Singular Event Research Articles

Continuity as Catastrophe: Origins of a Thesis in Walter Benjamin

In an unpublished fragment from the late 1930s, Walter Benjamin famously calls for a recasting of the idea of catastrophe and its relation to the progression of history. Catastrophe, Benjamin contends, is not to be understood as an exception to the regular course of history; rather than being conceived as a singular event marking the end of the world in its given form, catastrophe is to be located in its persistent continuity—the simple fact that “things ‘go on like this.’” This article traces the origins of this thesis to an earlier text: a 1923 manuscript that Benjamin wrote during a journey through Germany at the peak of the hyperinflation. Examining this text in relation to a treatise that was of particular significance to Benjamin—Erich Unger’s 1921 Politics and Metaphysics—this article offers a reconstruction of the image of catastrophic history presented here as well as its significance for Benjamin’s emerging political thought of the early 1920s. Through a commentary on both texts, the article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the sources and meaning of the “continuity as catastrophe” thesis, sketching out how Benjamin’s singular vantage point could inform contemporary debates on catastrophe, apocalypse, and the politics of interruption.

Slicing with deep learning models at ProtoDUNE-SP

DUNE is a cutting-edge experiment aiming to study neutrinos in detail, with a special focus on the flavor oscillation mechanism. The prototype of the DUNE Far Detector Single Phase TPC (ProtoDUNE-SP) was built and operated at CERN with a full set of reconstruction tools. To implement these reconstruction tools, Pandora, a multi-algorithm framework, has been developed. A large number of these algorithms, some of them being exploiting traditional clustering, detector physics and deep learning approaches, have been applied to images to gradually build up a picture out of singular events. One of such algorithms is the Pandora slicing algorithm which aims to partition the detector hits of an event in sets called slices. Each slice represents a single interaction in the detector and should identify all the hits related to the interacting particle and its subsequent decay products. We expect the order of tens of slices per event in ProtoDUNE-SP. In this paper we present a deep learning approach to the problem, designing a model able to outperform the state-of-the-art slicing algorithm which is currently implemented within Pandora. We assess the performance of our tool in terms of efficiency and accuracy, while exploiting hardware accelerating setups. The ultimate goal is to incorporate this deep learning approach in the Pandora reconstruction tool.

Italian University Students’ Resilience during the COVID-19 Lockdown—A Structural Equation Model about the Relationship between Resilience, Emotion Regulation and Well-Being

Over the past two years, the consequences of the severe restrictions imposed by the rapid spread of COVID-19 among the global population have been a central focus of scientific research. The pandemic has been a singular and unexpected event that found people unprepared and vulnerable in responding to its emergence, resulting in substantial psychological distress. Scientific evidence has highlighted that adolescents and emerging adults have been among those populations at greatest risk of adverse psychological outcomes, even in the long term. In particular, more than one-third of young adults reported high levels of loneliness, and nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds felt lonely during the pandemic, experiencing both psychological and emotional distress. The lockdown, the consequent suspension of face-to-face academic activities and the severe restriction of social life have disrupted the daily routines of students already involved in coping with developmental tasks related to identity formation and the relational experience. Under such conditions, emotions and emotional regulation skills are crucial in adapting behavior to reach academic goals and face mounting levels of distress. Therefore, several studies have investigated resilience mechanisms and coping strategies of emerging adults during the pandemic. The present study focuses on university students and explores the impact of resilience and emotional regulation on adverse psychological outcomes related to persistent distress conditions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Students were administered a self-report assessment battery through an online platform at the beginning (T0) and the end of the lockdown (T1). A structural equation model (SEM) was used to explore the relationship between resilience, emotional regulation difficulties and psychological distress (depression, anxiety and stress). The findings indicate that psychological resilience and emotion regulation are protective factors that buffer the extent of possible distress resulting from an adverse condition such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two New Methods for Defining Shut-In Pressure in Hydraulic Fracturing Tests

