A valiant effort : Faisal's failed inculcation of national identity in Iraq

textThe lack of attention to any comprehensive scholarly study of King Faisal I of Iraq since his untimely death in 1933 is interesting, considering that the twelve years in which he ruled Iraq witnessed the imposition and evolution of many of the institutions of the twentieth century state along with their concomitant ideologies and justifications. The construction of the modern Iraqi state belonged solely neither to the British nor to the efforts of the Ottoman-educated ex-Sharifian officers who followed Faisal from his aborted kingdom in Syria to the newly established monarchy in 1921. It was more a mélange of competing ideas, collaborative efforts, and political realities. In all this, Faisal played no small part as he maneuvered delicately among the strategic concerns of two major European powers, a re-emergent Turkish nation, his family's historical nemesis in the Nejd, relations with Iran following the 1921 coup d'état, and a variety of internal separatist ambitions and parochial interests. This paper seeks to redress this lacuna, concentrating on Faisal's efforts to establish a solid base of support and control while crafting an independent, coherently functioning polity from the patchwork of provinces presented him on his accession to the throne of Iraq.Histor

“We are not only English Jews—we are Jewish Englishmen”

Between 1840 and 1880, a mature, increasingly comfortable, native-born Jewish community emerged and matured in London. The history of this community and the ways it developed are explored in this volume using archival and also contemporary advertising material that appeared in the Jewish Chronicle and other Anglo-Jewish newspapers in these years

“We are not only English Jews—we are Jewish Englishmen”

Between 1840 and 1880, a mature, increasingly comfortable, native-born Jewish community emerged and matured in London. The history of this community and the ways it developed are explored in this volume using archival and also contemporary advertising material that appeared in the Jewish Chronicle and other Anglo-Jewish newspapers in these years

A hybrid SVM/HMM based system for the state detection of individual finger movements from multichannel ECoG signals

A hybrid state detection algorithm is presented for the estimation of baseline and movement states which can be used to trigger a free paced neuroprostethic. The hybrid model was constructed by fusing a multiclass Support Vector Machine (SVM) with a Hidden Markov Model (HMM), where the internal hidden state observation probabilities were represented by the discriminative output of the SVM. The proposed method was applied to the multichannel Electrocorticogram (ECoG) recordings of BCI competition IV to identify the baseline and movement states while subjects were executing individual finger movements. The results are compared to regular Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based HMM with the same number of states as SVM-based HMM structure. Our results indicate that the proposed hybrid state estimation method out-performs the standard HMM-based solution in all subjects studied with higher latency. The average latency of the hybrid decoder was approximately 290ms. © 2011 IEEE

Extraction of sparse spatial filters using Oscillating Search

Common Spatial Pattern algorithm (CSP) is widely used in Brain Machine Interface (BMI) technology to extract features from dense electrode recordings by using their weighted linear combination. However, the CSP algorithm, is sensitive to variations in channel placement and can easily overfit to the data when the number of training trials is insufficient. Construction of sparse spatial projections where a small subset of channels is used in feature extraction, can increase the stability and generalization capability of the CSP method. The existing 0 norm based sub-optimal greedy channel reduction methods are either too complex such as Backward Elimination (BE) which provided best classification accuracies or have lower accuracy rates such as Recursive Weight Elimination (RWE) and Forward Selection (FS) with reduced complexity. In this paper, we apply the Oscillating Search (OS) method which fuses all these greedy search techniques to sparsify the CSP filters. We applied this new technique on EEG dataset IVa of BCI competition III. Our results indicate that the OS method provides the lowest classification error rates with low cardinality levels where the complexity of the OS is around 20 times lower than the BE. © 2012 IEEE

Feasibility of Using Ultra-High Field (7 T) MRI for Clinical Surgical Targeting

The advantages of ultra-high magnetic field (7 Tesla) MRI for basic science research and neuroscience applications have proven invaluable. Structural and functional MR images of the human brain acquired at 7 T exhibit rich information content with potential utility for clinical applications. However, (1) substantial increases in susceptibility artifacts, and (2) geometrical distortions at 7 T would be detrimental for stereotactic surgeries such as deep brain stimulation (DBS), which typically use 1.5 T images for surgical planning. Here, we explore whether these issues can be addressed, making feasible the use of 7 T MRI to guide surgical planning. Twelve patients with Parkinson's disease, candidates for DBS, were scanned on a standard clinical 1.5 T MRI and a 7 T MRI scanner. Qualitative and quantitative assessments of global and regional distortion were evaluated based on anatomical landmarks and transformation matrix values. Our analyses show that distances between identical landmarks on 1.5 T vs. 7 T, in the mid-brain region, were less than one voxel, indicating a successful co-registration between the 1.5 T and 7 T images under these specific imaging parameter sets. On regional analysis, the central part of the brain showed minimal distortion, while inferior and frontal areas exhibited larger distortion due to proximity to air-filled cavities. We conclude that 7 T MR images of the central brain regions have comparable distortions to that observed on a 1.5 T MRI, and that clinical applications targeting structures such as the STN, are feasible with information-rich 7 T imaging