Review of Christopher Douglas, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism.

Christopher Douglas, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. 372 pp. ISBN 9780801447693

Efficient all-optical production of large 6^6Li quantum gases using D1_1 gray-molasses cooling

We use a gray molasses operating on the D$_1$ atomic transition to produce degenerate quantum gases of $^{6}$Li with a large number of atoms. This sub-Doppler cooling phase allows us to lower the initial temperature of 10$^9$ atoms from 500 to 40 $\mu$K in 2 ms. We observe that D$_1$ cooling remains effective into a high-intensity infrared dipole trap where two-state mixtures are evaporated to reach the degenerate regime. We produce molecular Bose-Einstein condensates of up to 5$\times$10$^{5}$ molecules and weakly-interacting degenerate Fermi gases of $7\times$10$^{5}$ atoms at $T/T_{F}<0.1$ with a typical experimental duty cycle of 11 seconds.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Open World Assistive Grasping Using Laser Selection

Many people with motor disabilities are unable to complete activities of daily living (ADLs) without assistance. This paper describes a complete robotic system developed to provide mobile grasping assistance for ADLs. The system is comprised of a robot arm from a Rethink Robotics Baxter robot mounted to an assistive mobility device, a control system for that arm, and a user interface with a variety of access methods for selecting desired objects. The system uses grasp detection to allow previously unseen objects to be picked up by the system. The grasp detection algorithms also allow for objects to be grasped in cluttered environments. We evaluate our system in a number of experiments on a large variety of objects. Overall, we achieve an object selection success rate of 88% and a grasp detection success rate of 90% in a non-mobile scenario, and success rates of 89% and 72% in a mobile scenario

A case-based reasoning framework for prediction of stroke

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018. Case-based reasoning (CBR) has been a popular method in health care sector from the last two decades. It is used for analysis, prediction, diagnosis and recommending treatment for patients. This research purposes a conceptual CBR framework for stroke disease prediction that uses previous case-based knowledge. The outcomes of this approach not only assist in stroke disease decision-making, but also will be very useful for prevention and early treatment of patients

A New Selective and Orally Active Oxytocin Receptor Antagonist for the Prevention of Preterm Labor

ABSTRACT 4-Chloro-3-[(3R)-(ϩ)-5-chloro-1-(2,4-dimethoxybenzyl)-3-methyl-2-oxo-2,3-dihydro-1H-indol-3-yl]-N-ethyl-N-(3-pyridylmethyl)- benzamide, hydrochloride (SSR126768A), a new potent and selective, orally active oxytocin (OT) receptor antagonist was characterized in several biochemical and pharmacological models. In binding studies, SSR126768A showed nanomolar affinity for rat and human recombinant and native OT receptors (K i ϭ 0.44 nM) and exhibited much lower affinity for V 1a , V 1b , and V 2 receptors. In addition, it did not interact with a large number of other receptors, enzymes, and ion channels (1 M). In autoradiographic experiments performed on at-term human pregnant uterus sections, SSR126768A dose dependently displaced [I 125 ]VT in situ labeling to OT receptors highly expressed in these tissues. In functional studies, SSR126768A behaved as a full antagonist and potently antagonized OT-induced intracellular Ca 2ϩ increase (K i ϭ 0.50 nM) and prostaglandin release (K i ϭ 0.45 nM) in human uterine smooth muscle cells. In rat isolated myometrium, OT-induced uterine contractions were competitively antagonized by SSR126768A (pA 2 ϭ 8.47). Similarly, in human pregnant myometrial strips, SSR126768A inhibited the contractile uterine response to OT. In conscious telemetrated rats, oral administration of SSR126768A (1-10 mg/kg) produced a competitive inhibition of the dose response to OT on uterine contractions up to 24 h at 3 mg/kg p.o.; no tachyphylaxis was observed after 4-day repeated treatment. Finally, SSR126768A (30 mg/kg p.o.) significantly delayed parturition in pregnant rats in labor similar to ritodrine (10 mg/kg p.o.). Thus, SSR126768A is a potent, highly selective, orally active OT receptor antagonist with a long duration of action. This molecule could find therapeutic application as a tocolytic agent for acute and chronic oral management of preterm labor. Preterm labor (at less than 37 completed weeks of gestation) occurs in approximatively 10% of births, accounts for 70% of all neonatal mortality and morbidity, and represents one of the highest costs per patient in health care budgets. Even though survival of preterm infants has increased due to the development of neonatal intensive care units, there has been no decrease in the rate of premature birth in the past 30 Article, publication date, and citation information can be found at http://jpet.aspetjournals.org. DOI: 10.1124/jpet.103.061200. ABBREVIATIONS: OT, oxytocin; AVP, arginine vasopressin; OTR, oxytocin receptor; SSR126768A, 4-chloro ; ANOVA, analysis of variance; IUP, intrauterine pressure