Hydraulic fracturing is one of the most common methods to determine in situ rock stress. The interpretation of the shut-in pressure to determine the minor principal stress is an important element of this method, and many different methods to interpret shut-in pressure have been studied and developed throughout the years. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages. With more than 50 years of research and development within the rock stress measurement field, especially in HF, SINTEF has established two practical ways of defining shut-in pressure. These methods are independent and termed zero flow and water hammer. The zero flow method has been used by SINTEF in more than 130 projects over the last 30 years. The methods clearly differ from the other methods as they are based on singular events in the development of pressure/flow versus time which enables us to read the shut-in pressure directly during testing. In this paper, a comparison is made between different methods for interpretation of shut-in pressure, including 12 existing methods and the 2 SINTEF methods. Comprehensive laboratory tests were performed, and a field test was selected from SINTEF’s database for demonstration and comparison of the methods. The SINTEF methods have been developed mainly for use in hard rock environment where the rock is a jointed aquifer and with low permeability. The application of the two methods has traditionally been hydroelectric power development, different types of tunnel, and cavern projects, and also in mineral mining. The methods have not been used in deep petroleum applications such as oil wells or offshore in porous rock types.

Tempos de infância: linguagem e experiência

We approach in the essay the temporality of childhood, taking as horizon the language and experience. Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben are the main thinkers who help us to address the fragile experience in contemporaneity, in the sense that the current ways of life are full of everyday practices that are not transformed into experience. To restore experience it is necessary to understand childhood as a condition of existence that accompanies all life; it is a subject who is exposed to historicity and who makes history, discontinuous history and singular event. With this in mind, through Manuel de Barros' poetic power we rekindle the relationship between childhood temporalities, language and experience, because ins this relation present itself the intensity of a lived that is devoid of a successive and chronological time. The creative power of this language has in the becoming-child the artisan for the creation of another perspective in the search for the inaugural source of words: to advance to the beginning and reach the childing of words. From these constructed approaches, we understand that together, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben and Manuel de Barros invite us to resume our childhood, in the search for the first meaning of words, which we only find with the presence of childhood. Here, it is not about establishing an absolute truth about childhoods and their times, but of finding ways to think about how to constitute other relationships with and in time.

Called to God: Event, Narration and Subject Formation in the Vocation of a Catholic Nun

The literature emphasizes institutional formation in the process of a young woman becoming a nun or sees her motivations as stemming from expectations of social and economic mobility. This article focuses on the nun’s call as event ( Badiou 2001 ; Humphrey 2008 ), revealing its truth to the subject and reconstituting her by her fidelity to it. However, its validation and realization are only accomplished within the structured formation and discipline of congregational life. Through an ethnographic analysis of the lives of nuns in two indigenous Catholic convents in Kerala, South India, the article shows that they often have to struggle against their families to embrace their call. The congregation endorses the authenticity of a young woman’s call while requiring its constant reexamination through prayer and meditation. Thus, a nun’s call is encoded in formulaic structures through institutional formation, but its sensory and imaginary experiences are uniquely hers. Analytically distinguishing the calling event from the narrated event, the article integrates a Foucauldian understanding of disciplinary practices with Alain Badiou’s idea of the singular event for a grounded ethnographic grasp of the subject formation of a nun within her calling.

Distracted to a fault: Attention, actions, and time perception

In the last years, it has become general consensus that actions change our time perception. Performing an action to elicit a specific event seems to lead to a systematic underestimation of the interval between action and effect, a phenomenon termed temporal (or previously intentional) binding. Temporal binding has been closely associated with sense of agency, our perceived control over our actions and our environment, and because of its robust behavioral effects has indeed been widely utilized as an implicit correlate of sense of agency. The most robust and clear temporal binding effects are typically found via Libet clock paradigms. In the present study, we investigate a crucial methodological confound in these paradigms that provides an alternative explanation for temporal binding effects: a redirection of attentional resources in two-event sequences (as in classical operant conditions) versus singular events (as in classical baseline conditions). Our results indicate that binding effects in Libet clock paradigms may be based to a large degree on such attentional processes, irrespective of intention or action-effect sequences. Thus, these findings challenge many of the previously drawn conclusions and interpretations with regard to actions and time perception.

