Idylls of socialism : the Sarajevo Documentary School and the problem of the Bosnian sub-proletariat

This historical overview of the Sarajevo Documentary School considers the films, in the light of their recent re-emergence, as indicative of both the legacy of socialist realism (even in the context of Yugoslav media) and attempted social engineering in the Bosnia of the 1960s and 1970s. The argument is made that the documentaries, despite their questionable aesthetic status (in respect of cinma-vrit and ethnography) and problematic ideological strategies and attempted interventions, document a history and offer insights that counter the prevailing revisionist trends in the presentation of Eastern and Central European history

The efficiency of chemical detectors.

Chemical detectors (“sensors”) usually consist of a two-dimensional array of receptors exposed to the solution to be tested, from whose output the bulk solution concentration of the analyte of interest can be determined. Both input and output—the number of analyte particles striking the array in a given interval of time, and the number captured—are countable events. The gain is the quotient of these two numbers, and the detectivity the quotient of their fluctuations. The gain and detectivity provide a universal framework for comparing different types of sensors, and in which the desirable properties of sensors, e.g. their ability to detect very weak signals (“sensitivity”), and to detect the analyte in the presence of a large excess of other molecules (“selectivity”), can be related to various physico-chemical parameters such as the packing density and size of receptors, and their affinity for the analyte. Analyte multivalence, although formally a source of inefficiency, is very useful for making the sensor more resistant to spurious chemical noise. An important result is that chemical fog engendered by a huge excess of nonspecifically binding particles has no effect on the detectivity, provided that the nonspecific interaction is reversible

Rabies: Interactions between neurons and viruses: A review of the history of Negri inclusion bodies

The first clear-cut description of a virus-nerve cell interaction was made by Adeichi Negri in 1903 with the detection of cytoplasmic bodies (Negri bodies) in subsets of neurons in the brain from rabies-infected animals. A biographical sketch of Negri is given here; he was born in Perugia, Italy, in 1875 and died in Pavia in 1912. In 1900 Negri became assistant to Camillo Golgi, who encouraged him to study rabies-infected brains with histological techniques. The report of intraneuronal bodies described by Negri as specific for rabies stimulated an intense debate both concerning their diagnostic value and their nature. The diagnostic value was finally determined in a study by Negri's wife, Lina Negri-Luzzani, in 1913, while the viral nature of the bodies had to await the introduction of electron microscopy and immunohistochemistry. However, the true significance of the Negri bodies is still mysterious, since they only develop in subsets of infected neurons and occur mainly after infection with wild. so-cal led 'street', virus strains and not after infection with strains passaged in the laboratory, so-called 'fixed' strains