Passive Vessels Research Articles

Ann Yearsley and the Poetics and Politics of Breastfeeding

ABSTRACT This article argues that Ann Yearsley, a milkwoman, mother, and poet, not yet fully recovered into the British literary canon, challenges stereotypical representations of breastfeeding mothers created and perpetuated primarily by male authors in Romantic poetry, philosophy, and medical discourse. Her poem “To Mira, on the Care of Her Infant” depicts breastfeeding as a complex labor that requires skill, intelligence, empathy, and discipline. In this poem, Yearsley rejects the arguments of Romantic writers such as William Wordsworth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and William Cadogan, who depict nursing mothers as passive vessels of milk or substitutes for a nurturing “mother nature.” I further locate Yearsley in rich networks of subscribers, printers, and periodicals adjacent to canon authors and texts. Thinking particularly about the conventions of epic and georgic forms, and their relationship to nationalism, labor, and motherhood, I ultimately show how Yearsley recasts the nursing mother as a subject rather than an object.

The Optimal pressure reactivity index range is disease-specific: A comparison between aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage and traumatic brain injury

PurposeImpaired cerebral pressure autoregulation is common and detrimental after acute brain injuries. Based on the prevalence of delayed cerebral ischemia in aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (aSAH) patients compared to traumatic brain injury (TBI), we hypothesized that the type of autoregulatory disturbance and the optimal PRx range may differ between these two conditions. The aim of this study was to determine the optimal PRx ranges in relation to functional outcome following aSAH and TBI, respectively.MethodsIn this observational study, 487 aSAH patients and 413 TBI patients, treated in the neurointensive care, Uppsala, Sweden, between 2008 and 2018, were included. The percentage of good monitoring time (%GMT) of PRx was calculated within 8 intervals covering the range from -1.0 to + 1.0, and analyzed in relation to favorable outcome (GOS-E 5 to 8).ResultsIn multiple logistic regressions, a higher %GMTs of PRx in the intervals -1.0 to -0.5 and + 0.75 to + 1.0 were independently associated with a lower rate of favorable outcome in the aSAH cohort. In a similar analysis in the TBI cohort, only positive PRx in the interval + 0.75 to + 1.0 was independently associated with a lower rate of favorable outcome.ConclusionExtreme PRx values in both directions were unfavorable in aSAH, possibly as high PRx could indicate proximal vasospasm with exhausted distal vasodilatory reserve, while very negative PRx could reflect myogenic hyperreactivity with suppressed cerebral blood flow. Only elevated PRx was unfavorable in TBI, possibly as pressure passive vessels may be a more predominant pathomechanism in this disease.

Experimental study on autonomous docking and hook-locking control for unmanned surface vehicle platforms

The challenge in autonomous docking and hook locking of multiple unmanned surface navigation platforms is to design an appropriate autonomous docking controller and ensure that the electric control hook can iteratively dock with the passive vessel. The current docking control solution for unmanned surface platforms needs to design an automatic tracking–generated trajectory and visual guidance docking system, capable of detecting the connection status after the hook-lock action to ensure a successful connection. However, most of the docking control designs for unmanned surface platforms pay more attention to the first-time success rate but pay less attention to the failures caused by complex and intelligent docking devices or environmental interference during docking. This article proposes a control strategy for autonomous docking and hook locking of two unmanned surface platforms. It guides the active vessel to the side of the passive vessel under the task requirements and triggers the visual docking control algorithm to complete the mechanical connection of the two joints. This method employs an iterative detection mechanism to improve the automatic hook and lock capability of both the active and passive vessels. The indoor pool and outdoor lake experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can successfully perform automatic iterative docking and hook locking, even in the presence of wave disturbance, showcasing the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Learning by feeling: excursions into the affective landscape

ABSTRACT Learning by doing has become a common phrase in the scholarship of teaching and learning as research continues to emphasize the benefits of active student engagement in higher education. Instead of passive vessels to be filled with information, students become the architects of their own education. While traditional ways of teaching focus on what students should learn, there is now more interest in how they should learn. With the emotional turn in geography, research has increasingly focused on the lived experience and the emotional and affective dimensions of space and place. However, the question often remains as to how to bring such research into an active learning environment that extends beyond the classroom. Instead of learning by doing, learning by feeling is presented as a new way of teaching emotional geographies. Student projects from two courses in landscape geography reveal how excursions into the affective landscape help students explore emotional geographies through more creative, reflective, affective, and active learning assessment strategies.

