Journal articles on the topic 'Degree Discipline: Cello'

The accurate measurement of cell and nuclei contours are critical for the sensitive and specific detection of changes in normal cells in several medical informatics disciplines. Within microscopy, this task is facilitated using fluorescence cell stains, and segmentation is often the first step in such approaches. Due to the complex nature of cell issues and problems inherent to microscopy, unsupervised mining approaches of clustering can be incorporated in the segmentation of cells. In this study, we have developed and evaluated the performance of multiple unsupervised data mining techniques in cell image segmentation. We adapt four distinctive, yet complementary, methods for unsupervised learning, including those based on k-means clustering, EM, Otsu’s threshold, and GMAC. Validation measures are defined, and the performance of the techniques is evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively using synthetic and recently published real data. Experimental results demonstrate that k-means, Otsu’s threshold, and GMAC perform similarly, and have more precise segmentation results than EM. We report that EM has higher recall values and lower precision results from under-segmentation due to its Gaussian model assumption. We also demonstrate that these methods need spatial information to segment complex real cell images with a high degree of efficacy, as expected in many medical informatics applications.

While state has traditionally been the sole (or at least primary) unit of analysis in International Relations, scholars are increasingly recognizing non-state entities, such as interstate organizations, multinational companies, terrorist cells, religious institutions, non-governmental organizations, epistemic communities, and transnational advocacy networks as actors in international politics. A natural question arises: is International Relations, as a discipline, capable of conceptualizing and explicating complex webs of relations among a myriad of actors, or is mapping a new field of enquiry required? Transnational Studies, offered at various degree levels at several universities, positions itself as a sub-filed within Humanities, mainly preoccupied with historical, social, cultural and linguistic aspects of cross-border interactions. Global Studies seems to reconcile International Relations and Transnational Studies. However, Global Studies, as a discipline, is only in the making; its emergence is surrounded by healthy skepticism.

Purpose – This paper aims to show data about Spanish higher-education students’ usage, habits and perceptions regarding reading on new digital media to show the potential future of electronic books (e-books) and reading mobile devices (e-readers, tablets, cell phones, etc) in academia. It explores whether demographics and academic factors might influence e-book reading habits and attitudes and university students’ opinions about e-books vs print books. REWIL 2.0, a purpose-built research tool, was applied to measure students’ opinions about digital reading in different media and formats, considering their academic context, at the confluence of analog and digital materials and learning. Likewise, REWIL 2.0 detects who are e-book readers (eBR) and who are not and produces a statistics indicator to identify five categories of eBRs by their frequency of e-book reading. This research gathered 745 online surveys between April and July 2010 in 15 degree programs at the University of Granada: Spanish philology, English philology, history, mathematics, chemistry, environmental sciences, education, library and information science, law, medicine, biology, dentistry, computer systems, architecture and civil engineering. Design/methodology/approach – This present study is a transversal applied research, where 745 students were surveyed from 15 different academic disciplines offered at the University of Granada (Spain), representing the five main discipline areas. The survey was carried out by means of a structured online survey, with REWIL 2.0 research tool. To ensure internal consistency of correlation between two different survey items designed to measure e-book reading frequency, Pearson’s r reliability test was applied. Likewise, Persons’ chi-squared statistics were applied to test the hypotheses and to detect if significant correlation existed between academic disciplines and e-book reading frequency measured through a Likert scale. Findings – The present research is motivated by our interest in discovering what effect the current technological maelstrom and the rapid growth of new portable digital reading devices in the Spanish university environment are having on students’ lives, and the extent to which students have adopted new reading technologies. Their first aim is to establish who is reading e-books in the University? A second aim is to answer the following question: is the academic discipline a determinant factor in e-book reading habits and students’ attitudes about it? The authors began by considering the following hypotheses: University students’ attitudes to e-book reading and the way they use them will be determined by the scientific discipline they study. Students of humanities, social sciences and law will prefer to read traditional format books (printed paper), while students of experimental sciences, health and technical courses will prefer reading e-books. Students’ preferences will be determined by their previous reading experiences. Originality/value – The main objective of the present study is to learn whether there are any notable differences among university students from distinct disciplines with regard to their attitude and behavior toward e-books. The authors, therefore, set out to identify the segment of the student population that does not read e-books yet (non-eBRs) from those who have already read at least one (eBRs), and within this segment, the readers that have read e-books recently (recent eBRs); find out how frequently university students are reading in different formats (paper and digital), document types (book, written press, etc.) and languages (textual, multimodal, etc.) identify what channels are used to access e-books; find out university students’ opinions on the advantages and disadvantages of reading e-books as compared to traditional print books; and identify the types of improvements or changes to the design–production–distribution–reception chain that students consider might help extend e-book reading.

A significant portion of the practice of medicine is dependent on individual acts of medical altruism. Many of these acts, such as the donation of blood, gametes, stem cells, and organs, entail varying degrees of bodily intrusion and, for the altruist, various combinations of discomfort, risk, and expense. Discussion of the ethics of altruism has typically been fragmented under various rubrics such as blood donation, organ and tissue transplantation, health information, and the assisted reproductive technologies. The ethics of these specific examples of altruism are best explored in conjunction with a broader discussion of their relatively neglected mother discipline, altruism in medicine.

Abstract. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of training on hematological and biochemical blood indices and acid–base balance as well as to attempt an assessment of the degree of driving horses' training based on examined parameters during the training cycle. The study was conducted on eight Polish Halfbred driving horses (aged 6–12 years). Each four-horse harness included two geldings and two mares. Blood was collected before and directly after training as well as after a 30 min recovery period. Blood samples were analyzed for hematological and biochemical parameters, as well as acid–base balance and glutathione peroxidase activity. The data were processed using a general linear model (ANOVA) procedure in Statistica v10. A significant (P < 0.01) post-exercise increase in heart rate and respiratory rate was noted. Changes (P < 0.01) in red blood cells (RBC), hemoglobin (HGB), glucose (GLU) and nonesterified fatty acids (NEFA) were observed after exercise. Correctness of the exercises affects the rate of recovery to rest values. The fastest recovery to the values of the rest period was noted in the case of RBC, HGB, LYM (lymphocytes), TCO2 (total carbon dioxide), HCO3− (bicarbonate concentration), GLU and NEFA. Training load did not cause acid–base balance disturbance, with visible compensation during the recovery period (increase in HCO3− and extracellular base excess (BE)). Changes in GPx activity were not confirmed statistically; however an increasing tendency was observed after training. Long-term exercises of driving horses cause significant lipomobilization. This study enables an evaluation and comparison of physical preparation to effort and intensity of driving horses' training. In the case of driving horses' training, there is a need to accept lower lactic acid (LA) (< 4 mmol L−1) values in aerobic–anaerobic threshold interpretation.

Background Several field studies have used fuel-cell breathalysers (FCB) to investigate the prevalence of alcohol intoxication. However, there is a lack of evidence evaluating the psychometric properties of these breathalysers outside of the forensic disciplines. Methods The current research describes four studies designed that assess the reliability and validity of portable platinum FCBs for research on alcohol intoxication. Utilising the Alcolizer LE5 breathalyser and, to a lesser degree, the Lifeloc FC-20 and the Lion Intoxilyzer 8000, each study sampled patrons frequenting popular night-time entertainment districts with varying levels of alcohol intoxication. Results Study one and two found excellent test-retest reliability and inter-instrument reliability for FCBs. Study three and four provided evidence to support the convergent validity of the two FCBs (the LE5 with the FC20), and with an evidential breathalyser (i.e., the Lion Intoxilyzer 8000; EB). Discussion A 93–97% agreement rate between breathalyser readings was found across the four studies. Portable FCB are recommended as a reliable and valid instrument for research designs requiring quick alcohol intoxication estimations in large populations. Strategies to enhance reliable and valid readings are provided for field researchers.

Abstract Introduction Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder characterized mainly by excessive daytime sleepiness, cataplexy, sleep paralysis, hypnagogic-hypnopompic hallucinations and sleep fragmentation. Besides those most known manifestations, other findings may be present in patients with narcolepsy, such as weight gain, reduction in eating satiety and psychological alterations. It is also observed that part of the hypocretin-producing cells projections are present in the olfactory bulb, and the conditions appears to be related to changes in olfaction. Methods a cross sectional study was performed in patients diagnosed with narcolepsy followed up by the excessive daytime sleepiness outpatient clinic of the discipline o Sleep Biology and Medicine of the Department of Psychobiology of the Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil. Olfaction was assessed by the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test (UPSIT) following an interview and nasal cavity examination. Patients with conditions and disorders that may cause hyposmia were excluded. Results 77 patients were assessed, of which 56 had type-1 narcolepsy and 21 with type-2 narcolepsy. The results were compared with the test’s reference data. Most patients with type-1 and type-2 narcolepsy presented scores compatible with some degree of olfactory impairment. No significant difference was observed between the scores of patients with type-1 and type-2 narcolepsy. Conclusion The present study shows most patients with narcolepsy have some degree of olfactory impairment. This impairment doesn’t appear to be explained by alterations in the hypocretineric cells as pointed out in previous studies. The changes in olfaction in people with narcolepsy may cause the satiety alterations often observed in them. Other mechanisms involved with the genesis of hyposmia in those patients should be studied further. Support AFIP - Associação Fundo de Incentivo à Pesquisa

With the continuous development of the concept of diagnosis and treatment, the current industry’s treatment model has developed into a multidisciplinary comprehensive treatment. That is, in view of the pathological characteristics and clinical stages of breast cancer, corresponding methods such as surgery, chemotherapy, endocrine therapy, radiotherapy, and biological targeted therapy are adopted to provide comprehensive treatment of patients with multiple disciplines. This paper combines experimental research to research and analyze the degree of pathological remission of breast cancer by adjuvant chemotherapy and combines investigation and analysis and group trials to study and explore the effect of adjuvant chemotherapy. Moreover, this paper fully considers the patient’s response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy and compares the changes in tumor cell abundance before and after chemotherapy to observe the response of the patient’s primary tumor to chemotherapy at a microscopic level. Therefore, this study has made a relatively objective and accurate evaluation of the chemotherapy efficacy of tumor tissues, which can provide a reference for subsequent related research.