DYNAMIC CEREBRAL BLOOD FLOW CHANGES ASSOCIATED WITH OFF PUMP CORONARY ARTERY BYPASS GRAFTING (OPCAB) ASSESSED BY A NOVEL, ROBOTIC ASSISTED, AUTONOMOUS, CONTINUOUS AND BILATERAL TRANSCRANIAL DOPPLER (TCD)

<h3>Background and Objectives</h3> There is ongoing controversy regarding the clinical and physiological benefit of OPCAB. While we have reported reduced perioperative mortality, neurological outcomes have not improved. Thus, further insights are needed to fully delineate the impact of OPCAB on the cerebral circulation. Here we present a novel strategy for continuous monitoring of mid cerebral artery (MCA) blood flow using the NovaGuide Robotic TCD system (NovaSignal Corp., Los Angeles CA USA) (figure 1). We have also employed cerebral tissue oximetry (Foresight, Edwards Lifesciences) to evaluate overall tissue oxygenation. <h3>Methods</h3> 7 elective OPCAB patients with no evidence of significant carotid disease were enrolled as part of our initial service evaluation. After anaesthesia induction, the patient head was stabilised in a specific cradle and robotic TCD probes were placed onto the patient's temporal region. The NovaGuide autonomously identified a transtemporal window, located the MCA vessels bilaterally and optimised the TCD signal. Baseline mean MCA flow was established prior to surgical manipulations and subsequent signals were automatically acquired for the entire duration of surgery. Data are reported as SEM +/- STD and group comparison was performed by ANOVA or t tests, as appropriate. <h3>Results</h3> There were no adverse events related to head positioning or access to central lines or placement of transoesophageal echo probes and routine monitoring. The device did not interfere with surgical conduct. Mean MCA flows at baseline were 43 +/-12 and 42 +/-13 cm/s for left and right MCA respectively. Pre-grafting events such as skin incision, sternotomy, and pericardiotomy increased LMCA flow by 14 +/- 35 24 +/- 27 and 17 +/- 20% with similar changes in RMCA flows. Mild Trendelenburg position and graded increase in MAP as pre-optimisation measures increased cerebral blood flow. While lifting and positioning the heart for grafting and placing the Octopus stabiliser generally reduced TCD levels, they remained higher than preoperative values (14+/-20; 31 +/- 36 and 9+/- 9 % increase for LAD, OM and PDA grafts, respectively). No significant changes were observed by clamping or anastomosing or reperfusing the respective coronary arteries. There was a transient increase in TCD signals upon replacing the heart in the pericardium after completing the anastomoses (28+/-7; 20 +/- 26 and 22 +/-29 % increase for LAD, OM and PDA positions, respectively). There were minor changes upon conducting the aortic anastomoses, but rare singular embolic events were noted occasionally upon releasing the aortic side clamp. Baseline left and right cerebral StO2 was identical (67+/-4 and 67+/-2) and showed little variation throughout surgery (<5%). <h3>Conclusion</h3> Continuous monitoring of bilateral TCD using the robotic TCD system is feasible during OPCAB. There are characteristic changes in TCD values at various phases of the operation, but our current optimisation strategy appears to preserve cerebral blood flow. Future validation studies are required which should address clinical correlates in high-risk patients including those with cerebrovascular disease.

