"Caine's Stake": Aimé Césaire, Emmett Till, and the Work of Acknowledgment

Our reasons for avoiding death are manifold, encompassing among others, motives that are personal, political, and historical. Still, are there ways that we might use words to overcome these common everyday aversions to death and the dead through another modality of language, that of poetry for example? Can the poetic word get us to acknowledge the particulars of death despite the various reasons we have to disavow it? Might we use language not simply grasp death abstractly (or more accurately, fail to grasp it) but instead to realize what death means in its awful particularity? These questions are prompted by Aimé Césaire’s poerty and his prose, and by his elegy for Emmett Till in particular. Through his writings and his political work, one of Césaire’s key aims was to get people to acknowledge what they would prefer to avoid.  Césaire’s work, both his poetry and prose, urges readers to see the things they would prefer not to see and to show us how language stakes us to the world in all its terrifying awfulness and wondrous splendor, despite our desperate attempts to avoid this realization.This essay is divided into two parts. The first part looks at how this problem of alienation and the need to acknowle this alienation motivates Césaire’s writing more generally, focusing on the ten years between 1945 (when his essay “Poetry and Knowledge” is published) and 1955 (when the second edition of his Discourse on Colonialism is published). In order to consider how alienation and acknowledgement work in this celebrated text, I consider related works and their contexts from the period from 1950-1956, including his famous letter of resignation from the French Communist Party. This sets the stage for the reading of Césaire’s Ferraments provided in the second section.  The second part examines how and why Césaire sought acknowledgement for Emmett Till’s brutal murder through his poetry, focusing specifically on his poem “…On the State of the Union” from his 1960 collection Ferraments

Ambivalent Modernities: Foucault’s Iranian Writings Reconsidered

This essay reconsiders Foucault’s writings on the Iranian Revolution in the context of his thought during 1977-1979. The essay defends three related claims: (1) Foucault does not turn away from power toward ethics as many scholars have claimed, (2) Careful interpretation of the texts on the Iranian Revolution will help us to better understand Foucault’s essays and lecture courses from this period (in particular, the relationship between political spirituality and counter-conduct), and (3) During this period Foucault is working on conceptualizing modernity as a multivalent set of practices—some that reinforce power relations and some that resist them

Rituals of Conduct and Counter-Conduct

This essay provides an account of the role of ritual in governmentality (or the conducting of conduct) through an analysis of key texts during the period roughly from 1973 through 1981. I claim that ritual plays an essential role in Foucault’s analysis of juridical forms and sovereign power as well as conduct and counter-conduct understood as features of governmentality and political rationality

RMAIS: RFID-based medication Adherence Intelligence System

There has been compelling evidence that outpatients, especially those who are elderly or taking multiple complexly scheduled drugs, are not taking their medicines as directed, leading to unnecessary disease progression, complications, functional disabilities, lower quality of life, and even mortality. Existing technologies for monitoring and improving drug adherence are either costly or too complicated for general patients to use. In this paper, we introduce the detailed design and the complete prototype of a marketable Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID)-based Medication Adherence Intelligence System (RMAIS) that can be conveniently used at a residential home by ordinary patients. RMAIS is designed to maintain patients\u27 independence and enable them to take multiple daily medicine dosages of the right amount at the right time. The system is patient-centered and user-friendly by reminding a patient of the prescribed time for medication and dispensing it in a fully automatic and fool-proof way. This is achieved mainly due to its novel design of a motorized rotation platform and the smooth integration of a scale, an RFID reader, and the rotation platform. In addition, this system has an Internet-based notification function that is used to alert the patient when it is time to take medicine as well as report deviations from the prescribed schedule to the primary care physicians or pharmacists

Molecular excitation in the Interstellar Medium: recent advances in collisional, radiative and chemical processes

We review the different excitation processes in the interstellar mediumComment: Accepted in Chem. Re

Validation of differential gene expression algorithms: Application comparing fold-change estimation to hypothesis testing

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Sustained research on the problem of determining which genes are differentially expressed on the basis of microarray data has yielded a plethora of statistical algorithms, each justified by theory, simulation, or ad hoc validation and yet differing in practical results from equally justified algorithms. Recently, a concordance method that measures agreement among gene lists have been introduced to assess various aspects of differential gene expression detection. This method has the advantage of basing its assessment solely on the results of real data analyses, but as it requires examining gene lists of given sizes, it may be unstable.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Two methodologies for assessing predictive error are described: a cross-validation method and a posterior predictive method. As a nonparametric method of estimating prediction error from observed expression levels, cross validation provides an empirical approach to assessing algorithms for detecting differential gene expression that is fully justified for large numbers of biological replicates. Because it leverages the knowledge that only a small portion of genes are differentially expressed, the posterior predictive method is expected to provide more reliable estimates of algorithm performance, allaying concerns about limited biological replication. In practice, the posterior predictive method can assess when its approximations are valid and when they are inaccurate. Under conditions in which its approximations are valid, it corroborates the results of cross validation. Both comparison methodologies are applicable to both single-channel and dual-channel microarrays. For the data sets considered, estimating prediction error by cross validation demonstrates that empirical Bayes methods based on hierarchical models tend to outperform algorithms based on selecting genes by their fold changes or by non-hierarchical model-selection criteria. (The latter two approaches have comparable performance.) The posterior predictive assessment corroborates these findings.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Algorithms for detecting differential gene expression may be compared by estimating each algorithm's error in predicting expression ratios, whether such ratios are defined across microarray channels or between two independent groups.</p> <p>According to two distinct estimators of prediction error, algorithms using hierarchical models outperform the other algorithms of the study. The fact that fold-change shrinkage performed as well as conventional model selection criteria calls for investigating algorithms that combine the strengths of significance testing and fold-change estimation.</p