Gasworks

The material imagination of the nineteenth century had to deal increasingly with what had previously been thought to be immaterial, or as good as, and with largely imaginary forms of material. The century was one in which the material and the immaterial entered into new and surprising alliances and exchanges, exchange becoming in the process the principal mode in which the material world was made apprehensible. Increasingly, the material world was immaterialised, with the growing dependence on invisible gases, vapours and substances, from steam (or, more strictly, water-vapour), to coal-gas, to the ether of space that provided such an indisputable and indispensable ground for nineteenth-century physics. This essay considers the ways in which gas, and in particular gaslighting, was imagined, especially in Victorian fiction. I conclude that gas became a mediate material, which connected up the global and the local, the economic and the physiological, the immediate and the mediate. As such, it provides a kind of correlative to the imaginary plasma of the novel itself, which equally arises from a curiosity about the complexity of conjunctures, with the intimate traffic of proximity and distance

Choralities

AbstractThe voice has often been identified with the assertion of idiosyncrasy or exception (The Chanting Crowd: ‘We are all individuals!’ An Individual: ‘I'm not.’ Monty Python,The Life of Brian). This article explores why humans (though not uniquely them) feel urged to merge and magnify the individual voice through assimilating it to the voices of others. What are the powers, menaces, and satisfactions of these singular–plural megavoices, in choirs, collective chants, and other forms of what may be calledchorality, that have become more familiar than ever in the mass spectacles (‘audicles’?) of sport, entertainment, and politics? I suggest that the chorus represents the challenge of the inchoate, in that it is the making manifest of what menaces music, the matter that must be made into form, a reservoir of unschooled energy that must be converted to information. I suggest that there may be an implicit relation between the individual voice and the collective voice it may seem to convoke, such that every individual vocality has a connection to a phantasmal chorality. Finally, I consider the political force of chorality, and the fantasy focused on and through the collective voice, and what this means in a world that seems to have moved from the dominion of the mass to that of the multitude.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S147857221500015

La Divina Comedia de Terry Eagleton

This essay reflects on the links between comedy and religion in Terry Eagle- ton’s writing since 2000. It proposes that religious thought provides the same kind of occasion and imperative to take comedy seriously as Marxist theory had done earlier in Eagleton’s career. The essay argues that the connecting principle between Marxism, Catholicism, criticism and comedy is the body, especially in its conjoining of absurdity and abasement. It proposes that comedy is best regarded as the enactment of the fantasy of cognitive omnipotence, or the abstract will-to-enjoyment in constant search for occasions. We therefore likely joke for the same reason as we pray, for the pleasure of getting above ourselves, which includes the gratifying prospect of seeing ourselves tumbling off the ladder, which might be a slapstick translation of the felix culpa, or fortunate fall. If Eagleton’s critical comedy is officially offered as a salutory foretaste of the pleasure of redemption, its gratifications seem always also to lie down where all the ladders start, in suffering and finitude.Este ensayo reflexiona acerca de los vínculos entre la comedia y la religión en los escritos de Terry Eagleton desde el año 2000 y plantea que el pensamiento reli- gioso provee el mismo tipo de ocasión e imperativo para tomarse la comedia en serio que la teoría marxista había brindado previamente a la carrera profesional de Eagle- ton. En este artículo argumentamos que el principio de conexión entre el marxismo, el catolicismo, la crítica y la comedia es el cuerpo, especialmente en su conjunción de absurdo y abajamiento. Sugerimos que la mejor manera de considerar la comedia es como puesta en escena de la fantasía de la omnipotencia cognitiva o como voluntad abstracta de disfrute en constante búsqueda de ocasiones. Por lo tanto, es probable que bromeemos por la misma razón que rezamos: por el placer de creernos más importantes de lo que somos. Esto incluye la grata posibilidad de vernos caer de la escalera, lo cual podría ser considerado una traducción bufonesca de la felix culpa o caída afortunada. Si la comedia crítica de Eagleton se presenta oficialmente como un anticipo salutífero del placer de la redención, sus gratificaciones parecen encontrarse siempre también allá donde empiezan todas las escaleras: en el sufrimiento y la finitud