The Energetic Brain Club in Life and Death

SummaryJapan’s aging society leaves many of its eldest residents to encounter loneliness and social isolation. However, the elderly in Japan and elsewhere are rarely passive vessels to fate and often use available tools to meet their needs. Exploring loneliness and its remedy, this essay presents an ethnographic account of a single Energetic Brain Club meeting in the Tokyo sprawl. While, on paper, the club is aimed at preventing dementia, cognitive declines frequently remain a peripheral topic. Elderly members partake in hospitality rituals and engage in long, meandering conversations about family, memories, struggles, and politics. In the process, they find commiseration, connection, and a salve for loneliness.

HMGB1 Promotes Myeloid Egress and Limits Lymphatic Clearance of Malignant Pleural Effusions.

Pleural effusions, when benign, are attributed to cardiac events and suffusion of fluid within the pleural space. When malignant, lymphatic obstruction by tumor and failure to absorb constitutively produced fluid is the predominant formulation. The prevailing view has been challenged recently, namely that the lymphatics are only passive vessels, carrying antigenic fluid to secondary lymphoid sites. Rather, lymphatic vessels can be a selective barrier, efficiently coordinating egress of immune cells and factors within tissues, limiting tumor spread and immune pathology. An alternative explanation, offered here, is that damage associated molecular pattern molecules, released in excess, maintain a local milieu associated with recruitment and retention of immune cells associated with failed lymphatic clearance and functional lymphatic obstruction. We found that levels of high mobility group box 1 (HMGB1) were equally elevated in both benign and malignant pleural effusions (MPEs) and that limited diversity of T cell receptor expressing gamma and delta chain were inversely associated with these levels in MPEs. Acellular fluid from MPEs enhanced γδ T cell proliferation in vitro, while inhibiting cytokine production from γδ T cells and monocytes as well as restricting monocyte chemotaxis. Novel therapeutic strategies, targeting HMGB1 and its neutralization in such effusions as well as direct delivery of immune cells into the pleural space to reconstitute normal physiology should be considered.

Investigation of the Influence of Smooth Muscle Contractions on the Properties of the Wall of a Small Arterial Vessel

The plane problem of the effect of contractions of smooth muscle cells in the wall of a resistance vessel under the action of transmural pressure on the radius and the distribution of stresses in the vascular wall is considered. It is assumed that in the inactivated state the vessel wall is hyperelastic, and the contraction of smooth muscle cells as a result of activation contributes to the circumferential stress alone. Based on the model and published experimental data, a functional dependence of the active stress on the concentration of the activator of smooth muscle contraction is obtained. Calculations show that the total stress in the wall is determined mainly by the active component. With increasing pressure, contractions of smooth muscle cells lead to decrease in stresses, while the pattern of the distribution of circumferential stresses changes. The circumferential stretch ratios also decrease with activation and their distribution becomes more homogeneous. In both passive and active vessels, the modulus of the ratio of the radial to circumferential stress decreases with increase in tension, this ratio being several times greater in the active vessel than in the passive one.

Liquid cell with temperature control for in situ TEM chemical studies

Liquid cells are hermetically sealed capsules that make it possible to image through liquids at the nanoscale using transmission electron microscopes (TEM). Until recently liquid cells can be passive vessels or integrate electrodes for electrodeposition experiments. Temperature is a key parameter for the chemical kinetics of certain processes. This paper describes a temperature controlled liquid cell for in situ TEM studies. The liquid cell integrates a resistive element for both heating and sensing temperature. A capacitively coupled heat feedback technique is implemented to control the temperature of the liquid cell from room temperature to 100 °C with an accuracy of ±0.1 °C. In situ TEM experiments illustrate the heating capability of such temperature controlled liquid cells observed at the nanoscale.

