used as the buffer. Samples that were DOT pressure treated to below the retention required for Formosan termites in American Wood Protection Association standards did not perform as well, possibly as a result of poor heartwood penetration as well as below-standard retentions. Addition of permethrin to DOT pressure treatment improved performance. ACQ pressure-treated samples did not perform as well, with two failures in Hawaii. This was also likely associated with poor penetration in the heartwood because this material was not incised.
The Multiple Faces of Patriarchy: Nawal el-Saadawi’s Two Women in One as a Critique of Muslim Culture
Authors: Nkealah Naomi
Published: April 2014

Nawal el-Saadawi is an internationally acclaimed feminist who has published several works, both fictional and nonfictional, which reflect the extent to which women in Egyptian society are oppressed by patriarchy. Patriarchy by its very nature permeates all levels of society—political, religious, social, and economic—and operates in various spaces, both urban and rural. Because it is essentially a power relation, it remains a major determinant of women’s access to power. Traditional patriarchy has, in both subtle and overt ways, denied women the same privileges it accords men. El-Saadawi’s Two Women in One challenges this status quo by presenting a female character who subverts the system with deliberation and precision. This article is an in-depth analysis of Two Women in One from a feminist perspective that frames transgression as the ultimate means of women’s escape from patriarchy. The analysis looks at the ways in which the female body is exploited to maintain patriarchal power and conversely at how the same body destabilizes male dominance. Power is interpreted as an essentially fluid concept, while transgression is read as crucial to women’s individual and collective emancipation.
Empathetic Engagement in Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying
Authors: Austen Veronica
Published: April 2014

In 2004 while fleeing upheaval in Haiti, 81 year-old Joseph Dantica died while being detained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In seeking temporary asylum, Dantica became subject to regulations that can be assumed to have precipitated his death. This article discusses Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying , a memoir in which Danticat negotiates how best to establish her uncle’s grievability as a subject. Using Judith Butler’s Precarious Life and Frames of War as theoretical touchpoints, this article explores Danticat’s manipulation of narrative form as an interrogation of the efficacy of emotional appeals. In viewing Danticat’s narrative choices as her way to manage sites for empathetic engagement, this article questions the complexities and limits of affective citizenship.
Hunger “Beyond Appetite”: Nurture Dialectics in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Authors: Hichri Asma
Published: April 2014

This paper traces the various manifestations of the hunger/ingestion motif in Beloved and its implications at the psychological and diegetic levels, mapping out the connection between hunger and storytelling as a form of resistance. At a deeper level, however, the novel also evinces how the hunger/ingestion dialectics inform not only African Americans’ emotional and spiritual deprivation but also the diegetic in(di)gestion, disadjustments, and dis(re)memberment of their history and identity. By mapping out the fusion between the intra-diegetic and extradiegetic, this essay ultimately argues that Morrison’s transgressive re-reading/rewriting of the imperial archive of black history and identity essentially requires both “a visceral reliving of [its] trauma[s]” (Young 9) and a parodic o/aural and narratological reinscription of its predatory patterns.
“Nothing in that Other Kingdom”: Fashioning a Return to Africa in Omeros
Authors: Nayak Srila
Published: April 2014

What are we to make of Achille’s imaginary return to Africa in Derek Walcott’s Omeros ? Is it a rejection of Walcott’s earlier theme of postcolonial nostalgia for lost origins? Does it lead to a different conception of postcolonial identity away from notions of new world hybridity and heterogeneity that Walcott had espoused earlier, or is it a complex figuring of racial identity for the Afro-Caribbean subject? My essay answers these questions through a reading of the specific intertextual moments in the poem’s return to Africa passage. The presence of allusions and textual fragments from Virgil’s Aeneid , Homer’s Odyssey , and James Joyce’s Ulysses in this particular passage of Omeros (Book 3) has not received much critical attention so far. Through the use of these modular texts, I argue that Omeros not only transforms the postcolonial genre of a curative return to origins and fashions a distinctive literary landscape but also imagines a postcolonial subjectivity that negotiates the polarity between origins and the absence of origins or a fragmented new world identity.
Postcolonial Trauma in David Bergen’s The Time in Between
Authors: Visvis Vikki
Published: April 2014

Studies of postcolonial trauma investigate Cathy Caruth’s contention that traumatic psychopathology, by virtue of its universality, can bridge cultural difference. David Bergen’s The Time in Between tests this theory in relation to the Vietnam War. Bergen’s novel recognizes trauma as an effective, though limited, vehicle of cultural reconciliation that ultimately needs to be supplemented by further discursive resistance. Although the novel’s treatment of trauma resists Orientalist representations of Vietnam, forms of parallelism point to tacit cultural fissures, which are countered through narrative self-reflexivity and the frustration of what Edward Said terms the “exteriority of representation.”
Phantasms of War and Empire in Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road
Authors: Smethurst Toby , Craps Stef
Published: April 2014

