Kapsula: Crisis, Part 3 of 3

Over the past couple of months KAPSULA has sent subscribers two separate releases dealing with CRISIS. We’ve looked at crisis in art criticism, moments of individual or personal crisis, the crisis of (re)presentation and now, for our final crisis-themed iteration, we turn to focus on our chosen domain: the digital and technological. Considering that many of the most widely publicized and discussed crises have been based in this realm, it may seem surprising that we’ve taken this long. Over the last couple of years the digital realm, and surveillance thereof, has dominated news stories: the Snowden/NSA/PRISM trinity and the Assange/Wikileaks duo chief among them. We’re not going to be investigating surveillance, though—after all, we’ve already infiltrated your inbox. Instead, the essays are more formal in their scope: exploring the shifting implications of the cyborg figure, and the ramifications of four D cinema. In early (feminist) discussions the cyborg was presented, by Donna Haraway and other theorists, as a potential figure of resistance and resilience—a marker of difference and defiance. It offered, as Tyler Morgenstern notes, “a conception of the body as negotiable and assembled.” Yet, while wearable technologies increasingly make the merging of human and machine an everyday reality, Morgenstern notes that the form of these prosthetic extensions overwhelming veers towards the invisible and the seamless. This aesthetic sensibility (or, perhaps lack of a sensibility) extends beyond wearable technologies and into broader conceptions of networks “of all sorts (financial, military, activist, terrorist).” They aim for erasure. Morgenstern hones in on this increasing reality, and seeks to understand its ramifications beyond the realm of the formal. What does this erasure entail? How can it be resisted? Similarly circling within the realm of recent expansions in corporate technology, Grant Leuning delves into the topic of four D cinemas, which aim to enhance the movie-going experience through ‘augmented reality’ à la moving viewers’ chairs, spraying them with water, blasting them with air and so on. With Leuning, as with Morgenstern, we are in Laura Mulvey’s company. But the association traced by Mulvey and other film theorists is threatened—we’ve cut the cord and been expelled from the darkened womb-like state of the theatre. Our comfortable association with the protagonist character has been disrupted, denied. Instead, our association has fragmented into each and every element of the highly manufactured environment. Leuning explains (with echoes of Oppenheimer): “I am become the punch, the robot, the seaspray, the fight as such, the substance of the film itself.” As with Morgenstern, Leuning searches for sites of plurality and alterity, even at the centre of “gratuitous capitalist innovation.” Despite their contrasting topics both authors are congruent in an emphasis on making obvious and, to a lesser extent, making physical (perhaps even material). In Leuning, the varied effects of the four D cinema make countless environmental details obvious, thereby altering the terms of the viewer’s gaze and identification. In Morgenstern, this making obvious is found in the work of the artists he champions. They use clunky, outdated technology that makes no attempt at seamless integration, thus embracing incoherence, glitch and the in-between. In this spirit, then, while reading the issue there should be a few things amiss with the document. (No need to look hard, it will be obvious.) Text will be garbled, overlaid on top of itself until it becomes incomprehensible. Be patient; we want your reading to be disrupted, your attention to be redirected and diverted. Easily achieved, clear reading might not always be the best reading. Perhaps, if you haven’t already, you will gain some appetite for the imperfect, yet impassioned

The Citizen Nurse: An Educational Innovation for Change

Background: Nursing education needs to provide the necessary tools for students to develop leadership skills and to practice civic agency to create meaningful change in the shifting health care field. This article focuses on facilitating a student\u27s role in becoming a citizen nurse through curricular modifications. Method: Through an ongoing partnership, nursing faculty and community organizers implemented a year-long pilot project to discover the deeper insights into the role of a citizen nurse and to analyze the skills students need to be effective agents of change. Pilot lectures and workshops were held throughout the academic year, and curricular changes were implemented. Results: Based on input from pilot class experiences, student reflections, and faculty workshop feedback, the decision to implement ongoing curricular changes was made by the department. Conclusion: The development of citizen nurses in nursing education will pave the way for praxis embedded in meaningful work with just solutions, enhancing the agency of all involved in promoting health and well-being. [J Nurs Educ. 2017;56(4):247–250.

Development of novel strategies to regenerate the human kidney

Within this thesis several novel strategies to regenerate the human kidney are exploited. The first strategy is to improve kidney function is by mesenchymal stromal cell (MSC) therapy. In chapter 2 the current status of clinical trials with MSC therapy are discussed. In chapter 3 we show an extensive characterization of MSCs derived from human kidney (hkPSCs) compared to bone marrow derived MSCs (bmMSCs) and show that hkPSCs show organotypic expression signatures and functionality. For fluent clinical translation, we developed a clinical grade acceptable standard operation procedure (SOP) (chapter 4). In chapter 5 we show that the cytokine secretion profile of both hkPSCs and bmMSCs was closely related to cell morphology adaptation to culture surface topography and was stromal cell type specific. In chapter 6 we show that not only the kidney cortex but also the kidney capsule contains a stromal cell population. In chapter 7 we report the regeneration of kidney vasculature by repopulating the vascular compartment of human and rat kidney matrices with hiPSC-derived endothelial cells. We show efficient cell delivery, adherence and survival of these endothelial cells as a first, but critical, step towards a human bioengineered kidney. Nierstichting Alrijne Zorggroep Nederlandse Transplantatie VerenigingLUMC / Geneeskund

