Creative Currencies: Circulation and Sovereignty in The Alchemist, Urania, and The Blazing World

Lisa Walters claims that in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, “Cavendish suggests that what is considered valuable, whether it is gold or a monarch, is not inherently valuable in itself. Value is placed externally by the interpretative powers of the community at large” (185). In The Blazing World and Urania, Margaret Cavendish and Mary Wroth, respectively, use these “interpretative powers” to rewrite the societal appraisals of their texts. They create literary worlds in which their stories can subvert the gendered barriers of early modern England’s economic and literary circulation—and ultimately, assert themselves as valuable. In this thesis, I examine Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, Mary Wroth’s Urania, and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World to trace the implications that literary circulation and sovereignty had for female characters and writers throughout the seventeenth century. I argue that the ways in which Jonson, Wroth, and Cavendish’s female characters circulate and gain power in their texts can explain how their authors did the same outside of fiction

Change in pattern of muscle activity following botulinum toxin injections for torticollis

Twenty patients with torticollis had electromyographic studies of their neck muscles performed before and after a series of local injections of botulinum toxin. The pattern of muscle activity changed after the injections, and this effect persisted even after head position had returned to baseline. Patients who did not experience any clinical benefit from the injections also demonstrated a change in the pattern of muscle activity. These results suggest that the underlying abnormality in torticollis usually involves a general motor program for head position, rather than the activity of individual neck muscles.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/50342/1/410290407_ftp.pd

Pairing virtual reality with dynamic posturography serves to differentiate between patients experiencing visual vertigo

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>To determine if increased visual dependence can be quantified through its impact on automatic postural responses, we have measured the combined effect on the latencies and magnitudes of postural response kinematics of transient optic flow in the pitch plane with platform rotations and translations.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Six healthy (29–31 yrs) and 4 visually sensitive (27–57 yrs) subjects stood on a platform rotated (6 deg of dorsiflexion at 30 deg/sec) or translated (5 cm at 5 deg/sec) for 200 msec. Subjects either had eyes closed or viewed an immersive, stereo, wide field of view virtual environment (scene) moved in upward pitch for a 200 msec period for three 30 sec trials at 5 velocities. RMS values and peak velocities of head, trunk, and head with respect to trunk were calculated. EMG responses of 6 trunk and lower limb muscles were collected and latencies and magnitudes of responses determined.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>No effect of visual velocity was observed in EMG response latencies and magnitudes. Healthy subjects exhibited significant effects (<it>p </it>< 0.05) of visual field velocity on peak angular velocities of the head. Head and trunk velocities and RMS values of visually sensitive subjects were significantly larger than healthy subjects (<it>p </it>< 0.05), but their responses were not modulated by visual field velocity. When examined individually, patients with no history of vestibular disorder demonstrated exceedingly large head velocities; patients with a history of vestibular disorder exhibited head velocities that fell within the bandwidth of healthy subjects.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Differentiation of postural kinematics in visually sensitive subjects when exposed to the combined perturbations suggests that virtual reality technology could be useful for differential diagnosis and specifically designed interventions for individuals whose chief complaint is sensitivity to visual motion.</p

Considerations for the future development of virtual technology as a rehabilitation tool

BACKGROUND: Virtual environments (VE) are a powerful tool for various forms of rehabilitation. Coupling VE with high-speed networking [Tele-Immersion] that approaches speeds of 100 Gb/sec can greatly expand its influence in rehabilitation. Accordingly, these new networks will permit various peripherals attached to computers on this network to be connected and to act as fast as if connected to a local PC. This innovation may soon allow the development of previously unheard of networked rehabilitation systems. Rapid advances in this technology need to be coupled with an understanding of how human behavior is affected when immersed in the VE. METHODS: This paper will discuss various forms of VE that are currently available for rehabilitation. The characteristic of these new networks and examine how such networks might be used for extending the rehabilitation clinic to remote areas will be explained. In addition, we will present data from an immersive dynamic virtual environment united with motion of a posture platform to record biomechanical and physiological responses to combined visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive inputs. A 6 degree-of-freedom force plate provides measurements of moments exerted on the base of support. Kinematic data from the head, trunk, and lower limb was collected using 3-D video motion analysis. RESULTS: Our data suggest that when there is a confluence of meaningful inputs, neither vision, vestibular, or proprioceptive inputs are suppressed in healthy adults; the postural response is modulated by all existing sensory signals in a non-additive fashion. Individual perception of the sensory structure appears to be a significant component of the response to these protocols and underlies much of the observed response variability. CONCLUSION: The ability to provide new technology for rehabilitation services is emerging as an important option for clinicians and patients. The use of data mining software would help analyze the incoming data to provide both the patient and the therapist with evaluation of the current treatment and modifications needed for future therapies. Quantification of individual perceptual styles in the VE will support development of individualized treatment programs. The virtual environment can be a valuable tool for therapeutic interventions that require adaptation to complex, multimodal environments

