bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Praying to be Killed at Once
Authors: Uehling Greta Lynn
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses how Ukraine, in addition to being divided by a political line of demarcation, was characterized by different ways of coping with the military violence emotionally. The chapter considers how individuals concerned about the desensitization to violence made it their work to care for the individuals who seemed to have stopped caring for themselves. It also points out the other way of emotionally being in this world that rejected “working through” or “getting beyond” trauma. The chapter explores the descent into everyday war that sometimes meant choosing to die with one's children rather than be evacuated or praying to be killed at once rather than being maimed or having to suffer. It develops the theme of care by attending to the people who were troubled by the normalization of violence.
The Volunteer Body Collectors of Ukraine
Authors: Uehling Greta Lynn
Published: May 2023

The chapter follows the Black Tulips, a group of volunteer body collectors, noting the group's strict neutrality that enabled them to operationalize everyday peace with the separatists face-to-face. Body collection was only half the equation, while the other half was supplying life-saving medicines for children by smuggling insulin into the noncontrolled territory in the very same trucks bringing bodies out. The chapter describes the flow of insulin to, and bodies from, the separatist-controlled territories, which illuminates the dialectic between violent conflict and ethics of care. The chapter considers the Black Tulips' work and argues they exemplify the recalibration of personal values and priorities that was occurring as a result of war. It emphasizes how adversity in combination with the state's inattention to people elicited ethically motivated caring.
Balkan Decisions
Authors: Marantzidis Nikos
Published: May 2023

This chapter assesses how the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) leadership tried to navigate the uncertain postwar terrain of international politics, and reevaluates the transnational origins of the Greek Civil War. In May of 1945, when the KKE's secretary-general, Nikos Zachariadis, returned to Athens from imprisonment at the Dachau concentration camp, a new era began for the Greek party. Having had no involvement in the Communist-led uprising of December 1944, Zachariadis, together with Communist leaders in Belgrade and Sofia, began to draw up revolutionary strategies under Moscow's careful supervision. The civil war that began again in 1946 basically as a KKE initiative was possible only because of this international Communist alignment and the prospect of decisive foreign support. The party leadership moved its headquarters to Belgrade and throughout the civil conflict worked closely with its sister parties in the Balkans and in Eastern Europe.
James’s Human Bibelots
Authors: Pfeifer Annie
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses how the practice and politics of possession are manifested in Henry James's thematic preoccupation with collecting and remain at the forefront of his critical concerns as a writer. Indeed, the lens of collecting provides a new perspective on the agency, motivations, and relationships of James's strongest characters. James cultivated an intense, lifelong interest in collecting and its institutions, authoring many pieces on visual art, galleries, and museums. Yet, he refused the label of collector. For James, all three manifestations of collecting are tied to spoils: the victor's “triumphal procession” of “cultural treasures” that gives The Spoils of Poynton (1897) its name; the objectification of characters into collectible objects as a form of human spoils; and the modernist, artistic notion of collecting that appropriates and transforms its object in an unorthodox way. The chapter then uses the material collections in The Spoils of Poynton as a lens for exploring James's larger anxieties about possession, with all its uncanny applications to the human world.
The Collector in a Collectivist State
Authors: Pfeifer Annie
Published: May 2023

This chapter assesses—through the lens of Walter Benjamin's Russian toy collection—the contradiction within collecting between preservation and transformation, locating a distinct tension between his theory of collecting as a historical practice of conservation and his modernist appreciation for the object as singular, artistic, and transformative. Benjamin's toy collection is critical to understanding the composition and methodology of The Arcades Project (1982). Both are constitutive of a patchwork modernist aesthetic that values fragments, curiosities, and spoils. The toy collection also enables one to rethink Benjamin's famous concept of aura as a transformational, historically contingent notion. Toys are transitional objects whose aura is always already in flux. Reading the Moscow Diary (1980) alongside The Arcades Project allows one to see more clearly the way Benjamin redefines collecting with all of its revolutionary artistic and political possibilities.
Einstein’s “Critical Dictionary”
Authors: Pfeifer Annie
Published: May 2023

This chapter demonstrates Carl Einstein's centrality to the founding of the “Critical Dictionary,” the section at the end of each issue of Documents, the surrealist journal Einstein co-founded with Georges Bataille. The “Critical Dictionary” attempted to rewrite language by collecting words and transforming their meaning. In spite of Documents' putatively documentary ambitions, the Dictionary is a paradigmatic modernist collection that aims to decontextualize words in order to reinvest them with new semantic significance. A close reading of “Nightingale,” Einstein's Dictionary entry, exposes the limitations of this project. By paraphrasing Einstein's earlier work, “Nightingale” performatively highlights the failures of literary language to achieve innovation even in a medium designed to transform it. As the chapter concludes, paraphrasing is an endlessly iterative form of textual collecting that eschews any notion of originality. For an author, the recycling of one's own ideas is both a way of archiving oneself as well as an illustration of the limitations of language.
Paradox
Authors: Dalarun Jacques
Published: May 2023

