The Pains of Sharing Pleasure: Imag(in)ing Motherhood on Pinterest

Contemporary experiences of motherhood take stage at the intersection between ideologies of intensive mothering, which demand an exclusive orientation towards the needs of the child, and new individualism, which prescribes a focus on the self, and a continuous need to re-invent self-identity physically, psychologically, and professionally. This essay argues that while Pinterest provides a forum for women to experiment with a variety of rapidly revisable self-representations, it simultaneously functions to reinforce compartmentalized idealizations of motherhood in the form of imagery from a regressive and repressive cultural archive. The ideal user is a post-feminist subject who celebrates the freedom to enjoy visual pleasure uncritically, thereby participating in the continued dissemination of unattainable ideals of motherly perfection. Thus, as a site where the conflict between different demands becomes tangible via the use of images, Pinterest offers an important window into the complexity of contemporary experiences of motherhood

Affective Dissonance: (post)feminism And Popular Cultural Expressions Of Motherhood

In “Affective Dissonance: (Post)feminism and Popular Cultural Expressions of Motherhood,” I argue that motherhood in the so-called post-feminist age is structured by a conflicted relationship between affective expectations raised by public discourses of motherhood and the material, embodied experience of maternity, inflected by race, class, age, and sexuality. While recent feminist scholarship has engaged questions of (bodily) materiality, and popular medial discourses increasingly critique unrealistic ideals of motherhood, my dissertation considers these approaches together. Juxtaposing representations of motherhood from various sources – memoirs, digital media, art photography, and television – I demonstrate how the postfeminist rhetoric of female empowerment and the availability of choices conflicts with actual affective and embodied maternal experiences, a process that produces what I call “affective dissonance.” This experience is more than mere ambivalence and cannot be explained simply by asserting that ideological representations of motherhood are unrealistic. Instead, I consider both the expectations created by popular cultural discourses and maternal bodies’ encounters with them. For instance, I show how three memoirists of postpartum depression make sense of their ostensible illness by exploring the ways in which their experience of early motherhood failed to produce the kind of maternal bliss which contemporary ideologies of “good” motherhood led them to expect. In another example, I discuss photographs depicting the bodily materiality of breastfeeding and argue that while they may provide an “authentic” representation of early motherhood, they also present the maternal body as one that refuses to fulfill expectations raised by widely publicized ideals of young, white feminine beauty. In both cases, bodily agency interferes with discursive constructions of “good” motherhood, in this case one that complies with popular cultural beauty standards. This results in the experience of affective dissonance, which, I argue, is pivotal to the formation of contemporary maternal subjectivity

Characterization of the processivity of the fast fungal kinesin, NKin, from Neurospora crassa, on the level of single molecules

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Strong evidence for age as the single most dominant predictor of medically supervised driving test-mini mental status test outcomes provide only weak but significant moderate additional predictive value

Background: With age, medical conditions impairing safe driving accumulate. Consequently, the risk of accidents increases. To mitigate this risk, Swiss law requires biannual assessments of the fitness to drive of elderly drivers. Drivers may prove their cognitive and physical capacity for safe driving in a medically supervised driving test (MSDT) when borderline cases, as indicated by low performance in a set of four cognitive tests, including e.g. the mini mental status test (MMST). Any prognostic, rather than indicative, relations for MSDT outcomes have neither been confirmed nor falsified so far. In order to avoid use of unsubstantiated rules of thumb, we here evaluate the predictive value for MSDT outcomes of the outcomes of the standard set of four cognitive tests, used in Swiss traffic medicine examinations. Methods: We present descriptive information on age, gender and cognitive pretesting results of all MSDTs recorded in our case database from 2017 to 2019. Based on these retrospective cohort data, we used logistic regression to predict the binary outcome MSDT. An exploratory analysis used all available data (model 1). Based on the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), we then established a model including variables age and MMST (model 2). To evaluate the predictive value of the four cognitive assessments, model 3 included cognitive test outcomes only. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) and area under the curve (AUC) allowed evaluating discriminative performance of the three different models using independent validation data. Results: Using N = 188 complete data sets of a total of 225 included cases, AIC identified age (p < 0.0008) and MMST (p = 0.024) as dominating predictors for MSDT outcomes with a median AUC of 0.71 (95%-CI 0.57-0.85) across different training and validation splits, while using the four cognitive test results exclusively yielded a median AUC of 0.55 (95%-CI 0.40-0.71). Conclusions: Our analysis provided strong evidence for age as the single most dominant predictor of MSDT outcomes. Adding MMST provides only weak additional predictive value for MSDT outcomes. Combining the results of four cognitive test used as standard screen in Swiss traffic medicine alone, proved to be of poor predictive value. This highlights the importance of MSDTs for balancing between the mitigation of risks by and the right to drive for the elderly. Keywords: Clock test; Cognitive testing; Elderly drivers; Fitness to drive; Medically supervised driving test; Mini mental status test; Receiver operating characteristics; Traffic medicine; Trail making test

