Foucault, Kant, Deleuze, and the problem of political agency

Political agency concerns the transformation of the conditions of social organization through collective action. In order to treat the set of necessary conditions for such agency, I develop a detailed reconstruction of Michel Foucault\u27s political philosophy, placed in relation to the work of Immanuel Kant and Gilles Deleuze. I argue that the key to Foucault\u27s political thought is contained in two crucial but neglected concepts, verticality andtransversality, and that the systematic exposition of these concepts yields an account of what must obtain for political agency to be possible, realizable, and sustainable

Effects of environmental variation during seed production on seed dormancy and germination

The environment during seed production has major impacts on the behaviour of progeny seeds. It can be shown that for annual plants temperature perception over the whole life history of the mother can affect the germination rate of progeny, and instances have been documented where these affects cross whole generations. Here we discuss the current state of knowledge of signal transduction pathways controlling environmental responses during seed production, focusing both on events that take place in the mother plant and those that occur directly as a result of environmental responses in the developing zygote. We show that seed production environment effects are complex, involving overlapping gene networks active independently in fruit, seed coat, and zygotic tissues that can be deconstructed using careful physiology alongside molecular and genetic experiments

Analyses of some apatites containing manganese

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XXX. Ueber Graftonit, ein neues Mineral von Grafton, New Hampshire, und dessen Verwachsung mit Triphylin.

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In situ chemically specific mapping of agrochemical seed coatings using stimulated Raman scattering microscopy.

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley-VCH-Verlag via the DOI in this record.Providing sufficient, healthy food for the increasing global population is putting a great deal of pressure on the agrochemical industry to maximise crop yields without sustaining environmental damage. The growth and yield of every plant with sexual reproduction, depends on germination and emergence of sown seeds, which is affected greatly by seed disease. This can be most effectively controlled by treating seeds with pesticides before they are sown. An effective seed coating treatment requires a high surface coverage and adhesion of active ingredients onto the seed surface and the addition of adhesive agents in coating formulations plays a key role in achieving this. Although adhesive agents are known to enhance seed germination, little is understood about how they affect surface distribution of actives and how formulations can be manipulated to rationally engineer seed coating preparations with optimized coverage and efficacy. We show, for the first time, that stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy can be used to map the seed surface with microscopic spatial resolution and with chemical specificity to identify formulation components distributed on the seed surface. This represents a major advance in our capability to rationally engineer seed coating formulations with enhanced efficacy.We thank the funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC, BB/M017915/1 and BB/K013602/1)

Physical interpretation of the Wigner rotations and its implications for relativistic quantum information

We present a new treatment for the spin of a massive relativistic particle in the context of quantum information based on a physical interpretation of the Wigner rotations, obtaining different results in relation to the previous works. We are lead to the conclusions that it is not possible to define a reduced density matrix for the particle spin and that the Pauli-Lubanski (or similar) spin operators are not suitable to describe measurements where spin couples to an electromagnetic field in the measuring apparatus. These conclusions contradict the assumptions made by most of the previous papers on the subject. We also propose an experimental test of our formulation.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. Several changes were made on the text. One extra example was include

Electromagnetic self-forces and generalized Killing fields

Building upon previous results in scalar field theory, a formalism is developed that uses generalized Killing fields to understand the behavior of extended charges interacting with their own electromagnetic fields. New notions of effective linear and angular momenta are identified, and their evolution equations are derived exactly in arbitrary (but fixed) curved spacetimes. A slightly modified form of the Detweiler-Whiting axiom that a charge's motion should only be influenced by the so-called "regular" component of its self-field is shown to follow very easily. It is exact in some interesting cases, and approximate in most others. Explicit equations describing the center-of-mass motion, spin angular momentum, and changes in mass of a small charge are also derived in a particular limit. The chosen approximations -- although standard -- incorporate dipole and spin forces that do not appear in the traditional Abraham-Lorentz-Dirac or Dewitt-Brehme equations. They have, however, been previously identified in the test body limit.Comment: 20 pages, minor typos correcte

Microwave and Millimeter Wave Techniques

Contains research objectives and summary of research.Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAAB07-71-C-0300

Morphosyntactic processing in late second-language learners

The goal of the present study was to investigate the electro- physiological correlates of second-language (L2) morphosyn- tactic processing in highly proficient late learners of an L2 with long exposure to the L2 environment. ERPs were col- lected from 22 English–Spanish late learners while they read sentences in which morphosyntactic features of the L2 present or not present in the first language (number and gender agree- ment, respectively) were manipulated at two different sentence positions—within and across phrases. The results for a control group of age-matched native-speaker Spanish participants in- cluded an ERP pattern of LAN-type early negativity followed by P600 effect in response to both agreement violations and for both sentence positions. The late L2 learner results included a similar pattern, consisting of early negativity followed by P600, in the first sentence position (within-phrase agreement viola- tions) but only P600 effects in the second sentence position (across-phrase agreement violation), as well as significant am- plitude and onset latency differences between the gender and the number violation effects in both sentence positions. These results reveal that highly proficient learners can show electro- physiological correlates during L2 processing that are qualita- tively similar to those of native speakers, but the results also indicate the contribution of factors such as age of acquisition and transfer processes from first language to L