The human mind is the mediator of knowledge about the world because no human being has direct knowledge of their surrounding reality. All knowledge is „read and transported” by the brain and nervous system. Regardless of the progressive nature of the research into psychic phenomena, we are still faced with the mystery of what phenomena occur in the brain. The difficulties are mainly due to the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science. Cognitive science as an interdisciplinary field, which attempts to explore the human mind and find a common area of research to unite all scientific research. Attempts to understand the mind constitute the most interdisciplinary task. Neuroscience is one of the disciplines that make up modern cognitive science. Neurobiology suggests the variety of processes that occur either in individual cells, the brain, and the nervous system, and the human body. Modern studies indicate the possibility of cognition of the brain in order to apply effective teaching and education. How does the brain learn? This question stimulates researchers to interdisciplinary cooperation in order to obtain a satisfactory answer. Recently there have been many new concepts related to research into the brain and methods that allow you to better utilize the potential of the brain in order to undertake a conscious process of self-discovery. The science of the brain is not only a part of medical science or biology but also disciplines such as pedagogy and didactics. The concepts neuroteaching, neurodidactics, and neurotechnologies are new, still relatively unknown, and unused. Reflecting on the conscious changes in the learning process, it is worth looking into the rules of biofeedback and neurofeedback and the possibilities of practically applying EEG biofeedback training, which is becoming a readily available method. Insightful observations of bioelectrical activity of the brain have led to naming multiple correlations between the mental state of individuals, their behavior, and EEG activity. Biofeedback, as a neurotechnological road to self-discovery, allows for the individual functions of the brain and body, previously considered involuntary, to become dependent on our will to a certain degree. Upon obtaining a higher degree of self-awareness, self-regulatory responses develop. Proponents of this method argue that self-regulation will become a major part of health care in the twenty-first century.

The paper deals with the experience report of a project developed with students of the discipline Poetic Languages: The contemporary “Image”, part of an interdisciplinary master’s program. The project proposal was elaborated as means to contribute to the understanding of ways of articulation and construction of images in contemporary times, as well as starting reflections on said subject’s theory, processes and practices that take into consideration technical hybridities and relational structures. The project accomplished an art intervention at a social and cultural space, dedicated to children in need, in the town of São Carlos, São Paulo state (Brazil). The activity was developed throughout 135 hours, equivalent to the designated class hours of the discipline’s semester, implicating not only the professor, five master’s degree students, but also the educational coordinators, workers and children supported by the social project. Comprising both research methodologies and field studies in the artistic area, this work concludes in a report of the production of lambe-lambe style posters, since its literature research, up until the fruition of before mentioned art intervention. Both the research and the practical activity procedures brought to light a need to dominate processes of imanence and transcendence when phenomena get mixed up with our own experiences. As a final result to this project, one can say that it was possible to comprehend relations between what’s sayable and non-sayable, visible and non-visible, when concerning images, all while establishing consistent exchanges between theory and practice.ResumoTrata-se do relato de experiência de um projeto desenvolvido com alunos da disciplina Linguagens Poéticas: A “imagem” contemporânea do curso de mestrado interdisciplinar. A proposta foi elaborada com o objetivo de contribuir para o entendimento dos modos de articulação e construção da imagem na contemporaneidade e refletir sobre a teoria, os processos e práticas contemporâneas que levam em conta hibridismos técnicos e estruturas relacionais. O projeto teve o objetivo de fazer uma intervenção artística no espaço de apoio social e cultural dedicado às crianças carentes de uma região da cidade de São Carlos, interior de São Paulo. A atividade foi desenvolvida ao longo das 135 horas/aula que compõem o semestre letivo da disciplina e envolveu, além da docente, um corpo de cinco mestrandos do programa de pós-graduação, bem como o apoio da coordenadoria pedagógica, funcionários e atendidos pelo projeto social. Compreendendo a metodologia de pesquisa e estudo no campo das artes, o trabalho registrou e relatou o processo da produção de cartazes lambe-lambe desde a pesquisa bibliográfica até a intervenção artística em muros. No procedimento de estudo e prática notou-se a necessidade de dominar o processo de imanência e transcendência quando os fenômenos se confundem com nossa própria vivência. Com o resultado do projeto foi possível compreender as relações do dizível e não dizível, visível e não visível da imagem, além de estabelecer consistentes permutas entre a teoria e a prática.Palavras-chave: Imagem contemporânea, Estudo em artes, Intervenção artística.Keywords: Contemporary image, Art studies, Art intervention.ReferencesADORNO, Theodor W. Prismas - Crítica cultural e sociedade. São Paulo: Ática, 1998.AZEVEDO, Agatha de Souza. JR, Rancière e a política das imagens: uma análise sobre rosto, olhar e subjetivação na fotografia. In: CONGRESSO DE CIÊNCIAS DA COMUNICAÇÃO NA REGIÃO SUDESTE, 19., 2014, Vila Velha. Anais... . Vila Velha: Intercom, 2014. p. 1 - 13.BARTHES, Roland. A Câmara clara. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2018.BAUDRILLARD, Jean. Simulacros e simulação. Lisboa: Relógio d'Água, 1991.BAUDRILLARD, Jean. A arte da desaparição. Rio de Janeiro: Travessa, 1997.BAUDRILLARD, Jean. A fotografia como mídia do desaparecimento. CISC: Centro disciplinar de semiótica da cultura e da cultura e da mídia, 2002. Disponível em http://www. cisc. org. br/portal/biblioteca/iv13_midiadesapa. pdf. Acesso em: 22, set. 2019.BOURRIAUD, Nicolas. Estética relacional. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2009.BRITES, Bianca; TESSLER, Elida. O meio como ponto zero – Metodologia da pesquisa em Artes Plásticas. Porto Alegre: Editora UFRGS, 2002.DEBORD, Guy. A sociedade do espetáculo. Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2017.FREDERICO, Celso. Debord: from spectacle to simulacrum. Matrizes, v. 4, n. 1, p. 179, 2014.PALLAMIN, Vera. Arte, cultura e cidade. São Paulo: Annablume, 2015.RANCIÈRE, Jacques. O destino das imagens. Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2012.REY, Sandra. Da prática à teoria: três instâncias metodológicas sobre a pesquisa em artes visuais. Porto Arte, Porto Alegre: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Artes Visuais-UFRGS, n.13, v.7, 1996.SEEL, Martin. Estética del aparecer. Buenos Aires: Katz, 2011.SILVA, Rubens Rangel; VENEROSO, Maria do Carmo de Freitas. Arte gráfica de protesto: reflexões acerca dos cartazes políticos das jornadas de junho. In: CONGRESSO BRASILEIRO DE PESQUISA E DESENVOLVIMENTO EM DESIGN, 12, 2016, Belo Horizonte. Proceedings... . Belo Horizonte: Blucher Design Proceedings, 2016. p. 607-617.e3727100

There is a much increased demand for a degree of interworking between software packages as it is no longer reasonable to expect a single application to be able to do its job without support or reference to data and events that are handled by other closely related application systems. In practice, it is essential to help ensure and maintain discipline and harmony to enable graceful co-operation among interoperating software components. Functional interaction management is identified as a vital service requirement necessary to help address this issue of software interoperability. Current manufacturing control systems (MCS) exhibit deficiencies and constraints that inhibit or complicate their interaction. This paper reports on ongoing research work where the main thrust is to derive a new generation of reconfigurable and modular forms of MCS, the components of which can ‘functionally interact’ and share common information through accessing distributed data repositories in an efficient, changeable and standardized manner. The emphasis is on: (a) development of an effective framework to manage functional interaction between MCS components, which typically may comprise software packages that facilitate production planning, product design, finite capacity scheduling and cell control; (b) ‘soft’ integration of these MCS components over the CIM-BIOSYS integrating infrastructure.

Unlike other STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) disciplines, program guidelines for undergraduate physiology degree programs have yet to be firmly established. The purpose of this study was to examine the use of physiology core concepts within undergraduate physiology curricula to discern whether a common subset could be broadly recommended for inclusion in programmatic guidelines. A curricular survey tool was developed to evaluate the depth to which each core concept was included in physiology curricula. Seven self-selected physiology programs assessed core concept inclusion across all courses within the major (0 = not covered, 1 = minimally covered, and 2 = covered to a great extent). The top core concepts ranked by each institution varied considerably, but all were robustly represented across programs. The top five combined rankings for all institutions were as follows: 1) interdependence (1.47 ± 0.63); 2) structure/function (1.46 ± 0.72); 3) homeostasis (1.45 ± 0.71); 4) scientific reasoning (1.44 ± 0.70); and 5) cell-cell communication (1.38 ± 0.75). No common subset of specific core concepts was evident among the seven participating institutions. Next, results were compared with recent Physiology Majors Interest Group (P-MIG) faculty and student surveys that ascertained perceptions of the top five most important core concepts. Three core concepts (homeostasis, structure/function, cell-cell communication) appeared in the top five in more than one-half of survey questions included. We recommend that future programmatic guidelines focus on inclusion of the core concepts of physiology as general models to scaffold learning in physiology curricula, but the programmatic guidelines should allow flexibility in the core concepts emphasized based on program objectives.

ABSTRACTSoft lithographic printing techniques can be used to print nanoparticle dispersions with relative ease while allowing for a measureable degree of controllability of printed feature size. In this study, a Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) stamp was used to print multi-layered, porous, nanoparticle dispersions of titanium dioxide (TiO2), for use in a dye-sensitized solar cell application. The gelled patterns were then sintered and the surface of the printed sample was chemically analyzed.X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) was used to determine the surface constituents of the printed sample. The presence of a secondary peak feature located approximately 2.8 eV above the high resolution O1s core level binding energy peak was attributed to a contamination layer. Fourier transform infrared spectra (FTIR) of the printed sample revealed the presence of vibrational modes characteristic of the asymmetric bond stretching of silica, located at approximate wavenumbers of 1260 and 1030 cm-1.Soft lithographic techniques are a viable manufacturing technique in a number of disciplines and sintered nano-oxide dispersions are readily used as reaction centers in a number of technologies. The presence of a residual, bonded silicate contamination layer may preclude the soft lithographic printing of chemically active oxide surfaces.

This study investigates the use of self-regulated in blended learning by students in doctoral education courses to complete advanced statistics lectures. Self-regulated in blended learning is described in four phases according to Zimmerman, namely planning, monitoring, evaluation, and reinforcing. The participants consisted of five students from 5 different disciplines, and were willing to share their learning experiences. Research data obtained by interview method and analyzed qualitatively. Validation uses two strategies, namely member checking and peer debriefing. Member checking is done after the data is formulated into themes, then the researcher will bring it back to the participants to find out their accuracy. Peer debriefing was conducted by colleagues to review and ask critical questions about this research. Colleagues have at least a doctoral degree. The results show that planning for the completion of student assignments begins with (1) setting goals and planning strategies with (a) planning time for completing assignments; (b) Cooperation with peers online and off-line; and (c) planning for technical issues; (2) Regularly calculate their scores every week after being given feedback on the results of the lecturer's assessment, and save the feedback results from completed assignments; (3) using assignment assessment rubrics, using lecturer feedback, and grades, to measure progress in lectures; (4) the strategies they have designed and implemented have succeeded in making success in doing the task.

Abstract Abstract 2570 Physician-scientists spend a significant proportion of their time doing research, alongside clinical practice and teaching. Recruitment to academic medicine appears insufficient for workforce needs, with a perception of a 'crisis' in academic medicine (Andrew I. Schafer The Vanishing Physician Scientist 2009). Policy initiatives are in place to counter this recruitment problem and make an academic medicine career more attractive to trainees. Hematologists have a unique translational role in medicine and research, straddling the divide between laboratory and patient care. Since hematology may be inherently more academic compared to other medical specialties, this recruitment crisis may be more relevant to our specialty. Hematologists' experiences of research have been poorly reported. We employed mixed qualitative methods to explore hematologists' views on these issues, using focus groups (14 participants) to explore the experiences of research and higher degrees. Following themes from these, we used an online survey to gain quantitative data and obtained results from 39 hematologists in the local network in North East London serving approximately 4 million people, including two teaching hospitals. Among attendings, 72% had completed a research degree and 52% were in academic positions. Of trainees, 36% were enrolled in a higher degree program. The focus groups felt that hematology has a strong role in research because of the inherently lab-based aspects of the work, access to tissue for research and the history of translational research. The survey supported this, with most feeling that the lab experience facilitated the transition of hematologists to research, and 77% agreeing that 'compared to other medical specialities, hematology is more academic'. The focus groups explored the benefits of doing a research degree, such as a PhD. These included gains in critical thinking, data interpretation skills, a chance to study a topic in depth and CV development. Drawbacks included dislike of the work involved, financial loss and the stress of research. Some expressed concern about losing clinical skills during years of full-time research, whilst others felt that skills gained during research translated to better clinical acumen in the long term. The survey explored this further. 74% felt that whilst clinical acumen decreased during full-time research, this returned almost immediately on return to practice. 21% felt that clinical skills were better in the long term as a result of doing a PhD. Competition for non-academic hematology posts in the UK is low, and most doctors who do research will not become academics. However, there are expectations that hematologists need a research experience to further their careers, and most participants felt that there was greater pressure for hematologists to do research compared to other disciplines, with this pressure greater in London. We considered this perception of pressure in the context of UK research funding. The Royal College of Pathologists estimate that of ≤450 million spent on UK cancer research, ≤50-100 million are spent on hematological malignancies. Research funding is therefore out of proportion to the disease burden of blood cancers (8% of cancer deaths). London has 31% of UK academic doctors, 5 medical schools and receives 33% of UK research funding. These data help explain the greater pressure (or opportunity) for hematologists to undertake research, particularly in London. We explored views on recruitment to academic medicine. Whilst ‘becoming an academic doctor’ was rated as the strongest motivation for hematologists to do a PhD, doctors who subsequently did not proceed to an academic career benefitted from the research experience. Whilst academic doctors felt that more hematologists need to do research and become academic doctors, this view was not held by non-academic hematologists (p<0.05). In conclusion, hematologists consider their specialty to be more academic, with the nature of the work facilitating research. Particular motivations drive hematologists to undertake research. The pressure to do research may be higher in hematology compared to other areas of medicine, despite low competition for jobs overall. Concerns about loss of clinical skills do not appear to be justified. The perception of a recruitment problem within academic hematology varies depending on whether academic or non-academic hematologists are surveyed. Disclosures: Gribben: Roche: Consultancy; Celgene: Consultancy; GSK: Honoraria; Napp: Honoraria.

This article reminisces about the life and key scientific achievements of Jan Evangelista Purkinje (1787–1869), a versatile 19th century Czech pioneer of modern experimental physiology. In 1804, after completing senior high school, Purkinje joined the Piarist monk order, but, after a 3-yr novitiate, he gave up the religious calling “to deal more freely with science.” In 1818, he earned a Medical Doctor degree from Prague University by defending a dissertation on intraocular phenomena observed in oneself. In 1823, Purkinje became a Physiology and Pathology professor at the Prussian Medical University in Breslau, where he innovated the traditional teaching methods of physiology. Purkinje’s contributions to physiology were manifold: accurate descriptions of various visual phenomena (e.g., Purkinje-Sanson images, Purkinje phenomenon), discovery of the terminal network of the cardiac conduction system (Purkinje fibers), identification of cerebellar neuronal bodies (Purkinje cells), formulation of the vertigo law (Purkinje’s law), discovery of criteria to classify human fingerprints, etc. In 1850, Purkinje accepted and held until his death the Physiology chair at Prague Medical Faculty. During this period, he succeeded in introducing the Czech idiom (in addition to long-established German and Latin) as a Medical Faculty teaching language. Additionally, as a zealous Czech patriot, he actively contributed to the naissance and consolidation of a national Czech identity conscience. Purkinje was a trend-setting scientist who, throughout his career, worked to pave the way for the renovation of physiology from a speculative discipline, ancilla of anatomy, into a factual, autonomous science committed to the discovery of mechanisms governing in-life functions.

There are many ways of describing and explaining the properties of living systems; causal, functional, and reductive accounts are necessary but no one account has primacy. The history of biology as a discipline has given excessive authority to reductionism, which collapses higher level accounts, such as social or behavioural ones, into molecular ones. Such reductionism becomes crudely ideological when applied to the human condition, with its claims for genes “for” everything from sexual orientation to compulsive shopping. The current enthusiasm for genetics and ultra-Darwinist accounts, with their selfish-gene metaphors for living processes, misunderstand both the phenomena of development and the interactive role that DNA and the fluid genome play in the cellular orchestra. DNA is not a blueprint, and the four dimensions of life (three of space, one of time) cannot be read off from its one-dimensional strand. Both developmental and evolutionary processes are more than merely instructive or selective; the organism constructs itself, a process known as autopoiesis, through a lifeline trajectory. Because organisms are thermodynamically open systems, living processes are homeodynamic, not homeostatic. The self-organising membrane-bound and energy-utilising metabolic web of the cell must have evolved prior to so-called naked replicators. Evolution is constrained by physics, chemistry, and structure; not all change is powered by natural selection, and not all phenotypes are adaptive. Finally, therefore, living processes are radically indeterminate; like all other living organisms, but to an even greater degree, we make our own future, though in circumstances not of our own choosing.

Трехуровневая система подготовки кадров по селекции, семеноводству и биотехнологии в ФГБОУ ВО РГАУ – МСХА имени К.А. Тимирязева включает базовую и основательную подготовку выпускников бакалавриата к профессиональной деятельности в государственных и частных организациях селекционного профиля, а также к углубленному обучению в магистратуре и аспирантуре по научной специальности «Селекция, семеноводство и биотехнология». В университете по селекционному профилю одновременно обучаются 160–200 студентов бакалавриата по направлению «Селекция, генетика и биотехнология садовых культур», «Генетика и селекция сельскохозяйственных культур», 40–60 студентов магистратуры по программам «Технологии ускоренной селекции растений» и «Селекция и генетика растений» в рамках двух направлений «Садоводство» и «Агрономия». Четырехлетняя образовательная программа бакалавриата представлена общеобразовательными дисциплинами, читаемыми на 1–2 курсах, с 3 курса начинается блок специальных дисциплин, формирующих профессиональные компетенции селекционеров. Общий объем профильных дисциплин и практик (учебной и производственной) в составе образовательной программы бакалавриата (без учета смежных агрономических дисциплин) составляет 70 зачетных единиц, или 30% от всего объема образовательной программы. Теоретические знания и практические навыки, приобретаемые студентами бакалавриата, позволяют выпускникам уверенно представлять себя на рынке труда или продолжить углубленное обучение в магистратуре. Двухлетние магистерские программы включают преимущественно дисциплины, формирующие профессиональные компетенции выпускника, а научно-исследовательская работа в рамках производственной практики, занимающей 40 зач.ед., или 1/3 от общей трудоемкости образовательной программы магистратуры, позволяет магистрантам развивать свои профессиональные навыки в любой из интересующих его областей науки и практики, к примеру, в области молекулярной селекции, культуры клеток и тканей, генетической инженерии или традиционной селекции. В университете реализуется цикл дополнительных образовательных программ для повышения квалификации специалистов разного уровня в области селекции и семеноводства. Реализуют образовательные программы профессионалы-практики на развитой материально-технической базе университета, оснащенной современным оборудованием, и на базе ведущих партнерских Федеральных исследовательских центров. Educational programs in breeding, seed production and biotechnology in the FSBEI of Higher Education Russian Timiryazev State Agrarian University includes basic training of bachelor's graduates for professional activities in public and private breeding organizations, as well as for in-depth training in master's and postgraduate studies in the «Breeding, seed production and biotechnology». At the university, 160–200 undergraduate students are studying at the specialization of «Breeding, genetics and biotechnology of horticultural crops», «Genetics and breeding of agricultural crops», 40–60 master's students in the programs «Technologies of accelerated plant breeding» and «Plants Breeding and genetics' within the framework of two directions «Horticulture» and «Agronomy». The four-year educational program of the bachelor's degree is represented by general educational disciplines taught in the 1st–2nd year, the block of special disciplines that form the professional competencies of breeders begins from the 3rd year. The total volume of specialized disciplines and practices (educational and industrial) as part of the undergraduate educational program, excluding related agronomic disciplines, is 70 credits or 30% of the entire volume of the educational program. The theoretical knowledge and practical skills acquired by undergraduate students allow graduates to confidently represent themselves in the labor market or continue in-depth studies in the master's program. Two-year master's programs include mainly disciplines that form the professional competencies of the graduate, and research work within the framework of industrial practice, which occupies 40 credits or 1/3 of the total labor intensity of the educational program of the master's program, allows master students to develop their professional skills in any of the areas of science and practice that are of interest to them, for example, in the field of molecular breeding, cell and tissue culture, genetic engineering or traditional breeding and seed technologies. The university is implementing a cycle of additional educational programs to improve the skills of specialists of various levels in the field of breeding and seed production. The implementation of educational programs is carried out by professional practitioners using equipped with modern equipment facilities of University and Federal Research Centers.