This chapter addresses how Christianity was the dominant religion of the West and of the Byzantine East. The Christian religion was institutionalized as a church and governed by an established body: the clergy. During the medieval millennium, the church and its clergy were simultaneously the most important landholders, the main possessors of written culture, and (from the clergy's point of view) the essential mediators of the sacred. Medieval Christianity, endowed with a particularly efficient ideological apparatus, thus had all the features of a dominant ideology. And yet, it faced a serious challenge. The teaching and legitimacy of Christianity rested on a body of texts held to be the expression of divine revelation. The chapter then looks at Christian exegesis and the Gospels.
Benedictine Beginnings
Authors: Dalarun Jacques
Published: May 2023

This chapter describes how the Rule of St. Benedict enjoyed unrivaled prestige in the West throughout the Middle Ages. Charlemagne's son Louis the Pious, with the help of Benedict of Aniane, insisted that all monasteries in the empire adopt it in 817. From this moment on, every form of regular religious life in the West expressed itself in relation to Benedict's Rule. Not having been able to implement her own rule during her lifetime, Clare of Assisi assumed the direction and government of the sisters of San Damiano as a Benedictine abbess. Cardinal Hugolino's Constitutions, followed by Clare's community in Assisi, were really just specific arrangements to clarify the application of the normative text par excellence that regulated the life of the sisters: the Rule of St. Benedict. In its infinite wisdom, the Benedictine Rule envisions the possibility of an unworthy superior who is elected by the community because he shares its evil ways. In that event, it would fall to the local bishop and the neighboring abbots and Christians to depose him and replace him with “a worthy steward.”
Preachers
Authors: Dalarun Jacques
Published: May 2023

This chapter reflects on the Order of Preaching Brothers (better known as the Dominicans). The clerical preachers were well aware of the tribulations roiling Stephen of Muret's foundation, and they explicitly referred to them as a deplorable example to be avoided. Dominic, the Castilian canon, certainly knew the Rule of Grandmont. Was it under its influence that he conceived the idea of entrusting the order's administration to the converts? One should note how closely the formulation of Dominic's desire echoes the Rule of Grandmont's chapter 54, “On the Treatment of Clerics and Converts.” In both cases, preference is given to the converts for the administration and representation of temporal affairs, and this step is understood as relieving the clerics of a burden. In other respects, the legislation of the preachers rises as a splendid institutional edifice, the most impressive of any such legislation left by the Middle Ages in terms of democracy and representation. But it was built to the disadvantage of the simple and in direct opposition to what could have been the cutting edge of Dominic's project: a government based on service, rooted in a complementarity of vocations.
Lesser Brothers I: Writings by and about Francis
Authors: Dalarun Jacques
Published: May 2023

This chapter reviews the Franciscan dossier, in which no single source directly addresses the question of inverted obedience. Francis was born in the city of Assisi around 1181. Around 1206, he converted to the call of the Gospel, and two years later companions began to join him. In 1209, the little group received Innocent III's oral approval for its embryonic form of life. The brotherhood grew and took the name of “Minors” (“Lesser” Brothers). The chapter then looks at the Regula non bullata, a rule drafted in 1221 but did not receive pontifical approval. In carrying out the work of legislation, the Poverello (as Francis came to be known) returned, inevitably, to the model of monastic community life, with touches resembling the Benedictine tradition. Like the congregation of Grandmont and the Order of Preachers, the community of Lesser Brothers did not burden itself with the question of women.
Lesser Brothers II: Chronicles
Authors: Dalarun Jacques
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses how, in the Chronicle he dictated to Brother Baldwin of Brandenburg in 1262, Jordan of Giano recounted the arrival of the Lesser Brothers in Germany. Brother Jordan, originally from Umbria, was already a cleric when he set off—reluctantly—for this distant land in 1221. In 1223, he was promoted to the priesthood. He was generally careful to note the status of the brothers mentioned in his Chronicle. The chapter then examines this Chronicle, in order to clarify three main points: the composition of the teams of brothers working in Germany; the possibilities for internal mobility from one status to another; and the promotion to positions of responsibility in the order as a function of personal status.
Lesser Brothers III: About Face
Authors: Dalarun Jacques
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the conflict that Jordan of Giano and Thomas of Eccleston allow to simmer just beneath the surface of their texts and that Salimbene of Adam then angrily exposes. What exactly was Brother Elias's attitude during his generalship? If one takes at face value Salimbene of Adam's most explicit accusations, one might wonder whether Elias gave in to a temptation similar to the one Dominic flirted with for the Order of Preachers: entrusting the administration of the Order of Lesser Brothers to the lay brothers, on the model of Grandmont, which was well known to them at the time. The chapter argues that Elias sought to maintain the status quo just as it had been established in Francis's day, but this was enough to cause discontent, indeed scandal, because the world had changed around the order, and the order, inevitably, had changed with it. The status quo was that priests were not to claim that their priesthood exempted them from domestic chores, dishwashing and cooking, within the community; that brothers of any status could be promoted to any kind of office; that all were allowed to participate in general chapters.
Pastorate
Authors: Dalarun Jacques
Published: May 2023

