The Evolution Of Dandyism In Baudelaire\u27s Thought: Dandy, Hero And Saint

As a dandy-litterateur Baudelaire was the inheritor of a literary tradition which originated in England and which was subsequently established in France by writers such as Balzac, Gautier, Musset, Sue and, in particular, Barbey d\u27Aurevilly. In his study Du dandysme et de George Brummell, Barbey struggled to find a succinct definition of dandyism, and admitted: Ceci est presque aussi difficile a decrire qu\u27a definir. ;Throughout his works Baudelaire is repeatedly preoccupied by an attempt to conceptualise dandyism, not only as a social and philosophical stance, but as a literary style as well. While many critics have touched at least briefly upon the question of Baudelaire\u27s dandyism, little attention is given to the evolution of this concept in Baudelaire\u27s thought.;The meaning which Baudelaire associated with the word dandy shifted constantly. His own early life and works were in many ways the testament of an enfant terrible and a poete maudit. His early writings, and in particular the 1857 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, are without question a cogent expression of his initial conception of dandyism, of what he termed his phase d\u27egoisme. However, the condemnation of the 1857 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal precipitated a crisis resulting in a spiritual and literary reassessment. Henceforth Baudelaire\u27s works would reveal an increasing concern about man in general but a decreasing egotistical view of art and the artist. In his later works published after 1857--the Salon de 1859, the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, Les Paradis artificiels, his articles on Poe, Gautier, Delacroix and Wagner, his prose poems, his journal, and also his correspondence of the period--Baudelaire\u27s very personal use of the word dandy underwent a significant evolution, to the extent that he finally confounded the dandy and the saint, thereby manifesting a marked spiritual, moral and aesthetic evolution which has been either neglected or oversimplified

Ethics of AI in Education: Towards a Community-Wide Framework

While Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) research has at its core the desire to support student learning, experience from other AI domains suggest that such ethical intentions are not by themselves sufficient. There is also the need to consider explicitly issues such as fairness, accountability, transparency, bias, autonomy, agency, and inclusion. At a more general level, there is also a need to differentiate between doing ethical things and doing things ethically, to understand and to make pedagogical choices that are ethical, and to account for the ever-present possibility of unintended consequences. However, addressing these and related questions is far from trivial. As a first step towards addressing this critical gap, we invited 60 of the AIED community’s leading researchers to respond to a survey of questions about ethics and the application of AI in educational contexts. In this paper, we first introduce issues around the ethics of AI in education. Next, we summarise the contributions of the 17 respondents, and discuss the complex issues that they raised. Specific outcomes include the recognition that most AIED researchers are not trained to tackle the emerging ethical questions. A well-designed framework for engaging with ethics of AIED that combined a multidisciplinary approach and a set of robust guidelines seems vital in this context

Radiotherapy using a laser proton accelerator

Laser acceleration promises innovation in particle beam therapy of cancer where an ultra-compact accelerator system for cancer beam therapy can become affordable to a broad range of patients. This is not feasible without the introduction of a technology that is radically different from the conventional accelerator-based approach. The laser acceleration method provides many enhanced capabilities for the radiation oncologist. It reduces the overall system size and weight by more than one order of magnitude. The characteristics of the particle beams (protons) make them suitable for a class of therapy that might not be possible with the conventional accelerator, such as the ease for changing pulse intensity, the focus spread, the pinpointedness, and the dose delivery in general. A compact, uncluttered system allows a PET device to be located in the vicinity of the patient in concert with the compact gantry. The radiation oncologist may be able to irradiate a localized tumor by scanning with a pencil-like particle beam while ascertaining the actual dosage in the patient with an improved in-beam PET verification of auto-radioactivation induced by the beam therapy. This should yield an unprecedented flexibility in the feedback radiotherapy by the radiation oncologist. Laser accelerated radiotherapy has a unique niche in a current world of high energy accelerator using synchrotron or cyclotron.Comment: 26 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables, 69 references. International Symposium on Laser-Driven Relativistic Plasmas Applied for Science, Industry and Medicine, Kyoto, Japan, 17-20 September (2007

Chronic testicular Chlamydia muridarum infection impairs mouse fertility and offspring development

With approximately 131 million new genital tract infections occurring each year, Chlamydia is the most common sexually transmitted bacterial pathogen worldwide. Male and female infections occur at similar rates and both cause serious pathological sequelae. Despite this, the impact of chlamydial infection on male fertility has long been debated, and the effects of paternal chlamydial infection on offspring development are unknown. Using a male mouse chronic infection model, we show that chlamydial infection persists in the testes, adversely affecting the testicular environment. Infection increased leukocyte infiltration, disrupted the blood:testis barrier and reduced spermiogenic cell numbers and seminiferous tubule volume. Sperm from infected mice had decreased motility, increased abnormal morphology, decreased zona-binding capacity, and increased DNA damage. Serum anti-sperm antibodies were also increased. When both acutely and chronically infected male mice were bred with healthy female mice, 16.7% of pups displayed developmental abnormalities. Female offspring of chronically infected sires had smaller reproductive tracts than offspring of noninfected sires. The male pups of infected sires displayed delayed testicular development, with abnormalities in sperm vitality, motility, and sperm-oocyte binding evident at sexual maturity. These data suggest that chronic testicular Chlamydia infection can contribute to male infertility, which may have an intergenerational impact on sperm quality