Lines that Reduce:Biography, Palms, Borders

Through various cases and instances, this essay opens with the question of biography and the demands of its form: that is, biography’s attempt to reduce historical totalities to the page in moments of sudden condensation. It then introduces the figure of Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986), a doctor and later hand reader and sexologist, who appears on a diagram, constructed by Walter Benjamin in 1932, to map his life through his ‘Urbekanntschaften’ (primal acquaintances). It then seeks to transpose Benjamin’s diagram into other linear forms, such as a family tree, a diagram of chemical affinity, and an astral chart, to add one: the diagram as a map of the hand. This opens up a number of temporal, historical, and epistemic reductions, or cases of reduction, in Wolff’s work and beyond. It concludes with a particular moment in Wolff’s biography — her arrest in 1933 and her escape to Paris — as a final instance of the line, as border.Sam Dolbear, ‘Lines that Reduce: Biography, Palms, Borders’, in The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 117-33 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-25_06

Proust List Impulse

Lists litter Marcel Proust’s pages of À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), but also the works about it. This short contribution collects together a number of those lists, and offers some reflection on the list’s place and function within the work, on the level of the sentence and as a form in its own right.Sam Dolbear, ‘Proust List Impulse’, in The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 267-70 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-25_15

Image Interpretation by radiographers in brain, spine and knee MRI examinations: Findings from an accredited postgraduate module

Introduction: The aim of the study was to evaluate the performance of radiographers in image interpretation of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain, spine and knee examinations following a nine-month work based postgraduate MRI module. Methods: Twenty-seven participants each submitted 60 image commentaries taken from prospective clinical workloads. The image interpretations (n=1,620) comprised brain, spine, and knee MRI examinations. Prevalence of abnormal examinations approximated 53% (brain), 74% (spine), and 73% (knee), and included acute and chronic pathology, normal variants and incidental findings. Each image interpretation was graded against reference standard consultant radiologist definitive report. Results: The radiographer’s performance on brain image interpretations demonstrated mean accuracy at 86.7% (95% CI 83.4-89.3) with sensitivity and specificity of 84% (95% CI 80.9-86.4) and 89.7% (95% CI 86.2-92.6) respectively. For spinal interpretations the mean accuracy was 86.4% (95% CI 83.4-89.0), sensitivity was 90.2% (95% CI 88.2-92), mean specificity was 75.3% (95% CI 69.4-80.4). The mean results for knee interpretation accuracy were 80.9% (95% CI 77.3-84.1), sensitivity was 83.3% (95% CI 80.8-85.5), with 74.3% specificity (95% CI 67.4-80.4). Conclusions: The radiographer’s demonstrated skills in brain, spine and knee MRI examination image interpretation. These skills are not to replace radiologist reporting but to meet regulating body standards of proficiency, and to assist decision making in communicating unexpected serious findings, and /or extend scan range and sequences. Further research is required to investigate the impact of these skills on adjusting scan protocols or flagging urgent findings in clinical practice

Evaluation of an equilibrium phase free-breathing dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI prototype sequence compared to traditional breath-held MRI acquisition in liver oncology patients

Introduction: Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a commonly used for diagnosing metastatic liver disease. When patients are unable to achieve the necessary arrested respiration required during image acquisition, image artefacts occur that affect image quality and diagnostic value. The main contribution of this study is the evaluation of a novel prototype technique that allows a specific sub-group of patients to breathe freely throughout the acquisition of dynamic contrast enhanced equilibrium phase MRI of the liver. Methods: The study compared a traditional single phase of arrested respiration T1-weighted (T1W) fat saturated (FatSat) volumetric interpolated breath-hold sequence (VIBE) with a novel free-breathing T1W 3D Radial VIBE prototype sequence. A cohort of patients (n=30) with known hepatic metastases who demonstrated difficulty in complying with the instructions for arrested inspiration were scanned. Both sets of data were compared for diagnostic quality using a Likert scale questionnaire by specialist Oncology Radiologists (n=2). Results: Higher scores for all image quality criteria, including the presence of artefact (2.6 + 0.57; p <0.001), lesion conspicuity (2.9 + 0.35; p <0.001) and visibility of intra-hepatic vessels (2.8 + 0.37; p <0.001) were found using the free-breathing sequence (13.5 + 1.94; p <0.001 t=13.31; df 29; p <0.001) than the breath hold phase (8.1 + 2.06), confirmed with kappa (k-0.023; p-0.050). Conclusions: The results demonstrated a 39.5% improvement in overall image quality using the T1W 3D Radial VIBE prototype sequence, and has the potential to improve patient experience and reduce image artefacts during MRI imaging of this sub-group of patients

Lantern Transparencies

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Heavier Than Air:Resisting the Military State

The starting point is a novel entitled Gas gegen Gas (Gas against Gas) written by the chemist, editor, and translator Dora Sophie Kellner (1890–1960), which was serialized in a number of newspapers between 1930–32. The novel takes place between Berlin and a number of islands in the Adriatic Sea in the interwar years. It centres on two female protagonists, one of whom assists in the invention of a gas that might shield urban populations from the effects of chemical warfare: an antidote to chloroacetophenone, or tear gas. It is a work of ambiguous genre, suspended between capitalist crime novel, bourgeois family drama, and feminist sci-fi, born out of the traumatic events of the First World War, foreshadowing years of conflict to come. Gas gegen Gas builds on a short piece of journalism, entitled ‘The Weapons of Tomorrow’ (1925), which was subsumed into Kellner’s husband Walter Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften, though it is likely to be, at least partially, written by her. If this article describes in terrifying detail the body’s experience of contact with chemical gases, inflicted by a conspiracy of technology and the state, the novel is an attempt to map its technical, scientific, and political resistance. Eva Weissweiler’s recent biography of Dora Sophie Kellner, Das Echo deiner Frage. Dora und Walter Benjamin — Biographie einer Beziehung (2020), has made Kellner’s intellectual career and this novel in particular more widely known in the German-speaking world. Over the past year, Sam Dolbear and Flossie Draper (who is also the great-granddaughter of Dora Sophie Kellner and Walter Benjamin) have collected and collated the novel’s installments from the three different periodicals in which they were printed and embarked on its first complete publication in both German and English. This symposium will begin with a synopsis of the novel, followed by an exploration of its various themes. It aims to introduce the life and work of Dora Sophie Kellner and place the novel within its contemporary and subsequent historical contexts, particularly anti-war aesthetic and political currents in the 1920s; to consider the place of the city and the vulnerability of the body in the endurance of, and resistance to, war and state violence; to investigate the relationship between the technologies of war and colonialism, capitalism, and science, and the place of tear gas within the histories of riot, protest, and insurrection; and to explore histories of science fiction, questions of forensics, trauma, genre, and seriality, the possibility of an anti-militarist or feminist science, and the politics of breath and turbidity.Heavier Than Air: Resisting the Military State, symposium, ICI Berlin, 15 June 2022 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e220615

On the List

This essay presents some thoughts about lists and draws on a range of material, from Lauren Berlant to George Perec. It acts as an introduction to a series of short meditations on individual instances of listing. Usually presented in a sequence and assembled according to some practical or conceptual necessity, lists offer the promise, perhaps the illusion, of keeping track, of bringing control to the flux of things and thoughts, of putting confusion to a halt. They relate to reduction in two ways: first, as a quantitative reduction — as a form of making smaller or less; and second, as a qualitative reduction — as a form of condensation to the most salient data.Sam Dolbear, Ben Nichols, and Claudia Peppel, ‘On the List’, in The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 253-61 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-25_13

Why factors facilitating collusion may not predict cartel occurrence — experimental evidence

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this recordFactors facilitating collusion may not successfully predict cartel occurrence: When a factor predicts that collusion (explicit and tacit) becomes easier, firms might be less inclined to set up a cartel simply because tacit coordination already tends to go in hand with supra‐competitive profits. We illustrate this issue with laboratory data. We run n‐firm Cournot experiments with written cheap‐talk communication between players and we compare them to treatments without the possibility to talk. We conduct this comparison for two, four, and six firms. We find that two firms indeed find it easier to collude tacitly but that the number of firms does not significantly affect outcomes with communication. As a result, the payoff gain from communication increases with the number of firms, at a decreasing rate

Institutional Authority and Collusion

A 'collusion puzzle' exists by which, even though increasing the number of firms reduces the ability to tacitly collude, and leads to a collapse in collusion in experimental markets with three or more firms, in natural markets there are such numbers of firms colluding successfully. We present an experiment showing that, if managers are deferential towards an authority, firms can induce more collusion by delegating production decisions to middle managers and providing suitable informal nudges. This holds not only with two but also with four firms. We are also able to distinguish compliance effects from coordination effects