Ruin philosophy, poetic discourse, and the collapse of meta-narratives in Aleksandr Kushner’s poetry of the 1970s

This article offers an analysis of the trope of ruin in the poetry of Aleksandr Kushner (born 1936), in particular through a close reading of two of his poems: “In a slippery graveyard, alone” and “Ruins”. The analysis of these poems is preceded by an overview of ruin philosophy from Burke and Diderot to Simmel and Benjamin, with particular emphasis on the way the trope of ruin contemplation stages a confrontation between the self and what transcends it (death, history, nature, etc.). This philosophical background serves as a heuristic tool to shed light on the poetry of Kushner. Through the trope of ruin, Kushner explores the legitimacy of poetic speech after the collapse of all meta-narratives. Kushner has no truck with Diderot's solipsism, nor with Hegel's bold narrative of progress, nor with Simmel's peaceful reconciliation with the creative forces of nature. Nor, really, does he intend to bear witness to history, the way Benjamin does in the faint anticipation of some miracle. Instead, Kushner posits the endurance of a community united not around a grand project, but around the idea of carrying on in the face of everything, muddling through despite the lack of hopes for a transformational future and making the most of fleeting moments of positivity that emerge out of the fundamental serendipity of history

Battery-aware design exploration of scheduling policies for multi-sensor devices

Lifetime maximization is a key challenge in battery-powered multi-sensor devices. Battery-aware power management strategies combine task scheduling with dynamic voltage scaling (DVS), accounting for the fact that the power drawn by the device is different from that provided by the battery due to its many non-idealities. However, state-of-the-art techniques in this field do not take into account several important aspects, such as the impact of sensing tasks on the overall power demand, the (operating point dependent) losses due to multiple DC-DC conversions, and the dynamic modifications in battery efficiency caused by different distributions of the currents in the temporal and in the frequency domains. In this work, we propose a novel approach to identify optimal power management solutions, that addresses all these limitations. Specifically, using advanced battery and DC-DC converter models, we propose methods to explore the scheduling space both statically (at design time) and dynamically (at run-time), accounting not only for computation tasks, but also for communication and sensing. With this method, we show that the battery lifetime can be increased by as much as 23.36% if an optimal power management strategy is adopted

Field-Tunable 0-pi-Transitions in SnTe Topological Crystalline Insulator SQUIDs.

Schonle J, Borisov K, Klett R, et al. Field-Tunable 0-pi-Transitions in SnTe Topological Crystalline Insulator SQUIDs. Scientific reports. 2019;9(1): 1987.The manifestation of spin-orbit interactions, long known to dramatically affect the band structure of heavy-element compounds, governs the physics in the surging class of topological matter. A particular example is found in the new family of topological crystalline insulators. In this systems transport occurs at the surfaces and spin-momentum locking yields crystal-symmetry protected spin-polarized transport. We investigated the current-phase relation of SnTe thin films connected to superconducting electrodes to form SQUID devices. Our results demonstrate that an assisting in-plane magnetic field component can induce 0-π-transitions. We attribute these findings to giant g-factors and large spin-orbit coupling of SnTe topological crystalline insulator, which provides a new platform for investigation of the interplay between spin-orbit physics and topological transport

Quantitative Imaging of Protein-Protein Interactions by Multiphoton Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging Microscopy using a Streak camera

Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging Microscopy (FLIM) using multiphoton excitation techniques is now finding an important place in quantitative imaging of protein-protein interactions and intracellular physiology. We review here the recent developments in multiphoton FLIM methods and also present a description of a novel multiphoton FLIM system using a streak camera that was developed in our laboratory. We provide an example of a typical application of the system in which we measure the fluorescence resonance energy transfer between a donor/acceptor pair of fluorescent proteins within a cellular specimen.Comment: Overview of FLIM techniques, StreakFLIM instrument, FRET application

Lotman and Cultural Studies Encounters and Extensions

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Transliteration and Referencing -- Introduction -- Power -- 1. Dante, Florenskii, Lotman: Journeying Then and Now through Medieval Space -- 2. Lotman's Other: Estrangement and Ethics in Culture and Explosion -- 3. Pushkin's "Andzhelo," Lotman's Insight into It, and the Proper Measure of Politics and Grace -- 4. Post-Soviet Political Discourse and the Creation of Political Communities -- 5. State Power, Hegemony, and Memory: Lotman and Gramsci -- 6. The Ever-Tempting Return to an Iranian Past in the Islamic Present: Does Lotman's Binarism Help? -- Margins and Selfhood -- 7. The Self, Its Bubbles, and Its Illusions: Cultivating Autonomy in Greenblatt and Lotman -- 8. Lotman's Karamzin and the Late Soviet Liberal Intelligentsia -- 9. Bipolar Asymmetry, Indeterminacy, and Creativity in Cinema -- 10. Post-ing the Soviet Body as Tabula Phrasa and Spectacle -- 11. Eccentricity and Cultural Semiotics in Imperial Russia -- 12. Writing in a Polluted Semiosphere: Everyday Life in Lotman, Foucault, and de Certeau -- Afterword: Lotman without Tears -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- IndexDescription based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, YYYY. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries