Obi Nwakanma United States, 2016

Born and raised in southern Nigeria, Obi Nwakanma is an Igbo poet and scholar of African and African diasporan literature. The three poems included here, “A Brief Memoir of Time,” “Child of Four Winds” and “Last Will and Testament” come from his book, Birthcry (Kraft Books 2016), which was a finalist for the 2016 Nigeria Literature Prize. These poems capture the author’s uniquely lyrical, gnomic, and prophetic voice and represent well the themes that define the volume: ancestry, historical consciousness, the politics and psychology of decolonization, Africa’s place in a polyethnic global society, and openness to the future as the speaker’s generation passes on the challenges of life to the next generation, imagined as a child listening to the speaker’s verse

Fayeza Hasanat When Our Fathers Die United States, 2018

English is the most spoken language in the world, even though Chinese is the most widely spoken native language. Many people across the globe speak English as a second language. In this story, written by the first Bangladeshi woman in print in the US, a college professor from Bangladesh teaches English and is mocked for her Bangladeshi accent. The student who mocks her otherizes her but also looks to her as a mother figure, which creates a complicated overlapping of imagery in her efforts to teach him, to forgive him, to forgive herself for being absent from her Bangladeshi family, and to make English literature accessible to her American students. The story takes us through the process by which postcolonial citizens speak and read a language and literature that was not originally “their own” and yet, still somehow is their inheritance, culturally and ethnically. The professor’s father permitted his children to write lines of English literature on his body with their fingers so he could guess them; this becomes a physical representation of how postcoloniality constructs identity and writes itself on the physical bodies of those who are formed by its ideologies

Bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen und Solidarisches Bürgergeld - mehr als sozialutopische Konzepte

Thomas Straubhaar und Ingrid Hohenleitner skizzieren das Modell eines bedingungslos gewährten Grundeinkommens. Sie zeigen, dass es auch für Deutschland finanzierbar ist. Sie sehen im Grundeinkommen die Chance, den Staatshaushalt nachhaltig zu sanieren und den Sozialstaat auch für künftige Generationen wieder finanzierbar zu machen. Sie zeigen, dass insbesondere im Niedriglohnbereich neue Arbeitsplätze im Umfang von bis zu 1,17 Millionen Vollzeitstellen geschaffen werden könnten. Michael Opielka sieht im Modell von Althaus „eine Art Kombilohn für alle“. Ein Teil des Volkseinkommens werde auf alle verteilt. Mit einer „Mischung aus Pragmatismus und Idealismus“ schaffe das Solidarische Bürgergeld einerseits einen „echten“ Arbeitsmarkt, mache zugleich aber Teilzeitarbeit lohnend und sichere freiwilliges Engagement und Bildungsphasen ab. Mit dem Solidarischen Bürgergeld führe die Lohndifferenzierung im unteren Einkommensbereich nicht mehr zu Armut. Das Solidarische Bürgergeld von Dieter Althaus wäre ein wichtiger Schritt auf dem Wege zu mehr gesellschaftlicher Solidarität, zu mehr Subsidarität und zu mehr (sozialer) Gerechtigkeit. Zu diesem Fazit kommt Michael Schramm. Zudem würde das System der sozialen Sicherung auf eine ökonomisch tragfähige Basis gestellt und eine Belebung des Arbeitsmarktes sowie der unternehmerischen Kräfte bewirkt.Thomas Straubhaar and Ingrid Hohenleitner outline the model of an unconditionally granted basic income. According to the authors, it can also be financed by Germany. They see the basic income as an opportunity to sustainably restructure the state budget and make the welfare state financially viable again for future generations. They show that new jobs of up to 1.17 million full-time jobs could be created, particularly in the low-wage sector. Michael Opielka sees the Althaus model as "a kind of combination wage for all". Part of the national income would be distributed to all. With a "mixture of pragmatism and idealism", the Solidarity Citizen\u27s Income creates on the one hand a "real" labour market, but at the same time makes part-time work worthwhile and provides secure voluntary commitment and educational phases. With the Solidarity Citizen Income, wage differentiation in the lower income bracket no longer leads to poverty. The Solidarity Citizen Income of Dieter Althaus would be an important step on the way to more social solidarity, more subsidiarity and more (social) justice. Michael Schramm comes to this conclusion. In addition, the system of social security would be placed on an economically viable footing and the labour market and entrepreneurial forces would be stimulated

The Prestigious and the Predatory: Helping Online Students Navigate Open Education Source in a World of Fake News

Teaching early literature students to conduct research online poses a challenge when students encounter Open Education Resources. Some are predatory, published for profit, and not well vetted. Others are highly credible and perfectly appropriate for use in student essays. An instructional designer and two faculty members collaborated to design a module to help English literature students think critically about the online sources they find and how to best participate in the existing literary conversation

Degradation Prediction of Semiconductor Lasers using Conditional Variational Autoencoder