MUSCULAR ARTERIAL TONE IS A DETERMINANT OF PERIPHERAL MUSCULAR ARTERY STIFFNESS

Objective: Due the practical weaknesses of cuff based methods for arterial blood pressure (BP) measurement, efforts are made to establish non-invasive and continuous PB measurement by using alternative methods. One of them is based on the determination of the pulse transit time and pulse wave velocity (PWV), respectively. Arterial BP and PWV correlate, which opens the possibility of the determination of arterial BP by measuring the pulse transit time (PTT). Recent validation studies revealed usefulness of this method in clinical practice. The accuracy of this method depends on the transfer function (model) between arterial BP and PWV. Since PWV is mainly determined by the arterial elasticity (stiffness), knowledge about the contribution of different components and to the arterial stiffness as well as their modulation is important. We hypothesize that the vascular smooth muscle (VSM) tone significantly determines arterial stiffness in muscular arteries and thus may contribute to the PWV-BP relation. Design and method: We used the pressurized artery method and investigated the influence of inherent and pharmacologically modified VSM tone on measures of arterial stiffness. We first characterized passive and active components of arterial stiffness by calculating pressure-diameter-relation, stress-strain-relation, and the stiffness parameter beta in vessels with spontaneous tone and in vessel after calcium depletion. Further, the effect of norepinephrine in different concentrations on the measures of stiffness was investigated. Results: Vessels with spontaneous myogenic tone showed left shifted pressure-diameter- and stress-strain-relations compared to passive vessels, expressing an increased vascular stiffness. Norepinephrine in higher concentration further shifted these curves to the left and consequently increased vessel stiffness. The stiffness parameter beta was also increased. Conclusions: The data suggest that the myogenic tone and the action of norepinephrine increases arterial stiffness in muscular arteries of rats. This effect may contribute the PWV in muscular arterioles and thus influences to the PWV-BP relation.

Ideological Asymmetries and the Essence of Political Psychology

Individuals are not merely passive vessels of whatever beliefs and opinions they have been exposed to; rather, they are attracted to belief systems that resonate with their own psychological needs and interests, including epistemic, existential, and relational needs to attain certainty, security, and social belongingness. Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway () demonstrated that needs to manage uncertainty and threat were associated with core values of political conservatism, namely respect for tradition and acceptance of inequality. Since 2003 there have been far more studies on the psychology of left‐right ideology than in the preceding half century, and their empirical yield helps to address lingering questions and criticisms. We have identified 181 studies of epistemic motivation (involving 130,000 individual participants) and nearly 100 studies of existential motivation (involving 360,000 participants). These databases, which are much larger and more heterogeneous than those used in previous meta‐analyses, confirm that significant ideological asymmetries exist with respect to dogmatism, cognitive/perceptual rigidity, personal needs for order/structure/closure, integrative complexity, tolerance of ambiguity/uncertainty, need for cognition, cognitive reflection, self‐deception, and subjective perceptions of threat. Exposure to objectively threatening circumstances—such as terrorist attacks, governmental warnings, and shifts in racial demography—contribute to modest “conservative shifts” in public opinion. There are also ideological asymmetries in relational motivation, including the desire to share reality, perceptions of within‐group consensus, collective self‐efficacy, homogeneity of social networks, and the tendency to trust the government more when one's own political party is in power. Although some object to the very notion that there are meaningful psychological differences between leftists and rightists, the identification of “elective affinities” between cognitive‐motivational processes and contents of specific belief systems is essential to the study of political psychology. Political psychologists may contribute to the development of a good society not by downplaying ideological differences or advocating “Swiss‐style neutrality” when it comes to human values, but by investigating such phenomena critically, even—or perhaps especially—when there is pressure in society to view them uncritically.

Reading 9/11 from the American Revolution to US Annexation of the Moon: M. T. Anderson’s Feed and Octavian Nothing

