10,621 research outputs found
Education as event: a conversation with John D. Caputo by T. Wilson Dickinson
This interview with John D. Caputo conducted by T. Wilson Dickinson discusses the implications of the event for the philosophy of education. It addresses various aporias the event poses for academic standards, protocols of writing, teaching as formation or transformation, the post-secular, the new technologies, the old versus the new asceticism
in the face of the environmental crisis
Hermeneutics as the Recovery of Man
The point of the present essay will be to thematize the project of recovery, to probe and unfold it, and to defend its role in an adequately conceived hermeneutics. I will argue as follows. There are two philosophies of recovery or retrieval which feed into the hermeneutic strategy of Being and Time — the Kierkegaardian notion of existential repetition and the phenomenological return to beginnings in Husserl. In Being and Time, Heidegger demonstrates that these two versions of retrieval are of a piece, that they represent as it were twin circles. I will show that the one circle existential repetition - belongs to what Kierkegaard calls the foundering of metaphysics, while Husserlian phenomenology, as Derrida shows so well, remains under the spell of the metaphysics of presence. I will argue that Kierkegaardian repetition controls and decisively modifies the phenomenological element in Being and Time, and hence that the hermeneutics which is at work in this book has broken with metaphysics. After Heidegger, hermeneutics means a recovery of origins, a return to the more primordial, which has nothing to do with the nostalgia for presence but on the contrary everything to do with what Kierkegaard calls the courage for repetition. Finally, without pretending to know what Derrida in the long run wants to say, and fully cognizant that I may be deconstructed on the spot, I want to conclude that Derrida\u27s critique of Heideggerian hermeneutics is misled by the Husserlian element in Being and Time. It is a mistake, I will contend, to make the critique of presence into a critique of the whole project of retrieval, and hence a mistake to think that hermeneutics is a matter of the free play of signs — even as it is a mistake for Rorty to think that hermeneutics has to do merely with keeping the lines of communication open between the diverse language games
Novel sulfur and selenium containing bis-α-amino acids from 4-hydroxyproline
The synthesis of new substituted prolines carrying at C-4 a second α-amino acid residue is reported. The amino acid, l-cysteine or l-selenocysteine, is linked to the proline ring through the sulfur or the selenium atom, respectively. The products were prepared with different stereochemistry at C-4, in few and clean high-yielding steps, with suitable protections for solid phase applications. The introduction of both sulfur and selenium atoms at C-4 of the proline ring seems to enhance significantly the cis geometry at the prolyl amide bond
Monitoring the performance of residents during training in off-pump coronary surgery.
OBJECTIVE: Control charts (eg, cumulative sum charts) plot changes in performance with time and can alert a surgeon to suboptimal performance. They were used to compare performance of off-pump coronary artery bypass surgery between a consultant and four resident surgeons and to compare performance of off-pump coronary artery bypass surgery and conventional coronary artery bypass grafting within surgeons. METHODS: Data were analyzed for consecutive patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting who were operated on by one consultant or one of four residents. Conversions were analyzed by intention to treat. Perioperative death or one or more of 10 adverse events constituted failure. Predicted risks of failure for individual patients were derived from the study population. Variable life-adjusted displays and risk-adjusted sequential probability ratio test charts were plotted. RESULTS: Data for 1372 patients were analyzed; 769 of the procedures were off-pump coronary artery bypass operations (56.0%). The consultant operated on 382 patients (293 off-pump, 76.7%), and the residents operated on 990 (474 off-pump, 47.9%). Patients operated on by residents tended to be older, more obese, more likely to require an urgent operation, and more likely to need a circumflex artery graft but less likely to have triple-vessel disease. There were 7 conversions (consultant 5, residents 2). The overall failure rate was 8.5% (9.2% for consultant's operations and 8.2% for residents' operations), including 10 deaths (0.7%). Predicted and observed risks of failure were similar for all five surgeons. After 100 off-pump coronary artery bypass operations, performance was the same or better for the residents as for the consultant. For all surgeons, performance was the same or better for off-pump as for conventional coronary artery bypass grafting. CONCLUSIONS: Off-pump coronary artery bypass surgery can be safely taught to cardiothoracic residents. Implementation of continuous performance monitoring for residents is practicable
Creep, Relaxation and Viscosity Properties for Basic Fractional Models in Rheology
The purpose of this paper is twofold: from one side we provide a general
survey to the viscoelastic models constructed via fractional calculus and from
the other side we intend to analyze the basic fractional models as far as their
creep, relaxation and viscosity properties are considered. The basic models are
those that generalize via derivatives of fractional order the classical
mechanical models characterized by two, three and four parameters, that we
refer to as Kelvin-Voigt, Maxwell, Zener, anti-Zener and Burgers. For each
fractional model we provide plots of the creep compliance, relaxation modulus
and effective viscosity in non dimensional form in terms of a suitable time
scale for different values of the order of fractional derivative. We also
discuss the role of the order of fractional derivative in modifying the
properties of the classical models.Comment: 41 pages, 8 figure
Pulsation Period Changes as a Tool to Identify Pre-Zero Age Horizontal Branch Stars
One of the most dramatic events in the life of a low-mass star is the He
flash, which takes place at the tip of the red giant branch (RGB) and is
followed by a series of secondary flashes before the star settles into the
zero-age horizontal branch (ZAHB). Yet, no stars have been positively
identified in this key evolutionary phase, mainly for two reasons: first, this
pre-ZAHB phase is very short compared to other major evolutionary phases in the
life of a star; and second, these pre-ZAHB stars are expected to overlap the
loci occupied by asymptotic giant branch (AGB), HB and RGB stars observed in
the color-magnitude diagram (CMD). We investigate the possibility of detecting
these stars through stellar pulsations, since some of them are expected to
rapidly cross the Cepheid/RR Lyrae instability strip in their route from the
RGB tip to the ZAHB, thus becoming pulsating stars along the way. As a
consequence of their very high evolutionary speed, some of these stars may
present anomalously large period change rates. We constructed an extensive grid
of stellar models and produced pre-ZAHB Monte Carlo simulations appropriate for
the case of the Galactic globular cluster M3 (NGC 5272), where a number of RR
Lyrae stars with high period change rates are found. Our results suggest that
some -- but certainly not all -- of the RR Lyrae stars in M3 with large period
change rates are in fact pre-ZAHB pulsators.Comment: Conference Proceedings HELAS Workshop on 'Synergies between solar and
stellar modelling', Rome, June 2009, Astrophys. Space Sci., in the pres
Stability analysis of static solutions in a Josephson junction
We present all the possible solutions of a Josephson junction with bias
current and magnetic field with both inline and overlap geometry, and examine
their stability. We follow the bifurcation of new solutions as we increase the
junction length. The analytical results, in terms of elliptic functions in the
case of inline geometry, are in agreement with the numerical calculations and
explain the strong hysteretic phenomena typically seen in the calculation of
the maximum tunneling current. This suggests a different experimental approach
based on the use, instead of the external magnetic field the modulus of the
elliptic function or the related quantity the total magnetic flux to avoid
hysteretic behavior and unfold the overlapping curves.Comment: 36 pages with 17 figure
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