Consuela Francis, The Critical Reception of James Baldwin 1963–2010: “An Honest Man and a Good Writer”; Michele Elam, ed. The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin

Consuela Francis, The Critical Reception of James Baldwin 1963–2010: “An Honest Man and a Good Writer” Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014. Pp. 165. ISBN: 1571133259. Michele Elam, ed. The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. 274. ISBN:  9781107043039. Ben Robbins In the contemporary moment, James Baldwin’s works, words, and influence seem to be everywhere. The enduring relevance of his work has been surveyed and reassessed with recent prominent ..

Consuela Francis, The Critical Reception of James Baldwin 1963–2010: “An Honest Man and a Good Writer”; Michele Elam, ed. The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin

Consuela Francis, The Critical Reception of James Baldwin 1963–2010: “An Honest Man and a Good Writer” Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014. Pp. 165. ISBN: 1571133259. Michele Elam, ed. The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. 274. ISBN:  9781107043039. Ben Robbins In the contemporary moment, James Baldwin’s works, words, and influence seem to be everywhere. The enduring relevance of his work has been surveyed and reassessed with recent prominent ..

The Consequences of Fairness for a Small Professional Services Firm

 This paper distinguishes among client perceptions of outcome, procedural and interactional justice in professional services. We surveyed clients of a small accounting firm and focused specifically on fairness perceptions in income tax services. We predicted that procedural and interactional fairness would be more influential than distributive fairness on evaluations of the service. The results suggest that interactional fairness, the interpersonal treatment in the delivery of the service, is the most significant predictor of client perceptions of service quality, loyalty, and trust. Implications for managers of small businesses as well as sole practitioners that offer professional services are discussed.

Value generalization in human avoidance learning.

Generalization during aversive decision-making allows us to avoid a broad range of potential threats following experience with a limited set of exemplars. However, over-generalization, resulting in excessive and inappropriate avoidance, has been implicated in a variety of psychological disorders. Here, we use reinforcement learning modelling to dissect out different contributions to the generalization of instrumental avoidance in two groups of human volunteers (N = 26, N = 482). We found that generalization of avoidance could be parsed into perceptual and value-based processes, and further, that value-based generalization could be subdivided into that relating to aversive and neutral feedback - with corresponding circuits including primary sensory cortex, anterior insula, amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Further, generalization from aversive, but not neutral, feedback was associated with self-reported anxiety and intrusive thoughts. These results reveal a set of distinct mechanisms that mediate generalization in avoidance learning, and show how specific individual differences within them can yield anxiety.Wellcome, Arthritis Research U

Michael K. Glenday, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Michael K. Glenday’s book titled simply F. Scott Fitzgerald seeks to offer critical approaches to all of Fitzgerald’s novels in a reader-friendly study. The book aims to provide new readings of the author’s canonical works and to reassess the ideas and significance of Fitzgerald’s major novels by exploring their core themes and positioning them within modern-day American culture. With the purpose of being reader-friendly, the book assumes no prior knowledge and is designed to provide a genera..

Panel. Other Faulkners

Nothing Has Been Resolved: Mimesis and the Modern Dance Interpretations of As I Lay Dying / Michael P. Bibler, Manchester UniversityThis presentation introduces and discusses two important dramatic interpretations of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: Jean-Louis Barrault’s avant-garde French production Autour d’une Mère (1935) and Valerie Bettis’s U.S. modern dance production As I Lay Dying (1949). Given the obvious emphasis on bodily expression, these interpretations raise interesting questions about the novel’s use of language and the difficulty (even impossibility) of mimetic representation. Yet my purpose here is not just to show how these dances help illustrate or illuminate Faulkner’s work. Rather, I’m more interested in exploring how these three works help decenter Faulkner’s place in the modernist canon by placing greater attention on questions of performance, intertextuality, and collaboration—questions already raised by the multi-vocal form of the novel itself. Toward a Camp Appreciation of Faulkner’s Sanctuary / Ben Robbins, Freie Universität BerlinI would like to argue that both Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary (1932) and the film treatments he made of the novel for MGM in the early 1930s can be read with a camp sensibility, since they possess many aesthetic hallmarks of camp, including heightened stylization, theatricality, amorality, exaggeration, failed seriousness, and a predilection towards artifice. I am particularly interested in exploring those moments where the novel particularly, to quote Susan Sontag in her landmark essay from 1964, ‘Notes on Camp’, “proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken seriously because it is ‘too much.’” I will show how a camp reading of Sanctuary can help us understand how the novel disturbs the high/low axes by which we judge the Faulknerian canon. William Faulkner and a Family Who Influenced Him / Sally Wolff-King, Emory UniversityWilliam Faulkner’s celebrated heroine of The Sound and the Fury, Caddy Compson, may have had a real-life antecedent. That is a theory mentioned in Ledgers of History: William Faulkner, an Almost Forgotten Friendship, and an Antebellum Plantation Diary. More evidence to support that argument has come to light since the publication of Ledgers of History, however, and research indicates that a cousin of the McCarroll/Francisco/Leak family could be that person. The McCarroll/Francisco/Leak family of Holly Springs and Salem, Mississippi, came into focus recently when it became clear that they inherited and preserved a nineteenth-century plantation diary, in their possession for several generations. What Faulkner discovered in the diary of long ago informed his fiction in myriad ways, including plot, characterization, theme, and detail. Leak/McCarroll/Francisco family stories, however, also seem to have found their way into plotlines of The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished. That Faulkner drew from the real life around him has been well known since his lifetime, but the case seems stronger than ever that members of this particular family, whom he knew well and visited often, may have been—in ways not previously recognized—sources for some of Faulkner’s most famous novels

