« Le théâtre de ma mort ». La création comme annihilation

Cet essai s’arrête sur trois dénominateurs sémantiques communs établis dans l’oeuvre de Wilson par des liens associatifs entre des images visuelles, verbales et tonales: la mort, l’hérésie et l’absence. Ils sont liés, par le thème de la création, au créateur et, plus spécifiquement, à Molière. Le créateur mourant, dévoré par sa création, est représenté dans La Mort de Molière à la fois comme un processus et son produit – le sujet observé, «un mourant au travail». La mort devient ainsi une action constitutive. Mais Molière est aussi un hérétique, un Dom Juan, un illusionniste, qui, par le fait de créer par la négation, va jusqu’à défier le Créateur. Mais un créateur est aussi celui dont l’oeuvre est produite et conservée même en son absence. Cette absence est l’objet d’une représentation, elle devient l’objet d’un fétichisme. Ces aspects permettent une interprétation de La Mort de Molière comme présentation de la création comme annihilation.The paper focuses on three semantic common denominators constructed through an associative connection between visual, tonal and verbal images: death, heresy and vacancy. These are tied to the theme of creation, to the creator, and especially to Molière. The dying creator, consumed by his creation, is presented in La Mort de Molière both as the medium itself and its product – the object observed, “a dying man at work”. Thus, death becomes a constitutive action. Molière is also the demoniac heretic, the Dom Juan, the trickster, who by creating through negation even challenges The Creator. The creator is also the one whose work is brought to life and perpetuated in his absence. However, the absence itself is presented ; it becomes a fetish or a work of art. These aspects enable an integrative but tentative interpretation to La Mort de Molière – the presentation of creation as annihilation

Unsupervised spike detection and sorting with wavelets and superparamagnetic clustering

This study introduces a new method for detecting and sorting spikes from multiunit recordings. The method combines the wavelet transform, which localizes distinctive spike features, with superparamagnetic clustering, which allows automatic classification of the data without assumptions such as low variance or gaussian distributions. Moreover, an improved method for setting amplitude thresholds for spike detection is proposed. We describe several criteria for implementation that render the algorithm unsupervised and fast. The algorithm is compared to other conventional methods using several simulated data sets whose characteristics closely resemble those of in vivo recordings. For these data sets, we found that the proposed algorithm outperformed conventional methods

Reply to the Comment by S. Harvey on “Entropy, Energy, and Bending of DNA in Viral Capsids”

AbstractThe comment by Stephen Harvey in this issue of the Biophysical Journal concludes with two statements regarding my recent letter about DNA packaging into viral capsids. Harvey agrees with my interpretation of the origin of the large confinement entropy predicted by the molecular-dynamics simulations of his group, and its sensitive dependence on the molecular parameters of their wormlike chain model of double-stranded DNA. On the other hand, he doubts my assertion that the confinement entropy is already included in the interstrand repulsion free energy derived from osmotic stress measurements, which constitutes the major contribution to the packaging free energy used in recent continuum theories of this process. Harvey suggests instead that the confinement entropy should be added to this free energy as a separate term (using, for instance, the method described in my letter). I will argue that this addition is redundant, and, in a brief discussion of continuum theories, will also discuss his comments as relates to the work of other researchers

Ideology of Form in Storytelling Theater: The Politics of Inter-medial Adaptation in Discovering Elijah, A Play about War

