Past and Future Presents: Existential Time and Futural Materialism

The paper brings existential temporality, as developed in the work of phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Husserl, into dialogue with historical materialism. What results is the development of a theoretical background for what the author terms futural materialism, which is taken to be a complimentary logical extension of historical materialist projects. To this end, it is suggested that the past and the future are best understood as materially existing in the present in an immanent way, mediated by conscious beings in the form of memory, projection, residual effect, and affect. Put differently, the present's presence in the past and future play a determining roll in those temporal dimensions, which subsequently fold back into the configuration of the present. Following Nietzsche and drawing influence from Guattari and Deleuze, it is argued that past and future are relatively fluid tools to be purposively deployed in the present for particular purposes rather than being transcendent facts which subjectivity must merely contend with. It is further asserted that as part of a broader non-reductive material monist project of social transformation, both futural and historical materialism are necessary considerations. 

A conceptual study of spirituality in selected writings of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze

Several authors have noted that one of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s aims was to dissolve the mind–body dualism, typical of Cartesianism. However, there has been little research on the spirit–body connection, as it appears in Jaques-Dalcroze’s writings. The purpose of this document analysis is to understand how a hermeneutic phenomenological model for spirituality in music education can inform our understanding of spirituality in selected writings by Jaques-Dalcroze. In the adapted model holism, balance, aesthetic experience, and movement in time, space, and with energy emerged as core concepts. This gives us a much richer understanding of the Dalcroze approach than has hitherto been available and adds to a growing narrative about the spiritual as it pertains to Jaques-Dalcroze and the approach he initiated

Nonoperative management of peripancreatic arterial aneurysms. A 10-year experience.

The surgical approach to bleeding visceral artery aneurysms has a mortality rate of 16-50% that is dependent primarily on anatomic location and underlying cause. Nineteen patients were studied over a 10-year period who were definitively treated by embolization. There was a 79% success rate and no mortality. The cause of the aneurysms was pancreatitis in 13 patients, trauma in four patients, subacute bacterial endocarditis in one patient, and secondary to biliary tract surgery in one patient

Accurate modelling of small-scale linear ion trap operating mode using He buffer gas to improve sensitivity and resolution for in-the-field mass spectrometry

Improved sensitivity and resolution of a small-scale linear ion trap is observed using He buffer.</p

A Preliminary List of the Hydrophilidae Known to Occur in Iowa

The Hydrophilidae, or water scavenger beetles, received their name from the genus Hydrophilus, a word of Greek origin meaning, a lover of water. They are usually found in ponds and streams. Several genera are, however, terrestrial in habit, living in moist earth and in the dung of cattle and horses, where they are said to feed upon the larvae of dipterous insects. The family consists of some 1,700 species, mostly tropical, but well represented in the temperate regions. About 190 species are known from the United States

Sequence tutor: Conservative fine-tuning of sequence generation models with KL-control

This paper proposes a general method for improving the structure and quality of sequences generated by a recurrent neural network (RNN), while maintaining information originally learned from data, as well as sample diversity. An RNN is first pre-trained on data using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), and the probability distribution over the next token in the sequence learned by this model is treated as a prior policy. Another RNN is then trained using reinforcement learning (RL) to generate higher-quality outputs that account for domain-specific incentives while retaining proximity to the prior policy of the MLE RNN. To formalize this objective, we derive novel off-policy RL methods for RNNs from KL-control. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated on two applications; 1) generating novel musical melodies, and 2) computational molecular generation. For both problems, we show that the proposed method improves the desired properties and structure of the generated sequences, while maintaining information learned from data