Hateful Contraries: Studies in Literature and Criticism

These ten essays, written over a period from 1950 to 1962, are bound together by their common concern with questions of the meaning of criticism and the larger meaning of literature itself. These difficult questions W.K. Wimsatt treats with characteristic wit and penetration, ranging easily from a broad consideration of principles to incisive comment on individual writers and works. The first part of the book is devoted to a discussion of literary theory. Wimsatt reviews the development of critical dialectic from the German romanticism of Schelling and the Schlegels to the mythopeic bravura of Northrop Frye. Himself a classical ironist, he nevertheless exposes here some of the extravagances of the ironic principle as flourished by the systematic Prometheans. The second and third parts contain essays on more particular topics: the meaning of “symbolism,” Aristotle’s doctrines of the tragic plot and catharsis, the theory of comic laughter, and the objective reading of English meters. Here too are extended comment on particular writers—a study of the imagination of James Boswell, an analysis of the comedy of T. S. Eliot in The Cocktail Party, and a contrast in the handling of similar themes by Tennyson and Eliot. The fourth part is a comprehensive statement of the demands and opportunities confronting the critic in his or her role as teacher. W. K. Wimsatt (1907–1975) was professor of English at Yale University and author of several literary critcisms, including Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. A monumental work. —Literary Half-Yearly A rich storehouse of judgment, analysis, and demonstration. —Renascence A first-rate book of criticism. —Times Literary Supplementhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_comparative_literature/1008/thumbnail.jp

Non-Markovian Momentum Computing: Universal and Efficient

All computation is physically embedded. Reflecting this, a growing body of results embraces rate equations as the underlying mechanics of thermodynamic computation and biological information processing. Strictly applying the implied continuous-time Markov chains, however, excludes a universe of natural computing. We show that expanding the toolset to continuous-time hidden Markov chains substantially removes the constraints. The general point is made concrete by our analyzing two eminently-useful computations that are impossible to describe with a set of rate equations over the memory states. We design and analyze a thermodynamically-costless bit flip, providing a first counterexample to rate-equation modeling. We generalize this to a costless Fredkin gate---a key operation in reversible computing that is computation universal. Going beyond rate-equation dynamics is not only possible, but necessary if stochastic thermodynamics is to become part of the paradigm for physical information processing.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures; Supplementary Material, 1 page; http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/cbdb.ht

Balancing Error and Dissipation in Computing

Modern digital electronics support remarkably reliable computing, especially given the challenge of controlling nanoscale logical components that interact in fluctuating environments. However, we demonstrate that the high-reliability limit is subject to a fundamental error-energy-efficiency tradeoff that arises from time-symmetric control: Requiring a low probability of error causes energy consumption to diverge as logarithm of the inverse error rate for nonreciprocal logical transitions. The reciprocity (self-invertibility) of a computation is a stricter condition for thermodynamic efficiency than logical reversibility (invertibility), the latter being the root of Landauer's work bound on erasing information. Beyond engineered computation, the results identify a generic error-dissipation tradeoff in steady-state transformations of genetic information carried out by biological organisms. The lesson is that computation under time-symmetric control cannot reach, and is often far above, the Landauer limit. In this way, time-asymmetry becomes a design principle for thermodynamically efficient computing.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures; Supplementary material 7 pages, 1 figure; http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/tsp.ht

Oral Perfluorooctane Sulfonate (PFOS) Lessens Tumor Development In The APCmin Mouse Model of Spontaneous Familial Adenomatous Polyposis

Colorectal cancer is the second most common cause of cancer deaths for both men and women, and the third most common cause of cancer in the U.S. Toxicity of current chemotherapeutic agents for colorectal cancer, and emergence of drug resistance underscore the need to develop new, potentially less toxic alternatives. Our recent cross-sectional study in a large Appalachian population, showed a strong, inverse, dose–response association of serum perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) levels to prevalent colorectal cancer, suggesting PFOS may have therapeutic potential in the prevention and/or treatment of colorectal cancer. In these preliminary studies using a mouse model of familial colorectal cancer, the APCmin mouse, and exposures comparable to those reported in human populations, we assess the efficacy of PFOS for reducing tumor burden, and evaluate potential dose–response effects