The performance Discovering Elijah, A Play about War (first performed in Israel in 2001), directed by Ruth Kanner as storytelling theater, is based on a literary-documentary text about the 1973 Yom Kippur War written by S. Yizhar, a notable Israeli writer. This is one of the instances in which Kanner's postdramatic search has generated unique directorial patterns that, while not precluding performances of written plays, rely on the power of words, mostly through adaptation of non-dramatic texts. The article focuses on the striking, unsettling performance Discovering Elijah, performed by the Ruth Kanner Theater Group, as a case study to a hermeneutic view according to which the ideology is embedded in the structure itself and becomes an "ideology of form." In this case, this phe­nomenon is inherently structured in theater which is created most dominantly through the inter-medial co-existence (or clash) of different sign- systems—telling (a reductive formulation of the epic principle) and show­ing. The spatial-anecdotal array by which the story of war is presented in the performance seems to intensify patterns of narrative logic which can be seen as a paradigm of Superstructure. But in the encounter between the narrative action and the physical-perceptual performative acts is em­bedded a constant tension between a need for an overall rationale for war and a concrete, appallingly incomprehensible experience. It is through this tension that the theater "strikes back," activating its opposing power

Thermodynamics of micellization of oppositely charged polymers

The complexation of oppositely charged colloidal objects is considered in this paper as a thermodynamic micellization process where each kind of object needs the others to micellize. This requirement gives rise to quantitatively different behaviors than the so-called mixed-micellization where each specie can micellize separately. A simple model of the grand potential for micelles is proposed to corroborate the predictions of this general approach.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for publication in Europhysics Letter

Integrating Groupware Activities into Workflow Management Systems

Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) has been recognized as a crucial enabling technology for multi-user computer-based systems, particularly in cases where synchronous human-human interaction is required between geographically dispersed users. Workflow is an emerging technology that supports complex business processes in modern corporations by allowing to explicitly define the process, and by supporting its execution in a workflow management system (WFMS). Since workflow inherently involves humans carrying out parts of the process, it is only natural to explore how to synergize these two technologies. We analyze the relationships between groupware and workflow management, present our general approach to integrating synchronous groupware tools into a WFMS, and conclude with an example process that was implemented in the Oz WFMS and integrated such tools. Our main contribution lies in the integration and synchronization of individual groupware activities into modeled workflow processes, as opposed to being a built-in part of the workflow WFMS

Voluntary Provision of Public Goods: The Multiple Unit Case

This paper reports the results of a series of experiments designed to test the predictions of a model of voluntary provision of public goods through private contributions. The particular voluntary contribution game implements the core in successively undominated perfect equilibria, but the behavioral question is whether the agents adopt strategies which support this refinement to the Nash equilibrium. The experimental evidence suggests that they do not: core allocations do not consistently occur in the laboratory markets.Center for Research on Economic and Social Theory, Department of Economics, University of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100798/1/ECON025.pd

Temporal Response Properties of Accessory Olfactory Bulb Neurons: Limitations and Opportunities for Decoding

The vomeronasal system (VNS) is a major vertebrate chemosensory system that functions in parallel to the main olfactory system (MOS). Despite many similarities, the two systems dramatically differ in the temporal domain. While MOS responses are governed by breathing and follow a subsecond temporal scale, VNS responses are uncoupled from breathing and evolve over seconds. This suggests that the contribution of response dynamics to stimulus information will differ between these systems. While temporal dynamics in the MOS are widely investigated, similar analyses in the accessory olfactory bulb (AOB) are lacking. Here, we have addressed this issue using controlled stimulus delivery to the vomeronasal organ of male and female mice. We first analyzed the temporal properties of AOB projection neurons and demonstrated that neurons display prolonged, variable, and neuron-specific characteristics. We then analyzed various decoding schemes using AOB population responses. We showed that compared with the simplest scheme (i.e., integration of spike counts over the entire response period), the division of this period into smaller temporal bins actually yields poorer decoding accuracy. However, optimal classification accuracy can be achieved well before the end of the response period by integrating spike counts within temporally defined windows. Since VNS stimulus uptake is variable, we analyzed decoding using limited information about stimulus uptake time, and showed that with enough neurons, such time-invariant decoding is feasible. Finally, we conducted simulations that demonstrated that, unlike the main olfactory bulb, the temporal features of AOB neurons disfavor decoding with high temporal accuracy, and, rather, support decoding without precise knowledge of stimulus uptake time