Remarkable Alignment Research Articles

Godwin, Provocation, and the Plot of Anger

I was angry with my friend I told my wrath my wrath did end I was angry with my foe I told it not my wrath did grow --Blake, A Poison Tree WILLIAM BLAKE'S A POISON TREE SUGGESTS THAT ACTING UPON ANGER puts an end to plot; whether we tell or wreak our wrath, its expression is antithetical to calculated narratives. As Philip Fisher says, anger is a fundamentally rash emotion precisely at odds with the world of plots.(1) On the other hand, the same poem presents the cultivation of angry passions as dependent upon the secret plotting of the speaker, whose hunger for vengeance grows in proportion to the narrative's deferral of satisfaction. In other words, in Blake's poem, anger both requires plots and disables them. This double vision is symptomatic of a broader, historically-specific oscillation in British conceptions of anger during the 1790s, due primarily to the influence of the French Revolution and the ways it was discussed. In English political, medical, and legal discourse of the period, we find a remarkable alignment of changing attitudes towards rage in the wake of the Revolution, as if the fear of popular anger washed over the entire culture and altered the landscape of the mind. As revolutionary anger was being demonized as irrational, destructive rage in conservative political discourse, inflammation (of the body and body politic) was being reconceptualized as a dangerous disease in metaphorical and medical terms.(2) To this extent, the plot of anger was being written as a blind and rash trajectory--the arc of shrapnel in the explosion. On the other hand, a parallel discourse depicted the radical leaders as pursuing a conscious, calculating program of wrath against the state, a plot of anger as sharply directed as a knife in the back. Furthermore, it remained a question of some importance to the revolution debates whether British subjects were discontented (i.e., angry) because of rational causes, such as their lack of representation in parliament, or because they had been inflamed by radical rhetoric that blinded them to their best interests. Was their anger a rational exercise of the will to advance the nation towards reform, or a mindless response to demagoguery, one that followed only a trajectory of destruction? These questions underlie much of the rhetoric surrounding the issue of reform in England during this period, and answers to them overspill the bounds of political debate into other disciplinary arenas. More specifically, and for our purposes here, changes in the way English courts judged cases of provocation follow the contours of the debate, suggesting a large-scale shift in national consciousness. As Jeremy Horder has shown, a new legal situation at the end of the eighteenth century had its basis in a changing conception of anger: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the law ceased to describe anger in terms of outrage, the conception of anger in which reason plays the dominant role in guiding action. The law instead described it in terms of a loss of self-control ... according to which passions overwhelm the power of reason, leaving people at the mercy of their desires for retaliatory suffering.(3) As a result, defendants who could establish that they killed in anger were assumed to have been out of control and thus not fully culpable for their actions. Just as medical doctors were redefining inflammation from curative symptom to irrational disease, lawyers and judges were rethinking outbursts of anger as fits of madness rather than exercises of the will. In this account, anger's narrative logic--a perceived injury followed by a desire for retaliation and an expression of that desire--becomes an automatic reaction that usually thwarts one's larger interests, rather than a rationally-pursued path in keeping with the self and its desires: the angry man kills his best friend; the British worker pulls down the political structures that have sustained him. …

Likelihood analysis of the Local Group acceleration

We compute the acceleration on the Local Group using 11206 IRAS galaxies from the recently completed all-sky PSCz redshift survey. Measuring the acceleration vector in redshift space generates systematic uncertainties due to the redshift space distortions in the density field. We therefore assign galaxies to their real space positions by adopting a non-parametric model for the velocity field that solely relies on the linear gravitational instability and linear biasing hypotheses. Remaining systematic contributions to the measured acceleration vector are corrected for by using PSCz mock catalogues from N-body experiments. The resulting acceleration vector points approx. 15 degrees away from the CMB dipole apex, with a remarkable alignment between small and large scale contributions. A considerable fraction of the measured acceleration is generated within 40 h-1 Mpc with a non-negligible contribution from scales between 90 and 140 h-1 Mpc after which the acceleration amplitude seems to have converged. The local group acceleration from PSCz appears to be consistent with the one determined from the IRAS 1.2 Jy galaxy catalogue once the different contributions from shot noise have been taken into account. The results are consistent with the gravitational instability hypothesis and do not indicate any strong deviations from the linear biasing relation on large scales. A maximum-likelihood analysis of the comulative PSCz dipole is performed within a radius of 150 h-1 Mpc in which we account for nonlinear effects, shot noise and finite sample size. We obtain \beta = 0.70 (+ 0.35)(-0.2) at 1 \sigma confidence level.

