Writing as a ghost: Zambrano’s “Carta sobre el exilio”

This article takes as its point of departure the hybrid format of María Zambrano’s “Carta sobre el exilio”, which takes the form of a letter but fulfils the function of an essay. In order to answer the question of why Zambrano may have chosen to do so, I consider the spectral qualities of the letter writer by homing in on the image of “El Niño de Vallecas”. In addition, the notion of trauma is brought to bear on the need for an addressee. Escrivint com un fantasma: la «Carta sobre el exilio» de María Zambrano Aquest article té com a punt de partida el text de format híbrid, la «Carta sobre el exilio» de María Zambrano. Tot i que pren forma de carta, compleix la funció d’assaig. Per respondre a la pregunta de per què Zambrano es va decantar per aquest gènere, parteixo de les qualitats espectrals de l’autora de la carta des de la imatge del text, “El Niño de Vallecas”. Així mateix, la noció de «trauma» en relació a la necessitat de la figura d’un destinatari. Escribiendo como un fantasma: la «Carta sobre el exilio» de María Zambrano Tomando como punto de partida el formato híbrido de la «Carta sobre el exilio», el artículo intenta averiguar por qué Zambrano se decantó por ese género, dado que el texto ofrece más bien una reflexión ensayística acerca del exilio. A través de un enfoque en la imagen de «El Niño de Vallecas» se plantean las cualidades espectrales de la autora de la carta. Asimismo, la necesidad de un destinatario queda vinculada a la noción del trauma

Escribiendo como un fantasma: la «Carta sobre el exilio» de María Zambrano

Aquest article té com a punt de partida el text de format híbrid, la «Carta sobre el exilio» de María Zambrano. Tot i que pren forma de carta, compleix la funció d’assaig. Per respondre a la pregunta de per què Zambrano es va decantar per aquest gènere, parteixo de les qualitats espectrals de l’autora de la carta des de la imatge del text, “El Niño de Vallecas”. Així mateix, la noció de «trauma» en relació a la necessitat de la figura d’un destinatari. This article takes as its point of departure the hybrid format of María Zambrano’s “Carta sobre el exilio”, which takes the form of a letter but fulfils the function of an essay. In order to answer the question of why Zambrano may have chosen to do so, I consider the spectral qualities of the letter writer by homing in on the image of “El Niño de Vallecas”. In addition, the notion of trauma is brought to bear on the need for an addressee. Tomando como punto de partida el formato híbrido de la «Carta sobre el exilio», el artículo intenta averiguar por qué Zambrano se decantó por ese género, dado que el texto ofrece más bien una reflexión ensayística acerca del exilio. A través de un enfoque en la imagen de «El Niño de Vallecas» se plantean las cualidades espectrales de la autora de la carta. Asimismo, la necesidad de un destinatario queda vinculada a la noción del trauma.

Cost Per Flying Hour Analysis of the C-141

This paper sought to examine if DoD\u27s current transfer pricing method places AMC in a price competitive position with the government commercial rates and promotes managers to make the best decisions. Attention was paid to the stated customer concerns that current transfer pricing methods incorporate overhead and sunk costs that are not attributable to routine movement of peacetime cargo and could make AMC non price competitive with commercial vendors. The findings are that AMC currently uses full cost transfer pricing, as required by DoD policy, that includes significant overhead and sunk costs associated with its wartime responsibilities. The full cost method of transfer pricing is not in congruence with the generally accepted accounting practices and the private sector position that, with excess capacity and no outside market, a unit should transfer price at variable cost. The current cost per flying hour is inflated by fixed costs, primarily overhead and sunk cost, by 6O.47 percent. This means the CPFH is 2.5 times greater than the cost that AMO incurs for operating a peacetime mission

Comparison of Serial and Parallel Connections of Membrane Lungs against Refractory Hypoxemia in a Mock Circuit