Reading 9/11 from the American Revolution to US Annexation of the Moon:M. T. Anderson’s Feed and Octavian Nothing Sara L. Schwebel (bio) In early September 2001, M. T. Anderson had a partially completed young adult novel on his hard drive. The story was set in a fairly distant future—with technological advances allowing the installation of sophisticated Internet capabilities directly into the human body—but the setting was eminently recognizable. American teenagers tracked trends in entertainment and fashion, fell in and out of love, and alternately displayed apathy toward and alienation from the local and global politics that shaped their world. The novel’s opening line captures the tenor of its economically privileged but selfishly provincial characters: "We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck" (3). In the period between that early draft and the novel’s October 2002 publication, the World Trade Center collapsed. The after-effects of September 11 became Feed’s backdrop, making the teenagers inhabiting Anderson’s setting—the United States in its "final days" (297)—a means to focalize the trauma of the 9/11 moment. Four years later, Anderson published The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party. In 2006, the War on Terror raged and homeland security policies were in full effect. In many minds, the United States now figured as perpetrator rather than prey.1 For Anderson, this prompted a shift in setting and genre: instead of writing a dystopian novel set in the future, he wrote a historical novel set in the American past. Octavian Nothing features an African boy who lives with his mother amid a community of academicians in Revolutionary Boston. Unbeknownst to him, Octavian—who has been told that he is an African prince—is both a slave and the subject of a scientific experiment to determine the intellectual capacity of Homo afri. As the nation’s founding documents are penned, Octavian discovers first-hand the contradictions of a battle cry for "liberty and property." Ostensibly a novel about the American Revolution, Octavian Nothing and its desecrated protagonist document the trauma induced by the War on Terror. Together, Feed and Octavian Nothing alternately anticipate and mourn the state of US affairs today, articulating a politically progressive [End Page 197] nostalgia in the process. Even as they recognize that the national past—the United States at both its birth and its late twentieth-century apex—was far from utopian, they point to its utopian aspirations. Teenage protagonists are central to this task. In literature written for adults, the sentimental child often serves as a means to focalize society’s collective effort to process trauma; as the most vulnerable and innocent member of society, the child enables readers to see the full extent of the damage enacted. The role of the teenage protagonist, however, is more complex; citing classics ranging from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Little Women, Roberta Trites has argued that "American adolescent literature is replete with adolescents whose rebellions are linked to social critique" (Twain ix).2 Unlike child protagonists who are subjected to societal tragedy, teenage protagonists are not passive vessels evoking sympathy. Instead, they are citizens-in-the-making whose response to catastrophe—whether displays of apathy, anger, or political action—is understood to have real import. The state of youthful idealism, particularly in the United States, a nation mythically defined by its youth, doubles as a measure of the nation’s resiliency and health in moments of crisis. Neither Feed nor Octavian Nothing is set in New York during the first decade of the twenty-first century, but they are unquestionably 9/11 novels, and the fate of their teenage protagonists speaks to the state of the Union in 9/11’s aftermath. The books’ central characters, Octavian and his young mother Cassiopeia and Titus and his girlfriend Violet, experience trauma bodily. The narrators, moreover, suffer regular co-option of their tales; again and again, foreign voices intrude on the teenage protagonists’ storytelling, rendering Octavian and Titus either mute or a mouthpiece. In using first-person narration and linking teenage rebellion to social change, the novels...

American Nietzsche. A History of an Icon and His Ideas by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (review)

Reviewed by: American Nietzsche. A History of an Icon and His Ideas by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen Larry S. McGrath Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen. American Nietzsche. A History of an Icon and His Ideas Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. 450 pages. Nietzsche’s corpus offered European philosophers a conceptual playground. Throughout the twentieth century, monographs systematically reinterpreted and reconciled Nietzsche’s master concepts such as the will to power, the [End Page 1263] eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, and the revaluation of values. The most prominent include Heidegger’s four-volume study (1936–1940); Karl Jaspers’ Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity (1936); George Bataille’s On Nietzsche (1945); and Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962). Jennifer Ratner-Rosnehagen reminds readers in American Nietzsche. A History of an Icon and His Ideas that Americans were also probing readers of Nietzsche; even if their readings did not always assume an exclusively philosophical form. Ratner-Rosenhagen dedicates her book to unearthing the rich and forgotten American archives of Nietzsche’s cultural receptions that paralleled his metaphysical treatments on the other side of the Atlantic. She demonstrates how Nietzsche remained a fixture throughout the long American twentieth century by tracing his receptions across literary, religious, political, as well as philosophical realms. American Nietzsche is a reception history. Behind it lurks the thorny problem that Nietzsche has always posed for reception histories. For those giants of twentieth century European philosophy, reading Nietzsche was like playing on a conceptual jungle gym with him. That is to say the value of their monographs depends less on their fidelity to what Nietzsche really said than on their playfulness: how idiosyncratically each recruits Nietzsche in service of the author’s own project. The problem for reception histories is thus: does an authoritative account of Nietzsche exist that could serve as a basis for comparing his disparate readings? Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen tackles the problem by writing American Nietzsche as a Rezeptionsgeschichte, or a history of creative appropriations. She affords each reception equal weight, regardless of whether it conforms to the Nietzschean letter. The problem of what Nietzsche really meant is never posed. Ratner-Rosenhagen’s is not the first Rezeptionsgeschichte of this kind. Steven Ascheim’s The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992); Eric Forth’s Zarathustra in Paris (Illinois: Northern Illinois UP, 2001); and the recent edited volume Interpreting Nietzsche: Reception and Influence (London: Continuum, 2011) are exemplary. Given the density of Nietzsche studies, it is a feat that American Nietzsche manages to rejuvenate the field by following his reception to fertile American soil. The impact also resonates through intellectual history generally. Ratner-Rosenhagen extrapolates from Nietzsche’s case to reflect on what constitutes the very notion of a reception. In a methodological interlude, she examines personal letters written to Nietzsche that did not formulate their authors’ thoughts in systematic, let alone published form. She takes it as her project to rethink what counts as a reception by resisting the picture of readers as passive vessels into which the historian pours Nietzsche’s ideas. Fan mail demonstrates a productive dimension in “how readers used Nietzsche’s words to imagine new moral and intellectual worlds for themselves” (208). Ratner-Rosenhagen’s project of writing, as it were, a production history animates the book’s close attention to Nietzsche’s cultural influence and sets the book’s methodology apart from other histories of his reception abroad. [End Page 1264] Each chapter is organized chronologically and thematically. They march through the long twentieth century following the waves along which Americans read Nietzsche. Each wave concerns both the content of ideas received and the channel of reception. The book opens with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Nietzsche read as a young Gymnasium student. Ratner-Rosenhagen mines Nietzsche’s personal library at Weimer both to illuminate the neglected influence on Nietzsche and to signal her recurring method of closely reading marginalia. Following her account of Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for the American philosopher, Ratner-Rosenhagen demonstrates how, like in Europe, Nietzsche was first read as literature outside the academy. The first chapter examines how the arts critic James Gibbons Huneker first popularized Nietzsche in the States...

