662 research outputs found
Apocalypticisim in the fiction of William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Thomas Pynchon.
No full textApocalypse should not be thought of as merely a synonym for chaos or disaster or cataclysmic upheaval; more properly we should think of disclosure, unveiling and revelation. The exact status of literary apocalyptic is the subject of some debate, and in an attempt to help clarify matters an introductory historical survey examines both the formal characteristics of apocalypse and the various critical positions taken in regard to the genre's social influence. Texts considered in the chapter include the Revelation of John and Thomas Pynchon's short story Entropy (1959); theoretical works by Frank Kermode, John Barth, and Jean Baudrillard (amongst others) are also discussed. Chapter One traces the development of William S. Burroughs's apocalyptic sensibility through readings of his correspondence with Allen Ginsberg and the novel The Naked Lunch (1959); the latter's apocalyptic title referring to the "frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork". Chapter Two considers Burroughs's experiments with the "cut-ups" and their application in a number of texts, most notably Nova Express (1964). Chapter Three is concerned with Burroughs's work in the 1970s and 80s, and specifically his concept of Here to Go, a theory of mutability presented as a transcendental antidote to the threat of nuclear annihilation (the author's alleged misogyny and the views of radical US feminists are also taken into account). Chapters Four and Five explore the apocalyptic fiction of J. G. Ballard; topics covered include Ballard's concept of inner space, his debt to Surrealism, and the coded landscapes of his more experimental texts; in particular the "condensed novels" which comprise The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). A concluding chapter returns to the work of Thomas Pynchon, offering a reading of Gravity's Rainbow (1973) which allows us to consider his treatment of such related themes as Paranoia, Holocaust, Apocalypse, and finally, Counterforce
Also By The Same Author: AKTiveAuthor, a Citation Graph Approach to Name Disambiguation
No full textThe desire for definitive data and the semantic web drive for inference over heterogeneous data sources requires co-reference resolution to be performed on those data. In particular, name disambiguation is required to allow accurate publication lists, citation counts and impact measures to be determined. This paper describes a graph-based approach to author disambiguation on large-scale citation networks. Using self-citation, co-authorship and document source analyses, AKTiveAuthor clusters papers, achieving precision of 0.997 and recall of 0.818 over a test group of eight surname clusters
Hydrogen from Radiolysis of Aqueous Fluid Inclusions during Diagenesis
No full textAcknowledgments We are grateful to J. Bowie and J. Still for skilled technical support and the staff at ICL-UK’s Boulby mine (especially Thomas Edwards), STFC’s Boulby underground Laboratory and the UK Centre for Astrobiology MINAR programme team (especially Sean Paling) for their support and supervised access to the site. The critical comments of two reviewers helped to improve the manuscript. Author Contributions John Parnell undertook the sampling. Nigel Blamey performed all analytical work. John Parnell wrote the manuscript.Peer reviewe
L’assurance-vie face aux nouveaux instruments financiers et à la déréglementation
No full textDeregulation is the outcome of the unification of the industry throughout Europe. Insurance companies have been slow to react to
the sweeping change we are witnessing. This is partly owing to the
legislation in force in each of the member countries. But, with the
emergence of a single European market, the situation is beginning to
change.