Semiconductor lasers have been rapidly evolving to meet the demands of next-generation optical networks. This imposes much more stringent requirements on the laser reliability, which are dominated by degradation mechanisms (e.g., sudden degradation) limiting the semiconductor laser lifetime. Physics-based approaches are often used to characterize the degradation behavior analytically, yet explicit domain knowledge and accurate mathematical models are required. Building such models can be very challenging due to a lack of a full understanding of the complex physical processes inducing the degradation under various operating conditions. To overcome the aforementioned limitations, we propose a new data-driven approach, extracting useful insights from the operational monitored data to predict the degradation trend without requiring any specific knowledge or using any physical model. The proposed approach is based on an unsupervised technique, a conditional variational autoencoder, and validated using vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) and tunable edge emitting laser reliability data. The experimental results confirm that our model (i) achieves a good degradation prediction and generalization performance by yielding an F1 score of 95.3%, (ii) outperforms several baseline ML based anomaly detection techniques, and (iii) helps to shorten the aging tests by early predicting the failed devices before the end of the test and thereby saving costsComment: Published in: Journal of Lightwave Technology (Volume: 40, Issue: 18, 15 September 2022

Experimental Demonstration of 84 Gb/s PAM-4 Over up to 1.6 km SSMF Using a 20-GHz VCSEL at 1525 nm

We demonstrate 84-Gb/s four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) over up to 1.6-km standard single mode fiber using a 20-GHz single mode short cavity vertical cavity surface emitting laser diode at a transmission wavelength of 1525 nm. Different equalizer approaches including a common feedforward equalizer, a nonlinear Volterra equalizer (NLVE), a maximum likelihood sequence estimator (MLSE) and their combinations are evaluated working either as an equalizer for a standard PAM-4 or a partial response PAM-4 signal with seven levels. It is demonstrated that a standard FFE is not enough for a transmission distance of >0.6 km, while the use of an NLVE or FFE + MLSE is able to improve the transmission distance towards 1 km. The use of partial-response PAM-4 FFE in combination with a short memory MLSE is able to efficiently equalize the bandwidth limitations, showing more than 10-times BER improvement compared to standard NLVE or FFE + MLSE at a transmission distance of 1.6 km. Using a partial-response NLVE instead of an PR-FFE further performance improvement is achieved, resulting in BERs below the KP4 FEC-threshold with a BER-limit of 2E-4 after 1.6-km transmission distance, allowing error free operation

Release of tryptophan and serotonin into the portal vein of the isolated perfused rat small intestine

To investigate the release of serotonin from intestinal enterochromaffin cells, we used an in vitro technique which allows studies excluding overlapping influences from outside the gut. The entire small intestine of rats fed a standard or tryptophan-enriched (3% of total) diet was totally isolated by ligatures with the exception of the superior mesentric artery and portal vein that supply and drain the intestine. Simultaneously to the vascular perfusion (Krebs-Ringer bicarbonate buffer, 0,4% human albumin, 5 m M glucose, 0.6 m M glutamine) the gut lumen was infused (buffer or 0.1 N HCL). Acidification of the gut lumen resulted in an increment of venously released tryptophan and serotonin. After feeding tryptophan-enriched food the release of tryptophan was increased. However, the total amount of released serotonin after tryptophan diet did not differ as compared to that after standard diet. Addition of a monoamino-oxidase inhibitor (pargyline) to the arterial perfusate enhanced the released amount of serotonin 3-fold in the portal venous effluent (at a concentration of 1 m M but not 0.1 m M ). Recovery studies done by arterial infusions of serotonin (1 µ M , 10µ M ) and evaluation of the amounts venously released revealed a high loss of infused serotonin (40%–70%). Our data suggest gut-born serotonin to more likely play a paracrine role than a role as a classical hormone.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47538/1/433_2005_Article_BF01852260.pd

Effects of Anacetrapib in Patients with Atherosclerotic Vascular Disease

BACKGROUND: Patients with atherosclerotic vascular disease remain at high risk for cardiovascular events despite effective statin-based treatment of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels. The inhibition of cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) by anacetrapib reduces LDL cholesterol levels and increases high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels. However, trials of other CETP inhibitors have shown neutral or adverse effects on cardiovascular outcomes. METHODS: We conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial involving 30,449 adults with atherosclerotic vascular disease who were receiving intensive atorvastatin therapy and who had a mean LDL cholesterol level of 61 mg per deciliter (1.58 mmol per liter), a mean non-HDL cholesterol level of 92 mg per deciliter (2.38 mmol per liter), and a mean HDL cholesterol level of 40 mg per deciliter (1.03 mmol per liter). The patients were assigned to receive either 100 mg of anacetrapib once daily (15,225 patients) or matching placebo (15,224 patients). The primary outcome was the first major coronary event, a composite of coronary death, myocardial infarction, or coronary revascularization. RESULTS: During the median follow-up period of 4.1 years, the primary outcome occurred in significantly fewer patients in the anacetrapib group than in the placebo group (1640 of 15,225 patients [10.8%] vs. 1803 of 15,224 patients [11.8%]; rate ratio, 0.91; 95% confidence interval, 0.85 to 0.97; P=0.004). The relative difference in risk was similar across multiple prespecified subgroups. At the trial midpoint, the mean level of HDL cholesterol was higher by 43 mg per deciliter (1.12 mmol per liter) in the anacetrapib group than in the placebo group (a relative difference of 104%), and the mean level of non-HDL cholesterol was lower by 17 mg per deciliter (0.44 mmol per liter), a relative difference of -18%. There were no significant between-group differences in the risk of death, cancer, or other serious adverse events. CONCLUSIONS: Among patients with atherosclerotic vascular disease who were receiving intensive statin therapy, the use of anacetrapib resulted in a lower incidence of major coronary events than the use of placebo. (Funded by Merck and others; Current Controlled Trials number, ISRCTN48678192 ; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01252953 ; and EudraCT number, 2010-023467-18 .)