Fifty years on: the 1972 Asian expulsion as global critical event, or the insecurities of expulsion

This commentary examines the contemporary relevance of Uganda’s 1972 Asian expulsion. It describes and argues against “expulsion exceptionalism,” or the ways that expulsion is understood as a singular event and through discourses of African-Asian racial estrangement, the racial victimization of Asians, the excesses of military dictator Idi Amin, and illiberal framings of Uganda, Africa and African governance. Rather, the expulsion is a global critical event and a continuous reality that remains unresolved yet is central to new practices of South Asian noncitizen incorporation by the current government. The “insecurities of expulsion” refer to: 1) the effects and affects of expulsion; 2) the imaginaries, memories and meaning-making around expulsion; and 3) the practices and performances of Ugandan Asian/South Asian citizenship that have emerged since expulsion. This research contributes to Afro-Asian futures and to anthropological and other disciplinary engagements with global/transnational “Afro-Asian study.”

Reciprocal Mobilities in Colonial Encounters in Eighteenth-Century Luzon

AbstractThe article sheds new light on colonial encounters in eighteenth-century Luzon by viewing them through the lens of mobility. Historical actors—both Spaniards and indigenes—created and sustained ties with each other through reciprocal visits punctuated by feasts. Encounters were not singular events but rather pertained to a series of multiple mobilities and multisited celebrations. The very act of travelling transformed the visitors’ identities, which became ever more entangled with their hosts’. In the colonial context, encounters did not involve a simple unilateral or unidirectional penetration and conquest of the island's interior on the part of Spanish missionaries and officials. They were embedded in a combination of Spanish and indigenous practices of reciprocal mobilities.

Working toward sustainability: Transitioning HIV programs from a USA-based organization to a local partner in Zimbabwe.

Despite the history of United States of America (USA)-based partners implementing global health programs in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), future models for sustainable healthcare rely on local country ownership and leadership. Transition is the process of shifting programs towards country ownership, where local stakeholders plan, manage, and deliver health programs. Transition is not a singular event but a process which may include a phase where health programs are led and managed by local entities but still reliant on awards from international partners. This phase is scarcely described yet can impact long-term program sustainability if navigated poorly. This qualitative study examines the transition of Zimbabwe's voluntary medical male circumcision and HIV care and treatment services from management by a USA-based organization, the International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH), to management under a new Zimbabwean organization, the Zimbabwe Technical Assistance, Training and Education Centre for Health (Zim-TTECH). The primary objective of this paper is to explore challenges, successes, and lessons learned during this transition to inform other non-governmental organizations. We conducted sixteen virtual, key informant interviews using purposeful sampling, identifying potential participants based on their role in the transition team (leadership, administrative, financial, or human resources) and willingness to consent to the study. We aimed for equal representation from USA-based, I-TECH headquarters staff and Zimbabwe-based, Zim-TTECH staff involved in the transition team. Data were analyzed in Atlas.Ti using deductive and inductive methods, followed by a thematic analysis guided by several frameworks for program transition and organizational change. Findings suggest five themes to guide transition: 1) Develop a vision and empower leadership for change by delegating clear roles and supporting local ownership; 2) Plan and strategize for transition in a manner that accounts for historical context; 3) Communicate with and inform stakeholders to understand transition perceptions, understand barriers to transition, and enable open communications related to risks and benefits; 4) Engage and mobilize staff by constructing necessary infrastructure and providing technical assistance as needed; and 5) Define short-term and long-term success. Transition processes were challenged by the local country context, compressed transition timelines, and all-or-nothing measures of transition success. Facilitators included strong staff capacity and a synergistic partnership model between Zim-TTECH and I-TECH. Global funders and international organizations should support local LMIC partners in their pathway to independence by removing restrictions on funding awards, including transitioning ownership mid-stream, and positioning leadership of international awards for in-country entities.