Cloning and expression of a soluble sialidase from Chinese hamster ovary cells: sequence alignment similarities to bacterial sialidases

A cDNA encoding a soluble sialidase from Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells has been cloned and expressed. Completely degenerate oligonucleotide primers, which were based on the amino acid sequence of peptides obtained from the purified sialidase (Warner et al., Glycobiology, 3, 455-463, 1993), and the polymerase chain reaction, with single-stranded cDNA template, were employed to generate a unique oligonucleotide probe. The unique probe of 93 bp was used for screening a lambda gt 10 CHO cell cDNA library. A single clone, which contained a 1.4 kb insert, was isolated after screening 450,000 recombinants. The complete coding region of the protein, 1137 nucleotides, was contained in the isolated clone and it predicted a protein of 379 amino acids. The insert had a 186 bp 5' non-coding leader sequence and a 40 bp 3' non-coding region. No signal peptide was identified in the insert, suggesting a cytosolic localization for the protein. No significant primary sequence identities were observed when the deduced amino acid sequence of the CHO cell sialidase was compared with other mammalian proteins or microbial sialidases. However, the protein had significant sequence alignment similarity with several bacterial sialidases. Two 'Asp box' motifs in the CHO cell sialidase had a remarkable alignment positioning in the protein sequence with the similar motifs of the Salmonella LT2 and Clostridium perfringens sialidases. High levels of the enzyme were expressed in Spodoptera frugiperda cells infected with a modified Autographa californica nuclear polyhedrosis virus harbouring the sialidase cDNA.

Orientation dependence of chemiluminescence spectra of CF 3 formed in the reaction of oriented CF 3H with Ar( 3P)

Chemiluminescence of the CF* 3 radical formed in the reaction of Ar( 3P) with the oriented CF 3H was taken at five different wavelengths in the range from 500 to 700 nm for two reactant orientations with a reference orientation. A remarkable alignment dependence of the emission spectra was observed. Analysis of the wavelength dependence of the CF 3 chemiluminescence revealed the existence of three reactive sites due to two reaction mechanisms. One is preferable at the side-on orientation and the second is both at the CF 3 end and H end orientations.

The Afro-Arabian rift system—an overview

The Afro-Arabian rift system is reviewed beginning with the Dead Sea transform and Gulf of Suez in the north, followed by the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea and ending with a brief mention of rifting through eastern and southern Africa. A consistent interpretation is obtained for geophysical data from the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea and geological data for the Dead Sea transform, Suez graben and Red Sea and Gulf of Aden margins. Geophysical data are used to estimate the locations of the ocean-continent boundaries in the northern Red Sea; these are found to coincide when the total 107 km shear along the Dead Sea is restored. The Red Sea is therefore reconstructed in stages beginning with the 45 km post-Miocene shear and 62 km early-Miocene shear along the Dead Sea transform followed by estimates for extension in the early Red Sea-Suez graben. When this is done, there is a remarkable alignment of various features revealed on Landsat TM imagery for both sides of the northern Red Sea. North-south differences in the Red Sea and west-east differences hi the Gulf of Aden are discussed and found to be best explained by a propagating rift model.

Red River and associated faults, Yunnan Province, China: Quaternary geology, slip rates, and seismic hazard

The 900-km-long right-slip Red River fault of southernmost China and northern Vietnam is a profound structural discontinuity that is mechanically associated with the collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates. Although history records no large earthquakes resulting from slippage along at least the principal segment of the fault in China, youthful landforms and disruptions of young sedimentary rocks indicate that it has generated large earthquakes during the Pleistocene and Holocene epochs. The historic quiescence thus must be regarded as being indicative of a current seismic gap, although the recurrence interval between major earthquakes is evidently much longer than for many other major active fault systems. That recent displacement has been primarily right lateral is indicated by consistently displaced drainages, ranging in offset from 9 m to 6 km, and the freshness of the smallest and most recent offsets implies repeated Holocene movements. Although physiographic features typical of active faulting such as scarps and drainage diversions are present throughout, the general absence of sag ponds reflects both the high rate of dissection of the fault by the Red River and its tributaries and the lower degree of activity as compared to highly active faults such as the San Andreas fault of California. In its middle 170 km, the fault zone is made up of two branches. The range-front branch demarcates the northeastern base of the Ailao Mountains and, at least locally, has an appreciable component of dip slip. The mid-valley branch, in large part previously unrecognized, traverses principally deeply dissected Cenozoic valley fill northeast of the range-front fault and has undergone almost pure lateral slip. Lateral postfill offsets along the range-front branch diminish toward the southeast, whereas those along the mid-valley branch diminish northwestward; the net effect is that the total postfill offset across both branches is almost uniform. The Red River and its major tributaries appear to have experienced about 5.5 km of right slip since the beginning of a major episode of incision that continues to the present day. Restoration of this offset provides a remarkable alignment of most large tributaries as well as removing a major kink in the course of the Red River itself. Using maximum credible rates of incision, we estimate an average fault-slip rate of 2 to perhaps 5 mm/yr. At this long-term rate of slip, the smallest offsets observed along the fault (9 m) would occur no more frequently than every 1,800 to 4,500 yr on the average. This is consistent with the historical record of fault dormancy for the past 300 yr. North of the Red River fault, there is a large seismically active region laced with numerous faults of north and northwesterly trends. Several of these faults display clear and even spectacular evidence of youthful normal faulting, and some appear to have left-lateral components as well. These faults, as well as the Red River fault itself, are accommodating regional east-west crustal extension and north-south shortening.