This essay interrogates the nature, limits, and effects of the juxtaposition of Great Britain and Melanesia that takes place in Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995), the final installment of the much-lauded Regeneration trilogy. Published two years before the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, which marked the unofficial end of the British Empire, and four years after the end of the neocolonial charade of the first Gulf War, The Ghost Road brings its readers back to the beginning of the twentieth century, cannily meshing a carefully researched portrayal of the First World War with its protagonist’s dreams and memories of a Melanesian society suffocating under the oppressive weight of colonial law. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s concept of postcolonial melancholia, we read the success of the Booker Prize-winning novel as reflecting a deep-seated anxiety about the downfall of empire(s) that continues to characterize political life in the West. The novel’s strength lies in the way it highlights the insidious workings of class prejudices on the front lines, the complex matrix of sexuality, duty, and friendship that defined relationships between men in the trenches, and the reshuffling of traditional gender roles that the war brought about both at home and abroad. In spite of its merits, however, the transformative and challenging confrontation with the human cost of Britain’s imperial transgressions that The Ghost Road offers is consistently deferred and masked behind its more visible portrayal of the melancholic fantasy of a racially homogenous, tragic, and exclusively Western First World War.
“The Whole Root Is Somewhere in the Music”: Jazz, Soul, and Literary Influence in James Baldwin and Caryl Phillips
Authors: Naughton Gerald David
Published: April 2014

This article discusses the contemporary British Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips and the twentieth-century African-American writer James Baldwin within a comparative framework that speaks to the expanding issue of international (and transnational) American literary influence. Baldwin has frequently been cited by Phillips as a major literary source, but the nature of this influence can be difficult to frame. The article is interdisciplinary in nature and takes its theoretical framework not from narrative theory but from music theory. Issues of creative repetition in black music and rhythmic counterpoint in jazz are suggested as models that can be applied to a relationship of literary influence. The article applies these issues to close readings of Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” (1957) and Phillips’ In the Falling Snow (2009), focusing on the musical structures, themes, and motifs that permeate both texts.
A State of Interdependence: Caryl Phillips and the Postwar World Order
Authors: Brown J. Dillon
Published: April 2014

This essay examines Caryl Phillips’ second novel, A State of Independence , suggesting that it is often left out of critical accounts of Phillips’ career not only because of its formal simplicity, but also and primarily because of its ambivalent representation of the United States. Considering the novel’s critical reception within the broader patterns of postcolonial literary scholarship, the essay argues for a reading of the book that emphasizes its measured evaluation of U.S. influence in the post-independence landscape. In doing so, it ties the novel’s concerns directly to Phillips’ later work and career while proposing that his entire oeuvre can be seen to suggest a mode of critique far more attuned to the affective, political, and economic nuances of global U.S. power than is normally encouraged by postcolonial critical paradigms.
Literary Cosmopolitanisms in Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief and Open City
Authors: Hallemeier Katherine
Published: April 2014

Abstract: This paper examines cosmopolitanism in Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief (2007) and Open City (2011). The protagonists of both texts maintain cosmopolitan identities largely by embracing an international literary culture in which elite cosmopolitan fiction relays the experiences of marginalized cosmopolitan subjects such as migrant workers and refugees. The texts, however, suggest the parochialism of the protagonists’ cosmopolitan sensibilities by introducing characters who possess creative resilience and language skills that the protagonists lack. Cole’s texts thus foreground the limits of a literary cosmopolitanism that privileges Anglophone fiction published in New York and London and gesture toward alternative literary cosmopolitanisms notable for their linguistic and geographical diversity, if not their glamour. Although Farouq and the “yahoo boys” aspire to membership in an elite cosmopolitan culture, their lives are non-spectacular and relatively immobile. Cole’s texts value a cosmopolitan literariness that neither hails from the intellectual cosmopolitan elite nor takes the dispossessed cosmopolitan migrant for its subject.
Resistance, Oil, and Awakening: Textual Responses to the Butler Strike and Its Aftermath
Authors: Walonen Mike
Published: April 2014