Trauma Never Occurs Only Once: Being Traumatized by a Slap is Like Making Meaning of the Game of Peek-a-Boo

ABSTRACT It is argued that the lack of a normal developmental perspective along with a dominant psychopathological perspective framing our thinking about trauma limits our understanding of trauma, the value of trauma theory, and trauma informed practices. A developmental perspective sees dysfunction emerging from chronic repeated experiences and processes, primarily external interpersonal relational experiences and internal somatic and brain – neurosomatic processes. Repetition of trauma occurs because of the individual’s on-going endogenous reiterated neurosomatic meaning making processes of the meaning made of a recurrent or singular event given the flow of the context in which it occurs. Thus trauma, for me, is like a bulge in a landscape that we note in our language and diagnoses as if it was the only feature of the landscape, but typical trauma is in fact just a more severe outcropping on many small and large bumps making up a desolate toxic landscape. And while becoming traumatized is hardly a game, the process of making meaning of it and of a game, such as peek-a-boo is pretty much the same. At the heart of the similarity is the repetition of endogenous meaning making processes which most often, but not always because there are single occurrence events, travel with the event’s exogenous re-occurrence. The repetition instantiates the trauma and the game into the individual’s way of experiencing and being in the world. Thus, what makes sense for us as a guide for therapy – for children and adults – is to take our cue from the development of meaning: Approach therapeutic change like learning peek-a-boo. Do it often, do it in multiple ways that fully engage every level of the individual, and let the individual agenically control the process.

Pictorial Realism in Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance

This article explores an often overlooked, broadly realist aspect of Weiss’s engagement with visual art in The Aesthetics of Resistance. Analysis of the role played in the novel by painted depiction usually focuses on dramatic stagings of figures engaged in violent struggle. The focus here is on a different kind of art depicting generic situations rather than singular events, one that closely echoes aesthetic and ideological priorities evident in the conception of Weiss’s novel. The pictorial realism that particularly drew his attention consisted both of modern social realism, where a politics of class resonated with his powerfully committed and richly articulated Marxism, and the “epic” realism of the early modern artist Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The way in which in the latter, concrete, rationally graspable realities would merge into phantasmagoria and monstrous deformations spoke perhaps more forcefully to his politically activist aesthetics of resistance.

Stunde Null: Naming and Re-naming

Stunde Null – this expression is used to indicate the end of the German Nazi regime in 1945 and the beginning of a new Germany. This historical turning point was marked by the re-naming of the former Germany in both East and West, and Nazi symbols, institutions, values and paraphernalia were taken to the tip. Naming and re-naming were part of this iconoclastic attempt to undo a recent past by turning the memory of it into a negative memory soon to disappear out of sight. However, Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a cumbersome process in which iconoclasm acts both as a singular event and as a moment in an ongoing historical process. The iconoclastic destruction in 1562 of the cathedral in Lyon opens a discussion of the interdependence of event and process in iconoclasm as an intervention in collective memory. Using re-naming to exemplify this cultural dynamic, the motto of the French Revolution, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, serves as a brief illustration of how revolutionary iconoclasms were exploited later to redesign French history. To finish, post-colonial India sets the scene for a demonstration of the ambiguities embedded in iconoclastic processes in the short story ‘Lawley Road’ (1956) by R.K. Narayan, an ironic account of a back-and-forth process of re-naming of streets and places in the aftermath of Indian independence.

Deolito V. Vistar. The Cross-and-Resurrection: The Supreme Sign in John’s Gospel

Deolito V. Vistar. <i>The Cross-and-Resurrection: The Supreme Sign in John’s Gospel</i>

&lt;비 오는 날의 오후 세 시&gt;(1959) 속 멜로드라마 미학과 윤리

A majority of South Korean melodramas produced in the late 1950s are characterized by the “gaps” between clichéd nationalist narrative and exotic international style. This article analyzes 3 PM on a Rainy Day in relation to its cosmopolitan aesthetics and the ethical significance gained from it. The first part of the article examines prior criticism on melodrama and style in order to demonstrate the ways in which melodrama uses style to “speak the unspeakable.” The second part discusses concepts developed by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, such as “the aesthetic regime of art,” “a thwarted fable,” and “impurities” of cinema. Viewing cinema as a truth-seeking singular event, Rancière and Badiou make room for new aisthesis (perception) and thus invite an ethical rethinking of the status quo. 3 PM on a Rainy Day recasts a clash between nationalism and the American-style modernization in postwar Korea within a love triangle between a Korean-American journalist, a Korean veteran, and a Korean woman adored by the two men. The last part argues that the film’s cosmopolitan style packed with western indexes disrupts nationalist narrative and creates a “thwarted fable” which, by unsettling the logical flow of storytelling, reveals the unspeakable: in this film, a cosmopolitan aspiration on the part of the audience consumed by war.