Determinants of valve gating in collecting lymphatic vessels from rat mesentery.

Secondary lymphatic valves are essential for minimizing backflow of lymph and are presumed to gate passively according to the instantaneous trans-valve pressure gradient. We hypothesized that valve gating is also modulated by vessel distention, which could alter leaflet stiffness and coaptation. To test this hypothesis, we devised protocols to measure the small pressure gradients required to open or close lymphatic valves and determine if the gradients varied as a function of vessel diameter. Lymphatic vessels were isolated from rat mesentery, cannulated, and pressurized using a servo-control system. Detection of valve leaflet position simultaneously with diameter and intraluminal pressure changes in two-valve segments revealed the detailed temporal relationships between these parameters during the lymphatic contraction cycle. The timing of valve movements was similar to that of cardiac valves, but only when lymphatic vessel afterload was elevated. The pressure gradients required to open or close a valve were determined in one-valve segments during slow, ramp-wise pressure elevation, either from the input or output side of the valve. Tests were conducted over a wide range of baseline pressures (and thus diameters) in passive vessels as well as in vessels with two levels of imposed tone. Surprisingly, the pressure gradient required for valve closure varied >20-fold (0.1-2.2 cmH(2)O) as a passive vessel progressively distended. Similarly, the pressure gradient required for valve opening varied sixfold with vessel distention. Finally, our functional evidence supports the concept that lymphatic muscle tone exerts an indirect effect on valve gating.

Our lives, our say: Street and working children talk about their rights in Delhi

Recently a “new sociology of childhood” has been proposed arguing that childhood must be seen as a social construct and considered like race, class and gender as an important analytical variable. It is asserted that children and their life worlds are topics worthy of study and that children must be seen as active agents in creating their own social worlds and society at large. The main implication of such a conceptualization is that childhood takes a multiplicity of forms over time and across cultures. Essentially these approaches privilege the perspectives of children and reject the representation of them as passive vessels into which the rules of society are poured as merely adults in training. This paper examines this new discourse by drawing upon the experiences of Butterflies, a non-government organization working for the empowerment of street and working children in Delhi. In particular the paper will explore Butterflies’ rights-based approach to working with street and working children and give space to children’s own experiences and perceptions in regards to this approach. The article focuses on four key areas: the right to participation; the right to freedom of assembly; the right to protection from economic exploitation and the right to work. Keywords: children, work, rights, poverty, marginalisation, participation

Women Subdued: The Abjectification and Purification of Female Characters in Perrault’s Tales

