The Eternal Crossroads: The Art of Flannery O\u27Connor

Flannery O’Connor was a writer of extraordinary power and virtuosity. Her strong supple prose blends humor, pathos, satire, and grotesquerie which leads the reader to the evil at the center of the self’s labyrinth. There, she confronts that evil with originality and power, pulling the reader into consideration of the terrifying dependencies of love in the recesses of the heart. This study focuses on Flannery O’Connor’s sense of the coincidence of the eternal and cosmic with worldly time and place—“the eternal crossroads”— and how that sense controls and infuses her fiction. From an examination of various influences upon Miss O’Connor’s work—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Mauriac, Nathaniel West, and Hawthorne—the authors consider her novels and stories, as well as several stories never collected. Their textual analysis shows that her structures, images, motifs, and symbols became vehicles for anagogical meaning as she progressed from early promise to artistic fulfillment. Considering O’Connor’s own comments on her writing, the authors illuminate some frequently misunderstood features of her work, such as her “grotesques” and her stress on death and violence. In so doing they make an important contribution to our understanding of how Flannery O’Connor arrived at “the eternal crossroads.” Leon V. Driskell teaches English at the University of Louisville, and Joan T. Brittain teaches English at Bellarmine- Ursuline College.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/1023/thumbnail.jp

Subsonic high-angle-of-attack aerodynamic characteristics of a cone and cylinder with triangular cross sections and a cone with a square cross section

Experiments were conducted in the 12-Foot Pressure Wind Tunnel at Ames Research Center on three models with noncircular cross sections: a cone having a square cross section with rounded corners and a cone and cylinder with triangular cross sections and rounded vertices. The cones were tested with both sharp and blunt noses. Surface pressures and force and moment measurements were obtained over an angle of attack range from 30 deg to 90 deg and selected oil-flow experiments were conducted to visualize surface flow patterns. Unit Reynolds numbers ranged from 0.8x1,000,000/m to 13.0x1,000,000/m at a Mach number of 0.25, except for a few low-Reynolds-number runs at a Mach number of 0.17. Pressure data, as well as force data and oil-flow photographs, reveal that the three dimensional flow structure at angles of attack up to 75 deg is very complex and is highly dependent on nose bluntness and Reynolds number. For angles of attack from 75 deg to 90 deg the sectional aerodynamic characteristics are similar to those of a two dimensional cylinder with the same cross section

Dust Stratification in Young Circumstellar Disks

We present high-resolution infrared spectra of four YSOs (T Tau N, T Tau S, RNO 91, and HL Tau). The spectra exhibit narrow absorption lines of 12CO, 13CO, and C18O as well as broad emission lines of gas phase12CO. The narrow absorption lines of CO are shown to originate from the colder circumstellar gas. We find that the line of sight gas column densities resulting from the CO absorption lines are much higher than expected for the measured extinction for each source and suggest the gas to dust ratio is measuring the dust settling and/or grain coagulation in these extended disks. We provide a model of turbulence, dust settling and grain growth to explain the results. The techniques presented here allow us to provide some observationally-motivated bounds on accretion disk alpha in protostellar systems

Where on Earth Are the Best-50 Time Servers?

© 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. We present a list of the Best-50 public IPv4 time servers by mining a high-resolution dataset of Stratum-1 servers for Availability, Stratum Constancy, Leap Performance, and Clock Error, broken down by continent. We find that a server with ideal leap performance, high availability, and low stratum variation is often clock error-free, but this is no guarantee. We discuss the relevance and lifetime of our findings, the scalability of our approach, and implications for load balancing and server ranking

Case report: a diagnostically challenging conjunctival mass caused by the Epstein-Barr virus.