This chapter assesses Michel Foucault's sixth lecture, on February 15, 1978, which mark a pause in the course's trajectory. Foucault felt obliged to confront objections that have been raised, and that he has probably also raised to himself, in order to demonstrate that “the shepherd–flock relationship was not a good political model for the Greeks.” While acknowledging that this theme was present in Homeric literature and in the Pythagorean tradition, he notes its extreme rarity in classical political vocabulary, with one major exception: Plato. Closely analyzing the text of The Statesman, Foucault shows that although Plato does raise the theme of the pastor as a figure for the king or magistrate, it is only in order to dismiss it, preferring the model of the weaver to that of the shepherd. The pastorate can be applied to the lesser activities of physicians, farmers, masters of gymnastics, and teachers, but “the royal art of prescribing cannot be defined on the basis of the pastorate.” Foucault then focuses on the subject of the Hebrews and Christianity.
Bonds
Authors: Dalarun Jacques
Published: May 2023

This chapter places the Spoleto note in its historical context, looking at the parallel between two systems: feudal and religious. In the feudal system, one swears, in the latter, one promises—on one hand fealty, on the other obedience—and both sets of values are much older than either feudalism or the new orders. Yet entrance into vassalage and entrance into religion both create a hierarchical link and at the same time a society of equals united by reciprocal exchange. This also creates the conditions of “governmentality.” In the secular realm, just as in the church, the usage—in fact, the diversion—of interpersonal ties allowed the construction of an institution that integrated and ultimately transcended them. The change of heart of the Spoleto note carries the echoes of these bonds as well.
Domestic Work and Exchange in Early Contact
Authors: Kane Maeve
Published: May 2023

This chapter chronicles the arrival of a Ganounata woman in Seneca country, arguing that it was made possible by a long history of extensive Haudenosaunee trade and signaled impending changes to that trade. The chapter emphasizes that the arrival of the woman was also part of larger regional and global changes that would eventually bring more people and things from far beyond North America to Haudenosaunee territory. The Ganounata woman's arrival and adoption were probably not regarded as unusual by her Haudenosaunee family. The Ganounata woman entered Seneca country during a time of increasing women's travel between the Five Nations. The chapter underlines that this reflected a period of peace and stability between Haudenosaunee communities and security from outside incursions that made women's travel for trade safer. It stresses that the Ganounata woman's presence in Seneca territory was part of a global process that would bring her daughters, nieces, and granddaughters a wide variety of imported textiles from around the world that they would use to create a uniquely Haudenosaunee identity. The chapter looks at how the Ganounata woman's experience of adaptation and adoption mirrored the adoption of goods and people in Haudenosaunee territory during the first several decades of Haudenosaunee indirect contact with “saltwater” people of the Atlantic World.
Women’s Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Mid-Eighteenth Century
Authors: Kane Maeve
Published: May 2023

This chapter tracks the journey of a Kahnawà:ke Mohawk woman in Montreal and Kahnawà:ke who deposited beaver pelts with her business partner, the French Canadian Marie-Magdalene Desauniers, who ran a discreet and illegal business. In the early part of the eighteenth century, her journey was common, if nominally illegal under the laws of New France and New York, and facilitated by women's daily cross-cultural connections. The chapter underlines that the Mohawk woman and other Mohawk traders continued to make these journeys because French and English law did not apply to them. French and English law especially did not apply in moving through Haudenosaunee territories, and traders depended on connections with Haudenosaunee traders. As the chapter shows, many of these connections were made within the mixed religious communities that both British and French officials hoped would convert Haudenosaunee individuals and secure Haudenosaunee nations as allies in the contest for control of the North American continent. The chapter concludes by noting that the intercolonial trade fit into a far older and broader tradition of wide-ranging movement. It then analyzes how Haudenosaunee women used their connections to European women to build beneficial ties to settler colonial communities without inviting settler colonial control of their communities.
Erasure and Violence against Women in the American Revolution
Authors: Kane Maeve
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses the relations between Haudenosaunee and newly declared American neighbors since the early days of the American Revolution. It recounts the attacks against Haudenosaunee women's property, and examines how it signaled a shift in perceptions of Haudenosaunee women by their American neighbors that would eventually lead to attacks against Haudenosaunee women's bodies as well. The very consumer similarity that had tied together British and Haudenosaunee communities in the years leading to the Revolution made Haudenosaunee women and their property targets for political violence during the Revolution. As the chapter stresses, this was part of American efforts to establish the new nation's political legitimacy by attempting to deny the political legitimacy of neutral and British-allied Indigenous nations. Recalling the years after the raid on Konwatsi'tsiaenni Molly Brant's home, the chapter chronicles how American diplomats were forced to acknowledge their need for Haudenosaunee assistance in negotiating with the Western Confederacy in the Ohio Valley after the close of the Revolution. In order to make Haudenosaunee diplomats politically legible on American terms to facilitate both western Indian diplomacy and land sales in western New York, the chapter emphasizes that American diplomats refused to acknowledge even the presence of Haudenosaunee women. The chapter underlines how American diplomats attempted to erase the role of women in Haudenosaunee governance after political violence during the Revolution failed to do so.
Caroline Parker and Making a Modern Traditionality
Authors: Kane Maeve
Published: May 2023