Dissociable Learning Processes Underlie Human Pain Conditioning.

Pavlovian conditioning underlies many aspects of pain behavior, including fear and threat detection [1], escape and avoidance learning [2], and endogenous analgesia [3]. Although a central role for the amygdala is well established [4], both human and animal studies implicate other brain regions in learning, notably ventral striatum and cerebellum [5]. It remains unclear whether these regions make different contributions to a single aversive learning process or represent independent learning mechanisms that interact to generate the expression of pain-related behavior. We designed a human parallel aversive conditioning paradigm in which different Pavlovian visual cues probabilistically predicted thermal pain primarily to either the left or right arm and studied the acquisition of conditioned Pavlovian responses using combined physiological recordings and fMRI. Using computational modeling based on reinforcement learning theory, we found that conditioning involves two distinct types of learning process. First, a non-specific "preparatory" system learns aversive facial expressions and autonomic responses such as skin conductance. The associated learning signals-the learned associability and prediction error-were correlated with fMRI brain responses in amygdala-striatal regions, corresponding to the classic aversive (fear) learning circuit. Second, a specific lateralized system learns "consummatory" limb-withdrawal responses, detectable with electromyography of the arm to which pain is predicted. Its related learned associability was correlated with responses in ipsilateral cerebellar cortex, suggesting a novel computational role for the cerebellum in pain. In conclusion, our results show that the overall phenotype of conditioned pain behavior depends on two dissociable reinforcement learning circuits.Research was supported by National Institute for Information and Communications Technology (Japan), the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and The Wellcome Trust (UK). S.Z. was supported by the WD Armstrong Fund and the Cambridge Trust. G.G. was partially supported by the Kakenhi Research Grant B #13380602 from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. We thank the imaging team at the Center for Information and Neural Networks for their help in performing the study. The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.This is the final version of the article. It was first available from Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.10.06

Gamma radiation damage study of 0.18 µm process CMOS image sensors

A 0.18 µm process CMOS image sensor has recently been developed by e2v technologies plc. with a 0.5 megapixel imaging area consisting of 6 x 6 µm 5T pixels. The sensor is able to provide high performance in a diverse range of applications including machine vision and medical imaging, offering good low-light performance at a video rate of up to 60 fps. The CMOS sensor has desirable characteristics which make it appealing for a number of space applications. Following on from previous tests of the radiation hardness of the image sensors to proton radiation, in which the increase in dark-current and appearance of bright and RTS pixels was quantified, the sensors have now been subjected to a dose of gamma radiation. Knowledge of the performance after irradiation is important to judge suitability for space applications and radiation sensitive medical imaging applications. This knowledge will also enable image correction to mitigate the effects and allow for future CMOS devices to be designed to improve upon the findings in this paper. One device was irradiated to destruction after 120 krad(Si) while biased, and four other devices were irradiated between 5 and 20 krad(Si) while biased. This paper explores the resulting radiation damage effects on the CMOS image sensor such as increased dark current, and a central brightening effect, and discusses the implications for use of the sensor in space applications

Fast battery-charging architecture

The disclosure describes a power-efficient, low-footprint, and fast battery charger based on a hybrid of the charge pump and the three-level chargers. The charger is low cost, reduces thermal dissipation, increases battery-charging speed, and is compatible with wired and wireless charging

The control of tonic pain by active relief learning.

Tonic pain after injury characterises a behavioural state that prioritises recovery. Although generally suppressing cognition and attention, tonic pain needs to allow effective relief learning to reduce the cause of the pain. Here, we describe a central learning circuit that supports learning of relief and concurrently suppresses the level of ongoing pain. We used computational modelling of behavioural, physiological and neuroimaging data in two experiments in which subjects learned to terminate tonic pain in static and dynamic escape-learning paradigms. In both studies, we show that active relief-seeking involves a reinforcement learning process manifest by error signals observed in the dorsal putamen. Critically, this system uses an uncertainty ('associability') signal detected in pregenual anterior cingulate cortex that both controls the relief learning rate, and endogenously and parametrically modulates the level of tonic pain. The results define a self-organising learning circuit that reduces ongoing pain when learning about potential relief