Novelistic Intimacies: Reading And Writing In The Late Age Of Print

In Novelistic Intimacies, I consider the political and aesthetic structure of intimacy in a diverse set of narrative forms produced in the so-called digital age, or the late age of print—from encyclopedic and metafictional novels to graphic storytelling and Afrofuturist fantasy. As an organizing principle, intimacy forces us to consider, at once, how novelists have attempted to restore language and narrative with personal meaning after postmodernism—often termed New Sincerity or post-irony. At the same time, intimacy allows us to see how novelists have experimented on the materiality of the book and the eroticism of language to invent new, impersonal modes of storytelling in the present. In this way, I think about reading and writing in contemporary fiction affectively, as acting on both the body and the mind. This requires that I consider these novels as material objects in the world. How do they circulate? How and why do readers engage with and activate them in the present? I argue that, in the late age of print, readers have particular bodily, physical, and sensual orientations towards books themselves. In different ways, each of the novels chosen manipulates the reader’s orientation towards the book as an object as a fundamental component of their aesthetic practice. And, I argue that part of the reason these manipulations are effective is because of a broader history of the book and the ways in which deep-seated habits and memories coalesce around and inform how readers engage with books. In doing so, I examine the contemporary novel in the context of a longer history of the book as an erotic threat and/or tool, looking backwards to literary figures like Samuel Richardson, Walt Whitman, and W.E.B. Du Bois to illuminate the aesthetic techniques of these contemporary storytellers. Beginning with an interrogation of the unacknowledged homosocial intimacy between men staged by one of the popular originators of New Sincerity, David Foster Wallace, I develop an alternative account of literary production in the late age of print. Through close readings of the works of Wallace, his contemporary A.M. Homes, the graphic auteur Chris Ware, and #BlackLivesMatter activist Kiese Laymon, I analyze the ways in which intimacy—filtered through the categories of race, gender, and sexuality—undergird and determine the relationships between the reader, narrative, and the book

Using the SA-CMM as a Tool for Estimating the User and Management Costs for Software Acquisition Projects

The SA-CMM is based on the expectation that a mature organization and its project managers will do a thorough job of planning software acquisitions. Each key process area within the SA-CMM addresses a project management process that must take place as an adjunct to planning and managing the software acquisition project. This requires the allocation of resources to plan and oversee the acquisition activities. While software project cost estimation tools are becoming more precise in their ability to predict the costs associated with software production, few address the costs associated with acquisition planning, oversight and management. Such costs are considered “hidden.” This paper describes a methodology used and the research done to determine the effort expended by organizations in overseeing software acquisitions and the implications for predicting costs of proposed projects. A major goal of the research was to encourage a quantitative approach in collecting acquisition costs within an organization so that databases of completed projects can be used to forecast costs for future projects. Such a quantitative approach helps identify the true cost of the project which is essential to economic analysis techniques used in the decision making process for software projects. Although both the CMM and SA-CMM were used in the research as frameworks to assess software management processes, the SA-CMM was primarily used for assessing the acquisition processes and measuring their costs

Production of Medical Isotopes From a Thorium Target Irradiated by Light Charged Particles up to 70 MeV

International audienc

Prandial states modify the reactivity of the gustatory cortex using gustatory evoked potentials in humans