This chapter turns to discuss the hesitations of Gähahno Caroline Parker about perceptions of the Haudenosaunee in the wider American consciousness. Parker was college educated, an advocate against western removal and allotment but in favor of mission education. She enrolled at the Albany Normal School, an institution chartered in part for the purpose of erasing Haudenosaunee traditionality. The chapter begins by narrating how her family's Indigenous identity endured despite nearly a century of American efforts to subsume Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous groups as citizens. It discusses her ambivalence about the view of Indigenous people that white anthropologists constructed for the wider American public. It also elaborates on how white Americans projected a shifting set of anxieties about commercial culture, women's labor, and civility onto Indigenous people as the bar for the political legitimacy of Indigenous nations. The chapter underlines that Americans in the early nineteenth century attempted to recreate an imagined and imaginary “Age of Homespun” on reservations even as the broader American economy moved ever further from that fantasy of republican simplicity. By forcibly enacting this imagined age of homespun on reservations, the chapter reveals how white American missionaries and government officials were able to justify the exclusion of Indigenous nations from political legitimacy and assuage their own industrial anxieties.
Epilogue
Authors: Kane Maeve
Published: May 2023

This chapter points out that Caroline Parker was widely recognized as an important figure in the Seneca and Tuscarora fight against removal, individual allotment, and land sales. It recounts her explicit political work of opposing land loss, removal, and the division of reservation lands that were so well known within her lifetime. The chapter then investigates the real tensions that Indigenous people in the nineteenth century navigated even—or especially—with friendly white anthropologists. It argues that Parker's joke to her friend Lewis Henry Morgan encapsulated her relation to what would become academic anthropology and the lens through which white Americans viewed even seemingly converted and assimilated Haudenosaunee families like the Parkers. It also emphasizes that the political significance of women's domestic and labor choices is often erased in the historical record. Parker's construction of Haudenosaunee material identity was made at a time when their very existence as both Indigenous nations and as Indigenous people was under attack as either too savage or irrelevant in the face of inevitable assimilation. As the chapter stresses, the garments she made were a statement of both Haudenosaunee separatism and equality with the surrounding white population.
Introduction Social Outsourcing and Inequality
Authors: McCarthy Gerard
Published: May 2023

This introductory chapter provides an overview of social outsourcing and inequality in Myanmar. Following successive socialist (1962–1988) and capitalist (1988–2010) dictatorships, an election in 2010 boycotted by the democratic opposition led to the formation of a reformist government in 2011. Despite elected officials having some scope to make policy change, there was little attempt to expand government commitment to socioeconomic justice and development through any constitutional amendments or major policy reforms. Instead, many political leaders and grassroots activists encouraged and supported diverse non-state actors to fill gaps in social welfare and public goods provision. Informed by the experience of Myanmar, the chapter explains how the book argues that social outsourcing can deliver aid to the needy, but it comes with short-term and long-run trade-offs—including regressive outcomes for the poor and the erosion of popular faith in the state as an agent of social justice and development.
Distributive Politics Since Colonization
Authors: McCarthy Gerard
Published: May 2023

This chapter presents a genealogy of distributive politics in Burma, examining four institutional inheritances that markedly shaped the postindependence welfare regime. These include an elite and popular Burmese Buddhist consensus that unregulated capitalism threatens the welfare of ordinary people; the ethnic and ideological fragmentation of state elites, especially within the military; an economy based largely on raw agricultural commodity export; and a weak state apparatus of coercion and taxation, particularly in the upland periphery. The chapter traces these competing priorities from their origins in the colonial period through to the dissolution of socialist dictatorship in 1988. It then looks at how the post-socialist junta abandoned a direct role in welfare provision after 1988 while using market reform to expand state coercive control in the upland periphery. The chapter concludes by noting a major gap in existing narratives about the 1990s and 2000s: how post-socialist junta officials dramatically reconfigured Myanmar's welfare regime by outsourcing state social functions to market and community actors after 1988.
Post-Socialist Welfare Outsourcing
Authors: McCarthy Gerard
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses how the post-socialist junta officials shifted social obligations and functions to non-state actors throughout the 1990s and 2000s by coupling commercial and tax incentives with Buddhist propaganda and selective encouragement of civil society. As activists and religious authorities framed the provision of materially limited aid to the needy as expressions of Buddhist obligation, potentially mundane social contributions began to accrue metaphysical and civic meaning as acts of meritorious charity (dana) that helped sustain a democratic ideal. The notion of “community” popularized during the 1990s and 2000s was thus not limited solely to the ward, village, or even township. Rather, the parameter of social obligation enacted by welfare groups often transcended these local networks and practices of redistribution, most notably in the wake of disasters. Ultimately, these welfare groups and practices helped sustain democratic ideals and resistance efforts amid dictatorship during the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC)/State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) junta.
Philanthropy and Wealth Defense
Authors: McCarthy Gerard
Published: May 2023

