268 research outputs found

    Wordsworth's Causal Poetics of Thought

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    This article first appeared in Studies in Romanticism 62, no 2 (2023). Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.acceptedVersio

    Towards a Literary Poetics of Use : Romantic, Aesthetic, Modernist

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    Avhandlingen gir en ny tilnærming til aktuelle debatter i akademia om litteraturens nytte. I stedet for å ta utgangpunkt i en bestemt forestilling av hva det nyttige innebærer, for så å vurdere litteraturens legitime bruksområder, utforsker den hva litterære tekster selv har hatt å si om nyttebegrepet. Avhandlingen retter søkelyset mot engelskspråklig litteratur fra romantikken til modernismen. Den tar for seg nærlesninger av William Wordsworths romantiske lyrikk, Walter Pater og Oscar Wildes estetiske litteraturkritikk, og Virginia Woolfs modernisme. Wordsworths lyrikk går imot økonomistiske perspektiver om nytteverdi. Pater og Wilde, ofte sitert som talspersoner for et kategorisk skille mellom det estetiske og det nyttige, anses heller som tilhengere av et radikalt syn på nytte i kunst og kritikk. I Woolfs skjønnlitteratur pågår det en kontinuerlig forhandling av verdiene som avgjør hva som oppfattes som nyttig.This thesis attempts to reframe questions about the “use of literature” by asking how literary works themselves reflect on the relation of means and ends—both with respect to literature and more broadly. Its three chapters address moments in the history of modern literature in which key bodies of writing helped to define the literary in relation to the useful as a question. William Wordsworth’s poetry suggests an anti-utilitarian line of critique that does not so much dismiss utility as ally poetic thought to unmasterable means-ends relations. The Aestheticism of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, often taken to repudiate the useful in favor of an autonomous aesthetic sphere, instead commits literature, art, and criticism to radical use-making through the production of individuated, i.e., new and unique forms of value. Virginia Woolf’s modernist fiction theorizes an ordinary-life poetics that continually offers to reinscribe the domain of ends through attention to an all-embracing but ever labile ordinariness.Doktorgradsavhandlin

    Poster 345 Cubitus Valgus ‐ An Uncommon Etiology for Ulnar Neuropathy: A Case Report

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    Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146993/1/pmr2s204.pd

    Correction: The Role of Compensatory Mutations in the Emergence of Drug Resistance

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    Pathogens that evolve resistance to drugs usually have reduced fitness. However, mutations that largely compensate for this reduction in fitness often arise. We investigate how these compensatory mutations affect population-wide resistance emergence as a function of drug treatment. Using a model of gonorrhea transmission dynamics, we obtain generally applicable, qualitative results that show how compensatory mutations lead to more likely and faster resistance emergence. We further show that resistance emergence depends on the level of drug use in a strongly nonlinear fashion. We also discuss what data need to be obtained to allow future quantitative predictions of resistance emergence

    When does humoral memory enhance infection?

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    Antibodies and humoral memory are key components of the adaptive immune system. We consider and computationally model mechanisms by which humoral memory present at baseline might instead increase infection load; we refer to this effect as EI-HM (enhancement of infection by humoral memory). We first consider antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) in which antibody enhances the growth of the pathogen, typically a virus, and typically at intermediate "Goldilocks" levels of antibody. Our ADE model reproduces ADE in vitro and enhancement of infection in vivo from passive antibody transfer. But notably the simplest implementation of our ADE model never results in EI-HM. Adding complexity, by making the cross-reactive antibody much less neutralizing than the de novo generated antibody or by including a sufficiently strong non-antibody immune response, allows for ADE-mediated EI-HM. We next consider the possibility that cross-reactive memory causes EI-HM by crowding out a possibly superior de novo immune response. We show that, even without ADE, EI-HM can occur when the cross-reactive response is both less potent and "directly" (i.e. independently of infection load) suppressive with regard to the de novo response. In this case adding a non-antibody immune response to our computational model greatly reduces or completely eliminates EI-HM, which suggests that "crowding out" is unlikely to cause substantial EI-HM. Hence, our results provide examples in which simple models give qualitatively opposite results compared to models with plausible complexity. Our results may be helpful in interpreting and reconciling disparate experimental findings, especially from dengue, and for vaccination

    Interplay between pleiotropy and secondary selection determines rise and fall of mutators in stress response