Plugs

Plugs are peculiarly intimate objects. Plugs are archaic things, that belong to an economy of spaces in which what mattered was to seal, to store, to quarantine and dam up flow. But now the plug is used for different purposes, to establish connections, and to draw together places and times. Plugs are scale-transformers: they used to keep proximal things distant, now they bring distant things up close. We use plugs not to keep things apart, but to become a part of them, to plug in rather than plug up. Plugs used to keep things in their place, enforcing a world governed by the prepositions ‘in’, ‘on’ or ‘at’. Now the plug is the enabler of relationships signified by prepositions like ‘through’, ‘across’ and ‘between’. As such, the plug is a prime example of the interference between spatio-temporal dispensations that is so much a feature of the modern world. Perhaps the plug is itself a connector between the archaic and the contemporary

The Differences Between CPM and Resource-Loaded Scheduling and How They Applied to The Martinez Tesoro Refinery Flare Header Replacement Project

A case study was conducted to analyze the scheduling challenges faced on a refinery construction project in Martinez, California. The main issues on the project were complications experienced by the general contractor in fulfilling a requirement to produce a resource-loaded schedule. Unable to create one, a CPM schedule was produced instead. Research on the differences between a CPM and resource-loaded schedule was conducted in order to uncover how they applied to the refinery project. The most significant differences between the two scheduling methodologies is that a CPM assumes infinite capacity, while resource loading recognizes that resources have finite limits in terms of availability, capability, and proficiency. Consequently, resource-loaded schedules are substantially more advantageous to projects in terms of feasibility, tracking productivity, controlling cost overruns, and eliminating schedule impacts. Three separate interviews were conducted with the GC, CM, and a scheduling expert to gain further insight on the matter. Information from the interviews led to the discovery of the main scheduling differences between MS Project and Oracle P6, the disadvantages of resource-loading, and where the future of the construction industry is going in terms of efficient scheduling methodology

The Free French and British Forces in the Desert War, 1942:The learning curve in interallied military cooperation

In July 1940, shortly after the fall of France, Winston Churchill insisted that the British high command organize immediately, in coordination with General Charles de Gaulle, strong forces of French exiles who wanted to continue the war against Germany. The British army's liaison mission to these Free French forces, named the ‘Spears Mission’ after its commander General Edward Spears, struggled to achieve this goal. In the Franco-British campaign to take Syria in 1941, the Free French fought not against Germans, but fellow Frenchmen of the Vichy garrison. Worse still, the British were unable to provide sufficient transport or artillery to their ally. However, in 1942 the 1st Free French Brigade joined the British Eighth Army in Libya. By now the Free French were one of the best equipped forces in the desert and performed outstandingly at the defence of Bir Hakeim. How does an army integrate foreign soldiers, overcoming the differences of language, culture, training and equipment? Taking the Free French forces in the Libyan campaign as a case study, this article will examine the problems resulting from Allied units serving under British command and how they were resolved. In particular, it will examine the work of the Spears Mission, which played an important role in Free French success in 1942. The liaison officers of the Spears Mission represented Free French needs and problems to the British high command, while also having responsibility for ensuring that the Free French followed British procedures and orders. Managing Franco-British military relations was a difficult task and sometimes the Mission was the victim of both sides’ frustration. Yet, this article will show that despite setbacks, or perhaps because of them, interallied military cooperation gradually improved during the 1942 Libyan campaign, which saw the first sustained large-scale deployment of Free French forces under British command

Cyclosporine shows benefit as compared to methotrexate for treatment of pediatric atopic dermatitis refractory to topical medications when rapidity of clinical response is of key importance to the patient

A clinical decision report appraising El-Khalawany MA, Hassan H, Shaaban D, Ghonaim N, Eassa B. Methotrexate versus cyclosporine in the treatment of severe atopic dermatitis in children: a multicenter experience from Egypt. European Journal of Pediatrics. 2012;172(3):351-356. https://doi.org10.1007/s00431-012-1893-3 for a pediatric patient with severe atopic dermatitis

Automatic sensation: environmental sensors in the digital city

This paper discusses the use of environmental sensors, wireless networks and mobile media as technologies of sensation in the city. While these devices enable a “digital city,” in many respects they appear to be immaterial, operating beyond sense. Further, drawing on two case studies presented by the Digital Cities project in Montreal, the paper considers how applications of environmental sensors and mobile media give rise to new conditions and questions for how we configure sense in the “digital city.” The paper ultimately finds that sensors direct us toward new sites, assemblages and practices of sensation within the urban sensorium. (Abstract)