Sleep and the Fitness to Drive: A Swiss Perspective

Medical conditions and behavioral patterns affecting sleep are a largely underestimated threat to traffic safety. Unsupervised or even illegal self-treatment of sleep issues by, for example, anti-histamines, cannabis products, or stimulants, questions safe driving and the fitness to drive as well as low compliance/adherence to treatments (CPAP, medication, etc.) of medical conditions, such as OSAS, or narcolepsy. In such cases, Swiss law calls for a medical assessment of the fitness to drive by experts in traffic medicine. With increasing complexity, this medical assessment is escalated in a four-tiered system of qualified experts, ranging from a qualified practitioner to experts in traffic medicine, at, for example, an Institute for Legal Medicine. The following overview provides insight in the Swiss framework of traffic medicine assessments that – with all caveats and potential drawbacks – helps mitigating the risk of sleep-related accidents. For this, we first introduce Swiss traffic medicine and then argue for consistent terms and measurements to assess sleepy driving. A concise summary of those sleep related conditions most relevant in traffic medicine is followed by an overview over potential issues of sleep-medication

Direct 2D measurement of time-averaged forces and pressure amplitudes in acoustophoretic devices using optical trapping

Ultrasonic standing waves are increasingly applied in the manipulation and sorting of micrometer-sized particles in microfluidic cells. To optimize the performance of such devices, it is essential to know the exact forces that the particles experience in the acoustic wave. Although much progress has been made via analytical and numerical modeling, the reliability of these methods relies strongly on the assumptions used, e.g. the boundary conditions. Here, we have combined an acoustic flow cell with an optical laser trap to directly measure the force on a single spherical particle in two dimensions. While performing ultrasonic frequency scans, we measured the time-averaged forces on single particles that were moved with the laser trap through the microfluidic cell. The cell including piezoelectric transducers was modeled with finite element methods. We found that the experimentally obtained forces and the derived pressure fields confirm the predictions from theory and modeling. This novel approach can now be readily expanded to other particle, chamber, and fluid regimes and opens up the possibility of studying the effects of the presence of boundaries, acoustic streaming, and non-linear fluids.ISSN:1473-0197ISSN:1473-018

Acoustic force mapping in a hybrid acousticoptical micromanipulation device supporting high resolution optical imaging

Many applications in the life-sciences demand non-contact manipulation tools for forceful but nevertheless delicate handling of various types of sample. Moreover, the system should support high-resolution optical imaging. Here we present a hybrid acoustic/optical manipulation system which utilizes a transparent transducer, making it compatible with high-NA imaging in a microfluidic environment. The powerful acoustic trapping within a layered resonator, which is suitable for highly parallel particle handling, is complemented by the flexibility and selectivity of holographic optical tweezers, with the specimens being under high quality optical monitoring at all times. The dual acoustic/optical nature of the system lends itself to optically measure the exact acoustic force map, by means of direct force measurements on an optically trapped particle. For applications with (ultra-)high demand on the precision of the force measurements, the position of the objective used for the high-NA imaging may have significant influence on the acoustic force map in the probe chamber. We have characterized this influence experimentally and the findings were confirmed by model simulations. We show that it is possible to design the chamber and to choose the operating point in such a way as to avoid perturbations due to the objective lens. Moreover, we found that measuring the electrical impedance of the transducer provides an easy indicator for the acoustic resonances

Transport by molecular motors in the presence of static defects

The transport by molecular motors along cytoskeletal filaments is studied theoretically in the presence of static defects. The movements of single motors are described as biased random walks along the filament as well as binding to and unbinding from the filament. Three basic types of defects are distinguished, which differ from normal filament sites only in one of the motors' transition probabilities. Both stepping defects with a reduced probability for forward steps and unbinding defects with an increased probability for motor unbinding strongly reduce the velocities and the run lengths of the motors with increasing defect density. For transport by single motors, binding defects with a reduced probability for motor binding have a relatively small effect on the transport properties. For cargo transport by motors teams, binding defects also change the effective unbinding rate of the cargo particles and are expected to have a stronger effect.Comment: 20 pages, latex, 7 figures, 1 tabl

Tubulin polyglutamylation stimulates spastin-mediated microtubule severing

Microtubules with long polyglutamylated C-terminal tails are more prone to severing by spastin, establishing the importance of tubulin posttranslational modifications