Optimization of canopy conductance models from concurrent measurements of sap flow and stem water potential on Drooping Sheoak in South Australia

This project is supported by National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training (NCGRT, Australia). The first author is supported by China Scholarship Council and NCGRT for his PhD study at Flinders University of South Australia. Xiang Xu and Yunhui Guo provided assistance in the field. Constructive comments and suggestion from three anonymous reviewers significantly improve the manuscript. This article also appears in: Patterns in Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere Systems: Monitoring, Modelling and Data Assimilation.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A simple ecohydrological model captures essentials of seasonal leaf dynamics in semi-arid tropical grasslands

Modelling leaf phenology in water-controlled ecosystems remains a difficult task because of high spatial and temporal variability in the interaction of plant growth and soil moisture. Here, we move beyond widely used linear models to examine the performance of low-dimensional, nonlinear ecohydrological models that couple the dynamics of plant cover and soil moisture. The study area encompasses 400 000 km2 of semi-arid perennial tropical grasslands, dominated by C4 grasses, in the Northern Territory and Queensland (Australia). We prepared 8-year time series (2001-2008) of climatic variables and estimates of fractional vegetation cover derived from MODIS Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for 400 randomly chosen sites, of which 25% were used for model calibration and 75% for model validation. We found that the mean absolute error of linear and nonlinear models did not markedly differ. However, nonlinear models presented key advantages: (1) they exhibited far less systematic error than their linear counterparts; (2) their error magnitude was consistent throughout a precipitation gradient while the performance of linear models deteriorated at the driest sites, and (3) they better captured the sharp transitions in leaf cover that are observed under high seasonality of precipitation. Our results showed that low-dimensional models including feedbacks between soil water balance and plant growth adequately predict leaf dynamics in semi-arid perennial grasslands. Because these models attempt to capture fundamental ecohydrological processes, they should be the favoured approach for prognostic models of phenology

A New Approach to Measure Fundamental Microstructural Influences on the Magnetic Properties of Electrical Steel using a Miniaturized Single Sheet Tester

Magnetic properties of electrical steel are usually measured on Single Sheet Testers, Epstein frames or ring cores. Due to the geometric dimensions and measurement principles of these standardized setups, the fundamental microstructural influences on the magnetic behavior, e.g., deformation structures, crystal orientation or grain boundaries, are difficult to separate and quantify. In this paper, a miniaturized Single Sheet Tester is presented that allows the characterization of industrial steel sheets as well as from in size limited single, bi- and oligocrystals starting from samples with dimensions of 10x22 mm. Thereby, the measurement of global magnetic properties is coupled with microstructural analysis methods to allow the investigation of micro scale magnetic effects. An effect of grain orientation, grain boundaries and deformation structures has already been identified with the presented experimental setup. In addition, a correction function is introduced to allow quantitative comparisons between differently sized Single Sheet Testers. This approach is not limited to the presented Single Sheet Tester geometry, but applicable for the comparison of results of differently sized Single Sheet Testers. The results of the miniaturized Single Sheet Tester were validated on five industrial electrical steel grades. Furthermore, first results of differently oriented single crystals as well as measurements on grain-oriented electrical steel are shown to prove the additional value of the miniaturized Single Sheet Tester geometry

CO 2 exchange between air and water in an Arctic Alaskan and midlatitude Swiss lake: Importance of convective mixing

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94821/1/jgrd10025.pd

Hard magnetic material measurements in a pulsed field magnetometer considering coating and eddy current effects

Rare-earth permanent magnets are coated in order to avoid corrosion. When considering the rated geometrical properties of a sample, the coating thickness has to be known precisely as it wrongly enlarges the magnetically active volume which in turn affects the accuracy of the measured magnetic properties. In this work, the sensitivity of hard magnetic material property measurements regarding the consideration of different coating thicknesses is evaluated. Moreover, the impact of eddy current effects on the magnetic properties is studied when measuring in an open circuit. Additionally, an outlook for a measurement-based determination of the electric conductivity of permanent magnet samples is given

Ship-based measurement of air-sea CO2exchange by eddy covariance

A system for the shipboard measurement of air-sea CO2 fluxes by eddy covariance was developed and tested. The system was designed to reduce two major sources of experimental uncertainty previously reported. First, the correction for in situ water vapor fluctuations (the “Webb” correction) was reduced by 97% by drying the air sample stream. Second, motion sensitivity of the gas analyzer was reduced by using an open-path type sensor that was converted to a closed-path configuration to facilitate drying of the air stream. High-quality CO2 fluxes were obtained during 429 14 min flux intervals during two cruises in the North Atlantic. The results suggest that the gas analyzer resolved atmospheric CO2 fluctuations well below its RMS noise level. This noise was uncorrelated with the vertical wind and therefore filtered out by the flux calculation. Using climatological data, we estimate that the techniques reported here could enable high-quality measurements of air-sea CO2 flux over much of the world oceans