Usually, polyhedra are viewed as the underlying constructive cells of packing or tiling in many disciplines, including crystallography, protein folding, viruses structure, building architecture, etc. Here, inspired by the flexible origami polyhedra (commonly called origami flexiballs), we initially probe into their intrinsic metamaterial properties and robotized methods from fabrication to actuation. Firstly, the topology, geometries and elastic energies of shape shifting are analyzed for the three kinds of origami flexiballs with extruded outward rhombic faces. Provably, they meet the definitions of reconfigurable and transformable metamaterials with switchable stiffness and multiple degrees of freedom. Secondly, a new type of soft actuator with rhombic deformations is successfully put forward, different from soft bionic deformations like elongating, contracting, bending, twisting, spiraling, etc. Further, we redesign and fabricate the three-dimensional (3D) printable structures of origami flexiballs considering their 3D printability and foldability, and magnetically actuated them through the attachment of magnetoactive elastomer. Lastly, a fully soft in-pipe robot prototype is presented using the origami flexiball as an applicable attempt. Experimental work clearly suggests that the presented origami flexiball robot has good adaptability to various pipe sizes, and also can be easily expanded to different scales, or reconfigured into more complex metastructures by assembly. In conclusion, this research provides a newly interesting and illuminating member for the emerging families of mechanical metamaterials, soft actuators and soft robots.

Abstract Background: Herediatry Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT), is also known as Osler-Weber-Rendu syndrome is an inherited familial disorder of vascular dysplasia with a variety of clinical manifestations including arteriovenous malformations of hepatic, pulmonary, cerebral circulation and with characteristic mucocutaneous telangiectasias. The underlying arteriovenous malformation may lead to recurrent and sometimes severe bleeding, of which epistaxis is the the most common. Excessive bleeding may in turn contribute to the development of severe iron deficiency anemia. Current management of excessive bleeding can be local therapy such as nasal cauterization versus systemic treatment in the form of iron infusions, red blood cell transfusions and angiogenesis inhibitors. Currently, there is no cure for HHT. Despite screening measures, most patients with HHT are unaware of their diagnosis. The incidence of HHT has also been subject to under-reporting. Currently, the United States lacks a formal registry for pateints with HHT. Other countries have initiated a registry to understand HHT in their institution. Given the significant morbidity associated with HHT, the purpose of this single institution, multidisciplinary study is to understand the prevelance and clinical characteristics of HHT and thus facilitate better treatment measures and continuity of care for patients with HHT. Methods: A retrospective study was made of all patients diagnosed with HHT at our institution from 2008 to 2014. Epidemilogical data, presence or absence of first degree relatives with HHT, visceral involvement, severity of epistaxis using a validated epistaxis severity scoring system, genetic testing for ENG or ACVRL1 gene mutation, and current local or systemic treatment were evaluated. Results: 27 patients ranging from age of 11 to 78 years were diagnosed as HHT. Median age was 52. 15 patients were male and 12 patients were female. 6 pateints had ENG gene mutation and 1 patient had ACVRL1 gene mutation. 3 out of 6 patients with ENG gene mutation did not have significant iron deficiency anemia. 11 patients had more than one first degree relative with HHT. All patients had symptoms of epistaxis. 8 patients had more than 1 visceral involvement with gastrointestinal and pulmonary manifestations being the most common. 11 patients had pulmonary arteriovenous malformations, 4 had cerebral arteriovenous malformations, and 8 had gastrointestinal manifestaions. Majority of patients had nasal cauterization to control their nasal bleeding. Of the local treatments, 1 patient used intranasal bevacizumab. Of the systemic treatments, 1 patient used estrogen and 1 used tamoxifen and 1 used thalidomide. 8 patients received intravenous iron therapy with significant improvement in their symptoms. 7 patients has multiple red blood cell transfusions. The most common discipline to evaluate patients with HHT was otolaryngology, hematology and genetics department. Conclusion: This is the first single institution, multidisciplinary registry created to decribe the occurrence of HHT in our institution and to identify and understand the clinical presentation of HHT. This data will help improve better screening measures, diagnosis, treatment options and improve clinical care and outcomes for patients with HHT in our institution and also help facilitate a future multicenter registry. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

The present research presents the results about the implantation and development of the virtual master room that have as support the following pillars: (i) distance education (DE) and virtual learning environments (VLE); (ii) large number of students and several courses, characterizing the context as a master's room, with the complexities that this situation commits for interaction and accompaniment to the students; (iii). The pedagogical practices derived from andragogy and heutagogy. The methodology used for this research is characterized as a case study, aiming to juxtapose the transferability of what was found for other rooms of the same nature in DE courses. It was structured a research plan involving the teachers, the data collected from the interactions and the identification of pedagogical practices. The research scenario was a private institution, with a large number of students, which works at DE. The follow-up of the students and teachers in the master's hall occurred in a period of fourteen weeks, this time of duration of a certain discipline. The conclusions of the research point out that interactions between the educational actors happen only with the intervention of the teachers, that the students prefer to study for the written material, although other materials are included, and that the teachers' workload to break this educational culture of passivity needs to be dialogue within the educational institution, in addition to the training of teachers to work in the context of the master's course in the DE course, and the operational implications of the VLE.ResumoA presente pesquisa apresenta os resultados sobre a implantação e desenvolvimento da sala máster virtual que tem por sustentação os seguintes pilares: (i) educação a distância (EaD) e os ambientes virtuais de aprendizagem (AVA); (ii) grande número de alunos e de diversos cursos, caracterizando o contexto como uma sala máster, com as complexidades que essa situação comete para interação e acompanhamento aos alunos; (iii) as práticas pedagógicas oriundas da andragogia e heutagogia. A metodologia utilizada para esta pesquisa caracteriza-se como estudo de caso, com objetivo de justapor a transferibilidade do que foi encontrado para outras salas da mesma natureza em cursos EaD. Foi estruturado um plano de pesquisa envolvendo os professores, os dados coletados das interações e a identificação das práticas pedagógicas. O cenário da pesquisa foi uma instituição privada, de grande número de alunos, que atua na EaD. O acompanhamento dos alunos e professores na sala máster ocorreu num período de quatorze semanas, tempo este de duração de determinada disciplina. As conclusões da pesquisa direcionam que as interações entre os atores educacionais acontecem somente com intervenção dos professores, que os alunos preferem estudar pelo material escrito, apesar de constar outros materiais, e que a carga horária de professores para quebrar esta cultural educacional da passividade precisa ser dialogada dentro da instituição de ensino, além da formação de professores para atuar no contexto de sala máster em curso EaD, e a implicações operacionais do AVA.Palavras-chave: Educação a distância, Práticas pedagógicas, Teorias, Massificação.Keywords: Distance education, Pedagogical practices, Theories, Massification.ReferencesALLEN, D.; TANNER, K. Infusing active learning into the large-enrollment biology class: Seven strategies from the simple to the complex. Cell Biology Education, 4 (Winter), 2005, 262-268.CENSO EAD.BR: Relatório Analítico da Aprendizagem a Distância no Brasil 2015 = Censo EAD.BR: Analytic Report of Distance Learning in Brazil 2015/[organização].CROCHICK, N. Interesse de saber: um estudo com adolescente do ensino médio. Online. 2011 [internet]. Disponível em http://www.bv.fapesp.br/pt/publicacao/79762/interesse-de-saber-um-estudo-com-adolescente-do-ensino-medi/. Acessado em julho de 2017.GUDWIN, R. R. Aprendizagem ativa. Online. s. d. [internet]. Disponível em http://faculty.dca.fee.unicamp.br/gudwin/activelearning. Acesso em julho de 2017.HOLLOWAY, S. 4 Ways to bring gamification of education to your classroom. Online. s. d. [internet]. Disponível em https://tophat.com/blog/gamification-education-class/. Acesso em julho de 2017.HOLMBERG, B. Growth and structure of distance education. London: Croom Helm Ltda., 1986.LITTO, F. M.; FORMIGA, M. Educação a Distância: estado da arte. São Paulo: Pearson Education do Brasil, 2009.MACHADO, Dinamara P. Análises das Potencialidades das Práticas Formativas em um curso de Pedagogia na Modalidade a distância. 2015. Disponível em: https://sapientia.pucsp.br/bitstream/handle/9850/1/Dinamara%20Pereira%20Machado.pdf. Acesso em agosto 2017MARQUES, J. R. Qual a importância da visão sistêmica de uma empresa? Online. 2015 [internet]. Disponível em http://www.ibccoaching.com.br/portal/rh-gestao-pessoas/qual-a-importancia-da-visao-sistemica-de-uma-empresa/. Acesso em julho de 2015.MARTINI, A. L. G.; PERIPOLLI, O. J. Os meios de comunicação como ferramenta pedagógica. Online. 2011 [internet]. Disponível em http://sinop.unemat.br/projetos/revista/index.php/eventos/article/viewFile/388/203. Acesso em julho de 2017.MUNHOZ, A. S. Aprendizagem baseada em problemas: ferramenta de apoio ao docente no processo de ensino e aprendizagem. São Paulo: editora CENGAGE, 2016.MUNHOZ, A. S. Qualidade de ensino nas grandes salas de aula. São Paulo, 2016b.MUNHOZ, A. S.; MARTINS, D. R. Aprender pelo erro – vantagens da estratégia na educação de jovens e adultos. Online. 2015 [internet]. Disponível em http://www.abed.org.br/congresso2015/anais/pdf/BD_34.pdf. Acesso em julho de 2017.PIRES, H. F. Universidade, políticas públicas e novas tecnologias aplicadas à educação a distância. Revista Advir, Rio de Janeiro, n. 14, p. 22-30, 2001.RODRIGUES, C. Evasão é o maior problema do ensino a distância, aponta estudo. 2012 [internet]. Disponível em https://educacao.uol.com.br/noticias/2012/08/02/evasao-e-o-maior-obstaculo-ao-ensino-a-distancia-para-instituicoes-diz-estudo.htm. Acesso em julho de 2017.TORI, R. A presença das tecnologias interativas na educação. Online. 2010 [internet]. Disponível em: https://www.google.com.br/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiPp9W37erUAhUDiJAKHT63C_cQFggwMAI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcomunicacaomediadaporcomputador.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F12%2Fprticas-que-aumentam-presena-social.html&usg=AFQjCNFIGDhWz4rR61YsW_paW3XaavKDNg. Acesso em julho de 2017.e3841012