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is an important rescue therapy method for the treatment of severe hypoxic lung injury. In some cases, oxygen saturation and oxygen partial pressure in the arterial blood are low despite ECMO therapy. There are case reports in which patients with such instances of refractory hypoxemia received a second membrane lung, either in series or in parallel, to overcome the hypoxemia. It remains unclear whether the parallel or serial connection is more effective. Therefore, we used an improved version of our full-flow ECMO mock circuit to test this. The measurements were performed under conditions in which the membrane lungs were unable to completely oxygenate the blood. As a result, only the photometric pre- and post-oxygenator saturations, blood flow and hemoglobin concentration were required for the calculation of oxygen transfer rates. The results showed that for a pre-oxygenator saturation of 45% and a total blood flow of 10 L/min, the serial connection of two identical 5 L rated oxygenators is 17% more effective in terms of oxygen transfer than the parallel connection. Although the idea of using a second membrane lung if refractory hypoxia occurs is intriguing from a physiological point of view, due to the invasiveness of the solution, further investigations are needed before this should be used in a wider clinical setting

A convolutional neural network for segmentation of yeast cells without manual training annotations

MOTIVATION: Single-cell time-lapse microscopy is a ubiquitous tool for studying the dynamics of complex cellular processes. While imaging can be automated to generate very large volumes of data, the processing of the resulting movies to extract high-quality single-cell information remains a challenging task. The development of software tools that automatically identify and track cells is essential for realizing the full potential of time-lapse microscopy data. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are ideally suited for such applications, but require great amounts of manually annotated data for training, a time-consuming and tedious process. RESULTS: We developed a new approach to CNN training for yeast cell segmentation based on synthetic data and present (i) a software tool for the generation of synthetic images mimicking brightfield images of budding yeast cells and (ii) a convolutional neural network (Mask R-CNN) for yeast segmentation that was trained on a fully synthetic dataset. The Mask R-CNN performed excellently on segmenting actual microscopy images of budding yeast cells, and a density-based spatial clustering algorithm (DBSCAN) was able to track the detected cells across the frames of microscopy movies. Our synthetic data creation tool completely bypassed the laborious generation of manually annotated training datasets, and can be easily adjusted to produce images with many different features. The incorporation of synthetic data creation into the development pipeline of CNN-based tools for budding yeast microscopy is a critical step toward the generation of more powerful, widely applicable and user-friendly image processing tools for this microorganism. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The synthetic data generation code can be found at https://github.com/prhbrt/synthetic-yeast-cells. The Mask R-CNN as well as the tuning and benchmarking scripts can be found at https://github.com/ymzayek/yeastcells-detection-maskrcnn. We also provide Google Colab scripts that reproduce all the results of this work. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online

Evaluating fence-end treatments for migratory amphibians

Migratory amphibians require movements to complete their biphasic life cycle, often across altered landscapes fragmented by roadways, which can have severe consequences on their populations. To manage this threat, transportation agencies have begun to implement exclusion fencing to separate natural areas from the roadway to prevent wildlife-vehicle collisions. Although fences are an effective conservation tool, the tendency of animals to access the road by circumventing the fence ends, known as the fence-end effect, threatens to jeopardize management efforts to reduce road associated mortality. One strategy to lessen the impacts of the fence-end effect is to construct fence-end treatments to block amphibian movement and guide the animals to safe crossing locations. By using experimental fence arenas, we examined how nine amphibian species responded to two alternative fence-end structures: horizontal v-shape and perpendicular fence-end treatments. Using a generalized linear model framework, we found both fence-end treatments to be an effective strategy to reduce the impacts of the fence-end effect, with our predictor variable, fence-end treatment, explaining most of the variation in amphibian response. Structure effectiveness also started to improve by 20% with each 7°C increase in temperature, however, this was not significant. Despite these promising findings, we also found for each additional 312 s an amphibians spent attempting to navigate around the experimental fence resulted in a 25% decline in structure effectiveness, suggesting longer fences are not an adequate protection measure to combat the fence-end effect for amphibians. In addition, Anaxyrus americanus was not found to differ in their response, performing equally well to both experimental fence-end treatments. In contrast, Rana spp., Pseudacris crucifer, and Notopthalmus viridescens showed a greater response to the horizontal v-shape fence-end treatment compared to the perpendicular fence-end treatment. Variation in response for Ambystoma spp. could not be detected due to a small sample size; however, no individuals responded positively to the perpendicular fence-end treatment. Guidelines for amphibian fences should continue to incorporate fence-end treatments into the design and implementation to mitigate for the fence-end effect, and preferably angle the fence-ends inward in the horizontal v-shape pattern with the fence ends diagonal to the road for migratory amphibians