Singularities in turbulent flows: How to observe them?

The existence and relevance of finite time singularities of the fluid equations are outstanding problems in turbulent flows at high Reynolds number. Their existence is based on recent analytical studies of the time dependent equations for inviscid flow and it explains well the long known observation of intermittency there. The analysis of hot wire records of a turbulent flow in the wind tunnel of Modane is in fair agreement with this existence of finite time singularities passing by the point of recording. This analysis relies on the behavior of the structure functions of the Eulerian acceleration at increasing exponents. It is completed by the analysis of Lagrangian data coming from a von Karman experiment. A particular choice of multi-correlation functions of the acceleration, called test functions, makes them sensitive to the irreversible character of the dynamics, which is shown to be effective at short time only, that we interpret as a signature of the presence of singular events developing a very large acceleration on a very short time scale before they disappear. This time is of the order of the Kolmogorov dissipation time. Differently the test functions built on the velocity correlation functions display a much longer irreversible signal which we associate to the energy transfer occurring before the dissipation stage inside the isolated spots where singularities are formed.

Finding Meaning.

Finding Meaning.

"It Isn't Just Us": The Korean Catholic Church's Responses to Corona-19 as Seen in Diocesan Bulletins

The ceasing of public Catholic Masses just before Ash Wednesday 2020 in response to Corona-19 posed a significant problem as it meant Catholics could no longer easily receive Holy Communion, the center of Catholic faith life. Thus, one might have expected the Korean Catholic Church to oppose the limitation or cancellation of religious gatherings. But in fact, the opposite happened, with the Catholic Church being singled out for its support of such policies. This paper explores this response of Catholic leaders to Corona-19 and the theology that undergirded it through an examination of the bulletins of two archdioceses, Seoul and Daegu. It argues that the bulletins promoted a particular Catholic theology that understood adherence to public health measures as analogous to love of neighbor, and that such acts of love would bring a triumph over the virus. However, for such efforts to succeed they had to extend from Korea to embrace the entire world, particularly disadvantaged countries. Moreover, this study also argues that rather than being treated as a singular event, Corona-19 was understood as akin to issues like climate change, which were presented as sharing the same root cause of human selfishness.

The emotional significant negative events and wellbeing of student teachers during initial teacher training: The case of physical education

Teaching is a demanding job and the aim of the present study was to explore the emotional experiences and wellbeing levels (burnout and vigor) of Physical Education (PE) student teachers in comparison with student teachers of other subjects. In all, 167 student teachers (99 in PE and 68 in other subjects) described two significant professional negative events experienced during the school placement. They also reported the frequency of occurrence of these events, the level of unpleasant emotions related to the events, and their scores of burnout and vigor. The negative emotional events were encoded following an inductive approach and five categories emerged: Student rules violations, Collaborative issues, Physical integrity risks, Organizational issues, and Lack of student motivation. The Chi-square analyses revealed a different distribution in the negative events according to the subject taught, especially including an overrepresentation of Lack of student motivation and Physical integrity risks for PE student teachers and Collaborative issues for other-subjects student teachers. Moreover, Mann-Whitney U-tests revealed a similar frequency of negative emotional events whatever the subject taught, but a lower intensity of unpleasant emotions, lower physical fatigue and higher scores of physical strength for PE student teachers in comparison with those of other subjects. The present findings confirmed that the specificities of PE lead to singular significant negative events for PE students during initial training. Finally, the health outcomes (intensity of unpleasant emotions, burnout and vigor) suggest that PE teachers have developed specific resources to cope with school constraints, probably in relation to their sport experiences.