This chapter assesses the evolution of philanthropic networks and practices of one of Myanmar's most prominent tycoons throughout the decade of partial civilian rule. The structural dominance granted to tycoons by public philanthropy, and the impediments their influence presents to state-led social action, help to explain why outsourcing social functions to private and non-state actors continues across successive regimes. The chapter begins by focusing on Khin Maung Aye, the founder and chairman of KMA Group of Companies, tracing his rise as a military-linked businessman and subsequent metamorphosis into a patron of Myanmar's leading democratic party. It examines broadly the role played by tycoons as creditors, employers, and philanthropists in the post-socialist period and specifically how one tycoon adapted these levers of influence during partial civilian rule to defend his wealth from demands of redistribution and to expand his commercial empire. Focusing on the contingent legitimacy generated by elite provision of public goods, the chapter concludes that when tycoons become crucial to the public goods and collective identities, the welfare regimes that emerge tend to ensure that wealth trickles up to the already affluent, while the working poor are ensnared in debt and precarity.
Beyond Care Robots
Authors: Wright James
Published: May 2023

This chapter reflects on what care robots mean for the future of care and welfare in Japan and beyond. The symbolism of robots in Japanese society helps explain why the development and implementation of care robots became such a significant project for the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) and the Cabinet Office, which have presented them as a way to reclaim the future and revitalize an enervated Japan by recapturing a sense of the forward momentum of history, recovering a national identity rooted in technological modernity. Nursing care homes serve as a focal point of concern around perceived national entropy. The chapter then considers how the use of robots impacted the care home and its multiple temporalities. Although the robots in theory were designed for the discrete tasks of lifting, communication, and recreation, in actual use they intruded on overlapping areas of care and social life. The question then is how governments can maintain or improve quality of life by harmonizing productive and reproductive labor, providing sufficiently rewarding jobs to care workers, and supporting formal and informal caring practices, processes, and institutions that can sustain the well-being of aging populations.
A space and time efficient convolutional neural network for age group estimation from facial images
Authors: Alsaleh Ahmad , Perkgoz Cahit
Published: May 2023

Background

Age estimation has a wide range of applications, including security and surveillance, human-computer interaction, and biometrics. Facial aging is a stochastic process affected by various factors, such as lifestyle, habits, genetics, and the environment. Extracting age-related facial features to predict ages or age groups is a challenging problem that has attracted the attention of researchers in recent years. Various methods have been developed to solve the problem, including classification, regression-based methods, and soft computing approaches. Among these, the most successful results have been obtained by using neural network based artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as convolutional neural networks (CNN). In particular, deep learning approaches have achieved improved accuracies by automatically extracting features from images of the human face. However, more improvements are still needed to achieve faster and more accurate results.

Methods

To address the aforementioned issues, this article proposes a space and time-efficient CNN method to extract distinct facial features from face images and classify them according to age group. The performance loss associated with using a small number of parameters to extract high-level features is compensated for by including a sufficient number of convolution layers. Additionally, we design and test suitable CNN structures that can handle smaller image sizes to assess the impact of size reduction on performance.

Results

To validate the proposed CNN method, we conducted experiments on the UTKFace and Facial-age datasets. The results demonstrated that the model outperformed recent studies in terms of classification accuracy and achieved an overall weighted F1-score of 87.84% for age-group classification problem.
Valence moderates the effect of stimulus-hand proximity on conflict processing and gaze-cueing
Authors: Hoffmann Sven , Fischer Rico , Liepelt Roman
Published: May 2023

An effective interaction with the environment requires adaptation of one’s own behaviour to environmental demands. We do so by using cues from our environment and relating these cues to our body to predict the outcomes of events. The recent literature on embodied cognition suggests that task-relevant stimuli, presented near the hands, receive more attentional capacity and are processed differently than stimuli, presented spatially more distant to our body. It has also been proposed that near-hand processing is beneficial to conflict resolution. In the current study, we tested the assumption of an attentional bias towards the near hand space in the context of our previous work by combining a cueing paradigm (allocation of visual attention) with a conflict processing paradigm (Simon task) in the nearvsfar hand space. In addition, the relevance of processing was manipulated by using affective (angryvsneutral smileys) gaze cues (i.e., varying the valence of the cues). Our results indicate that (a) the interaction of valence × cue congruency × hand proximity was significant, indicating that the cueing effect was larger for negative valence in the proximal condition. (b) The interaction of valence × Simon compatibility × stimulus-hand proximity interaction was significant, indicating that for negative valence processing, the Simon effect was smaller in the proximal than in the distal stimulus-hand condition. This effect was at least numerically but not significantly reversed in the neutral valence condition. (c) Overall, cue congruency, indicating the correctvsincorrect attention allocation to the target stimulus onset, did not reveal any effect on Simon compatibility × stimulus-hand proximity. Our results suggest that valence, the allocation of attention, and conflict, seem to be decisive factors determining the direction and strength of hand proximity effects.
A Study of Morphological Variations of Carotid Bifurcation and Branching Pattern of External Carotid Artery in Adult Nigerian Cadavers
Authors: Gwunireama I. U. , Bob-Manuel I. F. , Collins G. U.
Published: May 2023