Reaching within a dynamic virtual environment

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licens

Using Virtual Clinicians to Promote Functional Communication Skills in Aphasia

Persons with aphasia (PWA) re-enter their community after their rehabilitation program is ended. Thus it is incumbent on rehabilitation specialists to incorporate training in using residual language skills for functional communication [1]. Evidence indicates that language abilities improve with continued treatment, even during chronic stages of aphasia (refs) For optimal generalization, PWA need to practice language in everyday living situations. Virtual reality technology is a method of providing home-based therapeutic interventions. A valuable potential of virtual reality technology is that it supports the successful generalization of residual language skills to functional communication situations. Traditionally, role-playing [2] and script training [3] have been used to improve functional communication in PWA. A more recent approach has been the adaptation of scripts through the implementation of virtual technology. [4]. We report progress on a project that aims to develop a virtual clinician that is capable of recognizing a variety of potential responses in the context of functional communication scenarios. Our goal is to develop a virtual clinician-human interaction system that can be used independently by PWA to practice and improve communication skills. This involves development of software that will support a spoken dialog system (SDS) that can interact autonomously with an individual and can be configured to personalize treatment [5]. As use of virtual technology in aphasia rehabilitation increases, questions about the physical and psychosocial factors that influence successful use of residual communication skills need to be resolved. Thus, a second aim of this project, the topic of this paper, is to determine whether interactive dialogues between a client and virtual clinician differ in the quantity and quality of the client’s language output compared to dialogues between client and human clinician. Although the potential of using virtual clinicians is promising, it must be determined if individuals with aphasia (or other language disorder) will be responsive to the virtual clinician and produce as much language in this context as they would during dialogues with human clinicians. We addressed two hypotheses in this study: 1. For PWA, practice with dialogues that focus on everyday activities will improve quality and quantity of verbal output in those dialogues. 2. For PWA, verbal output practiced in dialogues with a virtual clinician and a human clinician will yield similar amounts of verbal output as measured by information units in the dialogues

Gaze and viewing angle influence visual stabilization of upright posture

Focusing gaze on a target helps stabilize upright posture. We investigated how this visual stabilization can be affected by observing a target presented under different gaze and viewing angles. In a series of 10-second trials, participants (N = 20, 29.3 ± 9 years of age) stood on a force plate and fixed their gaze on a figure presented on a screen at a distance of 1 m. The figure changed position (gaze angle: eye level (0°), 25° up or down), vertical body orientation (viewing angle: at eye level but rotated 25° as if leaning toward or away from the participant), or both (gaze and viewing angle: 25° up or down with the rotation equivalent of a natural visual perspective). Amplitude of participants’ sagittal displacement, surface area, and angular position of the center of gravity (COG) were compared. Results showed decreased COG velocity and amplitude for up and down gaze angles. Changes in viewing angles resulted in altered body alignment and increased amplitude of COG displacement. No significant changes in postural stability were observed when both gaze and viewing angles were altered. Results suggest that both the gaze angle and viewing perspective may be essential variables of the visuomotor system modulating postural responses

Introduction to fractional linear systems. Part 1 : continuous-time case

IEE Proceedings - Vision, Image, and Signal Processing, Vol. 147, nº 1In the paper, the class of continuous-time linear systems is enlarged with the inclusion of fractional linear systems. These are systems described by fractional differential equations. It is shown how to compute the impulse, step, and frequency responses from the transfer function. The theory is supported by definitions of fractional derivative and integral, generalisations of the usual. An introduction to fractal signals as outputs of fractional differintegrators is presented. It is shown how to define a stationary fractal

Self versus Environment Motion in Postural Control

To stabilize our position in space we use visual information as well as non-visual physical motion cues. However, visual cues can be ambiguous: visually perceived motion may be caused by self-movement, movement of the environment, or both. The nervous system must combine the ambiguous visual cues with noisy physical motion cues to resolve this ambiguity and control our body posture. Here we have developed a Bayesian model that formalizes how the nervous system could solve this problem. In this model, the nervous system combines the sensory cues to estimate the movement of the body. We analytically demonstrate that, as long as visual stimulation is fast in comparison to the uncertainty in our perception of body movement, the optimal strategy is to weight visually perceived movement velocities proportional to a power law. We find that this model accounts for the nonlinear influence of experimentally induced visual motion on human postural behavior both in our data and in previously published results