In Defense of Jack: Gay Cowboys and Fairy Actors in Brokeback Mountain and Will & Grace

An investigation of the gender politics of Ang Lee\u27s Brokeback Mountain

Nietzsche/Pentheus: The Last Disciple of Dionysus and Queer Fear of the Feminine

This article examines the scholarly preoccupation with the hypothesis that Nietzsche was gay by offering a reading of Nietzsche\u27s texts as autobiographical that puts them in conversation with Euripides\u27s drama The Bacchae. Drawing a number of parallels between Nietzsche, self-avowed disciple of Dionysus, and Pentheus, the main character of The Bacchae and demonstrated antidisciple of Dionysus, I argue that both men experience their sexual attraction to women as somehow intolerable, and they negotiate this discomfort—which is simultaneously an unjustified paranoia and fear of the feminine—through the appropriation of feminine capacities and qualities for themselves. This appropriation ultimately expresses these men\u27s fear of the erosion of male power and the coherence of distinct gender categories that I call a “queer fear of the feminine.” However, this is neither a sign of incipient homosexuality nor a feminist move; rather, it is good old-fashioned patriarchy dressed up in drag. I conclude by offering a symptomatic reading of the popularity of the thesis that Nietzsche was gay, arguing that this reflects our own twenty-first-century tendency to read gender deviance as only ever a sign of sexual “orientation,” which is always already presumed to be homosexuality

Against Totalitarianism: Agamben, Foucault, and the Politics of Critique

Despite appearances, Agamben’s engagement with Foucault in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is not an extension of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics but ra-ther a disciplining of Foucault for failing to take Nazism seriously. This moralizing rebuke is the result of methodological divergences between the two thinkers that, I argue, have fun-damental political consequences. Re-reading Foucault’s most explicitly political work of the mid-1970s, I show that Foucault’s commitment to genealogy is aligned with his commitment to “insurrection”—not simply archival or historical, but practical and political insurrection—even as his non-moralizing understanding of critique makes space for the resistances he hopes to proliferate. By contrast, Agamben’s resurrection of sovereignty turns on a moraliz-ing Holocaust exceptionalism that anoints both sovereignty and the state with inevitably totalitarian powers. Thus, while both Agamben and Foucault take positions “against” totali-tarianism, their very different understandings of this term and method of investigating it unwittingly render Agamben complicit with the totalitarianism he otherwise seeks to reject

Continuous flow synthesis of antimalarials: opportunities for distributed autonomous chemical manufacturing

The concept of distributed manufacturing of chemicals is presented and discussed, with specific focus on the context of preparing molecules that can combat the development of geographically-localised resistant strains of infectious pathogens. Specifically we present the case of antimalarial compounds and demonstrate that the flow chemistry community have already designed both a machine capable of distrubuted chemical manufacturing and a module that would be capable of producing artemisin derivatives at the point of use

A machine-assisted approach for the preparation of follow-on pharmaceutical compound libraries

Follow-on drugs represent the majority of new drug introductions and show improved properties to the pioneer drug. In order to fast-follow, R&D needs to be able to quickly generate a library of analogues that can then be screened for desired properties. Here we have designed a hybrid machine-assisted approach which makes use of both multi-step continuous flow processing and robotic microwave reactors to generate a library of indoles over two technology steps (four reaction steps; diazotization, reduction, unmasking of the hydrazine and Fischer indole reaction). This ‘machine’ is then used to prepare a small library of hitherto unreported analogues of the 5-HT agonist Zolmitriptan in good yields, thus demonstrating that the integration and use of machines is a powerful tool to expedite drug discovery

Preparation of difluoromethylthioethers through difluoromethylation of disulfides using TMS-CF2H

We report an operationally simple, metal-free approach for the late-stage introduction of the important lipophilic hydrogen-bond donor motif, SCF2H. This reaction converts diaryl- and dialkyl-disulfides into the corresponding aryl/alkyl–SCF2H through the nucleophilic transfer of a difluoromethyl group with good functional group tolerance. This method is notable for its use of commercially available TMSCF2H, and does not rely on the need for handling of sensitive metal complexes

An efficient architecture for the integration of sensor and actuator networks into the future internet

In the future, sensors will enable a large variety of new services in different domains. Important application areas are service adaptations in fixed and mobile environments, ambient assisted living, home automation, traffic management, as well as management of smart grids. All these applications will share a common property, the usage of networked sensors and actuators. To ensure an efficient deployment of such sensor-actuator networks, concepts and frameworks for managing and distributing sensor data as well as for triggering actuators need to be developed. In this paper, we present an architecture for integrating sensors and actuators into the future Internet. In our concept, all sensors and actuators are connected via gateways to the Internet, that will be used as comprehensive transport medium. Additionally, an entity is needed for registering all sensors and actuators, and managing sensor data requests. We decided to use a hierarchical structure, comparable to the Domain Name Service. This approach realizes a cost-efficient architecture disposing of "plug and play" capabilities and accounting for privacy issues

Against Totalitarianism: Agamben, Foucault, and the Politics of Critique

Despite appearances, Agamben’s engagement with Foucault in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is not an extension of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics but rather a disciplining of Foucault for failing to take Nazism seriously. This moralizing rebuke is the result of methodological divergences between the two thinkers that, I argue, have fundamental political consequences. Re-reading Foucault’s most explicitly political work of the mid-1970s, I show that Foucault’s commitment to genealogy is aligned with his commitment to “insurrection”—not simply archival or historical, but practical and political insurrection—even as his non-moralizing understanding of critique makes space for the resistances he hopes to proliferate. By contrast, Agamben’s resurrection of sovereignty turns on a moralizing Holocaust exceptionalism that anoints both sovereignty and the state with inevitably totalitarian powers. Thus, while both Agamben and Foucault take positions “against” totalitarianism, their very different understandings of this term and method of investigating it unwittingly render Agamben complicit with the totalitarianism he otherwise seeks to reject

Context-based user grouping for multi-casting in heterogeneous radio networks

Along with the rise of sophisticated smartphones and smart spaces, the availability of both static and dynamic context information has steadily been increasing in recent years. Due to the popularity of social networks, these data are complemented by profile information about individual users. Making use of this information by classifying users in wireless networks enables targeted content and advertisement delivery as well as optimizing network resources, in particular bandwidth utilization, by facilitating group-based multi-casting. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a web service for advanced user classification based on user, network, and environmental context information. The service employs simple and advanced clustering algorithms for forming classes of users. Available service functionalities include group formation, context-aware adaptation, and deletion as well as the exposure of group characteristics. Moreover, the results of a performance evaluation, where the service has been integrated in a simulator modeling user behavior in heterogeneous wireless systems, are presented