Background: Understanding the morphological differences in the branching  pattern of carotid vessels has played a significant role in successful surgical operations around the neck region. This study aimed at evaluating the morphological variants of the external carotid artery (ECA) in relation to its carotid bifurcation (CB) and its  branches.
Methods: After obtaining twenty-five (25) hemi-necks and later dissected, 25 ECAs were examined (13 right and 12 left). The patterning of the superficial branches and CB from common carotid artery were photographed and later analyzed in terms of variations of origin.
Results: CB appeared as V-shaped in 24 cases (96%). Superior thyroid artery (STA) originated majorly from both the ECA (40.91%) and from the CB (36.36%).  The percentage distributions of occurrence of arterial branch origins from ECA in both hemi-neck sides are as follows; ascending pharyngeal (85.71%), lingual (84%), facial (88%) and occipital (95%).
Conclusion: In adult Nigerian cadavers, the V-shaped carotid bifurcation pattern is more common and the CB was more prevalent at the level of the upper border of thyroid cartilage. Higher numbers of origins were observed more in STA compared to other superficial branches of ECA.
Serum Ferritin – The Role of Birthweight: A Comparative Study
Authors: Asinobi Isaac Nwabueze
Published: May 2023

Aims: To determine the serum ferritin levels amongst low birth weight neonates and to correlate it with different categories of low birth weight. To determine the role of birth weight in predicting changes in serum ferritin levels.

Methodology: This was a prospective comparative cross sectional study which was carried out at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH), Enugu, Nigeria between June and December 2014. The study included 140 newborns of all birth weights delivered at the UNTH. These were categorized into extremely low birth weight (ELBW), very low birth weight (VLBW), low birth weight (LBW) normal birth weight and macrosomic.  Babies with C-reactive protein levels > 10mg/dl, who were intra-uterine growth restricted, and whose mothers had conditions associated with low iron stores were excluded from the study. Anthropometric measurements were done for all subjects. Serum ferritin was measured at birth and this was correlated with birth weight and gestational age.

Results: Serum ferritin levels ranged from 20.6 to 296.4µg/l. Ferritin levels showed a steady increase in relation to birth weight. (F = 42.453, P < .001). There was a significant association between ferritin levels and categories of birth weight. ELBW babies were 98 times more likely to have low ferritin levels than babies with normal weight (P < .001, OR = 97.600, 95% C.I = 10.083 – 944.711). VLBW and LBW babies were more likely to have low ferritin levels than babies with normal weight (P < .001, OR = 0.070, 95% C.I = 0.017 – 0.291)(P = .006, OR = 0.201, 95% C.I = 0.064 – 0.635). Only birthweight was a significant positive predictor of low ferritin levels (P = .024).

Conclusion: Serum ferritin in new-borns showed a significant association with birth weight. Birth weight is a positive predictor of low serum ferritin levels.
Nonlinear Inflatable Actuators for Distributed Control in Soft Robots
Authors: Van Raemdonck Bert , Milana Edoardo , De Volder Michael , Reynaerts Dominiek , Gorissen Benjamin
Published: May 2023

As soft robotic systems grow in complexity and functionality, the size and stiffness of the needed control hardware severely limits their application potential. Alternatively, functionality can be embodied within actuator characteristics, drastically reducing the amount of peripherals. Functions such as memory, computation, and energy storage then result from the intrinsic mechanical behavior of precisely designed structures. Here, actuators are introduced with tunable characteristics to generate complex actuation sequences from a single input. Intricate sequences are made possible by harnessing hysteron characteristics encoded in the buckling of a cone‐shaped shell incorporated in the actuator design. A large variety of such characteristics are generated by varying the actuator geometry. This dependency is mapped and used for creating a tool to determine the actuator geometry that yields a desired characteristic. Using this tool, a system with six actuators is created that plays the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with a single pressure supply.
All‐Optical Multiplexed Meta‐Differentiator for Tri‐Mode Surface Morphology Observation
Authors: Liang Xiao , Zhou Zhou , Li Zile , Li Jiaxin , Peng Chang , Cui Hao , Wei Kai , He Zhixue , Yu Shaohua , Zheng Guoxing
Published: May 2023