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    Dramatic rise of mutators has been found to accompany adaptation of bacteria in response to many kinds of stress. Two views on the evolutionary origin of this phenomenon emerged: the pleiotropic hypothesis positing that it is a byproduct of environmental stress or other specific stress response mechanisms and the second order selection which states that mutators hitchhike to fixation with unrelated beneficial alleles. Conventional population genetics models could not fully resolve this controversy because they are based on certain assumptions about fitness landscape. Here we address this problem using a microscopic multiscale model, which couples physically realistic molecular descriptions of proteins and their interactions with population genetics of carrier organisms without assuming any a priori fitness landscape. We found that both pleiotropy and second order selection play a crucial role at different stages of adaptation: the supply of mutators is provided through destabilization of error correction complexes or fluctuations of production levels of prototypic mismatch repair proteins (pleiotropic effects), while rise and fixation of mutators occur when there is a sufficient supply of beneficial mutations in replication-controlling genes. This general mechanism assures a robust and reliable adaptation of organisms to unforeseen challenges. This study highlights physical principles underlying physical biological mechanisms of stress response and adaptation

    Antigenic Diversity, Transmission Mechanisms, and the Evolution of Pathogens

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    Pathogens have evolved diverse strategies to maximize their transmission fitness. Here we investigate these strategies for directly transmitted pathogens using mathematical models of disease pathogenesis and transmission, modeling fitness as a function of within- and between-host pathogen dynamics. The within-host model includes realistic constraints on pathogen replication via resource depletion and cross-immunity between pathogen strains. We find three distinct types of infection emerge as maxima in the fitness landscape, each characterized by particular within-host dynamics, host population contact network structure, and transmission mode. These three infection types are associated with distinct non-overlapping ranges of levels of antigenic diversity, and well-defined patterns of within-host dynamics and between-host transmissibility. Fitness, quantified by the basic reproduction number, also falls within distinct ranges for each infection type. Every type is optimal for certain contact structures over a range of contact rates. Sexually transmitted infections and childhood diseases are identified as exemplar types for low and high contact rates, respectively. This work generates a plausible mechanistic hypothesis for the observed tradeoff between pathogen transmissibility and antigenic diversity, and shows how different classes of pathogens arise evolutionarily as fitness optima for different contact network structures and host contact rates

    Parasite Evolution and Life History Theory

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    Beth F. Kochin is with Emory University, James J. Bull is with UT Austin, Rustom Antia is with Emory University.As a group, parasites are extraordinarily diverse. Even closely related parasites may behave very differently, infecting different host species, causing different pathologies, or infecting different tissues. For example, Escherichia coli bacteria, a typically harmless inhabitant of the human gut, can, in different forms, cause diarrhea, intestinal bleeding, urinary tract infections, kidney bleeding, meningitis, and other diseases. Underlying this diversity is evolution.This work is supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Cellular and Molecular Biolog

    Revisiting Estimates of CTL Killing Rates In Vivo

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    Recent experimental advances have allowed the estimation of the in vivo rates of killing of infected target cells by cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL). We present several refinements to a method applied previously to quantify killing of targets in the spleen using a dynamical model. We reanalyse data previously used to estimate killing rates of CTL specific for two epitopes of lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV) in mice and show that, contrary to previous estimates the “killing rate” of effector CTL is approximately twice that of memory CTL. Further, our method allows the fits to be visualized, and reveals one potentially interesting discrepancy between fits and data. We discuss extensions to the basic CTL killing model to explain this discrepancy and propose experimental tests to distinguish between them

    Reconciling Estimates of Cell Proliferation from Stable Isotope Labeling Experiments.

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    Stable isotope labeling is the state of the art technique for in vivo quantification of lymphocyte kinetics in humans. It has been central to a number of seminal studies, particularly in the context of HIV-1 and leukemia. However, there is a significant discrepancy between lymphocyte proliferation rates estimated in different studies. Notably, deuterated (2)H2-glucose (D2-glucose) labeling studies consistently yield higher estimates of proliferation than deuterated water (D2O) labeling studies. This hampers our understanding of immune function and undermines our confidence in this important technique. Whether these differences are caused by fundamental biochemical differences between the two compounds and/or by methodological differences in the studies is unknown. D2-glucose and D2O labeling experiments have never been performed by the same group under the same experimental conditions; consequently a direct comparison of these two techniques has not been possible. We sought to address this problem. We performed both in vitro and murine in vivo labeling experiments using identical protocols with both D2-glucose and D2O. This showed that intrinsic differences between the two compounds do not cause differences in the proliferation rate estimates, but that estimates made using D2-glucose in vivo were susceptible to difficulties in normalization due to highly variable blood glucose enrichment. Analysis of three published human studies made using D2-glucose and D2O confirmed this problem, particularly in the case of short term D2-glucose labeling. Correcting for these inaccuracies in normalization decreased proliferation rate estimates made using D2-glucose and slightly increased estimates made using D2O; thus bringing the estimates from the two methods significantly closer and highlighting the importance of reliable normalization when using this technique
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