Point Of Disintegration Research Articles

Modular architecture and resilience of structural covariance networks in first-episode antipsychotic-naive psychoses

Structural covariance network (SCN) studies on first-episode antipsychotic-naïve psychosis (FEAP) have examined less granular parcellations on one morphometric feature reporting lower network resilience among other findings. We examined SCNs of volume, cortical thickness, and surface area using the Human Connectome Project atlas-based parcellation (n = 358 regions) from 79 FEAP and 68 controls to comprehensively characterize the networks using a descriptive and perturbational network neuroscience approach. Using graph theoretical methods, we examined network integration, segregation, centrality, community structure, and hub distribution across the small-worldness threshold range and correlated them with psychopathology severity. We used simulated nodal “attacks” (removal of nodes and all their edges) to investigate network resilience, calculated DeltaCon similarity scores, and contrasted the removed nodes to characterize the impact of simulated attacks. Compared to controls, FEAP SCN showed higher betweenness centrality (BC) and lower degree in all three morphometric features and disintegrated with fewer attacks with no change in global efficiency. SCNs showed higher similarity score at the first point of disintegration with ≈ 54% top-ranked BC nodes attacked. FEAP communities consisted of fewer prefrontal, auditory and visual regions. Lower BC, and higher clustering and degree, were associated with greater positive and negative symptom severity. Negative symptoms required twice the changes in these metrics. Globally sparse but locally dense network with more nodes of higher centrality in FEAP could result in higher communication cost compared to controls. FEAP network disintegration with fewer attacks suggests lower resilience without impacting efficiency. Greater network disarray underlying negative symptom severity possibly explains the therapeutic challenge.

Major Prophets

Major Prophets Christopher T. Begg, Rory K. Pitstick, Paul R. Redditt, Isaac M. Alderman, and Fred W. Guyette 1913. [Prophets/Prophetic Literature] Esther Fuchs, “Women as Prophets/Women in Prophets: Gender, Nation and Discourse,” Feminist Theory and the Bible, 95–113 [see #2022]. An intertextual reading of women as prophets and women in the prophets in the Hebrew Bible reveals that privileged speech is gendered. While narrative texts tend to inscribe and erase women’s prophecies, prophetic literature tends to erase them completely. To the extent that women prophets are inscribed in the narrative text, they are interpolated as subjects in a national saga of military confrontations with various collective enemies. Female prophetic roles are indistinguishable from their political roles in the continuous struggle against the foreign others. The violent language of national demarcation and differentiation is ascribed to women prophets, who thus are made to legitimize and sanction it. These speaking bodies reproduce the nation, culturally and discursively. As the cultural reproducers of the nation women prophets embody one category of idealized feminine identity. As prophets then Israelite women inscribed in the pedagogic narrative are part of a gendered as well as a national script. As poetic figures in prophetic literature women’s bodies are constructed as signifying representations of the nation as such. The signifying body appears as the sexual object of male violence, or as the victimized body of mother/daughter Zion. The metaphoric representation of the nation is a performative elaboration of the narrative script. The performative script which focuses on the nation’s failures and errors is no less “nationalistic” in the sense of its effort to identify a plurality and diversity of subjects as a unitary coherent collective. This imaginary community is repeatedly signified through a seriality of collective subjects among which the female body is only one. [End Page 666] The violence directed at the nation rather than by the nation captures the pivotal moment of political demise, even as the female body signifies the nation at the point of disintegration and defeat. By attributing to the signifying body a series of synonymous deviations from the pedagogic script, prophetic discourse reinterprets, reconstructs, re-encodes, and further elaborates the narration of the nation in poetic terms. The symbolic, recursive, and repetitive poetry of performative discourse envisions the nation’s future, while evaluating, criticizing, and condemning its past. The performative discourse thus affirms national continuity by reinventing and recasting the nation in a new proliferation of shifting subjects and predicates, all pointing to the idea of a shared past and a shared future. Feminist criticism has correctly pointed to the breakdown of the marital and sexual metaphor, and its questionable effectiveness as a representation of a sanctioned relationship. What I have tried to do here is to extend this analysis even further by adding a postcolonial dimension to what has already been written. The postcolonial perspective bridges the divide between those feminists who focus on the signifier, namely, the metaphor of sexual violence, and those who focus on the signified, namely, the nation. Postcolonial theory suggests that the signified is also a signifier, namely, that the nation as well is a metaphor of collective identity, a discursive phenomenon that moves between narration and poetic representation, pedagogy and performance. As such the nation should be as much the object of feminist inquiry as the sexual and marital metaphor which generated so much debate and continues to generate a considerable body of scholarship and historical as well as literary interpretation. (author’s conclusion, adapted, pp. 111–12)—C.T.B. 1914. [Prophetic Literature] Donatella Scaiola, “Abramo nella tradizione profetica,” RSB 26 (2014) 75–87. Prophetic texts rarely make reference to Abraham, but the references that do exist are largely in harmony with the Genesis portrait, except for their focusing primarily on Abraham’s positive characteristics and at the same time emphasizing much more than Genesis does the fidelity of God rather than the faith of Abraham. In the biblical tradition, Abraham was evidently a symbol continually recast as a key for the development and expression of Israel’s understanding of its own identity and vocation.—R.K.P. 1915. [Prophetic Literature] Massimilliano...

The Spectacle of the Veiled Woman and the Mutilated Child

When we imagine a body we imagine it whole, but, in fact, it is always in pieces. Pieces that are imagined held together in the image of a person before the law, or pieces that break apart in the image of the person who is outside this law. The person who recognises themselves before liberal law, we contend in this paper, references the images of those who are to become before law: savages, barbarians, children, animals. These categories frame the images of the body in pieces, waiting in the wings of a liberal imagination of the subject, recruited for the purposes of holding forth a difference; one which suggests pending prohibition which will in turn result in pending pieces. Here, we analyse several images of mutilated children and veiled women, and consider how they form a new colonial imagination as spectacle and, understood through the theories of Jacques Lacan, as specular. These images, we suggest, present an imagination of not only The Body that could ‘be’ beneath the veil, or beyond the knife, but of another's body which could be, and we suggest is represented as what should be broken into pieces to the point of disintegration in a post-9/11 world.

Proposals Regarding the Prospects for and Countermeasures against, Villages undergoing Depopulation and on the Point of Disintegration

Proposals Regarding the Prospects for and Countermeasures against, Villages undergoing Depopulation and on the Point of Disintegration

Fibrinolytic Activity at High Altitude and Sodium Acetate Buffer

At high altitude there is a tendency for fibrinolytic activity to be enhanced depending, perhaps, on the duration of exposure and this seems to be a protective mechanism against the development of high altitude pulmonary oedema which is associated with diminished fibrinolytic activity. The fibrinolytic response at high altitude seems to be fluctuated during the process of acclimatisation though being maintained at a plateau higher than that in the plains. It apparently results from hypoxic stress but more likely reflects the physiological response to the hypercoagulable state at high altitude. As clot lysis times in high altitude pulmonary oedema are unusually prolonged an attempt at shortening their observation in the test system is desirable. Sodium acetate, 0.12 M solution with pH 7.4 as a diluent in the low temperature technique of dilute clot lysis time is potentially effective to accelerate the lysis time by approximately 33% compared to phosphate buffer solution of similar pH and molarity. Also the end point of disintegration of clot is more abrupt and sharply defined. Sodium acetate buffer can advantageously replace phosphate buffer as a diluent in this technique.