The 1937 Trinidad oil field labor uprising, commonly known as the Butler Strike, has come to be seen as a watershed moment in the nation’s history by the various poets and prose writers, indigenous and exogenous, who have sought to represent and define Trinidad as a place. Collectively, they present a broad conceptual range of Uriah Butlers (the strike’s leader or figurehead), as well as the events associated with his name. Their individual articulations of the Butler strike are conditioned by their overriding aesthetic projects, genres of choice, political ideologies, and subject positions. This paper argues that while there is no definitive textual Butler Strike, the ways that the strike and its major players are represented keenly evince authors’ ideas regarding Trinidad’s emerging postcolonial identity, Négritude /black power, and the confluences of class, racial, and anti-colonial struggle. From C.L.R. James’ would-be proletariat hero hampered by religious zealotry to Eric Roach’s Toussaint l’Ouverture manqué and V.S. Naipaul’s racial fanatic adrift in large historical currents he cannot successfully navigate or comprehend, Butler and the struggle he embodies are enduring subjects through which authors seek to comprehend in historical and cultural terms the complexities and contradictions of late colonial and early postcolonial Trinidad.
Ex Utero: Live Human Fetal Research and the Films of Davenport Hooker
Authors: Wilson Emily K.
Published: April 2014

Between 1932 and 1963 University of Pittsburgh anatomist Davenport Hooker, Ph.D., performed and filmed noninvasive studies of reflexive movement on more than 150 surgically aborted human fetuses. The resulting imagery and information would contribute substantially to new visual and biomedical conceptions of fetuses as baby-like, autonomous human entities that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Hooker’s methods, though broadly conforming to contemporary research practices and views of fetuses, would not have been feasible later. But while Hooker and the 1930s medical and general public viewed live fetuses as acceptable materials for nontherapeutic research, they also shared a regard for fetuses as developing humans with some degree of social value. Hooker’s research and the various reactions to his work demonstrate the varied and changing perspectives on fetuses and fetal experimentation, and the influence those views can have on biomedical research.
“Patient Zero”: The Absence of a Patient’s View of the Early North American AIDS Epidemic
Authors: McKay Richard A.
Published: April 2014

This article contextualizes the production and reception of And the Band Played On , Randy Shilts’s popular history of the initial recognition of the American AIDS epidemic. Published over twenty-five years ago, the book and its most notorious character, “Patient Zero,” are in particular need of a critical historical treatment. The article presents a more balanced consideration—a “patient’s view”—of Gaétan Dugas’s experience of the early years of AIDS. I oppose the assertion that Dugas, the so-called Patient Zero, ignored incontrovertible information about the condition and was intent on spreading his infection. Instead I argue that scientific ideas in 1982 and 1983 about AIDS and the transmissibility of a causative agent were later portrayed to be more self-evident than they were at the time. The article also traces how Shilts’s highly selective—and highly readable—characterization of Dugas rapidly became embedded in discussions about the need to criminalize the reckless transmission of HIV.
The Fielding H. Garrison Lecture: The Aesthetic Grounding of Modern Medicine
Authors: Warner John Harley
Published: April 2014

This article focuses on visual choices that American physicians made in representing their profession, their work, and themselves during the decades when modern medical culture was set in place, the 1880s through the 1940s. Historians have emphasized the role that image played in the formation of modern medicine, but the visual images they have explored in connection to this process have tended to take a reductionist aesthetic identified with experimental laboratory science as emblematic of medical modernity. Explored here instead are several counterexamples—genres of self-representation in which medical students and physicians did not seek to link their identity with the laboratory and in some ways distanced themselves from the image and ideals of experimental science. The cultivation of these images invites us to see the cultural grounding of modern medicine as vastly more complex than a story scripted around the biomedical embrace of a stripped down, reductionist aesthetic.
Metaphors and Images of Cancer in Early Modern Europe
Authors: Stolberg Michael
Published: April 2014

Drawing on learned medical writing about cancer and on nonmedical texts that used cancer as a metaphor for hateful cultural, social, religious, or political phenomena that warranted drastic measures, this article traces the metaphors and images that framed the perception and experience of cancer in the early modern period. It finds that cancer was closely associated with notions of impurity and a visible destruction of the body’s surface and was diagnosed primarily in women, as breast and uterine cancer. Putrid, corrosive cancerous humor was thought not only to accumulate and eat its way into the surrounding flesh but also to spread, like the seeds of a plant, “infecting” the whole body. This infectious quality, the putrid secretions, and the often horrendous smell emanating from cancer victims raised fears, in turn, of contagion and were taken to justify a separation of cancer patients from the rest of society.
Cargo, “Infection,” and the Logic of Quarantine in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Barnes David S.
Published: April 2014

