Machine/ Flow/ Territory

In his lecture of 14th March 1979, within the series, The Birth of the Biopolitical, Michel Foucault discusses in some depth the American form of neo-liberalism, contrasting it with the development of neo-liberalism in Germany before and during World War Two. With respect to the radical approaches to neo-liberalism of Theodore Schulz and Gary Becker, Foucault offers a succinct shorthand understanding of the notion of self as human capital within neo-liberal economic rationality. This self is an “ability-machine” and an “incomestream” or “flow.” The English translator of The Birth of the Biopolitical, Graham Burchell, offers a curious footnote on this succinct abbreviation, machine/flow: “The word “machine” seems to be Foucault’s, an allusion or wink to L’Anti-Oedipe of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari”. Indeed the machine/flow couple is a crucial territorializing and deterritorialising ensemble of relations for Deleuze and Guattari in both volumes of Capitalism and schizophrenia. That “wink” to D & G, suggested by Burchell, opens the space for a compelling engagement with an ongoing understanding of Foucault’s critical philosophical writings and Deleuze’s own work. But here we are afforded an opportunity to engage the extent to which the machinic/flows ensemble in Deleuze and Guattari, or their political concerns with capitalism, are an allied diagnostic to Foucault’s writings on the governmentality of neo-liberalism, particularly in relation to the radical notions of the movement of freedom in a self’s relation to herself, that is opened in an analytics of the political rationality of neo-liberalism. This paper approaches an understanding of “territory” in relation to the emphasis given by both Deleuze and Foucault to fundamental transformations, particularly since the second half of the twentieth century, to sovereign juridical understanding of subject-rights, to neo-liberal understandings of entrepreneurial self-enterprise as inequity of competition: territory becoming milieu, becoming flow

Neither light nor language

This paper takes the context of responding to the film, Dark Light (2014) by Maria O’Connor, as a provocation to engage with aspects of the work of Jacques Derrida on the animal and the human. Dark Light develops as an essay film that references a series of philosophers, establishing how various philosophical frameworks have questioned the boundary that separates the human animal from its others. However, Dark Light complicates this register of presentation of philosophical positions in three ways. It does so in a disrupting of cinematic conventions with respect to languages and their translations. It also presents an enigmatic visual score whose resonance with a voice-track is allusive and open. Thirdly, it grounds its ethics on a question of sexual difference, as if sexual difference primordially opens our concerns with animal ethics. Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign, precisely an encounter with philosophers concerning the separation of the human and the animal, itself opens with a tracing of sexual difference. The paper initially engages two tropes developed by Derrida, one concerning anthropos as a mediating of the divine and the bestial. The other concerns a differentiation between the notions of feigning and feigning one’s feign, as if this difference is that which separates the animal and the human. The paper aims to ask how one encounters Dark Light as phenomenon, how it might be considered otherwise than as a reification, a thing or object of encounter, as de-vivified representation. Perhaps, obscurely, we ask how life living becomes the radical agency of the film’s encounter

Simulations of threshold displacement in beryllium

Atomic scale molecular dynamics simulations of radiation damage have been performed on beryllium. Direct threshold displacement simulations along a geodesic projection of directions were used to investigate the directional dependence with a high spatial resolution. It was found that the directionally averaged probability of displacement increases from 0 at 35 eV, with the energy at which there is a 50% chance of a displacement occurring is 70 eV and asymptotically approaching 1 for higher energies. This is, however, strongly directionally dependent with a 50% probability of displacement varying from 35 to 120 eV, with low energy directions corresponding to the nearest neighbour directions. A new kinetic energy dependent expression for the average maximum displacement of an atom as a function of energy is derived which closely matches the simulated data

Environmental bone disease of hitherto undescribed type

Click on the link to view

Extensin network formation in Vitis vinifera callus cells is an essential and causal event in rapid and H2O2-induced reduction in primary cell wall hydration