Current optical differentiators are generally limited to realizing a single differential function once fabricated. Herein, a minimalist strategy in designing multiplexed differentiators (1st‐ and 2nd‐order differentiations), implemented with a Malus metasurface consisting of single‐sized nanostructures is proposed, thus improving the functionality of optical computing devices without the cost of complex design and nanofabrication. It is found that the proposed meta‐differentiator exhibits excellent differential‐computation performance and can be used for simultaneous outline detection and edge positioning of objects, corresponding to the functions of the 1st‐ and 2nd‐order differentiations respectively. Experiments with biological specimens showcase that boundaries of biological tissues can not only be identified, but also the edge information for realizing high‐precision edge positioning is highlighted. The study provides a paradigm in designing all‐optical multiplexed computing meta‐devices, and initiates tri‐mode surface morphology observation by combining meta‐differentiator with optical microscopes, which can find their applications in advanced biological imaging, large‐scale defect detection, and high‐speed pattern recognition, etc.
Ultrasensitive Molecular Fingerprint Retrieval Using Strongly Detuned Overcoupled Plasmonic Nanoantennas
Authors: Li Dongxiao , Zhou Hong , Chen Ziwei , Ren Zhihao , Xu Cheng , He Xianming , Liu Tao , Chen Xin , Huang He , Lee Chengkuo , Mu Xiaojing
Published: May 2023

Tailoring light‐matter interactions via plasmonic nanoantennas (PNAs) has emerged as a breakthrough technology for spectroscopic applications. The detuning between molecular vibrations and plasmonic resonances, as a fundamental and inevitable optical phenomenon in light‐matter interactions, reduces the interaction efficiency, resulting in a weak molecule sensing signal at the strong detuning state. Here, it is demonstrated that the low interaction efficiency from detuning can be tackled by overcoupled PNAs (OC‐PNAs) with a high ratio of the radiative to intrinsic loss rates, which can be used for ultrasensitive spectroscopy at strong plasmonic‐molecular detuning. In OC‐PNAs, the ultrasensitive molecule signals are achieved within a wavelength detuning range of 248 cm−1, which is 173 cm−1 wider than previous works. Meanwhile, the OC‐PNAs are immune to the distortion of molecular signals and maintain a lineshape consistent with the molecular signature fingerprint. This strategy allows a single device to enhance and capture the full and complex fingerprint vibrations in the mid‐infrared range. In the proof‐of‐concept demonstration, 13 kinds of molecules with some vibration fingerprints strongly detuning by the OC‐PNAs are identified with 100% accuracy with the assistance of machine‐learning algorithms. This work gains new insights into detuning‐state nanophotonics for potential applications including spectroscopy and sensors.
As‐Grown Miniaturized True Zero‐Order Waveplates Based on Low‐Dimensional Ferrocene Crystals
Authors: Li Zhipeng , Ma Xuezhi , Wei Fengxia , Wang Dapeng , Deng Zeyu , Jiang Mengting , Siddiquee Arif , Qi Kun , Zhu Di , Zhao Meng , Shen Mengzhe , Canepa Pieremanuele , Kou Shanshan , Lin Jiao , Wang Qian
Published: May 2023

As basic optical elements, waveplates with anisotropic electromagnetic responses are imperative for manipulating light polarization. Conventional waveplates are manufactured from bulk crystals (e.g., quartz and calcite) through a series of precision cutting and grinding steps, which typically result in large size, low yield, and high cost. In this study, a bottom‐up method is used to grow ferrocene crystals with large anisotropy to demonstrate self‐assembled ultrathin true zero‐order waveplates without additional machining processing, which is particularly suited for nanophotonic integration. The van der Waals ferrocene crystals exhibit high birefringence (Δn (experiment) = 0.149  ±  0.002 at 636 nm), low dichroism Δκ (experiment) = −0.0007 at 636 nm), and a potentially broad operating range (550 nm to 20 µm) as suggested by Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations. In addition, the grown waveplate's highest and the lowest principal axes (n1 and n3, respectively) are in the a–c plane, where the fast axis is along one natural edge of the ferrocene crystal, rendering them readily usable. The as‐grown, wavelength‐scale‐thick waveplate allows the development of further miniaturized systems via tandem integration.
Dual‐Wavelength Comparative Imaging Based on a Novel NIR‐II/IIb Emissive Rare Earth‐Doped Nanoparticle
Authors: Liu Ruiqi , Qiu Yihua , Wu Fengxia , Duan Shuang , Suo Yongkuan , Chang Baisong , Ren Ying , Tian Mei , Liu Hongguang , Cheng Zhen
Published: May 2023