The aim of the study is to apply the theory of pedagogical technologies to reveal the possibilities of the new content and methodological line “Big Data Analysis” in the aspect of modernizing the training system of the future economist.Materials and methods. During the study, theoretical and empirical research methods were used, in particular, a theoretical analysis of methods for structuring the content of education and managing the educational and cognitive activities of higher school students based on technological goal-setting and identifying a sequence of tasks, according to the content and methods of solving graduates close to future professional activities; studying the products of pedagogical activities of lecturers of higher education and experimental work, including the method of pedagogical experiment.Results. The necessity of modernization of the system of professional training of the future economist in the context of the development of data science through the selection and implementation of a new content-methodological line “Big Data Analysis” is substantiated. It points to the demand for methods of pedagogical design and the theory of pedagogical technologies for the methodologically expedient inclusion of elements of Big Data theory in the practice of professional training of future bachelors of economics. At the same time, attention is paid to both the content of already developed academic disciplines “Probability theory and mathematical statistics”, “Decision theory”, “System’s analysis in Economics”, “Instrumental methods in Economics”, and the setting of new professionally significant academic disciplines related to quantitative justification of the decisions made. The article presents and methodically describes the components of the content-methodological line “Big Data Analysis”: firstly, a sequence of six micro-goals that allow setting the implementation of this contentmethodological line in the language of educational and cognitive activities of the future bachelor of economics and taking into account the capabilities of new digital tools that support Big Data analysis models; secondly, five didactic modules that can be used to form individual educational trajectories of students of economic bachelor’s degree. Six types of application tasks are presented and characterized, which are of fundamental importance for the implementation of this content-methodological line. These tasks include the following: “Application problem for the analysis of Big Data on the RapidMiner platform”; “Data clustering application”; “Applied problem of soft and hard clustering”; “Applied classification problem”; “Applied problem on the application of methods for finding association rules”; “Applied problem for text mining”.Conclusion. The approach proposed by the authors to structuring the content of professional training of the future bachelor of economics allows us to maintain the balance of four educational components of the content and methodological line “Big Data Analysis”: experience in cognitive and creative activities, experience in implementing standard methods of activity and emotional and value relations (ideals of entrepreneurship, value orientations and motives of economic activity, etc.) The material presented in this article can be useful for lecturers of the higher economic school, as well as for everyone who is interested in the modern achievements of data science.

Downscaling coarse global and regional climate models allows researchers to access weather and climate data at finer temporal and spatial resolution, but there remains a need to compare these models with empirical data sources to assess model accuracy. Here, we validate a widely used software for generating North American downscaled climate data, ClimateNA, with a novel empirical data source, 20th century weather journals kept by Admiralty Island, Alaska homesteader, Allen Hasselborg. Using Hasselborg’s journals, we calculated monthly precipitation and monthly mean of the maximum daily air temperature across the years 1926 to 1954 and compared these to ClimateNA data generated from the Hasselborg homestead location and adjacent areas. To demonstrate the utility and potential implications of this validation for other disciplines such as hydrology, we used an established regression equation to generate time series of 95% low duration flow estimates for the month of August using mean annual precipitation from ClimateNA predictions and Hasselborg data. Across 279 months, we found strong correlation between modeled and observed measurements of monthly precipitation (ρ = 0.74) and monthly mean of the maximum daily air temperature (ρ = 0.98). Monthly precipitation residuals (calculated as ClimateNA data - Hasselborg data) generally demonstrated heteroscedasticity around zero, but a negative trend in residual values starting during the last decade of observations may have been due to a shift to the cold-phase Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Air temperature residuals demonstrated a consistent but small positive bias, with ClimateNA tending to overestimate air temperature relative to Hasselborg’s journals. The degree of correlation between weather patterns observed at the Hasselborg homestead site and ClimateNA data extracted from spatial grid cells across the region varied by wet and dry climate years. Monthly precipitation from both data sources tended to be more similar across a larger area during wet years (mean ρ across grid cells = 0.73) compared to dry years (mean ρ across grid cells = 0.65). The time series of annual 95% low duration flow estimates for the month of August generated using ClimateNA and Hasselborg data were moderately correlated (ρ = 0.55). Our analysis supports previous research in other regions which also found ClimateNA to be a robust source for past climate data estimates.

Active cathode particles are fundamental architectural units for the composite electrode of Li-ion batteries. The microstructure of the particles has a profound impact on their behavior and, consequently, on the cell-level electrochemical performance. LiCoO2 (LCO, a dominant cathode material) is often in the form of well-shaped particles, a few micrometres in size, with good crystallinity. In contrast to secondary particles (an agglomeration of many fine primary grains), which are the other common form of battery particles populated with structural and chemical defects, it is often anticipated that good particle crystallinity leads to superior mechanical robustness and suppressed charge heterogeneity. Yet, sub-particle level charge inhomogeneity in LCO particles has been widely reported in the literature, posing a frontier challenge in this field. Herein, this topic is revisited and it is demonstrated that X-ray absorption spectra on single-crystalline particles with highly anisotropic lattice structures are sensitive to the polarization configuration of the incident X-rays, causing some degree of ambiguity in analyzing the local spectroscopic fingerprint. To tackle this issue, a methodology is developed that extracts the white-line peak energy in the X-ray absorption near-edge structure spectra as a key data attribute for representing the local state of charge in the LCO crystal. This method demonstrates significantly improved accuracy and reveals the mesoscale chemical complexity in LCO particles with better fidelity. In addition to the implications on the importance of particle engineering for LCO cathodes, the method developed herein also has significant impact on spectro-microscopic studies of single-crystalline materials at synchrotron facilities, which is broadly applicable to a wide range of scientific disciplines well beyond battery research.

<P>Background: Photoluminescent materials have been used for diverse applications in the fields of science and engineering, such as optical storage, biological labeling, noninvasive imaging, solid-state lasers, light-emitting diodes, theranostics/theragnostics, up-conversion lasers, solar cells, spectrum modifiers, photodynamic therapy remote controllers, optical waveguide amplifiers and temperature sensors. Nanosized luminescent materials could be ideal candidates in these applications. </P><P> Objective: This review is to present a brief overview of photoluminescent nanofibers obtained through electrospinning and their emission characteristics. </P><P> Methods: To prepare bulk-scale nanosized materials efficiently and cost-effectively, electrospinning is a widely used technique. By the electrospinning method, a sufficiently high direct-current voltage is applied to a polymer solution or melt; and at a certain critical point when the electrostatic force overcomes the surface tension, the droplet is stretched to form nanofibers. Polymer solutions or melts with a high degree of molecular cohesion due to intermolecular interactions are the feedstock. Subsequent calcination in air or specific gas may be required to remove the organic elements to obtain the desired composition. </P><P> Results: The luminescent nanofibers are classified based on the composition, structure, and synthesis material. The photoluminescent emission characteristics of the nanofibers reveal intriguing features such as polarized emission, energy transfer, fluorescent quenching, and sensing. An overview of the process, controlling parameters and techniques associated with electrospinning of organic, inorganic and composite nanofibers are discussed in detail. The scope and potential applications of these luminescent fibers also conversed. </P><P> Conclusion: The electrospinning process is a matured technique to produce nanofibers on a large scale. Organic nanofibers have exhibited superior fluorescent emissions for waveguides, LEDs and lasing devices, and inorganic nanofibers for high-end sensors, scintillators, and catalysts. Multifunctionalities can be achieved for photovoltaics, sensing, drug delivery, magnetism, catalysis, and so on. The potential of these nanofibers can be extended but not limited to smart clothing, tissue engineering, energy harvesting, energy storage, communication, safe data storage, etc. and it is anticipated that in the near future, luminescent nanofibers will find many more applications in diverse scientific disciplines.</P>