Previous functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging studies evaluated the role of satiety on cortical taste area activity and highlighted decreased activation in the orbito-frontal cortex when food was eaten until satiation. The modulation of orbito-frontal neurons (secondary taste area) by ad libitum food intake has been associated with the pleasantness of the food's flavor. The insula and frontal operculum (primary taste area) are also involved in reward processing. The aim was to compare human gustatory evoked potentials (GEP) recorded in the primary and secondary gustatory cortices in a fasted state with those after food intake. Fifteen healthy volunteers were enrolled in this observational study. In each of two sessions, two GEP recordings were performed (at 11:00 am and 1:30 pm) in response to sucrose gustatory stimulation, and a sucrose-gustatory threshold was determined. During one session, a standard lunch was provided between the two GEP recordings. During the other session, subjects had nothing to eat. Hunger sensation, wanting, liking, and the perception of the solution's intensity were evaluated with visual analog scales. GEP latencies measured in the Pz (p < 0.001), Cz (p < 0.01), Fz (p < 0.001) recordings (primary taste area) were longer after lunch than in the pre-prandial condition. Fp1 and Fp2 latencies (secondary taste area) tended to be longer after lunch, but the difference was not significant. No difference was observed for the sucrose-gustatory threshold regardless of the session and time. Modifications in the primary taste area activity during the post-prandial period occurred regardless of the nature of the food eaten and could represent the activity of the frontal operculum and insula, which was recently shown to be modulated by gut signals (GLP-1, CCK, ghrelin, or insulin) through vagal afferent neurons or metabolic changes of the internal milieu after nutrient absorption. This trial was registered at clinicalstrials.gov as NCT02472444

Bottlenose dolphin mothers modify signature whistles in the presence of their own calves

PLT received support from ONR grants N00014-18-1-2062 and N00014-20-1-2709. Financial support for the whistle database project has come from the Protect Wild Dolphins fund at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, Vulcan Machine Learning Center for Impact, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Adelaide M. & Charles B. Link Foundation, and Dolphin Quest, Inc.Human caregivers interacting with children typically modify their speech in ways that promote attention, bonding, and language acquisition. Although this “motherese,” or child-directed communication (CDC), occurs in a variety of human cultures, evidence among nonhuman species is very rare. We looked for its occurrence in a nonhuman mammalian species with long-term mother–offspring bonds that is capable of vocal production learning, the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). Dolphin signature whistles provide a unique opportunity to test for CDC in nonhuman animals, because we are able to quantify changes in the same vocalizations produced in the presence or absence of calves. We analyzed recordings made during brief catch-and-release events of wild bottlenose dolphins in waters near Sarasota Bay, Florida, United States, and found that females produced signature whistles with significantly higher maximum frequencies and wider frequency ranges when they were recorded with their own dependent calves vs. not with them. These differences align with the higher fundamental frequencies and wider pitch ranges seen in human CDC. Our results provide evidence in a nonhuman mammal for changes in the same vocalizations when produced in the presence vs. absence of offspring, and thus strongly support convergent evolution of motherese, or CDC, in bottlenose dolphins. CDC may function to enhance attention, bonding, and vocal learning in dolphin calves, as it does in human children. Our data add to the growing body of evidence that dolphins provide a powerful animal model for studying the evolution of vocal learning and language.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Une plateforme pour l'analyse de matériaux par faisceaux d'ions à ARRONAX : Etude de l'effet d'humidité sur les échantillons

International audienceQuantification of soil pollution with method based on X-ray detection like X-Ray Fluorescence(XRF) suffers of multiple bias (moisture, surface state) especially when it's used for insituanalysis using portable-XRF. In order to study the effect of moisture on the results of ananalysis performed using X-Ray, we have performed studies using high energy PIXE/PIGE atthe ARRONAX. Samples were made of sand of different type. High energy PIXE/PIGE allowsus to avoid bias from surface state and to focus on moisture effect. It also allows to assessthe chemical composition of the sample. Results show a different behavior for each elementpresent in volcanic sand.</p

Self-Timed Masking: Implementing Masked S-Boxes Without Registers

Masking is one of the most used side-channel protection techniques. However, a secure masking scheme requires additional implementation costs, e.g. random number, and transistor count. Furthermore, glitches and early evaluation can temporally weaken a masked implementation in hardware, creating a potential source of exploitable leakages. Registers are generally used to mitigate these threats, hence increasing the implementation\u27s area and latency. In this work, we show how to design glitch-free masking without registers with the help of the dual-rail encoding and asynchronous logic. This methodology is used to implement low-latency masking with arbitrary protection order. Finally, we present a side-channel evaluation of our first and second order masked AES implementations