Casting Light Upon The Great Endarkenment

While the Enlightenment promoted thinking for oneself independent of religious authority, the ‘Endarkenment’ (Millgram 2015) concerns deference to a new authority: the specialist, a hyperspecializer. Non-specialists need to defer to such authorities as they are unable to understand their reasoning. Millgram describes how humans are capable of being serial hyperspecializers, able to move from one specialism to another. We support the basic thrust of Millgram’s position, and seek to articulate how the core idea is deployed in very different ways in relation to extremely different philosophical areas. We attend to the issue of the degree of isolation of different specialists and we urge greater emphasis on parallel hyperspecialization, which describes how different specialisms can be embodied in one person at one time

How UK climate change policy has been made sustainable

UK climate change policy is based on the advice of the Committee on Climate Change established under the Climate Change Act 2008. This Committee is an independent, expert agency established as part of the reconceiving of the regulatory state as a response to the neo-liberal critique of older forms of regulation. But the quality of the advice given in the Committee’s recent Fourth Carbon Budget Review is so tendentious as to barely be able to be described as advice at all. This grave shortcoming poses the most serious questions for contemporary constitutional and regulatory processes

Determination of free 25(OH)D concentrations and their relationships to total 25(OH)D in multiple clinical populations

Context : The optimal measure of vitamin D(D) status is unknown. Objective : Directly measure circulating free 25(OH)D concentrations and relationships to total 25(OH)D in a clinically diverse sample of humans. Design : Cross-sectional analysis Setting : Seven academic sites Patients : 1661 adults: (healthy(n=211), pre-diabetic(n=479), outpatients(n=783), cirrhotic(n=90), pregnant(n=20), nursing home(n=79)) Interventions : Merge research data on circulating free 25(OH)D (directly measured immunoassay), total 25(OH)D (LC/MS/MS), D binding protein (DBP by radial (polyclonal) immunodiffusion assay)), albumin, creatinine, iPTH and DBP haplotype Main outcome measures : Distribution of free 25(OH)D (ANOVA with Bonferroni correction for post hoc comparisons) and relationships between free and total 25(OH)D (mixed effects modeling incorporating clinical condition, DBP haplotype with sex, race, eGFR, BMI and other covariates). Results : Free 25(OH)D was 4.7±1.8 pg/mL (mean ±SD) in healthy and 4.3 ±1.9 pg/mL in outpatients with 0.5-8.1 pg/mL and 0.9-8.1 pg/mL encompassing 95% of healthy and outpatients, respectively. Free 25(OH)D was higher in cirrhotics (7.1 ±3.0 pg/mL, pnursing home>prediabetic > outpatient > pregnant), and BMI (lesser effect) as covariates affecting relationships but not eGFR, sex, race or DBP haplotype. Conclusions : Total 25(OH)D, health condition, race and DBP haplotype affected free 25(OH)D, but only health conditions and BMI affected relationships between total and free 25(OH) D. Clinical importance of free 25(OH)D needs to be established in studies assessing outcomes

Transparent Nuclei and Deuteron-Gold Collisions at RHIC

The current normalization of the cross section of inclusive high-pT particle production in deuteron-gold collisions measured RHIC relies on Glauber calculations for the inelastic d-Au cross section. These calculations should be corrected for diffraction. Moreover, they miss the Gribov's inelastic shadowing which makes nuclei more transparent (color transparency). The magnitude of this effect rises with energy and it may dramatically affect the normalization of the RHIC data. We evaluate these corrections employing the light-cone dipole formalism and found a rather modest corrections for the current normalization of the d-Au data. The results of experiments insensitive to diffraction (PHENIX, PHOBOS) should be renormalized by about 20% down, while those which include diffraction (STAR), by only 10%. Such a correction completely eliminates the Cronin enhancement in the PHENIX data for pions. The largest theoretical uncertainty comes from the part of the inelastic shadowing which is related to diffractive gluon radiation, or gluon shadowing. Our estimate is adjusted to data for the triple-Pomeron coupling, however, other models do not have such a restrictions and predict much stronger gluon shadowing. Therefore, the current data for high-pT hadron production in d-Au collisions at RHIC cannot exclude in a model independent way the possibility if initial state suppression proposed by Kharzeev-Levin-McLerran. Probably the only way to settle this uncertainty is a direct measurement of the inelastic d-Au cross sections at RHIC. Also d-Au collisions with a tagged spectator nucleon may serve as a sensitive probe for nuclear transparency and inelastic shadowing. We found an illuminating quantum-mechanical effect: the nucleus acts like a lens focusing spectators into a very narrow cone.Comment: Latex 50 pages. Based on lectures given by the author at Workshop on High-pT Correlations at RHIC, Columbia University, May-June, 2003. The version to appear in PR

