Computerized project management: how to use a Macintosh to improve manager productivity.

http://archive.org/details/computerizedproj00scirN

Missing persons: Race and aphanisis in the twentieth-century American novel

Through images of disintegration and disappearance, American narratives reveal the black subject's problematic relationship to the (white) Other's desire and the language of that desire. Jacques Lacan's theories of subjectivity--especially the mirror stage and aphanisis, the subject's disappearance behind the signifier--illuminate the impact of racist signification on black bodies in twentieth-century American novels, where epithets like "nigger" invoke the mutilation and disappearance of African American subjects. Images of corporal disintegration reveal the reversal of the mirror-stage identification inaugurated by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, lynching, and scientific and literary manifestations of Negrophobia. Post-Plessy novels often feature Jim Crow segregation and the "black" body's destruction by the "white" voice. The Negrophobe rape plot infects James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) after the anonymous narrator is called "nigger." He chooses to "pass" for white after failing to project his disintegration onto his uncanny doubles. In Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), Irene reenacts Lacan's mirror stage by assuming Clare as her idealized image. But "Nig"--the signifier Clare's white husband supplies--invokes Clare's death and undoes Irene, whose final fainting is aphanisis. In William Faulkner's Light in August (1932), Joe Christmas' homicidal violence and suicidal "shattering" represent capitulations to Yoknapatawpha's insistence that he is a "nigger." Exemplary of the literary responses to racist signification since Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Toni Morrison's progression from The Bluest Eye (1970) to Beloved (1987) charts the restoration of voice and body to historically "missing persons" effaced by cultural institutions designed to "teach" them their place. Schooled in the white standards of worth symbolized by the primer motif, characters in The Bluest Eye cannot resist aphanisis; in Beloved, however, characters combat aphanisis by refusing the masters' prerogative to define them. This triumph over aphanisis also emerges in the reappropriation of the black body-in-pieces inspired by Jet magazine's 1955 photographs of Emmett Till's mutilated corpse. Till symbolizes African American integrity in works by Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Madison Jones and others

Grace and apocalypse in the novels of Cormac McCarthy (Appalachia)

McCarthy's novels articulate a vision of man's state of grace as a trajectory. Outer Dark, representative of McCarthy's early career, reveals a world filled with overwhelming evil, a vision of terra damnata mitigated only by the grace suggested in the narrative tenderness toward the heroine, Rinthy. Suttree affirms grace as the titular hero "pulls himself together" to overcome "dementia praecox," a form of madness combining the primitive implications of schizophrenia (represented by Suttree's dead twin) and the Manichean split between good and evil that paradoxically issues in Knoxville's "good-naturedly violent" demimonde. Blood Meridian, McCarthy's apocalyptic Western, reverses the vision of Suttree. The novel's ambiguous silences--moments of ineffability--either condemn "the kid" for his senseless brutalities or confirm the meaningless of life which the desecrating bloodshed suggests. Both possibilities leave mankind poised uncomfortably at his blood meridian, McCarthy's version of an apocalyptic foreclosure on the possibility of grace

Sequencing of Cytomegalovirus UL97 Gene for Genotypic Antiviral Resistance Testing

The widespread use of ganciclovir (GCV) to treat cytomegalovirus (CMV) infections in immunosuppressed patients has led to the development of drug resistance. Phenotypic assays for CMV drug resistance are presently too time-consuming to be therapeutically useful. To support the development of genotypic assays for GCV resistance, the complete sequences of the UL97 phosphotransferase genes in 28 phenotypically GCV-sensitive CMV clinical isolates were determined. The gene was found to be highly conserved, with nucleotide sequence identity among strains ranging from 98.6 to 100% and amino acid sequence identity of >99%. Primers for a genotypic assay were designed to amplify codons 400 to 707, because all known UL97 mutations conferring drug resistance occur at three sites within this region. This part of the UL97 gene was amplified from over 50 clinical isolates, and two sequencing reactions for the coding strand were successfully used to identify GCV resistance mutations. This genotypic assay can be performed in 48 h using genomic DNA extracted from cell monolayers at very low levels of virus infectivity, thus rapidly providing therapeutically useful results

Sharon Pollock's Portraits of the Artist

This essay is a study of Sharon Pollock's artist characters. Using concepts drawn from contemporary autobiography theory with Butler's theory of performativity, I examine three plays in detail—Blood Relations, Saucy Jack, and Moving Pictures—to show how Pollock develops an artist's power to produce identity, to articulate the meaning of a life in performance, and, in some instances, to resist those scriptings of life which limit or erase individuals. While I conclude with observations about these three plays, I also suggest that the paradigm Pollock explores through the artist character informs other of her plays and non-artist characters. Dans cet étude, on examine les portraits des artistes présentees par Sharon Pollock dans ses pièces, mais avec attention particulièr a Moving Pictures, qui raconte l'histoire de Nell Shipman, actrice et realisatrice. Pour creer la character de "Shipman," Pollock a utiliser l'autobiographie de Shipman et, dans mon analyse, j'applique les théories contemporaines d'autobiographics et performativity pour explorer comment Pollock monte l'enquete autobiographique de son "Shipman.