ELAnatsui, Visual Arts and Intersection with Knowledge

“Natural synthesis” compartmentalized the black art world. This essay unravels how with folkloric gleeEL Anatsui, in a “selective critiquing and re-evaluation of self” dared to “wriggle out” of that quagmire. Thusly, reactivating the dynamic terrain that lives and is animated from within the soul of artists, he forged a new path of creativity. With reappraisals of the intellectual dynamics that forged the artistic substance of the post 1960s; empirical analysis and the engagement of storytelling mechanisms, this essay unreels that artistry. Anatsui, in spite of his accademisisation and art practice, threads a detour to cloth making craft traditions, particularly the Kente weave and its autography; for inspiration. Hence, the “vital and enabling” intellectual paradigm “resumptions, disappearances, and repetitions” makes possible an intersection with arcane knowledge, while the “uniting representation” of the synthesis in the appropriation of Memory and Interview grounds the contexts within which each artwork is experienced. EL’s “non-fixed forms” make visible the temerity of new shapes and forms forged directly from the wellsprings and fecundity of African roots as exemplars of the art of the new dawn (Ben Shahn, 1965:53).A deconstruction of EL’s artworks reveals the groundings of his discourses on assemblages of “Forgotten Biography” and the engagement of “mythopoeia imagination” (Marina Paolo Banchetti-Robino, 2011) in the recalibration of personal expression in language and imageries that inflect spiritual ties to ancestry and the reality of memory. This is sufficient basis for the historical narration of the intersection of visual arts and knowledge

Inducing Head Motion with a Novel Helmet during Head-First Impact Can Mitigate Neck Injury Metrics: An Experimental Proof- of-Concept Investigation using Mechanical Surrogates

ABSTRACT There is a need for cervical spine injury prevention from head-first impacts in many sports and in various transportation contexts. We present an experimental helmet prototype that induces anterior or posterior head motion in a head-first impact as a mitigation strategy. Instrumented mechanical surrogates for the human neck, head, and helmet were tested on a drop tower. Peak lower-neck axial force and moment were used as injury metrics. A factorial experiment examining 3 escapes, 3 platform angles, and 2 platform stiffnesses was performed. The appropriate head-motion "escape" reduced mean peak axial force by up to 56% and moment by up to 72% compared to no-escape

The phase diagram of high-Tc's: Influence of anisotropy and disorder

We propose a phase diagram for the vortex structure of high temperature superconductors which incorporates the effects of anisotropy and disorder. It is based on numerical simulations using the three-dimensional Josephson junction array model. We support the results with an estimation of the internal energy and configurational entropy of the system. Our results give a unified picture of the behavior of the vortex lattice, covering from the very anysotropic BiSrCaCuO to the less anisotropic YBaCuO, and from the first order melting ocurring in clean samples to the continuous transitions observed in samples with defects.Comment: 8 pages with 7 figure

NEJM -- Capturing the Unexpected Benefits of Medical Research

Remarkable advances have been made recently in our understanding of the molecular and genetic bases of disease. The potential therapeutic opportunities offered by these scientific findings, combined with the expanding needs of an aging population, have led to broad-based congressional support for increases in the National Institutes of Health budget. These developments have put into sharp relief the question of how to allocate growing budgetary resources among the various categories of medical research. In addition to the need to support basic-science research, investigators and policy analysts alike have recently emphasized the need to invest in translational research and clinical evaluative research. The rationale for supporting translational research, which is typically physiologic in nature, is that it is needed to convert the insights provided by basic biomedical science into new methods of diagnosis and therapy. 1 A case in point is the research that was based on fundamental observations about how renal tubules handle sodium and that led, in turn, to the development of new diuretic agents and methods of managing sodium imbalance. The argument for supporting clinical evaluative research is that it is needed to assess the efficacy and safety of such new interventions. There is, however, a much stronger rationale for the support of both types of research. Innovation is a learning process that takes place over time, and a fundamental aspect of learning is the reduction of uncertainty. The end of the research-and-development process does not entail the elimination of all, or even most, of the uncertainties surrounding medical innovation. Among these uncertainties are benefits that were unanticipated when the research was performed. Unanticipated uses of diagnostic and therapeutic interventions are often identified many years after their introduction. Indeed, widespread use is often an essential precondition for the identification of new applications, and clinical practice itself is thus a particularly important source of medical innovation. The unexpected and anomalous results of clinical experience thus pose new questions for basic biomedical research and enrich its ultimate payoff. What measures might be taken to broaden the range of indications for new therapies and to accelerate their discovery and introduction? Should these measures be publicly or privately financed? It took half a century for the cardiovascular benefits of aspirin, the most widely used drug in the world, to be recognized and nearly 40 more years before it was widely used for cardiovascular indications. Could this process have been expedited? To address these questions, it is necessary to examine the pathways by which new indications for therapies are discovered. Why Uncertainty Endures Successful research and development puts an end to some uncertainties but opens the gate to others, not for want of methodologic acumen, but because the complexity of humans limits the ability to predict the effect of a new intervention. Alpha-adrenergic-receptor antagonists, for instance, were first tested for hypertension