Charles Perrault has been heralded by Marina Warner as champion of womankind, defender of old wives' wisdom (169). Joan DeJean has argued that Perrault defended the modernist position in the famous Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns by suggesting that was necessary to think, to judge, and to reason as a Woman (67). Many critics have taken Perrault's defense of women, best displayed in his Apologie des femmes (1694), at face value, neglecting to situate his Apologie and statements about women within the larger quarrel that erupted with the publication of Nicolas Boileau's misogynous Satire X, or within Perrault's own corpus. (1) Moreover, critics have yet to take into account the importance of religion in Perrault's oeuvre and how religion impacted his conception of women. (2) In follows, I would like to foreground the religious element in Perrault's tales, particularly as it relates to the representation of women. As I have argued elsewhere, Perrault takes his heroines through I call a penitential process of abjectification and purification. (3) In order to understand this pattern, we will consider specific influences and how this pattern gets reconfigured in different tales, looking in particular at Perrault's choice of subject matter and his sources. As part of this analysis we will take a detailed look at how Perrault drew from the tragic story princesse jalouse by the Catholic Reformer Jean-Pierre Camus in order to write belle au bois dormant. For Julia Kristeva, the abject is what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite (4). At the level of the individual body, the abject is that which simultaneously is and is not the body, such as excrement or bodily fluids, which must be eliminated or purged. The disfigured body also is a form of the abject for, like excrement and bodily fluids, it threatens the integrity, the oneness, the wholeness of the body. In relation to the body politic, the abject similarly regulates norms of sexuality, law, and morality by designating as impure, unholy, criminal, sinful, or loathsome certain practices, objects, or individuals that threaten the hegemonic order of the same, and which must be eliminated or expelled in some way. In Judith Butler's words, repudiation of bodies for their sex, sexuality, and/or coloris an 'expulsion' followed by a 'repulsion' that founds and consolidates culturally hegemonic identities along sex/race/sexuality axes of differentiation (133). In follows I will argue that for Perrault women indeed incarnate the abject, and in order to alleviate any threat women pose to male authority or the body politic, they must either be expelled from the public sphere or be put through a process of purification that renders them powerless and that reintegrates them as passive vessels into the domestic order of the family, an order guaranteed by a male and implicitly Catholic authority. Perrault's Parallele des Anciens et des Modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences (1688), his novella Griselidis (1691), and his Apologie des femmes (1694) all ostensibly defend women's role within public discourse and society. In the Parallele, Perrault uses aristocratic women and their tastes to legitimate the modernist cause. Griselidis was written in response to the Ancient Jean de La Bruyere's misogynous Des femmes, and the Apologie des femmes in response to the Satire X against women by the spokesman for the Ancients, Nicolas Boileau. In both texts Perrault's defense of women resides in his affirmation that good women indeed exist, but they are often hidden from the public eye, for they inhabit obscure and private spaces where they serve and care for others. (4) In both texts, however, Perrault implicitly pits worldly public women against rather meek women whose sphere of action is limited to the domestic sphere, which seems to contradict the role reserved for women in the Parallele. …

Picturing Listening in the Late Nineteenth Century

The music listener in European art attained a newfound prominence from 1880 to 1900. The extraordinary focus on listeners, previously dismissed as passive vessels unworthy of pictorial attention, reflects the role of Wagnerism and Symbolism in overhauling notions of aesthetic experience. Contemporary developments in philosophy and psychology favored the listener, independent even of the music that gave him or her this identity. Presaged by Degas and furthered by artists such as Fantin-Latour, Khnopff, and Vuillard, the new image of the listener marks an uneasy paragone episode in which painters sought for their own art the prestige accorded to music.

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ and the regulation of adipocyte function: lessons from human genetic studies

In recent years, the thiazolidinediones (e.g. rosiglitazone, pioglitazone) have emerged as an exciting novel class of therapeutic agent for the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus and the human metabolic syndrome. At first glance, the use of these high-affinity peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPARgamma) agonists, that promote adipogenesis, to treat a group of disorders that typically have their origins in obesity seems counter-intuitive. However, to view PPARgamma simply as a regulator of fat mass, and adipocytes themselves as passive vessels for energy storage, is to ignore an extensive body of data that speaks of the diverse roles of both this receptor and adipose tissue in the maintenance of normal metabolic homeostasis. This article highlights the important clinical and laboratory observations made in human subjects harbouring genetic variations in PPARgamma that have confirmed its pivotal role in the regulation of adipocyte endocrine function, and thus our metabolic response to the environment.