Postgraduate medical training started with the apprenticeship model. This system heavily relied on tradition and subjectivity. In the middle of the 20th century, there was a gradual shift to an objective-based structure which had its roots in the works of Ralph Tyler and Benjamin Bloom. As a result, the curriculum became focused on predefined objectives in the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective domains. This drive was aimed to standardize the learning criteria across various centers and align the tools for assessment for postgraduate medical students.1In our country, the College of Physicians and Surgeons Pakistan (CPSP) has been the main center of postgraduate medical education since its inception in 1962. With both local and foreign-trained faculty members, it was one of the first centers to start training in Medical Education in collaboration with the World Health Organization in 1979.2 Various supervisor workshops and certifications by the Department of Medical Education helped equip the faculty with the tools required for curricular development.3 Thus new curricula in each discipline were developed and were called “structured training programs”. They were based on the objective approach and largely focused on summative assessments with very few formative assessments.4In the last two decades, new evidence and methods of postgraduate teaching and assessment have evolved in the west.5 Due to technological enhancements in patient care and vast development in the scientific pool of medical knowledge, there was a demand to define outcome-based competencies that strongly align with the demands of the workplace. As a result, competency-based curriculum models were developed which “de-emphasized time-based training and promised greater accountability, flexibility, and learner-centeredness”.1 CANMEDS (Canadian Medical Education Directives for Specialists) and ACGME (Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education) are two of the most popular systems having a competency-based framework which has been developed and successfully implemented in North America.Competency-based programs differ from objective-based ones in the fact that instead of prescribing how to teach or learn, they focus on the demonstration of various competencies required for practice. A competency-based curriculum must exhibit “teacher-learner relationship and responsibility, workplace-based assessment approach, alignment of competencies with criterion-referenced assessment, and flexible training duration”. 6 The system focuses on the attainment of competencies by the trainee to determine readiness for unsupervised practice rather than the length of their training.The structure of a competency-based curriculum is not based solely on objectives but rather uses defined Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) which align the teaching and assessment at the workplace with the competency frameworks. Another key aspect of this curricular structure is milestones which are based on the skill development framework of Dreyfus and Dreyfus.1 Both these key elements ensure that the trainee has attained the desired level of clinical skill to practice.The teaching of these competencies is often done in a workplace setting. Assessments employ Work Place Based Assessment (WPBA) tools such as Directly Observed Procedural Skills (DOPS) for procedural skills, Mini Clinical Evaluation Exercises (Mini-CEX), and Chart Based Recall (CBR) for clinical reasoning skills and 360-degree feedback for professionalism, interpersonal and communication skills. The system also caters to the extent of differential achievement of learners by offering targeted help to trainees in form of regular formative feedback which is an essential component of WPBAs.7As with other, in vogue ideas of medical education, the College of Surgeons and Physicians Pakistan was the first to develop a competency-based curricular framework nearly a decade ago. It was centered on patient care and involved professionalism, pedagogy, and advocacy as essential competencies to be acquired by the specialists.4,8 One key area where the CPSP fellowship program has developed since then is the development of portfolios 9 in the form of an electronic log (e-log) system for regular monitoring of training. The e-log system also includes reflections by supervisors and trainees which is a step in the right direction.10 Other technological solutions such as learning management systems, mobile applications, simulation, and social media if added could further enhance student learning and engagement.11,12 A close inspection of the current fellowship and membership structured training programs of CPSP reveals that despite the claim of running a competency-based framework, none of the key features of this system like defined EPAs, milestones, and WPBA strategies exist. Also, there is a lack of curricular alignment with the core competencies. So, it is difficult to consider it as a competency-based framework of postgraduate medical education in a true sense.Other medical universities in the country have relatively recently developed their Master of Surgery (MS) and Doctor of Medicine (MD) curricula. Wide variations exist in their induction, teaching & learning, assessment, and evaluation criteria. Also, limited literature is available to study their curricular structural design. Instead of adopting the new competency-based framework, most have chosen to retain the archaic objective-based curricular model. Unfortunately, with no guidelines from the nascent Pakistan Medical Commission, most programs tend to evolve in the light of the Higher Education Commission’s curriculum recommendations which are based on the older objective-based approach.13Rawalpindi Medical University right from its inception had the vision to develop a University Residency Program for post-graduate studies in Medicine, Surgery, and allied disciplines based on ACGME competency-based curriculum. Under this program, we train hundreds of trainees with regular monitoring via workplace-based assessment and 360-degree feedback forms. These are evaluated by the Quality Enhancement Cell in 6 monthly cycles with feedback provided to the trainees, supervisors, and administration. The trainee is also required to log cases and activities with reflections in their logbooks. Each clinical case is also added to their online portal for record and evaluation. These regular formative tools with monitoring and feedback help the trainee assess their weaknesses, supervisors plan their trainee's progress and administration take decisions for improvement. Formative assessments are done at the end of each year comprising of MCQ, SAQ, and OSCE formats. At the end of the program, a comprehensive summative assessment is also conducted to certify competence.Nine years ago, Wasim Jafri14 wrote that “The competency-based model provides an exceptional opportunity for Pakistani postgraduate medical institutes”. We believe that today Rawalpindi Medical University is a pioneer among the medical sector universities in providing this excellent opportunity to its trainees and supports other partnering universities in developing competency-based curricula.

In this paper I want to enrich, on the methodological and epistemological side, an earlier review of mine (in which there are more details on the physics of electrodynamic coherence), aiming to stimulate attention to some seemingly trivial or irrelevant aspects, but, in my opinion, very subtle and of crucial importance in the study of living dynamics in various disciplines (physics, biology, medicine, philosophy of science). The conceptual core is: to understand that a living system cannot be conceived, and therefore neither studied, as “an object”, “a body.” The (in essence) relational nature of the living being finds its foundations in dissipation, symmetry breakings and field theories capable to count for multiple levels of vacuum (such as Quantum Field Theory, QFT), and sees the living phase of condensed matter (on an aqueous basis) as a consequence of bosonic condensation of correlation quanta (the well-known Nambu-Goldstone bosons) over an extended and interrelated hierarchy of degrees of freedom to which a (super)coherent is associated state. In there the matter and energy components of the biological system are subjected to phase correlations to give rise to a holo-state, shared over the whole system, from which a self, endowed with continuity, emerges and thus also a biological identity rooted in a dissipative thermodynamic history. However, this “identity” is like the river of Heraclitus’ anecdote: it is a flow and not an object existing in itself, nor static; dynamics, change, are all that lasts, while water, is always different. So holds for an organism that is, in fact, an organizationally closed system, but (and precisely because) thermodynamically open. This condition implies that the study of any biological system is de facto the study of a flow of relationships, and the living system (whether a cell, a complex organism, or an ecosystem) should be conceived as a process dissipatively coupled to its environment and as a producer of responses following an autopoietic order, inherent in the very condition of coherence (as long as it exists). Once this is recognized: • We obtain the possibility of reducing (without ontological discontinuities) sophisticated emergent properties (such as sensing, perception, semantics, teleology, adaptation, memory) irreducible to the deterministic laws of the elementary components of which, nonetheless, the living matter is composed (and to the laws of which it is therefore equally subjected); • Such properties result in the emergence of “biological laws” that, in addition to physical laws, dictating action-reaction relationships, describe stimulus-response relationships (with enormously greater logical openness) valid only for the living state; • The existence of these “laws” (analogical, but now physically grounded) forces us to revisit the definition of causality in biology, understanding that the method of inquiry must be revisited on both the theory and praxis fronts (details in the text); • It is understood that the complex view is to be applied ab initio, but also advanced to a further step (on a quantum-electrodynamic basis) in which the occurrence of not-only-diachronic causality in the living matter would be uncontemplable through “classical” observables only, considered within dynamical systems theory, chaos physics and complexity science. This gives rise to constructive methodological provocations, significant for research in biology, biophysics, and medicine, and for their application within humankind and its relationships to technology and Nature, in the name of a respectful and sensitive gesture towards the web of Life.

Abstract Background.—Under the auspices of the College of American Pathologists, the current state of knowledge regarding pathologic prognostic factors (factors linked to outcome) and predictive factors (factors predicting response to therapy) in colorectal carcinoma was evaluated. A multidisciplinary group of clinical (including the disciplines of medical oncology, surgical oncology, and radiation oncology), pathologic, and statistical experts in colorectal cancer reviewed all relevant medical literature and stratified the reported prognostic factors into categories that reflected the strength of the published evidence demonstrating their prognostic value. Accordingly, the following categories of prognostic factors were defined. Category I includes factors definitively proven to be of prognostic import based on evidence from multiple statistically robust published trials and generally used in patient management. Category IIA includes factors extensively studied biologically and/or clinically and repeatedly shown to have prognostic value for outcome and/or predictive value for therapy that is of sufficient import to be included in the pathology report but that remains to be validated in statistically robust studies. Category IIB includes factors shown to be promising in multiple studies but lacking sufficient data for inclusion in category I or IIA. Category III includes factors not yet sufficiently studied to determine their prognostic value. Category IV includes factors well studied and shown to have no prognostic significance. Materials and Methods.—The medical literature was critically reviewed, and the analysis revealed specific points of variability in approach that prevented direct comparisons among published studies and compromised the quality of the collective data. Categories of variability recognized included the following: (1) methods of analysis, (2) interpretation of findings, (3) reporting of data, and (4) statistical evaluation. Additional points of variability within these categories were defined from the collective experience of the group. Reasons for the assignment of an individual prognostic factor to category I, II, III, or IV (categories defined by the level of scientific validation) were outlined with reference to the specific types of variability associated with the supportive data. For each factor and category of variability related to that factor, detailed recommendations for improvement were made. The recommendations were based on the following aims: (1) to increase the uniformity and completeness of pathologic evaluation of tumor specimens, (2) to enhance the quality of the data needed for definitive evaluation of the prognostic value of individual prognostic factors, and (3) ultimately, to improve patient care. Results and Conclusions.—Factors that were determined to merit inclusion in category I were as follows: the local extent of tumor assessed pathologically (the pT category of the TNM staging system of the American Joint Committee on Cancer and the Union Internationale Contre le Cancer [AJCC/UICC]); regional lymph node metastasis (the pN category of the TNM staging system); blood or lymphatic vessel invasion; residual tumor following surgery with curative intent (the R classification of the AJCC/UICC staging system), especially as it relates to positive surgical margins; and preoperative elevation of carcinoembryonic antigen elevation (a factor established by laboratory medicine methods rather than anatomic pathology). Factors in category IIA included the following: tumor grade, radial margin status (for resection specimens with nonperitonealized surfaces), and residual tumor in the resection specimen following neoadjuvant therapy (the ypTNM category of the TNM staging system of the AJCC/UICC). Factors in category IIB included the following: histologic type, histologic features associated with microsatellite instability (MSI) (ie, host lymphoid response to tumor and medullary or mucinous histologic type), high degree of MSI (MSI-H), loss of heterozygosity at 18q (DCC gene allelic loss), and tumor border configuration (infiltrating vs pushing border). Factors grouped in category III included the following: DNA content, all other molecular markers except loss of heterozygosity 18q/DCC and MSI-H, perineural invasion, microvessel density, tumor cell–associated proteins or carbohydrates, peritumoral fibrosis, peritumoral inflammatory response, focal neuroendocrine differentiation, nuclear organizing regions, and proliferation indices. Category IV factors included tumor size and gross tumor configuration. This report records findings and recommendations of the consensus conference group, organized according to structural guidelines defined herein.