Feelings in Literature

In this article it is argued that feelings are all important to the function of literature. In contradiction to music that is concerned with the inwardness of humankind, literature has, because of language, the capacity to create fictional worlds that in many respects are similar to and related to the life world within which we live. One of the most important reasons for our emotional engagement in literature is our empathy with others and our constant imagining and hypothesizing on possible developments in our interactions with them. Hence, we understand and engage ourselves in fictional worlds. It is further claimed and exemplified, how poetic texts are very good at rhetorically engage and manipulate our feelings. Finally, with reference to the important work of Ellen Dissanayake, it is pointed out that the first kind of communication in which we engage, that between mother and infant, is a kind of speech that positively engages the infant in a dialogue with the mother by means of poetic devices

Mitochondrial Impairment in Cerebrovascular Endothelial Cells is Involved in the Correlation between Body Temperature and Stroke Severity

Stroke is the second leading cause of death worldwide. The prognostic influence of body temperature on acute stroke in patients has been recently reported; however, hypothermia has confounded experimental results in animal stroke models. This work aimed to investigate how body temperature could prognose stroke severity as well as reveal a possible mitochondrial mechanism in the association of body temperature and stroke severity. Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) compromises mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation in cerebrovascular endothelial cells (CVECs) and worsens murine experimental stroke. In this study, we report that LPS (0.1 mg/kg) exacerbates stroke infarction and neurological deficits, in the mean time LPS causes temporary hypothermia in the hyperacute stage during 6 hours post-stroke. Lower body temperature is associated with worse infarction and higher neurological deficit score in the LPS-stroke study. However, warming of the LPS-stroke mice compromises animal survival. Furthermore, a high dose of LPS (2 mg/kg) worsens neurological deficits, but causes persistent severe hypothermia that conceals the LPS exacerbation of stroke infarction. Mitochondrial respiratory chain complex I inhibitor, rotenone, replicates the data profile of the LPS-stroke study. Moreover, we have confirmed that rotenone compromises mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation in CVECs. Lastly, the pooled data analyses of a large sample size (n=353) demonstrate that stroke mice have lower body temperature compared to sham mice within 6 hours post-surgery; the body temperature is significantly correlated with stroke outcomes; linear regression shows that lower body temperature is significantly associated with higher neurological scores and larger infarct volume. We conclude that post-stroke body temperature predicts stroke severity and mitochondrial impairment in CVECs plays a pivotal role in this hypothermic response. These novel findings suggest that body temperature is prognostic for stroke severity in experimental stroke animal models and may have translational significance for clinical stroke patients - targeting endothelial mitochondria may be a clinically useful approach for stroke therapy

Long-Term Potentiation: One Kind or Many?

Do neurobiologists aim to discover natural kinds? I address this question in this chapter via a critical analysis of classification practices operative across the 43-year history of research on long-term potentiation (LTP). I argue that this 43-year history supports the idea that the structure of scientific practice surrounding LTP research has remained an obstacle to the discovery of natural kinds

Shifting Attention From Theory to Practice in Philosophy of Biology

Traditional approaches in philosophy of biology focus attention on biological concepts, explanations, and theories, on evidential support and inter-theoretical relations. Newer approaches shift attention from concepts to conceptual practices, from theories to practices of theorizing, and from theoretical reduction to reductive retooling. In this article, I describe the shift from theory-focused to practice-centered philosophy of science and explain how it is leading philosophers to abandon fundamentalist assumptions associated with traditional approaches in philosophy of science and to embrace scientific pluralism. This article comes in three parts, each illustrating the shift from theory-focused to practice-centered epistemology. The first illustration shows how shifting philosophical attention to conceptual practice reveals how molecular biologists succeed in identifying coherent causal strands within systems of bewildering complexity. The second illustration suggests that analyzing how a multiplicity of alternative models function in practice provides an illuminating approach for understanding the nature of theoretical knowledge in evolutionary biology. The third illustration demonstrates how framing reductionism in terms of the reductive retooling of practice offers an informative perspective for understanding why putting DNA at the center of biological research has been incredibly productive throughout much of biology. Each illustration begins by describing how traditional theory-focused philosophical approaches are laden with fundamentalist assumptions and then proceeds to show that shifting attention to practice undermines these assumptions and motivates a philosophy of scientific pluralism

Complexity

This is a contribution to the encyclopedia of systems biology on complexity