A genome-wide analysis of courting and mating responses inDrosophila melanogasterfemales

In Drosophila melanogaster, seminal fluid proteins influence several components of female physiology and behavior, including re-mating rates, ovulation and oviposition, and sperm use. It is well-known that female flies are not simply passive vessels and that female-mediated interactions with male products are important to female (and thus male) reproductive success. While the population genetics, molecular evolution and physiological effects of seminal fluid proteins have been examined, the genetics and evolution of the female side of these post-mating interactions is unexplored in spite of work showing that female genotype and female-by-male genotype interactions are important determinants of sperm competition outcomes. Here we use microarrays to identify candidate genes involved in the female side of post-mating sexual interactions. We report the results of a whole-genome oligonucleotide chip experiment that reveals 23 genes differentially expressed between virgin females exposed and unexposed to courting males, and 38 genes differentially expressed between virgin and recently mated females. Immune related genes are overrepresented among the mating-influenced candidates. We use quantitative reverse-transcriptase PCR to independently assess gene expression changes for roughly half of the mating-affected candidate genes.

Hitler's heroines: stardom and womanhood in Nazi cinema

Ascheid, Antje. Hitler's Heroines: Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. 288 pp. $19.95 paperback. In 1943, Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels decreed that all beauty salons in the Third Reich would be shut down. According to his official reasoning, beauty salons were a waste of valuable human and resources. At the same time, the shutdown was a logical step in the Nazis' campaign to manage femininity by purging the glamour and fashionability associated with Weimar and American culture in order to promote a natural German womanliness linked to motherhood and domesticity. Yet this campaign was far from successful, and Nazi culture in fact continually accommodated diverse, sometimes incongruous, and often conflicting representations of femininity, as Antje Ascheid shows in her important contribution to the burgeoning body of recent scholarship that has sought to reevaluate the film culture of the Third Reich. A study of three of Nazi cinema's biggest stars, Hitler's Heroines: Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema examines the divergent models of femininity embodied by Kristina Soderbaum, Lilian Harvey, and Zarah Leander. Hitler's Heroines uses the example of stardom as the basis for a feminist investigation of the ideological construction and interpellation of gender and gender roles in National Socialism. At the same time, Ascheid argues for a more nuanced and heterogeneous understanding of Nazi culture, particularly in its popular dimensions: If we accept the idea that German spectators harbored notions of the popular that did not correspond to those of National Socialist ideology, we can account for much of the period's cultural phenomena, including many of its female film stars (22). As Ascheid suggests, film spectatorship in the Third Reich was not simply a unidirectional experience, in which viewers were passive vessels. By problematizing the unidirectional model of Nazi culture and shifting the focus of analysis away from film production and toward stardom and spectatorship, Ascheid uncovers the ambiguities and contradictions of gender ideology in the Third Reich. While oppressive Nazi policies on women's education, employment, marriage, motherhood, and sexuality-and decrees such as Goebbels's closure of beauty salons- point to the ways in which the regime sought to police women and undesirable constructions of femininity from the top down, many of the Third Reich's most popular and widely disseminated images of femininity ran counter to the dominant ideology. Kristina Soderbaum, the star most closely identified with the Nazi conception of ideal womanhood, became popular for tragic performances that epitomized women's struggles to contend with loss, disaster, and deprivation. …

Effects of ischemia and myogenic activity on active and passive mechanical properties of rat cerebral arteries.

Passive (papaverine induced) and active (spontaneous pressure induced) biomechanical properties of ischemic and nonischemic rat middle cerebral arteries (MCAs) were studied under pressurized conditions in vitro. Ischemic (1 h of occlusion), contralateral, and sham-operated control MCAs were isolated from male Wistar rats (n = 22) and pressurized using an arteriograph system that allowed control of transmural pressure (TMP) and measurement of lumen diameter and wall thickness. Three mechanical stiffness parameters were computed: overall passive stiffness (beta), pressure-dependent modulus changes (E(inc,p)), and smooth muscle cell (SMC) activity-dependent changes (E(inc,a)). The beta-value for ischemic vessels was increased compared with sham vessels (13.9 +/- 1.7 vs. 9.1 +/- 1.4, P < 0.05), indicating possible short-term remodeling due to ischemia. E(inc,p) increased with pressure in the passive vessels (P < 0.05) but remained relatively constant in the active vessels for all vessel types, indicating that pressure-induced SMC contractile activity (i.e., myogenic reactivity) in cerebral arteries leads to the maintenance of a constant elastic modulus within the autoregulatory pressure range. E(inc,a) increased with pressure for all conditions, signifying that changes in stiffness are influenced by SMC activity and vascular tone.