Although education in rural areas is already robust, especially in relation to basic education, the graduation courses regarding to teacher formation to this specific area are still young in the brazilian educational scenario. This aspect is being the scene of epistemological, didactic and many other discussions that imply the teaching action. We teach natural sciences in a degree course in education in rural areas in the Northern University Center of Espírito Santo, Federal University of Espírito Santo and we discuss these and other issues, such as the teaching training by knowledge area, overlapping and incorporating the debates in our teaching practice. Therefore, we present in this article our co-teaching experience and we discuss its challenges and overcoming during teaching a discipline composed by contents of biology and chemistry. The discipline, called “Introduction to cell biology and life chemistry” was created by two teachers and had 60 hours of theory, taught during one semester. The discipline and its evaluation activities were elaborated to integrate biology and chemistry contents, to turn interdisciplinarity as possible to realize. We report here the whole process of co-teaching, which began with the collaborative conception and creation of the discipline, moving forward to its execution, the elaboration of evaluative activities and finalizing with the reflection and the writing of this paper. Our experience revels the importance of interdisciplinarity and co-teaching as a possibility of breaking the fragmented formation in higher education.

Abstract: Neurorestorative treatments have been able to improve the quality of life for patients suffering from neurological diseases and damages since the concept of Neurorestoratology was proposed. The discipline of Neurorestoratology focuses to restore impaired neurological functions and/or structures through the varying neurorestorative mechanisms including neurostimulation or neuromodulation, neuroprotection, neuroplasticity, neuroreplacement, loop reconstruction, remyelination, immunoregulation, angiogenesis or revascularization, and others. The neurorestorative strategies of Neurorestoratology include all therapeutic methods which can restore dysfunctions for patients with neurological diseases and improve their quality of life. The Neurorestoratology is different from the regenerative medicine in nervous system, which mainly focuses the neuroregeneration. It also is different from Neurorehabilitation. Neurorestoratology and Neurorehabilitation shares some functional recovering mechanisms, such as neuroplasticity, especially in the early phase of neurological diseases; but generally Neurorehabilitation mainly focuses to recover neurological functions through making the best use of residual neurological functions, replacing lost neurological functions in the largest degree, and preventing and treating varying complications. Recently, there have been more advances in restoring damaged nerves by cell therapy, neurostimulation/ neuromodulation and brain–computer interface (BCI), neurorestorative surgery, neurorestorative pharmaceutics, and other clinic strategies. Simultaneously related therapeutic guidelines and standards are set up in succession. Based on those advances, clinicians should consider injured and degenerated nervous disorders or diseases in the central nervous system as treatable or neurorestorative disorders. Extending and encouraging further neurorestorative explorations and achieving better clinical efficacy with stronger evidence regarding neurorestoratology will shed new light and discover superior benefits for patients with neurological disorders.

Abstract Background The Doppler sonography technique known as "superb microvascular imaging" (SMI) is advancing sonographic micro vascularization imaging in various disciplines. In this study, we aimed to determine whether SMI could reliably reproduce the blood flow in thyroid nodes and whether malignancy could be diagnosed, based on vascularization properties. Immunhistochemical staining by CD34 and SMI where used to determine the vascularization of nodes in terms of quantified vascularization parameters gained by computational evaluation. Methods We used image analysis programs to investigate whether the quantitative value for vascularization strength in the thyroid node, measured with SMI, was correlated with the actual degree of vascularization, determined microscopically. We included 16 patients that underwent thyroid resections. We prepared thyroid gland tissue slices for immunohistochemistry and labelled endothelial cells with CD34 to visualize blood vessels microscopically. We used image analysis programs, ImageJ, to quantify SMI Doppler sonographic measurements and CellProfiler to quantify CD34 expression in histological sections. We evaluated the numeric values for diagnostic value in node differentiation. Furthermore, we compared these values to check for correlations. Results Among the 16 nodes studied, three harboured malignant tumours (18.75%): two papillary and one follicular carcinoma. Among the 13 benign lesions (81.25%), four harboured follicular adenomas. Malignant and benign nodes were not significantly different in sonographic (0.88 ± 0.89 vs. 1.13 ± 0.19; p = 0.2790) or immunohistochemical measurements of vascularization strength (0.05 ± 0.05 vs. 0.08 ± 0.06; p = 0.2260). Conclusion We found a positive, significant correlation (r = 0.55588; p = 0.0254) between SMI (quantitative values for vascularization strength) and immunohistochemistry (CD34 staining) evaluations of thyroid nodes.

Abstract Plant metabolomics studies haves revealed new bioactive compounds. However, like other omics disciplines, the generated data are not fully exploited, mainly because the commonly performed analyses focus on elucidating the presence/absence of distinctive metabolites (and/or their precursors) and not on providing a holistic view of metabolomic changes and their participation in organismal adaptation to biotic and abiotic stress conditions. Therefore, spectral libraries generated from Cecropia obtusifolia cell suspension cultures in a previous study were considered as a case study and were reanalyzed herein. These libraries were obtained from a time-course experiment under nitrate starvation conditions using both electrospray ionization modes. The applied methodology included the use of ecological analytical tools in a systematic four-step process, including a population analysis of metabolite α diversity, richness, and evenness (i); a chemometrics analysis to identify discriminant groups (ii); differential metabolic marker identification (iii); and enrichment analyses and annotation of active metabolic pathways enriched by differential metabolites (iv). Our species α diversity results referring to the diversity of metabolites represented by mass-to-charge ratio (m/z) values detected at a specific retention time (rt) (an uncommon way to analyze untargeted metabolomic data) suggest that the metabolome is dynamic and is modulated by abiotic stress. A total of 147 and 371 m/z_rt pairs was identified as differential markers responsive to nitrate starvation in ESI− and ESI+ modes, respectively. Subsequent enrichment analysis showed a high degree of completeness of biosynthetic pathways such as those of brassinosteroids, flavonoids, and phenylpropanoids.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) will soon become a prominent part of the medical and economic burden on many Western countries’ healthcare systems. This review will discuss some emerging scenarios concerning the different classifications of HCC from the clinical, histological, and molecular perspective and to what extent they are integrated with each other. Beginning with an overview of the current numbers and facts regarding HCC, it touches upon the latest development of the epidemiological scenario. It is noteworthy that besides viral hepatitis infection, the fast growing rate of individuals affected by metabolic syndromes represents an additional influential factor on the rising incidence of HCC. However, despite recognised epidemiological evidence, too little is known about the molecular mechanisms that favour HCC development and progression. For instance, long non-coding RNAs playing a major role in the HCC carcinogenesis process have only recently been recognised. Although high cure rates are achieved for clinically asymptomatic patients when small tumours are detected, HCC is typically silent with few severe symptoms until its advanced stages. Patients with severe clinical signs are seldom good candidates for any type of curative therapy. Microscopically, HCC cells resemble normal liver cells to a variable degree, depending on the tumour differentiation status. Pathologists often use a panel of markers to assist HCC differential diagnosis. From a molecular perspective, HCC presents as a highly heterogeneous tumour entity. Despite considerable research efforts, to date no molecular classification has been introduced in clinical practice. A number of classifications have been suggested to stratify HCC patients by the likelihood of survival, with the aim of identifying those with the best chance of being successfully treated. These different systems do not seem to work well in conjunction and the various involved disciplines have so far failed to achieve their common goal. Co-ordinated initiatives involving clinicians, pathologists, biologists, and bioinformaticians are needed to achieve a comprehensive classification of HCC.

The author is a mathematician and engineer who has conducted medical research work over the past 13 years. Thus far, he has written 670 medical research papers. Beginning with paper No. 578 dated 1/8/2022, he wrote a total of 80 medical research articles using the viscoelasticity and viscoplasticity theories (VGT) from physics and engineering disciplines on 80 different medical problems with their associated data. These papers aim to explore some hidden biophysical behaviors and provide a quantitative understanding of the inter-relationships of a selected medical output (symptom) versus either singular input or multiple inputs (root causes, risk factors, or influential inputs). The hidden biophysical behaviors and possible inter-relationships exist among lifestyle details, medical conditions, chronic diseases, and certain severe medical complications, such as heart attacks, stroke, cancers, dementia, and even longevity concerns. The chosen medical subjects with their asso- ciated data, multiple symptoms, and influential factors are “time-dependent” which means that all biomedical variables change from time to time because body living cells are dynamically changing. This is what Profes- sor Norman Jones, the author’s adviser at MIT, suggested to him in December 2021 and why he utilizes the VGT tools from physics and engineering to conduct his medical research work since then. From 1980 to 1981, the author attended a college in California for his MBA degree, emphasizing finance and marketing. In addition, he spent many years managing a successful high-tech semiconductor business in Silicon Valley, where it involved many key factors of economics and finance, such as gross domestic product (GDP), inflation rate, consumer price index (CPI), NASDAQ stock performance, price/earnings ratio (P/E ratio), various investment decisions, return on investments (ROI), etc. As a result, he has a strong background in money topics associated with finance and economics.