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Extensin deposition is considered important for the correct assembly and biophysical properties of primary cell walls, with consequences to plant resistance to pathogens, tissue morphology, cell adhesion and extension growth. However, evidence for a direct and causal role for the extensin network formation in changes to cell wall properties has been lacking.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Hydrogen peroxide treatment of grapevine (<it>Vitis vinifera </it>cv. Touriga) callus cell walls was seen to induce a marked reduction in their hydration and thickness. An analysis of matrix proteins demonstrated this occurs with the insolubilisation of an abundant protein, GvP1, which displays a primary structure and post-translational modifications typical of dicotyledon extensins. The hydration of callus cell walls free from saline-soluble proteins did not change in response to H₂O₂, but fully regained this capacity after addition of extensin-rich saline extracts. To assay the specific contribution of GvP1 cross-linking and other wall matrix proteins to the reduction in hydration, GvP1 levels in cell walls were manipulated <it>in vitro </it>by binding selected fractions of extracellular proteins and their effect on wall hydration during H₂O₂incubation assayed.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This approach allowed us to conclude that a peroxidase-mediated formation of a covalently linked network of GvP1 is essential and causal in the reduction of grapevine callus wall hydration in response to H₂O₂. Importantly, this approach also indicated that extensin network effects on hydration was only partially irreversible and remained sensitive to changes in matrix charge. We discuss this mechanism and the importance of these changes to primary wall properties in the light of extensin distribution in dicotyledons.</p

Minsky machines and algorithmic problems

This is a survey of using Minsky machines to study algorithmic problems in semigroups, groups and other algebraic systems.Comment: 19 page

Integrity of H1 helix in prion protein revealed by molecular dynamic simulations to be especially vulnerable to changes in the relative orientation of H1 and its S1 flank

In the template-assistance model, normal prion protein (PrPC), the pathogenic cause of prion diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob (CJD) in human, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in cow, and scrapie in sheep, converts to infectious prion (PrPSc) through an autocatalytic process triggered by a transient interaction between PrPC and PrPSc. Conventional studies suggest the S1-H1-S2 region in PrPC to be the template of S1-S2 $\beta$-sheet in PrPSc, and the conformational conversion of PrPC into PrPSc may involve an unfolding of H1 in PrPC and its refolding into the $\beta$-sheet in PrPSc. Here we conduct a series of simulation experiments to test the idea of transient interaction of the template-assistance model. We find that the integrity of H1 in PrPC is vulnerable to a transient interaction that alters the native dihedral angles at residue Asn$^{143}$, which connects the S1 flank to H1, but not to interactions that alter the internal structure of the S1 flank, nor to those that alter the relative orientation between H1 and the S2 flank.Comment: A major revision on statistical analysis method has been made. The paper now has 23 pages, 11 figures. This work was presented at 2006 APS March meeting session K29.0004 at Baltimore, MD, USA 3/13-17, 2006. This paper has been accepted for pubcliation in European Biophysical Journal on Feb 2, 200

Leaf-applied sodium chloride promotes cadmium accumulation in durum wheat grain

Cadmium (Cd) accumulation in durum wheat grain is a growing concern. Among the factors affecting Cd accumulation in plants, soil chloride (Cl) concentration plays a critical role. The effect of leaf NaCl application on grain Cd was studied in greenhouse-grown durum wheat (Triticum turgidum L. durum, cv. Balcali-2000) by immersing (10 s) intact flag leaves into Cd and/or NaCl-containing solutions for 14 times during heading and dough stages. Immersing flag leaves in solutions containing increasing amount of Cd resulted in substantial increases in grain Cd concentration. Adding NaCl alone or in combination with the Cd-containing immersion solution promoted accumulation of Cd in the grains, by up to 41%. In contrast, Zn concentrations of grains were not affected or even decreased by the NaCl treatments. This is likely due to the effect of Cl complexing Cd and reducing positive charge on the metal ion, an effect that is much smaller for Zn. Charge reduction or removal (CdCl2 0 species) would increase the diffusivity/lipophilicity of Cd and enhance its capability to penetrate the leaf epidermis and across membranes. Of even more significance to human health was the ability of Cl alone to penetrate leaf tissue and mobilize and enhance shoot Cd transfer to grains, yet reducing or not affecting Zn transfer