2,791 research outputs found

    Ideologies of time: How elite corporate actors engage the future

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    Our paper deals with how elite corporate actors in a Western capitalist-democratic society conceive of and prepare for the future. Paying attention to how senior officers of ten important Danish companies make sense of the future will help us to identify how particular temporal narratives are ideologically marked. This ideological dimension offers a common sense frame that is structured around a perceived inevitability of capitalism, a market economy as the basic organizational structure of the social and economic order, and an assumption of confident access to the future. Managers envisage their organization?s future and make plans for organizational action in a space where ?business as usual? reigns, and there is little engagement with the future as fundamentally open; as a time-yet-to-come. In using a conceptual lens inspired by the work of Fredric Jameson, we first explore the details of this presentism and a particular colonization of the future, and then linger over small disruptions in the narratives of our interviewees which point to what escapes or jars their common sense frame, explore the implicit meanings they assign to their agency, and also find clues and traces of temporal actions and strategies in their narratives that point to a subtly different engagement with time

    Putting into Question the Imaginary of Recovery: A Dialectical Reading of the Global Financial Crisis and its Aftermath

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    In this article we put into question the discourses that emerged during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and that coalesced around a particular socio-economic imaginary of ?recovery? over the period 2009-2012. Our reading of these discourses is very much guided by the notion of the dialectic as developed by Fredric Jameson, and as such this paper can be read as attempt to put his theoretical ideas to work. Through our dialectical reading we aim to create a certain estrangement effect that makes the imaginary of recovery seem very odd and unnatural. In order to achieve such an effect we postulate four theses which are deliberately antagonistic: first, that there has been no ?crisis of capitalism?; second, that we must change the valence of the GFC from negative to positive; third, that the relationship between finance capitalism and ?free markets? is deeply contradictory; and fourth, that we must resist the regulation discourse

    Accelerated convergence to steady state by gradual far-field damping

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    Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/76495/1/AIAA-11054-168.pd

    In Silico Derivation of HLA-Specific Alloreactivity Potential from Whole Exome Sequencing of Stem Cell Transplant Donors and Recipients: Understanding the Quantitative Immuno-biology of Allogeneic Transplantation

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    Donor T cell mediated graft vs. host effects may result from the aggregate alloreactivity to minor histocompatibility antigens (mHA) presented by the HLA in each donor-recipient pair (DRP) undergoing stem cell transplantation (SCT). Whole exome sequencing has demonstrated extensive nucleotide sequence variation in HLA-matched DRP. Non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (nsSNPs) in the GVH direction (polymorphisms present in recipient and absent in donor) were identified in 4 HLA-matched related and 5 unrelated DRP. The nucleotide sequence flanking each SNP was obtained utilizing the ANNOVAR software package. All possible nonameric-peptides encoded by the non-synonymous SNP were then interrogated in-silico for their likelihood to be presented by the HLA class I molecules in individual DRP, using the Immune-Epitope Database (IEDB) SMM algorithm. The IEDB-SMM algorithm predicted a median 18,396 peptides/DRP which bound HLA with an IC50 of <500nM, and 2254 peptides/DRP with an IC50 of <50nM. Unrelated donors generally had higher numbers of peptides presented by the HLA. A similarly large library of presented peptides was identified when the data was interrogated using the Net MHCPan algorithm. These peptides were uniformly distributed in the various organ systems. The bioinformatic algorithm presented here demonstrates that there may be a high level of minor histocompatibility antigen variation in HLA-matched individuals, constituting an HLA-specific alloreactivity potential. These data provide a possible explanation for how relatively minor adjustments in GVHD prophylaxis yield relatively similar outcomes in HLA matched and mismatched SCT recipients.Comment: Abstract: 235, Words: 6422, Figures: 7, Tables: 3, Supplementary figures: 2, Supplementary tables:

    Cities in fiction: Perambulations with John Berger

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    This paper explores selected novels by John Berger in which cities play a central role. These cities are places, partially real and partially imagined, where memory, hope, and despair intersect. My reading of the novels enables me to trace important themes in recent discourses on the nature of contemporary capitalism, including notions of resistance and universality. I also show how Berger?s work points to a writing that can break free from the curious capacity of capitalism to absorb and feed of its critique

