Unworking Milton: Steps to a Georgics of the Mind

Traditionally read as a poem about laboring subjects who gain power through abstract and abstracting forms of bodily discipline, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) more compellingly foregrounds the erotics of the Garden as a space where humans and nonhumans intra-act materially and sexually. Following Christopher Hill, who long ago pointed to not one but two revolutions in the history of seventeenth-century English radicalism—the first, ‘the one which succeeded[,] . . . the protestant ethic’; and the second, ‘the revolution which never happened,’ which sought ‘communal property, a far wider democracy[,] and rejected the protestant ethic’—I show how Milton’s Paradise Lost gives substance to ‘the revolution which never happened’ by imagining a commons, indeed a communism, in which human beings are not at the center of things, but rather constitute one part of the greater ecology of mind within Milton’s poem. In the space created by this ecological reimagining, plants assume a new agency. I call this reimagining ‘ecology to come.

Analysis of operation efficiency of selected transport systems

This study deals with the problems connected with evaluation of technical systems efficiency of particular transport systems. The main goal of such a system operation is its effective functioning, through rational control of its particular activities and subsequent processes. A literature analysis of the definition of the efficiency term has been made. A real transport system has been accepted to be the research object. The system belongs to the group of sociotechnical systems in which evaluation of its operation efficiency depends on performance of operators, transport means and the impact of environmental factors. Criteria and methods of operation efficiency evaluation have been determined in this study as well as assessment indexes for transport systems. It has been shown that evaluation of a repair efficiency has a large influence on the efficiency of the whole system operation, especially the influence of secondary failure repairs, on the values of particular efficiency indexes. A semi-markov model of operation and maintenance of transport means used in the research object has been developed. This model provides the basis for evaluation of the influence of the processes involved in preparing transport means for service on the system operation efficiency. Moreover, the research also describes how to verify the developed model and present its simulation tests. The study is summarized with conclusions formulated based on the evaluation of the influence of the operation and maintenance processes on the investigated transport system operation efficiency

Examining self-reported and biological stress and near misses among Emergency Medicine residents : a single-centre cross-sectional assessment in the USA

Objectives: To examine the relationship between perceived and biological stress and near misses among Emergency Medicine residents. Design: Self-rated stress and stress biomarkers were assessed in residents in Emergency Medicine before and after a day shift. The supervising physicians and residents reported numbers of near misses. Setting: The study took place in the Emergency Department of a large trauma 1 centre, located in Detroit, USA. Participants Residents in Emergency Medicine volunteered to participate. The sample consisted of 32 residents, with complete data on 28 subjects. Residents' supervising physicians assessed the clinical performance of each resident. Primary and secondary outcome measures: Participants' preshift and postshift stress, biological stress (salivary cortisol, plasma interleukin-6, tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein), residents' and supervisors' reports of near misses, number of critically ill and patients with trauma seen during the shift. Results: Residents' self-reported stress increased from an average preshift level of 2.79 of 10 (SD 1.81) to a postshift level of 5.82 (2.13) (p<0.001). Residents cared for an average of 2.32 (1.52) critically ill patients and 0.68 (1.06) patients with trauma. Residents reported a total of 7 near misses, compared with 11 reported by the supervising physicians. After controlling for baseline work-related exhaustion, residents that cared for more patients with trauma and had higher levels of TNF-a reported a higher frequency of near misses (R-2=0.72; p=0.001). Residents' preshift ratings of how stressful they expected the shift to be were related to the supervising physicians' ratings of residents' near misses during the shift. Conclusion: Residents' own ratings of near misses were associated with residents' TNF-alpha, a biomarker of systemic inflammation and the number of patients with trauma seen during the shift. In contrast, supervisor reports on residents' near misses were related only to the residents' preshift expectations of how stressful the shift would be

Analysis of the 1/20 translocation in ram spermatozoa by flow cytometry

International audienc