Perancangan Aplikasi Enkripsi dan Dekripsi File Berbasis Web

In the development of technology that is so advanced today, especially in the field of&nbsp;communication and information, maintaining privacy is something that absolutely must be done&nbsp;for each individual. Rapoport (in Soesilo, 1998) defines privacy as an ability to control the&nbsp;interaction, the ability to acquire options and the ability to achieve the desired interaction.&nbsp;Nowadays, a lot of things that can be done by using the internet, such as selling, social&nbsp;interacting through social media (Social Media) such as Facebook, learn, or just read the news&nbsp;through the portal of electronic media, and so forth. Most of the activities that can be done on&nbsp;the internet, requires personal data of its users, where the issue of privacy is of onsiderableconcern. As the development of information and communication technology in this case the&nbsp;Internet, the technology used to protect all personal data users also grown and will continue to&nbsp;evolve into more sophisticated. For this reason the author took the initiative to create a&nbsp;Endesapp application program, which aims to facilitate a person or agency who frequently&nbsp;exchange data in the form of files through the Internet. With so security in maintaining personal&nbsp;data even be increased as well as the possibility of the spread of sensitive data has been poor. In&nbsp;this study, the method used is to design programs shaped application file encryption and&nbsp;decryption web-based cryptographic techniques to the type of algorithm that is supported is&nbsp;3DES ( Triple DES ) , AES - 128 ( Advanced encyption Standard) , AES - 192 and AES - 256

Finding Home in Babel: Transnationalism, Translation, and Languages of Identity.

“Finding Home in Babel” examines literary representations of (im)migrant identity formation and translation, or the ways in which cultural identity is created and articulated at linguistic crossroads. It explores the constructions and processes attending gendered accounts of immigration, Holocaust survival, and multilingual Polish, Yiddish, and English authorship in the autobiographical writings of three Polish Jewish American writers: Jadwiga Maurer, Irena Klepfisz, and Eva Hoffman. Through poems, short stories, and memoirs, these authors illustrate how immigrant identities are formed in the process of acquisition of American English, the adopted language, which informs and frames their own lives, as well as the lives of their fictional protagonists. While tracing the linguistic transitions in Maurer's, Hoffman's and Klepfisz's works, this project also examines these writers' conceptualization of home and homeland, and argues that they rest as much in language as in geography. In an exploration of synchronic and diachronic accounts of immigration and Holocaust survival, “Finding Home in Babel” relies on literary examinations of culturally and linguistically displaced lives. It highlights these writers’ distinctive voices by drawing upon extended interviews with them. It proposes a fundamentally linguistic and transnational understanding of immigration that Hoffman, Klepfisz, and Maurer depict as interwoven with the history and memory of the Holocaust. Such a mix of literary analyses, oral history, and critical genre shows how Maurer's, Hoffman's and Klepfisz’s representations of language and identity illustrate the ways that displacement and translation provide specific, often ambivalent, points of view on border crossing, home, and homeland. It provides a broader view of how immigrant writers create literary representations that make it possible for them to integrate their past experienced in native language(s) with their present lived in American English.Ph.D.American CultureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/60772/1/pasjm_1.pd

Representing their own? Ethnic minority women in the Dutch parliament

Ethnic minority women tend to be better represented in parliaments than ethnic minority men. What does this mean for their substantive representation? This article makes use of intersectional analysis to study how the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation differs within and between gender and ethnic groups. Drawing on written parliamentary questions and the committee memberships of MPs in seven parliamentary sessions (1995-2012) in the Netherlands, a strong link is found between descriptive and substantive representation. Female ethnic minority MPs more often sit on committees and table questions that address ethnic minority women's interests than male ethnic minority and female ethnic majority MPs. The link, however, is fragile as it is based on a small number of active MPs. This demonstrates the importance of an intersectional approach to understanding how representation works in increasingly diverse parliaments, which cannot be captured by focusing on gender or ethnicity alone

Screening for mild cognitive impairment in the preoperative setting: A narrative review

Contains fulltext : 251958.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)Cognitive impairment predisposes patients to the development of delirium and postoperative cognitive dysfunction. In particular, in older patients, the adverse sequelae of cognitive decline in the perioperative period may contribute to adverse outcomes after surgical procedures. Subtle signs of cognitive impairment are often not previously diagnosed. Therefore, the aim of this review is to describe the available cognitive screeners suitable for preoperative screening and their psychometric properties for identifying mild cognitive impairment, as preoperative workup may improve perioperative care for patients at risk for postoperative cognitive dysfunction. Electronic systematic and snowball searches of PubMed, PsycInfo, ClinicalKey, and ScienceDirect were conducted for the period 2015–2020. Major inclusion criteria for articles included those that discussed a screener that included the cognitive domain ‘memory’, that had a duration time of less than 15 min, and that reported sensitivity and specificity to detect mild cognitive impairment. Studies about informant-based screeners were excluded. We provided an overview of the characteristics of the cognitive screener, such as interrater and test-retest reliability correlations, sensitivity and specificity for mild cognitive impairment and cognitive impairment, and duration of the screener and cutoff points. Of the 4775 identified titles, 3222 were excluded from further analysis because they were published prior to 2015. One thousand four hundred and forty-eight titles did not fulfill the inclusion criteria. All abstracts of 52 studies on 45 screeners were examined of which 10 met the inclusion criteria. For these 10 screeners, a further snowball search was performed to obtain related studies, resulting in 20 articles. Screeners included in this review were the Mini-Cog, MoCA, O3DY, AD8, SAGE, SLUMS, TICS(-M), QMCI, MMSE2, and Mini-ACE. The sensitivity and specificity range to detect MCI in an older population is the highest for the MoCA, with a sensitivity range of 81–93% and a specificity range of 74–89%. The MoCA, with the highest combination of sensitivity and specificity, is a feasible and valid routine screening of pre-surgical cognitive function. This warrants further implementation and validation studies in surgical pathways with a large proportion of older patients.21 p