Excitation of autoionising Li I and He states in 20-500 keV Li+-He collisions

Autoionisation in 20-500 keV Li+-He collisions has been studied experimentally and absolute cross sections sigma (Li) and sigma (He) have been obtained. A double hump structure is observed for sigma (Li) against impact velocity, while sigma (He) declines surprisingly rapidly. For the four prominent Li lines: (1s2s2)2S, 1s(2s2p3P)a2P, 1s(2s2p1P)b2P and (1s2p2)2D, angular distributions have been measured to yield relative substate populations. The a2P state has a remarkable alignment structure peaked at an impact energy 250 keV with Q(ML=0)/Q(ML=1)=7.5, not seen in the b2P state. The mechanism of a2P excitation is not yet clear.

The reactions K − + p → pseudoscalar meson + Λ (1520) at 4.2 GeV/ c

The total and differential cross sections of the reactions K −p → π 0Λ (1520), ηΛ(1520) and η′ Λ(1520) have been measured. Prominent forward peaks are onserved in all three reactions. The first reaction shows also a backward peak. The spin density matrix elements of the Λ(1520) in this reaction are determined. For forward production the results show a remarkable alignment of the Λ(1520) corresponding to an M2 transition in the model of Stodolsky-Sakurai for 3 2 − baryon production.

The fauna and correlation of the McCraney limestone of Iowa and Illinois

The cerebral cortex provides a major source of inputs to the basal ganglia. As has been well documented, the topography of corticostriatal projections subdivides the striatum into a mosaic of functionally distinct sectors. How information flow from these striatal sectors remains segregated or not within basal ganglia output nuclei has to be established. Electrophysiologically identified neurons of the rat substantia nigra pars reticulata were labeled by juxtacellular injection of Neurobiotin, and the spatial organization of their dendritic arborizations was analyzed in relation to the projection fields of individual striatal sectors. Thirty-nine nigral neurons located in the projection territory of the distinct striatal sensorimotor sectors were reconstructed. The data show that the dendritic arborizations of nigral neurons conform to the geometry of striato-nigral projections. Like striatal projections, the arborizations formed a series of curved laminas enveloping a dorsolaterally located core. Although dendritic fields of the neurons lying in the laminae were flat, those located in the core were spherical or cylindrical, thereby conforming to the shape of the striatal projection fields. This remarkable alignment between the dendritic arborizations of nigral neurons and the projection fields from individual striatal districts supports the concept of a parallel architecture of the striato-nigral circuits. However, pars reticulata neurons usually extend part of their dendrites within adjacent striatal projection fields, thereby ensuring a continuum between channels. The extension of the dendritic arborizations within the striatal projection fields suggests that nigral neurons integrate the information that is relevant for the completion of the specific motor behavior they control.

The Figure of the Earth

Some of the more striking features of our planet are apt to escape attention if our studies are made upon charts without the assistance of a ‘globe.’ Thus the remarkable alignment of many volcanoes, volcanic islands, coast-lines, and even mountain-chains along circular arcs does not seem to have excited the interest which might otherwise have been expected. An arc-like form is not infrequently alluded to, but the almost precise correspondence of some great terrestrial features with a circular form seems to be generally overlooked. As an example, the chain of the Aleutian Islands may be cited: it is certainly one of the most perfect. If a circle be swept out on a terrestrial globe with its centre in lat. 6° N., long. 177° W., its circumference passing through one of the islands of the festoon will traverse nearly all the rest and extend through the length of the Alaskan peninsula. (See Al in fig. 2, p. 183.) The correspondence is so precise as to suggest that it must have some real physical meaning. The numerous mighty volcanoes which characterize the region point to the existence of an extensive subterranean reservoir of lava, and to discontinuity of the earth9s crust, in the form of a circular crack. It is difficult, as we look upon this part of the globe, to avoid the impression that we have before us the remains of a spherical dome or blister, which has broken down along circular and radial fractures, the islands standing over a circle, the coasts of the Kamchatkan