Kantorowicz’s Oaths: A Californian Moment in the History of Academic Freedom

This essay is about Ernst Kantorowicz’s stance on the anti-communist Loyalty Oath controversy at the University of California in the early years of the Cold War. Kantorowicz, who just had escaped Nazi Germany, found himself caught up in a fight between a group of so-called non-signers and the Regents of the University who tried to enforce a political oath on all faculty. In his pamphlet about the controversy Kantorowicz turned this moment of university politics into a meditation on the “fundamental issues” of academic freedom, the very character of the public office of the university professor, and the character of the university as legal corporation, which resembled his notion of a Secret Germany and anticipated aspects of his The King’s Two Bodies. After a close-reading of Kantorowicz’ pamphlet in which I analyze his understanding of the university as an idealized Arcadia of scholarship and a mythistorical reiteration of the medieval universitas magistrorum et scholarium, I finally turn to the afterlife of the Loyalty Oath controversy and its implications for our understanding of academic freedom.This essay is about Ernst Kantorowicz’s stance on the anti-communist Loyalty Oath controversy at the University of California in the early years of the Cold War. Kantorowicz, who just had escaped Nazi Germany, found himself caught up in a fight between a group of so-called non-signers and the Regents of the University who tried to enforce a political oath on all faculty. In his pamphlet about the controversy Kantorowicz turned this moment of university politics into a meditation on the “fundamental issues” of academic freedom, the very character of the public office of the university professor, and the character of the university as legal corporation, which resembled his notion of a Secret Germany and anticipated aspects of his The King’s Two Bodies. After a close-reading of Kantorowicz’ pamphlet in which I analyze his understanding of the university as an idealized Arcadia of scholarship and a mythistorical reiteration of the medieval universitas magistrorum et scholarium, I finally turn to the afterlife of the Loyalty Oath controversy and its implications for our understanding of academic freedom

The Last Judgment before the Last

Throughout the nineteenth century, most historians preferred not to ask philosophical questions. In their writings, however, they indirectly engaged with problems about the character of the world-historical process, thus confronting what might be called penultimate questions. This article analyzes both the notions and the practices of historical work in Leopold Ranke's writings to consider how his spontaneous philosophy of history came to shape an entire discipline. It argues that Ranke crafted what I call historical figures from archival materials and that these served as equivalents to concepts in G. W. F. Hegel's philosophical world history. The writing of history has not yet escaped the logic of these narrative figures of historical argumentation

Husimi Maps in Lattices

We build upon previous work that used coherent states as a measurement of the local phase space and extended the flux operator by adapting the Husimi projection to produce a vector field called the Husimi map. In this article, we extend its definition from continuous systems to lattices. This requires making several adjustments to incorporate effects such as group velocity and multiple bands. Several phenomena which uniquely occur in lattice systems, like group-velocity warping and internal Bragg diffraction, are explained and demonstrated using Husimi maps. We also show that scattering points between bands and valleys can be identified in the divergence of the Husimi map

Applying Optimizations for Dynamically-typed Languages to Java

While Java is a statically-typed language, some of its features make it behave like a dynamically-typed language at run time. This includes Java’s boxing of primitive values as well as generics, which rely on type erasure. This paper investigates how runtime technology for dynamically-typed languages such as JavaScript and Python can be used for Java bytecode. Using optimistic optimizations, we specialize bytecode instructions that access references in such a way, that they can handle primitive data directly and also specialize data structures in order to avoid boxing for primitive types. Our evaluation shows that these optimizations can be successfully applied to a statically-typed language such as Java and can also improve performance significantly. With this approach, we get an efficient implementation of Java's generics, avoid changes to the Java language, and maintain backwards compatibility, allowing existing code to benefit from our optimization transparently

Suitable Electrode Choice for Robotic-Assisted Cochlear Implant Surgery: A Systematic Literature Review of Manual Electrode Insertion Adverse Events

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: The cochlear implant (CI) electrode insertion process is a key step in CI surgery. One of the aims of advances in robotic-assisted CI surgery (RACIS) is to realize better cochlear structure preservation and to precisely control insertion. The aim of this literature review is to gain insight into electrode selection for RACIS by acquiring a thorough knowledge of electrode insertion and related complications from classic CI surgery involving a manual electrode insertion process. METHODS: A systematic electronic search of the literature was carried out using PubMed, Scopus, Cochrane, and Web of Science to find relevant literature on electrode tip fold over (ETFO), electrode scalar deviation (ESD), and electrode migration (EM) from both pre-shaped and straight electrode types. RESULTS: A total of 82 studies that include 8,603 ears implanted with a CI, i.e., pre-shaped (4,869) and straight electrodes (3,734), were evaluated. The rate of ETFO (25 studies, 2,335 ears), ESD (39 studies, 3,073 ears), and EM (18 studies, 3,195 ears) was determined. An incidence rate (±95% CI) of 5.38% (4.4–6.6%) of ETFO, 28.6% (26.6–30.6%) of ESD, and 0.53% (0.2–1.1%) of EM is associated with pre-shaped electrodes, whereas with straight electrodes it was 0.51% (0.1–1.3%), 11% (9.2–13.0%), and 3.2% (2.5–3.95%), respectively. The differences between the pre-shaped and straight electrode types are highly significant (p < 0.001). Laboratory experiments show evidence that robotic insertions of electrodes are less traumatic than manual insertions. The influence of round window (RW) vs. cochleostomy (Coch) was not assessed. CONCLUSION: Considering the current electrode designs available and the reported incidence of insertion complications, the use of straight electrodes in RACIS and conventional CI surgery (and manual insertion) appears to be less traumatic to intracochlear structures compared with pre-shaped electrodes. However, EM of straight electrodes should be anticipated. RACIS has the potential to reduce these complications