The ‘‘ICE’’ Study: Feasibility of Inexpensive Commercial Coolers on Mobile EMS Units

Introduction: Prehospital postresuscitation induced hypothermia (IH) has been shown to reduce neurological complications in comatose cardiac-arrest survivors. Retrofitting ambulances to include equipment appropriate to initiate hypothermia, such as refrigeration units for cooled saline, is expensive. The objective of this nonhuman subject research study was to determine if inexpensive, commercially available coolers could, in conjunction with five reusable ice packs, keep two 1 L bags of precooled 0.9% normal saline solution (NSS) at or below 48C for an average shift of eight to 12 hours in a real-world environment, on board in-service Emergency Medical Service (EMS) units, over varying weather conditions in all seasons. Methods: The coolers were chosen based on availability and affordability from two nationally available brands: The Igloo MaxxCold (Igloo Products Corp., Katy, Texas USA) and Coleman (The Coleman Company, Wichita, Kansas USA). Both are 8.5 liter (nine-quart) coolers that were chosen because they adequately held two 1 L bags of saline solution, along with the reusable ice packs designated in the study design, and were small enough for ease of placement on ambulances. Initial testing of the coolers was conducted in a controlled environment. Thereafter, each EMS unit was responsible to cool the saline to less than 48C prior to shift. Data were collected by emergency medical technicians, paramedics, and resident physicians working in seven different ambulance squads. Data analysis was performed using repeated measurements recorded over a 12-hour period from 19 individual coolers and were summarized by individual time points using descriptive statistics. Results: Initial testing determined that the coolers maintained temperatures of 48C for 12 hours in a controlled environment. On the ambulances, results based on the repeated measurements over time revealed that the saline solution samples as defined in the protocol, remained consistently below 48C for 12 hours. Utilizing the lower bound of the 2- sided 95% exact binomial confidence intervals, there was less than a five percent chance that saline samples could not be maintained below 48C for 12 hours, even during the summer months. Conclusions: Simple, commercially available coolers can maintain two 1 L bags of 0.9% NSS at 48C for 12 hours in ambulances in varying environmental conditions. This suggests that EMS agencies could inexpensively initiate prehospital IH in appropriate cases

Unworking Milton: Steps to a Georgics of the Mind

Traditionally read as a poem about laboring subjects who gain power through abstract and abstracting forms of bodily discipline, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) more compellingly foregrounds the erotics of the Garden as a space where humans and nonhumans intra-act materially and sexually. Following Christopher Hill, who long ago pointed to not one but two revolutions in the history of seventeenth-century English radicalism—the first, ‘the one which succeeded[,] . . . the protestant ethic’; and the second, ‘the revolution which never happened,’ which sought ‘communal property, a far wider democracy[,] and rejected the protestant ethic’—I show how Milton’s Paradise Lost gives substance to ‘the revolution which never happened’ by imagining a commons, indeed a communism, in which human beings are not at the center of things, but rather constitute one part of the greater ecology of mind within Milton’s poem. In the space created by this ecological reimagining, plants assume a new agency. I call this reimagining ‘ecology to come.

Activation and Deactivation of a Robust Immobilized Cp*Ir-Transfer Hydrogenation Catalyst: A Multielement in Situ X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy Study

A highly robust immobilized [Cp*IrCl2]2 precatalyst on Wang resin for transfer hydrogenation, which can be recycled up to 30 times, was studied using a novel combination of X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) at Ir L3-edge, Cl K-edge, and K K-edge. These culminate in in situ XAS experiments that link structural changes of the Ir complex with its catalytic activity and its deactivation. Mercury poisoning and “hot filtration” experiments ruled out leached Ir as the active catalyst. Spectroscopic evidence indicates the exchange of one chloride ligand with an alkoxide to generate the active precatalyst. The exchange of the second chloride ligand, however, leads to a potassium alkoxide–iridate species as the deactivated form of this immobilized catalyst. These findings could be widely applicable to the many homogeneous transfer hydrogenation catalysts with Cp*IrCl substructure

Gardens of happiness: Sir William Temple, temperance and China

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this recordSir William Temple, an English statesman and humanist, wrote “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus” in 1685, taking a neo-epicurean approach to happiness and temperance. In accord with Pierre Gassendi’s epicureanism, “happiness” is characterised as freedom from disturbance and pain in mind and body, whereas “temperance” means following nature (Providence and one’s physiopsychological constitution). For Temple, cultivating fruit trees in his garden was analogous to the threefold cultivation of temperance as a virtue in the humoral body (as food), the mind (as freedom from the passions), and the bodyeconomic (as circulating goods) in order to attain happiness. A regimen that was supposed to cure the malaise of Restoration amidst a crisis of unbridled passions, this threefold cultivation of temperance underlines Temple’s reception of China and Confucianism wherein happiness and temperance are highlighted. Thus Temple’s “gardens of happiness” represent not only a reinterpretation of classical ideas, but also his dialogue with China.European CommissionLeverhulme Trus

Conceptual blending and musical emotion

The scholarly literature on conceptual blending and emotion is very scant. One exception is a short section in Fauconnier and Turner (2002) focused on the emotion of anger. Fauconnier and Turner refer to the cross-cultural research of Lakoff and Kövecses (1987) on the anger script. The present article takes this dialogue on anger as a starting point to develop two separate yet interlinked matters: first, to open up a perspective on emotion from the standpoint of conceptual blending; second, to apply this perspective to the analysis of music’s structural features. The article begins by reviewing Juslin and Timmers’ (2010) model of the expressive character of acoustic features and proceeds to assess Lakoff and Kövecses’ theory of emotion as cognitive metaphor. Reconciling the cognitive metaphor of anger with the theory of conceptual blending allows us to analyze anger in two pieces, by Vivaldi and Haydn, respectively. The analysis throws into relief issues which arise when we apply conceptual blending to aesthetic objects in general, and musical works in particular. One key concept here is Fauconnier and Turner’s notion of time compression. Finally, the article examines Brandt’s (2006) useful ideas on blending in art as a way of further clarifying the special status of emotion in music, as distinct from utilitarian emotion in everyday life. The article concludes that a synthesis of conceptual blending and cognitive metaphor provides a useful tool for analyzing musical emotion