Dread Hermeneutics: Bob Marley, Paul Ricoeur and the Productive Imagination.

This article presents Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutic of the productive imagination as a methodological tool for understanding the innovative social function of texts that in exceeding their semantic meaning, iconically augment reality. Through the reasoning of Rastafari elder Mortimo Planno’s unpublished text, Rastafarian: The Earth’s Most Strangest Man, and the religious and biblical signification from the music of his most famous postulate, Bob Marley, this article applies Paul Ricœur’s schema of the religious productive imagination to conceptualize the metaphoric transfer from text to life of verbal and iconic images of Rastafari’s hermeneutic of word, sound and power. This transformation is accomplished through what Ricœur terms the phenomenology of the iconic augmentation of reality. Understanding this semantic innovation is critical to understanding the capacity of the religious imagination to transform reality as a proclamation of hope in the midst of despair

Re-Imagining Text — Re-Imagining Hermeneutics

With the advent of the digital age and new mediums of communication, it is becoming increasingly important for those interested in the interpretation of religious text to look beyond traditional ideas of text and textuality to find the sacred in unlikely places. Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological reorientation of classical hermeneutics from romanticized notions of authorial intent and psychological divinations to a serious engagement with the “science of the text” is a hermeneutical tool that opens up an important dialogue between the interpreter, the world of the text, and the contemporary world in front of the text. This article examines three significant insights that Paul Ricoeur contributes to our expanding understanding of text. First under scrutiny will be Ricoeur’s de-regionalization of classic hermeneutics culminating in his understanding of Dasein (Being) as “being-in-the-world,” allowing mean-ing to transcend the physical boundaries of the text. Next, Ricoeur’s three-fold under-standing of traditionality/Traditions/tradition as the “chain of interpretations” through which religious language transcends the tem-poral boundary of historicity will be explored. The final section will focus on Ricoeur’s understanding of the productive imagination and metaphoric truth as the under-appreciated yet key insight around which Ricoeur’s philosophical investigation into the metaphoric transfer from text to life revolves

High-sensitivity radio study of the non-thermal stellar bow shock EB27

We present a deep radio-polarimetric observation of the stellar bow shock EB27 associated with the massive star BD+43○3654. This is the only stellar bow shock confirmed to have non-thermal radio emission. We used the Jansky Very Large Array in S band (2-4 GHz) to test whether this synchrotron emission is polarized. The unprecedented sensitivity achieved allowed us to map even the fainter regions of the bow shock, revealing that the more diffuse emission is steeper and the bow shock brighter than previously reported. No linear polarization is detected in the bow shock above 0.5 per cent, although we detected polarized emission from two southern sources, probably extragalactic in nature. We modelled the intensity and morphology of the radio emission to better constrain the magnetic field and injected power in relativistic electrons. Finally, we derived a set of more precise parameters for the system EB27-BD+43○3654 using Gaia Early Data Release 3, including the spatial velocity. The new trajectory, back in time, intersects the core of the Cyg OB2 association.Fil: Benaglia, Paula. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía; ArgentinaFil: del Palacio, Santiago. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía; ArgentinaFil: Hales, Christopher. National Radio Astronomy Observatory; Estados UnidosFil: Colazo, Marcelo Eduardo Antonio. Comision Nacional de Actividades Espaciales; Argentin

The medial entorhinal cortex is necessary for temporal organization of hippocampal neuronal activity.

The superficial layers of the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) are a major input to the hippocampus. The high proportion of spatially modulated cells, including grid cells and border cells, in these layers suggests that MEC inputs are critical for the representation of space in the hippocampus. However, selective manipulations of the MEC do not completely abolish hippocampal spatial firing. To determine whether other hippocampal firing characteristics depend more critically on MEC inputs, we recorded from hippocampal CA1 cells in rats with MEC lesions. Theta phase precession was substantially disrupted, even during periods of stable spatial firing. Our findings indicate that MEC inputs to the hippocampus are required for the temporal organization of hippocampal firing patterns and suggest that cognitive functions that depend on precise neuronal sequences in the hippocampal theta cycle are particularly dependent on the MEC

Satellite-based prediction of pCO2 in coastal waters of the eastern North Pacific