We present a paediatric case of infectious mononucleosis in a 13-year old, manifesting with follicular conjunctivitis and a conjunctival mass in one eye with no evidence of leucocytosis on the blood count. The diagnosis was confirmed following surgical excision and biopsy. The case represented a diagnostic challenge due to its atypism and given the steady increase in the prevalence of EBV-related ocular diseases in the last years, this report can serve as an example to prompt earlier serological tests to identify the aetiology in similar cases. This is important because EBV can be treated with acyclovir early in the active viral phase

Noise analysis for 3-point chemical shift-based water-fat separation with spectral modeling of fat

Purpose: To model the theoretical signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) behavior of 3-point chemical shift-based water-fat separation, using spectral modeling of fat, with experimental validation for spin-echo and gradient-echo imaging. The echo combination that achieves the best SNR performance for a given spectral model of fat was also investigated. Materials and Methods: Cramér-Rao bound analysis was used to calculate the best possible SNR performance for a given echo combination. Experimental validation in a fatwater phantom was performed and compared with theory. In vivo scans were performed to compare fat separation with and with out spectral modeling of fat. Results: Theoretical SNR calculations for methods that include spectral modeling of fat agree closely with experimental SNR measurements. Spectral modeling of fat more accurately separates fat and water signals, with only a slight decrease in the SNR performance of the water-only image, although with a relatively large decrease in the fat SNR performance. Conclusion: The optimal echo combination that provides the best SNR performance for water using spectral modeling of fat is very similar to previous optimizations that modeled fat as a single peak. Therefore, the optimal echo spacing commonly used for single fat peak models is adequate for most applications that use spectral modeling of fat. © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc

A Cohort Study Assessing the Impact of Anki as a Spaced Repetition Tool on Academic Performance in Medical School

Introduction Anki is an application that capitalizes upon the techniques of spaced repetition and is increasingly utilized by medical students for examination preparation. This study examines the impact of Anki usage in a medical school curriculum on academic performance. Secondary objectives analyzed individual Anki utilization and a qualitative assessment of Anki use. Methods A cohort-control study was conducted at Boonshoft School of Medicine. One hundred thirty first-year medical students were enrolled in an Anki utilization training program from July 2021 to September 2021. Training included educational Anki courses and subsequent survey data collection over Anki usage. Data variables included all course final examinations, the Comprehensive Basic Science Exam (CBSE), individual Anki user statistics, nationally standardized exams scores, and Qualtrics surveys on student perceived ease of use. Results Seventy-eight students reported using Anki for at least one of the exams, and 52 students did not use Anki for any exam. Anki users scored significantly higher across all four exams: Course I (6.4%; p \u3c 0.001); Course II (6.2%; p = 0.002); Course III (7.0%; p = 0.002); and CBSE (12.9%; p = 0.003). Students who reported higher dependency on Anki for studying performed significantly better on the Course I, II, and CBSE exams. Conclusion Anki usage may be associated with an increase in standardized examination scores. This supports Anki as an evidence-based spaced repetition and active retrieval learning modality for medical school standardized examinations. There was little correlation between its specific statistical markers and examination performance. This is pertinent to physicians and medical students alike as the learning and preservation of biomedical knowledge is required for examinations and effective clinical care

The neonicotinoid insecticide Imidacloprid repels pollinating flies and beetles at field-realistic concentrations

Neonicotinoids are widely used systemic insecticides which, when applied to flowering crops, are translocated to the nectar and pollen where they may impact upon pollinators. Given global concerns over pollinator declines, this potential impact has recently received much attention. Field exposure of pollinators to neonicotinoids depends on the concentrations present in flowering crops and the degree to which pollinators choose to feed upon them. Here we describe a simple experiment using paired yellow pan traps with or without insecticide to assess whether the commonly used neonicotinoid imidacloprid repels or attracts flying insects. Both Diptera and Coleoptera exhibited marked avoidance of traps containing imidacloprid at a field-realistic dose of 1 μg L-1, with Diptera avoiding concentrations as low as 0.01 μg L-1. This is to our knowledge the first evidence for any biological activity at such low concentrations, which are below the limits of laboratory detection using most commonly available techniques. Catch of spiders in pan traps was also slightly reduced by the highest concentrations of imidacloprid used (1 μg L-1), but catch was increased by lower concentrations. It remains to be seen if the repellent effect on insects occurs when neonicotinoids are present in real flowers, but if so then this could have implications for exposure of pollinators to neonicotinoids and for crop pollination. © 2013 Easton, Goulson