Biochemical markers of bone turnover in patients with spinal metastases after resistance training under radiotherapy – a randomized trial

Background: To compare the effects of resistance training versus passive physical therapy on bone turnover markers (BTM) in the metastatic bone during radiation therapy (RT) in patients with spinal bone metastases. Secondly, to evaluate an association of BTM to local response, skeletal-related events (SRE), and number of metastases. Methods: In this randomized trial, 60 patients were allocated from September 2011 to March 2013 into one of the two arms: resistance training (Arm A) or passive physical therapy (Arm B) with thirty patients in each arm during RT. Biochemical markers such as pyridinoline (PYD), desoxy-pyridinoline (DPD), bone alkaline phosphatase (BAP), total amino-terminal propeptide of type I collagen (PINP), beta-isomer of carboxy-terminal telopeptide of type I collagen (CTX-I), and cross-linked N-telopeptide of type I collagen (NTX) were analyzed at baseline, and three months after RT. Results: Mean change values of PYD and CTX-I were significantly lower at 3 months after RT (p = 0.035 and p = 0.043) in Arm A. Importantly, all markers decreased in both arms, except of PYD and CTX-I in arm B, although significance was not reached for some biomarkers. In arm A, the local response was significantly higher (p = 0.003) and PINP could be identified as a predictor for survivors (OR 0.968, 95%CI 0.938–0.999, p = 0.043). BAP (OR 0.974, 95%CI 0.950–0.998, p = 0.034) and PINP (OR 1.025, 95%CI 1.001–1.049, p = 0.044) were related with an avoidance of SRE. Conclusions: In this group of patients with spinal bone metastases, we were able to show that patients with guided resistance training of the paravertebral muscles can influence BTM. PYD and CTX-I decreased significantly in arm A. PINP can be considered as a complementary tool for prediction of local response, and PINP as well as BAP for avoidance of SRE. Trial registration: Clinical trial identifier NCT 01409720. August 2, 2011

Pain response of resistance training of the paravertebral musculature under radiotherapy in patients with spinal bone metastases – a randomized trial

BACKGROUND: To compare pain response outcomes for patients with spinal bone metastases treated with resistance training of the spinal musculature versus passive physical therapy during radiotherapy (RT). METHODS: In this randomized trial, 60 consecutive patients were treated from September 2011 until March 2013 within one of the two groups: resistance training (Arm A) or passive physical therapy (Arm B) with thirty patients in each group during RT. The course of pain according to visual analog scale (VAS), concurrent medication, and oral morphine equivalent dose (OMED) were assessed at baseline, three months, and six months after RT. Pain response was determined using International Bone Consensus response definitions. RESULTS: The course of VAS in the intervention group (Arm A) was significantly lower both during and after RT (AUC, p < .001). The use of analgetic medication showed the same result, with significantly fewer analgetics being necessary both during and after RT in arm A (p < .001). In the course of time, the OMED decreased in arm A, but increased in arm B. After 6 month, 72.2% of patients in arm A, and 22.2% in arm B were responders (p = .014). CONCLUSION: Our trial demonstrated that guided isometric resistance training of the paravertebral muscles can improve pain relief over a 6-months period in patients with stable spinal metastases. Importantly, the intervention was able to reduce OMED as well as concomitant pain medication. The trial is registered in Clinical trial identifier NCT 01409720 (http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/) since 2(nd) of August 2011