    AMR, stability and higher accuracy

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    Efforts to achieve better accuracy in numerical relativity have so far focused either on implementing second order accurate adaptive mesh refinement or on defining higher order accurate differences and update schemes. Here, we argue for the combination, that is a higher order accurate adaptive scheme. This combines the power that adaptive gridding techniques provide to resolve fine scales (in addition to a more efficient use of resources) together with the higher accuracy furnished by higher order schemes when the solution is adequately resolved. To define a convenient higher order adaptive mesh refinement scheme, we discuss a few different modifications of the standard, second order accurate approach of Berger and Oliger. Applying each of these methods to a simple model problem, we find these options have unstable modes. However, a novel approach to dealing with the grid boundaries introduced by the adaptivity appears stable and quite promising for the use of high order operators within an adaptive framework

    The prophylactic role of intravenous and long-term oral acyclovir after allogeneic bone marrow transplantation.

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    Eighty-two patients were randomly allocated to receive intravenous acyclovir 5 mg kg-1 t.d.s. for 23 days followed by oral acyclovir 800 mg 6-hourly for 6 months or matching placebos after allogeneic bone marrow transplantation. Herpes simplex and varicella zoster virus infections were significantly reduced during the period of administration of acyclovir. No reduction in cytomegalovirus infection was demonstrated. The drug was not toxic

    Eco-aesthetic dimensions: Herbert Marcuse, ecollogy and art

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    In his last book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), Marcuse argued that a concern for aesthetics is justified when political change is unlikely. But the relation between aesthetics and politics is oblique: “Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness … of the men and women who could change the world.” (p. 33). Marcuse also linked his critique of capitalism to environmentalism in the early 1970s: “the violation of the Earth is a vital aspect of the counterrevolution.” (Ecology and Revolution, in The New Left and the 1960s, Collected Papers 3, 2005, p. 173). This article revisits Marcuse’s ideas on aesthetics and ecology, and reviews two recent art projects which engage their audiences in ecological issues: The Jetty Project (2014) by Wolfgang Weileder—which used recycled material and community participation to construct a temporary monument within a wider conservation project on the Tyne, N-E England—and Fracking Futures by HeHe (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen)—which turned the interior of the gallery at FACT, Liverpool, into what appeared to be a fracking site. The aim is not to evaluate the projects, nor to test the efficacy of Marcuse’s ideas, more to ask again whether art has a role in a shift of attitude which might contribute to dealing with the political and economic causes of climate change

    Cold gas outflows from the Small Magellanic Cloud traced with ASKAP

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    Feedback from massive stars plays a critical role in the evolution of the Universe by driving powerful outflows from galaxies that enrich the intergalactic medium and regulate star formation. An important source of outflows may be the most numerous galaxies in the Universe: dwarf galaxies. With small gravitational potential wells, these galaxies easily lose their star-forming material in the presence of intense stellar feedback. Here, we show that the nearby dwarf galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), has atomic hydrogen outflows extending at least 2 kiloparsecs (kpc) from the star-forming bar of the galaxy. The outflows are cold, T<400 KT<400~{\rm K}, and may have formed during a period of active star formation 256025 - 60 million years (Myr) ago. The total mass of atomic gas in the outflow is 107\sim 10^7 solar masses, M{\rm M_{\odot}}, or 3\sim 3% of the total atomic gas of the galaxy. The inferred mass flux in atomic gas alone, M˙HI0.21.0 M yr1\dot{M}_{HI}\sim 0.2 - 1.0~{\rm M_{\odot}~yr^{-1}}, is up to an order of magnitude greater than the star formation rate. We suggest that most of the observed outflow will be stripped from the SMC through its interaction with its companion, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), and the Milky Way, feeding the Magellanic Stream of hydrogen encircling the Milky Way.Comment: Published in Nature Astronomy, 29 October 2018, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41550-018-0608-
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