Anticipatory anti-colonial writing in R.K. Narayan's Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable

This article uses the term “anticipatory anti-colonial writing” to discuss the workings of time in R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. Both these first novels were published in 1935 with the support of British literary personalities (Graham Greene and E.M. Forster respectively) and both feature young protagonists who, in contrasting ways, are engaged in Indian resistance to colonial rule. This study examines the difference between Narayan’s local, though ironical, resistance to the homogenizing temporal demands of empire and Anand’s awkwardly modernist, socially committed vision. I argue that a form of anticipation that explicitly looks forward to decolonization via new and transnational literary forms is a crucial feature of Untouchable that is not found in Swami and Friends, despite the latter’s anti-colonial elements. Untouchable was intended to be a “bridge between the Ganges and the Thames” and anticipates postcolonial negotiations of time that critique global inequalities and rely upon the multidirectional global connections forged by modernism

Praxes of “The Human” and “The Digital”: Spatial Humanities and the Digitization of Place

The spatial humanities have evolved much in the last ten years or so, and much of this evolution has been driven by project and problem-based GIS applications. It is argued here that the field lacks a theoretical framework analogous to Critical GIS in human geography. I argue that, just as Critical GIS drew on the intellectual hinterlands of human and hybrid geography, so must the spatial humanities draw on the intellectual hinterlands of how humanities discourse have always formed and transmitted concepts of place. Rhetoric, and especially the rhetorical devices of ekphrasis are given as an example of this; a project co-led by the author, the Heritage Gazetteer of Cyprus, is given as an example of how the digitzation of (humanistic) place has been operationalized

Behind the stiff upper lip: war narratives of older men with dementia.

The concept of the stiff upper lip stands as a cultural metaphor for the repression and figurative ¿biting back¿ of traumatic experience, particularly in military contexts. For men born in the first half of the 20th century, maintaining a stiff upper lip involved the ability to exert high levels of cognitive control over the subjective, visceral and emotional domains of experience. In the most common forms of dementia, which affect at least one in five men now in their 80s and 90s, this cognitive control is increasingly lost. One result is that, with the onset of dementia, men who have in the intervening years maintained a relative silence about their wartime experiences begin to disclose detailed memories of such events, in some cases for the first time. This article draws on narrative biographical data from three men with late-onset dementia who make extensive reference to their experience of war. The narratives of Sid, Leonard and Nelson are used to explore aspects of collective memory of the two World Wars, and the socially constructed masculinities imposed on men who grew up and came of age during those decades. The findings show that in spite of their difficulties with short term memory, people with dementia can contribute rich data to cultural studies research. Some aspects of the narratives discussed here may also be considered to work along the line of the counter-hegemonic, offering insights into lived experiences of war that have been elided in popular culture in the post-War years

Regret: A Theoretical and Conceptual Analysis

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73569/1/j.1468-5914.1987.tb00092.x.pd

Neoliberalism and Neoliberals: What are we Talking About?

The terms neoliberalism and neoliberal play a variety of roles ranging from major to trivial in the papers they appear in. Both phrases carry pejorative connotations in nurse writing. Yet irrespective of the role assumed in argument, readers are rarely provided with enough information to determine what the descriptors mean in a substantive or concrete sense. It is proposed that scholars who use these terms in their work should consider expressing themselves more carefully than often occurs at present. Virtue signalling in academic writing should, absent critical argument, be discouraged