The second near‐infrared biological window two (NIR‐II, 1000–1700 nm) imaging has made remarkable achievements in fluorescence imaging of diseases. Here, this work takes advantage of the rich spectral properties of rare‐earth doped nanoparticles (RENPs) and their capability to present multiple emission peaks in different luminescence regions simultaneously; novel RENPs are synthesized that have emission peaks in the NIR‐II1000nm (1000–1300 nm) region and enhanced emission in the NIR‐IIb (1500–1700 nm) window and are named as NEU‐RENPs. These RENPs with new compositions enable a fair comparison to evaluate their imaging performance in NIR‐II1000nm and NIR‐IIb regions under the same conditions. The imaging abilities of the resulted nanoparticles in NIR‐II1000 nm and NIR‐IIb regions are investigated systematically for local blood vessels, tumor vessels, acute inflammatory vessels, arterial thrombosis, cerebrovascular inflammation, and brain injury models. The results indicate that imaging of NIR‐IIb shows higher resolution and sensitivity than that of NIR‐II1000nm, and it has a stronger ability to accurately distinguish normal and pathological tissues. Interestingly, the fuzzy image of NIR‐II1000nm reveals more information about the background structure of the target, which is difficult to be achieved in NIR‐IIb imaging. The results prove NEU‐RENPs based NIR‐IIb imaging is preferable for biomedical applications.
Moment‐Based Shape‐Learning Holography for Fast Classification of Microparticles
Authors: Luo Haixin , Xu Jie , Jiao Jiannan , Zhong Liyun , Lu Xiaoxu , Tian Jindong
Published: May 2023

Compact computational in‐line holography based on deep learning is an attractive single‐shot approach to image microparticles dispersed in 3D volume. The particle shape contains valuable information for species classification, but the dataset acquisition process for network training suffers from labor consuming and low efficiency due to the complex and varied 2D shapes of different particle species. Herein, a moment‐based shape‐learning holography (MSLH) is proposed where the shape of a microparticle is mathematically characterized using varying weights of Zernike moments. By decomposing and recombining feature shapes of pollen particles into numerous new characteristic shapes as incremental data, MSLH improves the efficiency of dataset preparation. The depth‐encoded shape‐learning is achieved using a U‐net with self‐attention mechanism, which enables fast axial depth determination. The shape reconstruction uses a wavelet‐based method with more explicit physical meanings, making MSLH a hybrid data‐and‐model driven approach that requires fewer primary data. Validation results show that MSLH achieves high accuracy in axial position and shape reconstruction, while maintaining good classification effectiveness. It is believed that MSLH is an easy‐to‐setup, efficient‐to‐construct, and fast‐to‐output approach for shape‐based classifications of 3D distributed microparticles in dynamic fluid.
Machine Learning and Pan‐Cancer Analysis of Tertiary Lymphoid Structures: A Potential Target for Survival and Drug Treatment
Authors: Lai Jianguo , Cao Yuchen , Zhang Jiexin , Wang Jinglong , Du Yawen , He Yan , Luo Yuting , Liao Ning
Published: May 2023

Tertiary lymphoid structure (TLS) is considered to be closely related to tumor prognosis and immune response. Therefore, it has predictable clinical significance for survival prognosis and cancer drug treatment to build TLS signature of pan‐cancer. The transcriptome sequencing data of The Cancer Genome Atlas pan‐cancer analysis are obtained from UCSC Xena, including 33 cancer types (N = 10 066). A 15 TLS genes‐based TLSscore is constructed using the Random Forest and Cox regression analyses. Then, according to TLS signature, patients are classified into low‐ and high‐risk groups. Then, the differences between the two groups in terms of survival prognosis, functional enrichment, immune infiltration, and drug sensitivity are further explored. On the basis of machine learning algorithm, TLS signature has satisfactory prediction performance for the prognosis of pan‐cancer patients. A nomogram with high predictive performance is formulated by incorporating TLS signature and clinical features. The function enrichment analysis suggests that TLS signature may be related to the key pathways of immunotherapy for pan‐cancer, and shows significant differences among groups at the immune checkpoint genes. In general, a novel TLSscore‐based model is established through comprehensive analysis of TLS genes, which can accurately predict the clinical prognosis and drug sensitivity of pan‐cancer.
Microneedle Patches with Antimicrobial and Immunomodulating Properties for Infected Wound Healing
Authors: Li Shengbo , Wang Xuemei , Yan Zhiyao , Wang Tian , Chen Zhenbing , Song Heng , Zheng Yongbin
Published: May 2023

Treatment of infected wounds remains a challenge owing to antibiotic resistance; thus, developing smart biomaterials for the healing of infected wounds is urgently needed. In this study, a microneedle (MN) patch system with antimicrobial and immunomodulatory properties is developed to promote and accelerate infected wound healing. In the MN patch (termed PFG/M MNs), a nanoparticle with polydopamine (PDA)‐loaded iron oxide is grafted with glucose oxidase (GOx) and hyaluronic acid (HA) and then integrated into the tips, and amine‐modified mesoporous silica nanoparticles (AP‐MSNs) are incorporated into the bases. Results show that PFG/M MNs eradicate bacterial infections and modulate the immune microenvironment, combining the advantages of chemodynamic therapy, photothermal therapy, and M2 macrophage polarization from Fe/PDA@GOx@HA in the tips as well as anti‐inflammatory effect of AP‐MSNs from the MN bases. Thus, the PFG/M MN system is a promising clinical candidate for promoting infected wound healing.