According to the author, Nigel J. Sedgewick, insurers, while
remaining competitive, should adopt a more offensive stance by not
only gaining more control over general expenses, but also by
broadening their range of products to include caps, floors, swaps
and others
T-Cell activation: a queuing theory analysis at low agonist density
No full textWe analyze a simple linear triggering model of the T-cell receptor (TCR) within the framework of queuing theory, in which TCRs enter the queue upon full activation and exit by downregulation. We fit our model to four experimentally characterized threshold activation criteria and analyze their specificity and sensitivity: the initial calcium spike, cytotoxicity, immunological synapse formation, and cytokine secretion. Specificity characteristics improve as the time window for detection increases, saturating for time periods on the timescale of downregulation; thus, the calcium spike (30 s) has low specificity but a sensitivity to single-peptide MHC ligands, while the cytokine threshold (1 h) can distinguish ligands with a 30% variation in the complex lifetime. However, a robustness analysis shows that these properties are degraded when the queue parameters are subject to variation—for example, under stochasticity in the ligand number in the cell-cell interface and population variation in the cellular threshold. A time integration of the queue over a period of hours is shown to be able to control parameter noise efficiently for realistic parameter values when integrated over sufficiently long time periods (hours), the discrimination characteristics being determined by the TCR signal cascade kinetics (a kinetic proofreading scheme). Therefore, through a combination of thresholds and signal integration, a T cell can be responsive to low ligand density and specific to agonist quality. We suggest that multiple threshold mechanisms are employed to establish the conditions for efficient signal integration, i.e., coordinate the formation of a stable contact interface
A standing ovation for Nigel: An informal study
No full textThis article analyses a series of emails thanking Nigel for his stewardship of JASSS and the characteristics of their authors. It identifies a correlation between two measures of author activity in social simulation research, but no pattern between these activity measures and the email timing. Instead, the sequence suggests a classic standing ovation effect.</p
Differential segregation in a cell-cell contact interface: the dynamics of the immunological synapse
No full textReceptor-ligand couples in the cell-cell contact interface between a T cell and an antigen-presenting cell form distinct geometric patterns and undergo spatial rearrangement within the contact interface. Spatial segregation of the antigen and adhesion receptors occurs within seconds of contact, central aggregation of the antigen receptor then occurring over 1-5 min. This structure, called the immunological synapse, is becoming a paradigm for localized signaling. However, the mechanisms driving its formation, in particular spatial segregation, are currently not understood. With a reaction diffusion model incorporating thermodynamics, elasticity, and reaction kinetics, we examine the hypothesis that differing bond lengths (extracellular domain size) is the driving force behind molecular segregation. We derive two key conditions necessary for segregation: a thermodynamic criterion on the effective bond elasticity and a requirement for the seeding/nucleation of domains. Domains have a minimum length scale and will only spontaneously coalesce/aggregate if the contact area is small or the membrane relaxation distance large. Otherwise, differential attachment of receptors to the cytoskeleton is required for central aggregation. Our analysis indicates that differential bond lengths have a significant effect on synapse dynamics, i.e., there is a significant contribution to the free energy of the interaction, suggesting that segregation by differential bond length is important in cell-cell contact interfaces and the immunological synapse
Error correction and diversity analysis of population mixtures determined by NGS
No full textThe impetus for this work was the need to analyse nucleotide diversity in a viral mix taken from honeybees; the methods are illustrated using honeybee viral samples. The paper has two findings. First, a method for correction of next generation sequencing error in the distribution of nucleotides at a site is developed. Second, a package of methods for assessment of nucleotide diversity is assembled. A statistically based error correction method is presented, which works at the level of the nucleotide distribution rather than the level of individual nucleotides. The method relies on an error model and a sample of known viral genotypes that is used for model calibration. A compendium of existing and new diversity analysis tools is also presented, allowing hypotheses about diversity and mean diversity to be tested and associated confidence intervals to be calculated. Software in both Excel and Matlab and a guide are available at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/systemsbiology/research/software/, the Warwick University Systems Biology Centre software download site
Distributed human computation framework for linked data co-reference resolution
No full textDistributed Human Computation (DHC) is a technique used to solve computational problems by incorporating the collaborative effort of a large number of humans. It is also a solution to AI-complete problems such as natural language processing. The Semantic Web with its root in AI is envisioned to be a decentralised world-wide information space for sharing machine-readable data with minimal integration costs. There are many research problems in the Semantic Web that are considered as AI-complete problems. An example is co-reference resolution, which involves determining whether different URIs refer to the same entity. This is considered to be a significant hurdle to overcome in the realisation of large-scale Semantic Web applications. In this paper, we propose a framework for building a DHC system on top of the Linked Data Cloud to solve various computational problems. To demonstrate the concept, we are focusing on handling the co-reference resolution in the Semantic Web when integrating distributed datasets. The traditional way to solve this problem is to design machine-learning algorithms. However, they are often computationally expensive, error-prone and do not scale. We designed a DHC system named iamResearcher, which solves the scientific publication author identity co-reference problem when integrating distributed bibliographic datasets. In our system, we aggregated 6 million bibliographic data from various publication repositories. Users can sign up to the system to audit and align their own publications, thus solving the co-reference problem in a distributed manner. The aggregated results are published to the Linked Data Cloud
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