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Vagrant, Convict, Cannibal Chief: Abel Magwitch and the Culture of Cannibalism in Great Expectations
No full textCharles Dickens’s Great Expectations opens with a jolt, as Abel Magwitch – an escaped convict – pounces on the narrator and protagonist, Pip. Despite this rather dramatic introduction, and the pivotal role that he goes on to play in the plot, Magwitch has never been given the sustained critical analysis that he warrants. More often than not he has been treated as one of Dickens’s infamous ‘flat’ characters; a kind of ‘pantomime wicked uncle’, in the words of George Orwell. This is a critical legacy that this paper seeks to redress. Seeing Magwitch as an essential element in Dickens’s critique of mid nineteenth-century society, this paper examines Magwitch’s largely ignored peripatetic and homeless past. By contextualizing Magwitch in his role as a vagrant outsider, and then exploring how this marginal position nuances the cannibalistic appetite he displays in the first pages of the novel, I argue that Magwitch’s violence and ‘savagery’ forms a foil for the more sadistic practices of civilized society. In doing so I position Magwitch at the dark heart of Dickens’s social pessimism, and re-evaluate the culture of cannibalism that we see in Great Expectations
Strategic engineering for cloud computing and big data analytics
No full textThis book demonstrates the use of a wide range of strategic engineering concepts, theories and applied case studies to improve the safety, security and sustainability of complex and large-scale engineering and computer systems. It first details the concepts of system design, life cycle, impact assessment and security to show how these ideas can be brought to bear on the modeling, analysis and design of information systems with a focused view on cloud-computing systems and big data analytics. This informative book is a valuable resource for graduate students, researchers and industry-based practitioners working in engineering, information and business systems as well as strategy
Algorithm to apply the best worst method to systems engineering problems concerning customer satisfaction, cost and implementation
Get PDFThis paper presents a method that automatically addresses trade-offs between system engineering problems. A simple example is presented that considers cost, customer satisfaction, and ease of implementation. The software calculates optimal weights for each factor using the Best-Worst multi criteria decision-making method and calculates an overall score for each alternative with respect to calculated factors weights
Predicting Impact of Labour Market Policies: Data Driven Computational Models for Prediction and Simulation of Path Dependencies in Complex Dynamic Labour Market Systems
Get PDFHistorically, Saudi Arabia has had a high reliance on foreign labor predominantly engaged in the private sector leading to an imbalance between national and expatriate workers (1.2 million Saudi workers vs. 8.6 million expatriate workers in 2016) affecting economic diversification and growth. Path dependence and multiple equilibriums are especially relevant to the problem of low private sector participation among Saudi nationals. Their effects are difficult to predict due to their complex spatial-temporal (cause-effect) trajectories in dynamic market systems. This research will provide data-driven insight into the composition and nature of the Saudi labor market through capture and analysis of multiple data sources. The data will help to develop novel nature inspired computational intelligence models for understanding and predicting the cause-effect relationships in complex market systems and create new intervention measures that can be evaluated against measurable objectives in simulated market scenarios to estimate market responses to policy interventions
From Schmitt to Foucault: Inquiring the relationship between exception and democracy
Get PDFThis article examines the debated relationship between liberal-democratic politics and states of exception in conditions of emergency. After Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, it is often maintained that today we live in a situation of perennial exceptionalism, where emergency measures have become a regular practice even by governments we name ‘democratic’. In these circumstances, exception is deemed to threaten democracy and hinder individual and collective political agency. Yet, such interpretation remains rigidly focused on the expanded governmental powers ushered by the exception. The article first unpacks how the relationship between exception and democracy has been differently addressed by juridical and biopolitical approaches. Then, it attempts an alternative heuristic: it discusses possibilities of democratic associative practices in emergency by looking at the notion of resistance that Michel Foucault links with power. This route remains unexplored in the literature on the concept of the exception
Review of Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages by Keagan Brewer (London: Routledge, 2016)
No full textPiety, Brotherhood and Power: The Role and Significance of Emotions in Albert of Aachen’s Historia Ierosolimitana
Get PDFThis article explores the role and significance of emotions in the Historia Ierosolimitana attributed to Albert of Aachen, long recognised as one of the most detailed and colourful histories of the First Crusade and the early years of Latin settlement in the East. Rather than attempting to reconstruct the crusaders' lived passions, it analyses the comments the author made about emotions and the ways in which emotion terms functioned in his history. It will be argued that emotions interacted with, and helped to communicate, a number of key themes in Albert's Historia, three of which are discussed here: crusader piety; Christian brotherhood; and power. At the same time, through a comparison with contemporaneous narratives of the First Crusade, it will be suggested that the emotional content of Albert's Historia is not without historical value, for it offers a window onto wider social and cultural conceptions of emotions in the 12th century
ACBD5 and VAPB mediate membrane associations between peroxisomes and the ER
Get PDFPeroxisomes (POs) and the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) cooperate in cellular lipid metabolism and form tight structural associations, which were first observed in ultrastructural studies decades ago. PO–ER associations have been suggested to impact on a diverse number of physiological processes, including lipid metabolism, phospholipid exchange, metabolite transport, signaling, and PO biogenesis. Despite their fundamental importance to cell metabolism, the mechanisms by which regions of the ER become tethered to POs are unknown, in particular in mammalian cells. Here, we identify the PO membrane protein acyl-coenzyme A–binding domain protein 5 (ACBD5) as a binding partner for the resident ER protein vesicle-associated membrane protein-associated protein B (VAPB). We show that ACBD5–VAPB interaction regulates PO–ER associations. Moreover, we demonstrate that loss of PO–ER association perturbs PO membrane expansion and increases PO movement. Our findings reveal the first molecular mechanism for establishing PO–ER associations in mammalian cells and report a new function for ACBD5 in PO–ER tethering
« Le surréalisme anglais: un langage visuel transnational (AVANT-GARDE: FROM DADA TO SURREALISM - eleventh part)
No full textAVANT-GARDE: FROM DADA TO SURREALISM, PART 11, - eleventh part--Kejt Grandjouan, Univerzitet umetnosti, Beogra