In the nineteenth century, maritime quarantine officials often paid more attention to ships’ cargo than they did to the health of passengers or crew members. Based on a close reading of the everyday practice of quarantine at Philadelphia’s Lazaretto (1801–1895), this article suggests that the historical significance of quarantine has been distorted by its association with the etiological debate over contagion and with xenophobic responses to immigration. In fact, the practice of quarantine rested neither on contagionist medical doctrine nor on nativism. Rather, it was based on the danger of infection , an elusive but fundamental concept in nineteenth-century public health. The concern about cargo rather than people—and the logic of infection it reflects—bespeak a widely shared set of perceptions of illness and public health in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century that is not captured by discussions of contagion or of anti-immigrant bias.
Exercises in Therapy—Neurological Gymnastics between Kurort and Hospital Medicine, 1880–1945
Authors: Guenther Katja
Published: April 2014

This article focuses on the convergence of sports and medicine in the practice of neurological gymnastics (Übungstherapie) in the German-speaking world at the turn of the twentieth century. It shows how Übungstherapie first found receptive ground within the peripheral medical space of the spa town ( Kurort ). Übungstherapie appealed to Kurort patients because, as a form of neurological gymnastics, it drew on the cultural capital of the broader German gymnastics movement. Only later did Übungstherapie find a place in more mainstream medicine, recasting itself as an integral part of neurological practice. Recuperating the therapeutic aspects of neurology, this article suggests that the development of Übungstherapie contributed to the formation of neurology as an independent specialty, distinct from psychiatry and internal medicine. It thus demonstrates the importance of expanding the scope of historical study beyond the traditional boundaries of the mainstream in order to understand clinical, institutional, and disciplinary change.
Philosophical Barnacles and Empiricist Dogs: Knowing Animals in Modernist Literature and Science
Authors: Hovanec Caroline
Published: April 2014

In the early twentieth century, both literature and science writing began experimenting with animal perspectives, imagining how creatures radically different from us would perceive and understand the world. This technique reflected a contemporary interest in animal minds, but it also led scientists to question their own epistemological assumptions and gave writers an opportunity to develop an aesthetics of defamiliarization. This essay examines works by C. Lloyd Morgan, J. B. S. Haldane, and Virginia Woolf, arguing that they use the technique of animal perspectives and the trope of the philosophizing animal to reflect on how we as humans know the world and the other animals within it. Their writings presage the methods and questions guiding cognitive ethologists today.
Standardized Spaces: Satellite Imagery in the Age of Big Data
Authors: Brannon Monica M.
Published: April 2014

This essay traces the history of perspectival seeing, explaining the normalization of the “view from above” as a historical production of visuality in the post–cold war period, as it has merged with contemporary data renderings to present images as seemingly real representations of space. In explaining how satellite images are produced through the measurement of radiation emitted from the surface, data that are then rendered to mimic an aerial photo, the essay looks at how satellite images are visual enumerations. It argues that the scaling effect, alongside the mathematical measurement of the earth’s surface through remote sensing, produces a quantified space that replaces difference and heterogeneity to produce standardizations that hold authority over subjective experience of places. This contributes to the increasing “datafication” of social practice that fixes action in a rational grid in the contemporary era and contributes to the emergence of a new visual logic.
Beyond the Uncanny Valley: Masahiro Mori and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Authors: Rhee Jennifer
Published: April 2014

This essay examines Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori’s influential theory of the uncanny valley, which holds that humans are attracted to robots that bear some resemblance to humans, and are repelled by robots that resemble humans too much, experiencing these all-too-human robots as eerie and uncanny. It argues that, in ignoring time and lived experience, the uncanny valley inscribes exclusionary boundaries around the human that are presented as inherent. The essay places Mori’s theory into conversation with Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and what it identifies as the novel’s ontology of entanglement between human and nonhuman. From this conversation it suggests that rather than wielding Mori’s uncanny valley to uncritically replicate and reify our biases about the human, the uncanny valley can be viewed as a site that renders visible these boundaries and normative conceptions so that we might expand our visions of the human beyond them, while examining the histories by which these boundaries emerge.
Air Conditioning Jahangir: The 1622 English Great Design, Climate, and the Nature of Global Projects
Authors: Keller Vera
Published: April 2014

An exploration of an unfulfilled 1622 English global project offers an anthropology of early modern global economic thought. The design included the air conditioning of the Mughal court, piracy, and a submarine treasure-hunting industry. A seemingly Orientalist or colonial attempt to Anglicize India, the design, in fact, aimed to globalize England by drawing on new views concerning the malleability of climate. Later colonialism cannot explain the culture of early seventeenth-century projecting in general and great designs in particular. However, the latter shaped relations of knowledge and power, which continued to operate in later Orientalism and colonialism.