Continental margin carbon cycling is complex, highly variable over a range of space and time scales, and forced by multiple physical and biogeochemical drivers. Predictions of globally significant air–sea CO2 fluxes in these regions have been extrapolated based on very sparse data sets. We present here a method for predicting coastal surface-water pCO2 from remote-sensing data, based on self organizing maps (SOMs) and a nonlinear semi-empirical model of surface water carbonate chemistry. The model used simple empirical relationships between carbonate chemistry (total dissolved carbon dioxide (TCO2) and alkalinity (TAlk)) and satellite data (sea surface temperature (SST) and chlorophyll (Chl)). Surface-water CO2 partial pressure (pCO2) was calculated from the empirically-predicted TCO2 and TAlk. This directly incorporated the inherent nonlinearities of the carbonate system, in a completely mechanistic manner. The model’s empirical coefficients were determined for a target study area of the central North American Pacific continental margin (22–50°N, within 370 km of the coastline), by optimally reproducing a set of historical observations paired with satellite data. The model-predicted pCO2 agreed with the highly variable observations with a root mean squared (RMS) deviation of 0.8 (r = 0.81; r2 = 0.66). This level of accuracy is a significant improvement relative to that of simpler models that did not resolve the biogeochemical sub-regions or that relied on linear dependences on input parameters. Air–sea fluxes based on these pCO2 predictions and satellite-based wind speed measurements suggest that the region is a ∼14 Tg C yr−1 sink for atmospheric CO2 over the 1997–2005 period, with an approximately equivalent uncertainty, compared with a ∼0.5 Tg C yr−1 source predicted by a recent bin-averaging and interpolation-based estimate for the same area.Fil: Hales, Burke. State University of Oregon; Estados UnidosFil: Strutton, Peter G.. University Of Tasmania; AustraliaFil: Saraceno, Martin. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Centro de Investigaciones del Mar y la Atmosfera. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Centro de Investigaciones del Mar y la Atmosfera; ArgentinaFil: Letelier, Ricardo. State University of Oregon; Estados UnidosFil: Takahashi, Taro. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; Estados UnidosFil: Feely, Richard. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory; Estados UnidosFil: Sabine, Christopher. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory; Estados UnidosFil: Chavez, Francisco. Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute; Estados Unido

Resolving the Structure at the Heart of BAL Quasars Through Microlensing Induced Polarisation Variability

While amongst the most luminous objects in the universe, many details regarding the inner structure of quasars remain unknown. One such area is the mechanism promoting increased polarisation in the broad absorption line troughs of certain quasars. This study shows how microlensing can be used to differentiate between two popular models that explain such polarisation through a realistic computational analysis. By examining a statistical ensemble of correlation data between two observables (namely image brightness and polarisation of the flux coming from the quasar), it was found that through spectropolarimetric monitoring it would be possible to discern between a model with an external scattering region and a model without one.Comment: 13 pages - accepted for publication in PASA. Quality of figures reduce

A Comparison of MRI Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping and TRUST-Based Measures of Brain Venous Oxygen Saturation in Sickle Cell Anaemia

In recent years, interest has grown in the potential for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measures of venous oxygen saturation (Yv) to improve neurological risk prediction. T2-relaxation-under-spin-tagging (TRUST) is an MRI technique which has revealed changes in Yv in patients with sickle cell anemia (SCA). However, prior studies comparing Yv in patients with SCA relative to healthy controls have reported opposing results depending on whether the calibration model, developed to convert blood T2 to Yv, is based on healthy human hemoglobin (HbA), bovine hemoglobin (HbBV) or sickle hemoglobin (HbS). MRI Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM) is an alternative technique that may hold promise for estimating Yv in SCA as blood magnetic susceptibility is linearly dependent upon Yv, and no significant difference has been found between the magnetic susceptibility of HbA and HbS. Therefore, the aim of this study was to compare estimates of Yv using QSM and TRUST with five published calibration models in healthy controls and patients with SCA. 17 patients with SCA and 13 healthy controls underwent MRI. Susceptibility maps were calculated from a multi-parametric mapping acquisition and Yv was calculated from the mean susceptibility in a region of interest in the superior sagittal sinus. TRUST estimates of T2, within a similar but much smaller region, were converted to Yv using five different calibration models. Correlation and Bland-Altman analyses were performed to compare estimates of Yv between TRUST and QSM methods. For each method, t-tests were also used to explore group-wise differences between patients with SCA and healthy controls. In healthy controls, significant correlations were observed between QSM and TRUST measures of Yv, while in SCA, there were no such correlations. The magnitude and direction of group-wise differences in Yv varied with method. The TRUST-HbBV and QSM methods suggested decreased Yv in SCA relative to healthy controls, while the TRUST-HbS (p < 0.01) and TRUST-HbA models suggested increased Yv in SCA as in previous studies. Further validation of all MRI measures of Yv, relative to ground truth measures such as O15 PET and jugular vein catheterization, is required in SCA before QSM or TRUST methods can be considered for neurological risk prediction