Consensus shattered : Japanese paradigm shifts and moral panic in the post-Aum era.

Any discussion of the factors shaping attitudes to, and patterns of conflict over, new religious movements (NRMs) in Japan today has to be conducted in the light of the activities of Aum Shinrikyô. For Japanese society, the “Aum affair” raised the spectre of a legally registered religious organization enjoying freedom of worship, legal protection, and religious tax exemptions and yet abusing these privileges to finance the manufacture of chemical weapons and commit heinous crimes. Inevitably, the question of Aum’s position and continued existence under Japanese law became a matter of public and political debate. On the wider level, too, the Aum affair raised basic questions about the relationship between religion, society, and state in a modern, liberal society and about the extent to which such societies should offer protection to, and tolerate the existence of, religious movements that are inimical to normative social values. The affair also raised questions about the tax benefits given to religious movements and about the ways in which religious movements acquire their wealth. Such issues gave a powerful boost to the development of an anticult movement in Japan and gave added impetus to an aggressive mass media keen to expose “deviant” religious groups. The Aum affair also damaged the ability of academics in the field to offer balanced judgments on new movements and virtually silenced academic researchers in the debates that arose during the post-Aum moral panic that gripped Japan

Hauntology, or the cultural logic of Neoliberalism

Mark Fisher argued that twenty-first century neoliberal culture is haunted by “lost futures” – futures that were “cancelled” and thus failed to happen. This was evident in the way that popular culture from the 2000s onwards had resorted to recycling and reusing old styles whilst appearing “new”. His thesis proposed that this haunted culture was made possible by the disappearance of the conditions enabling artists to produce genuinely new culture. By the mid-2000s Fisher identified certain artists that had picked up on this condition, producing artwork and albums that could be considered “hauntological” in their mixing of past, present and future together in a way that postmodernism had failed to do. Importantly, Fisher had adapted the idea of hauntology from the French Philosopher Jacques Derrida, who had confined its use to the strictly philosophical realm, where it appeared to be somewhat detached from reality. Fisher therefore introduced hauntology to a more popular audience. With specific reference to the artist Laura Grace Ford, the musician Burial, and various vaporwave artists I use Fredric Jameson’s method of analysing texts through the ‘political unconscious’, arguing that more than declaring culture to be “haunted”, the “hauntologists” actually attempt to restore a sense of history and class politics (although not always successfully or coherently) to a culture and society trying so hard to suppress those things; and that further to this, the texts in question even try to present an “imaginary resolution” to Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism”: the idea that “there is no alternative” to our current socioeconomic system

Test program for transmitter experiment package and heat pipe system for the communications technology satellite

The test program is described for the 200 watt transmitter experiment package and the variable conductance heat pipe system which are components of the high-power transponder aboard the Communications Technology Satellite. The program includes qualification tests to demonstrate design adequacy, acceptance tests to expose latent defects in flight hardware, and development tests to integrate the components into the transponder system and to demonstrate compatibility

Bootstrap-Optimised Regularised Image Reconstruction for Emission Tomography

In emission tomography, iterative image reconstruction from noisy measured data usually results in noisy images, and so regularisation is often used to compensate for noise. However, in practice, an appropriate, automatic and precise specification of the strength of regularisation for image reconstruction from a given noisy measured dataset remains unresolved. Existing approaches are either empirical approximations with no guarantee of generalisation, or else are computationally intensive cross-validation methods requiring full reconstructions for a limited set of preselected regularisation strengths. In contrast, we propose a novel methodology embedded within iterative image reconstruction, using one or more bootstrapped replicates of the measured data for precise optimisation of the regularisation. The approach uses a conventional unregularised iterative update of a current image estimate from the noisy measured data, and then also uses the bootstrap replicate to obtain a bootstrap update of the current image estimate. The method then seeks the regularisation hyperparameters which, when applied to the bootstrap update of the image, lead to a best fit of the regularised bootstrap update to the conventional measured data update. This corresponds to estimating the degree of regularisation needed in order to map the noisy update to a model of the mean of an ensemble of noisy updates. For a given regularised objective function (e.g. penalised likelihood), no hyperparameter selection or tuning is required. The method is demonstrated for positron emission tomography (PET) data at different noise levels, and delivers near-optimal reconstructions (in terms of reconstruction error) without any knowledge of the ground truth, nor any form of training data

Precision measurement of the branching ratio in the 6P3/2 decay of BaII with a single trapped ion

We present a measurement of the branching ratios from the 6P3/2 state of BaII into all dipoleallowed decay channels (6S1/2, 5D3/2 and 5D5/2). Measurements were performed on single 138Ba+ ions in a linear Paul trap with a frequency-doubled mode-locked Ti:Sapphire laser resonant with the 6S1/2->6P3/2 transition at 455 nm by detection of electron shelving into the dark 5D5/2 state. By driving a pi Rabi rotation with a single femtosecond pulse, a absolute measurement of the branching ratio to 5D5/2 state was performed. Combined with a measurement of the relative decay rates into 5D3/2 and 5D5/2 states performed with long trains of highly attenuated 455 nm pulses, it allowed the extraction of the absolute ratios of the other two decays. Relative strengths normalized to unity are found to be 0.756+/-0.046, 0.0290+/-0.0015 and 0.215+/-0.0064 for 6S1/2, 5D3/2 and 5D5/2 respectively. This approximately constitutes a threefold improvement over the best previous measurements and is a sufficient level of precision to compare to calculated values for dipole matrix elements.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

Determination of Atomic Data Pertinent to the Fusion Energy Program

We summarize progress that has been made on the determination of atomic data pertinent to the fusion energy program. Work is reported on the identification of spectral lines of impurity ions, spectroscopic data assessment and compilations, expansion and upgrade of the NIST atomic databases, collision and spectroscopy experiments with highly charged ions on EBIT, and atomic structure calculations and modeling of plasma spectra

At the end: a vignette-based investigation of strategies for managing end-of-life decisions in the intensive care unit

Background: Decision-making on end-of-life is an inevitable, yet highly complex, aspect of intensive care decision-making. End-of-life decisions can be challenging both in terms of clinical judgement and social interaction with families, and these two processes often become intertwined. This is especially apparent at times when clinicians are required to seek the views of surrogate decision makers (i.e., family members) when considering palliative care.  Methods: Using a vignette-based interview methodology, we explored how interactions with family members influence end-of-life decisions by intensive care unit clinicians (n = 24), and identified strategies for reaching consensus with families during this highly emotional phase of care.  Results: We found that the enactment of end-of-life decisions were reported as being affected by a form of loss aversion, whereby concerns over the consequences of not reaching a consensus with families weighed heavily in the minds of clinicians. Fear of conflict with families tended to arise from anticipated unrealistic family expectations of care, family normalization of patient incapacity, and belief systems that prohibit end-of-life decision-making.  Conclusions: To support decision makers in reaching consensus, various strategies for effective, coherent, and targeted communication (e.g., on patient deterioration and limits of clinical treatment) were suggested as ways to effectively consult with families on end-of-life decision-making