The author is a mathematician and engineer who has conducted medical research work over the past 13 years. To date, he has written 672 medical research papers. Beginning with paper No. 578 dated 1/8/2022, he has written a total of 80 medical research articles using the viscoelasticity and viscoplasticity theories (VGT) from physics and engineering disciplines on 80 different medical problems with their associated data. These papers aim to explore some hidden biophysical behaviors and provide a quantitative understanding of the inter-relationships of a selected medical output (symptom) versus singular input or multiple inputs (root causes, risk factors, or influential inputs). The hidden biophysical behaviors and possible inter-relationships exist among lifestyle details, medical conditions, chronic diseases, and certain severe medical complications, such as heart attacks, stroke, cancers, dementia, and even longevity concerns. All of these chosen medical subjects with their associated data, multiple symptoms, and influential factors are “time-dependent” which means that all of these biomedical variables are changing from time to time because body cells are dynamically changing. This is what Professor Norman Jones, the author’s adviser at MIT, suggested to him in December of 2021 and why he utilizes the VGT tools from physics and engineering to conduct his medical research work since then. From 1980 to 1981, the author attended a college in California for his MBA degree, emphasizing finance and marketing. In addition, he spent many years managing a successful high-tech semiconductor business in Silicon Valley, where it involved many key factors of economics and finance, such as gross domestic product (GDP), inflation rate, stock performance, price/earnings ratio (P/E ratio), investment decisions, return on investments (ROI), etc. As a result, the money subjects associated with finance and economics are familiar subjects to him.

The author has studied the strength of materials and theory of elasticity from undergraduate courses at the University of Iowa. He also conducted research work to earn a master’s degree in Biomechanics under Professor James Andrews. He remembers that he used both spring and dashpot models to simulate the behaviors of human bone, muscle, and tendon to investigate the human-weapon interactions. Later on, he went to MIT to pursue his Ph.D. study under Professor Norman Jones who taught him the theory of plasticity and dynamic plastic behaviors of various structural elements. Furthermore, he took some graduate courses at MIT in the field of fluid dynamics and thermodynamics. Since then, biomechanics has made advancements in a few application areas, especially tissues of the human body which possess viscoelastic characteristics, such as bone, muscle, cartilage, tendon (connect bone to muscle), ligament (connect bone to bone), fascia and skin. For example, the night splint dorsiflexes forefoot on rear foot increasing plantar fascia tension to offer stress-relaxation of plantar fascia pain. This model of muscles and tendons connecting lower-leg and foot is a kind of viscoelastic problem. However, when we deal with human internal organs, it is not easy to conduct live experiments to obtain some accurate measurements of material properties. Although blood itself is a viscous material which viscosity factor may sit between water and honey, syrup, or gel. But, the author’s research subject is “glucose”, the sugar amount inside of blood or carried by blood cells, not the blood itself. It is near impossible to measure the material geometry or engineering properties of glucose, for example, the viscosity of “glucose”. Therefore, the best he could do is to apply the concept of viscoelasticity and viscoplasticity to construct an analogy motor to study the glucose behaviors which are time-dependent. The author’s background covers mathematics, physics, and various engineering disciplines, not including biology and chemistry. As a result, he can only investigate the observed biomedical phenomena using his ready-learned math-physical tools.

The author has studied the strength of materials and theory of elasticity from undergraduate courses at the University of Iowa. He also conducted research work to earn a master’s degree in Biomechanics under Professor James Andrews. He remembers that he used both spring and dashpot models to simulate the behaviors of human bone, muscle, and tendon to investigate the human-weapon interactions. Later on, he went to MIT to pursue his Ph.D. study under Professor Norman Jones who taught him the theory of plasticity and dynamic plastic behaviors of various structural elements. Furthermore, he took some graduate courses at MIT in the field of fluid dynamics and thermodynamics. Since then, biomechanics has made advancements in a few application areas, especially tissues of the human body which possess viscoelastic characteristics, such as bone, muscle, cartilage, tendon (connect bone to muscle), ligament (connect bone to bone), fascia and skin. For example, the night splint dorsiflexes forefoot on rear foot increasing plantar fascia tension to offer stress-relaxation of plantar fascia pain. This model of muscles and tendons connecting lower-leg and foot is a kind of viscoelastic problem. However, when we deal with human internal organs, it is not easy to conduct live experiments to obtain some accurate measurements of material properties. Although blood itself is a viscous material which viscosity factor may sit between water and honey, syrup, or gel. But, the author’s research subject is “glucose”, the sugar amount inside of blood or carried by blood cells, not the blood itself. It is near impossible to measure the material geometry or engineering properties of glucose, for example, the viscosity of “glucose”. Therefore, the best he could do is to apply the concept of viscoelasticity and viscoplasticity to construct an analogy motor to study the glucose behaviors which are time-dependent. The author’s background covers mathematics, physics, and various engineering disciplines, not including biology and chemistry. As a result, he can only investigate the observed biomedical phenomena using his ready-learned math-physical tools.

This proceedings consists of the peer-reviewed papers from the 2nd International Conference on Robotics, Intelligent Automation and Control Technologies (RIACT 2021), which was organized by the School of Mechanical Engineering at Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai, India on September from 23rd to 25th, 2021. However, due to the COVID 19 pandemic the conference was held Online. The main objective of RIACT 2021 is to provide a platform for researchers and practitioners from both academic institutions and industries to meet and share cutting-edge developments in the areas of Robot Design, Development and Control, Rehabilitation Robots and Devices, Intelligent Automation and Fault Diagnosis, Agricultural Robots, Underwater Robots, Development of Drones, Control and Supervision Systems, Vision Systems, Actuators and Sensors, Mechatronics Systems, System Interface and Control, Sustainable Technologies and associated disciplines. This conference also provided an opportunity to exchange research evidence and innovative ideas and also the issues related to Robotics and Automation. This proceeding will include presentations on the latest research areas such as Agriculture Drones, Bio Mechanisms for rehabilitation applications and Deep learning in robotics. This conference had gathered an excellent group of keynote speakers from around the globe on different topics such as Engineering Challenges of the AI-Enabled Automation and Process Optimisation for Healthcare and Business Domain, Upcoming future of robotics in protected horticulture, Intelligent Systems: From Smart Manufacturing and Network Perspectives, High-performance surgical and wearable robots for translational medicine, Challenges in Rover Mission, Two-Degree-of-Freedom Control of Flexible Manipulator, Manipulator Rule Generation from Table Data Sets and Its Application, Enduruns: Long-endurance sea surveying autonomous unmanned vehicle with gliding capability powered by hydrogen fuel cell, Bio-Inspired Swarm Intelligence with Engineering Applications, K-Learn for Robotics: Kinesthetic and STREMS, Embedded Machine Learning for Decentralized Automation, Real-time decentralized control: Design guidelines and applications, Whole-Body Optimization using Differential Dynamic Programming for Humanoid Robot Applications and How Business Technology Platform Accelerates Your Innovation. List of Advisory Committee, Technical Review Committee, Program Committee Members, Organizing Committee Members, Co-Convenor, Convenor are available in this pdf.

A. Background A prevalent long-term condition that has been linked to salivary amylase levels is diabetes mellitus (DM). Recently, salivary amylase diagnostics have been linked to DM. The metabolic alterations that the DM population goes through have an impact on their salivary parameters. Saliva is a special fluid that is necessary for the mouth cavity to operate normally. Saliva collection is less intrusive, simpler, and technically insensitive than blood collection, making diagnosis by saliva analysis potentially helpful. The primary benefit of this approach is that it is a quick diagnostic tool. Establishing a conservative approach to measuring blood sugar in place of venous blood samples can be aided by examining the link between blood glucose levels and its concentration in saliva. Depending on how saliva was collected under fasting or non-fasting settings, there were variations in salivary amylase levels. The type of diabetes, the kind of insulin treatment, or the level of glycemic control determines the variations in salivary amylase. B. Methodology Human saliva is an organic liquid vital created by the salivary organs. Saliva contains a few biomarkers which makes it valuable for multiplexed measures that are being created for point-of-care gadgets, quick tests, or for centralised clinical research facility tasks. The most significant perception is that proteins present in the blood are comparably present in saliva. Saliva-based diagnostics can likewise help in contriving early treatment systems. Salivary glucose focuses were seen as uniquely different in diabetes mellitus. This is on the grounds that the salivary organs act as a filter of blood glucose that are adjusted by hormonal or neural regulation. Since parts of saliva are derived from blood, the grouping of biochemical and immunological parts estimated in saliva could reflect blood levels. This prompt expanded emission of glucose from the ductal cells of the salivary organ, consequently expanding the glucose content in saliva. Salivary glucose can be used as an elective technique for diabetes and as a general evaluating apparatus for pre-diabetes and undiagnosed diabetes features the significant parts of saliva (harmless) and blood (intrusive). There have been a few reports showing biochemical changes in the saliva of diabetic patients. These modifications are related to salivary egg whites, amylase, support limit, electrolytes, glucose focus, IgA, IgG, IgM, lysozyme, peroxidase, and complete protein levels. Sampling, transport, and capacity of saliva are exceptionally straightforward when compared with blood. The entire mouth saliva is a salivary fluid and every one of the additional items incorporate cells from the mouth, nasal bodily fluid, blood from gum bruises, food flotsam and jetsam, and microbiota. For exact proteomic examination, the mucosal transudate furthermore, gingival crevicular are better impressions of the blood constituents. The materials and strategies used to gather saliva might impact the precision of testing. Prompt refrigeration at 4 degrees C would protect tests in the event that freezing is absurd yet support at this temperature ought to be no longer than 2 h prior to freezing at - 20 degrees C. Storage methodology and time from the collection principally influence the examination of the biochemical factors described by temperature instability and microbial development. C. Results & Conclusions Contrasted with the blood, saliva contains a comparable assortment of constituents that can be utilised for the diagnosis of diabetes mellitus. Salivary glucose levels can be analysed as a noninvasive symptomatic. In addition to biochemical and metabolomic analysis, a paper strip-based non-invasive glucose biosensor was effectively created for salivary examination to analyse diabetes. Saliva protein profiling could be an alluring chance to analyse and screen diabetes in future. Therefore, salivary diagnostics has developed into a sophisticated discipline and fills in as a region of the bigger field of molecular diagnostics, presently perceived as a vital participant in biomedical, fundamental, and clinical examination.

The author is a mathematician and engineer who has conducted medical research work over the past 13 years. Thus far, he has written 670 medical research papers. Beginning with paper No. 578 dated 1/8/2022, he wrote a total of 80 medical research articles using the viscoelasticity and viscoplasticity theories (VGT) from physics and engineering disciplines on 80 different medical problems with their associated data. These papers aim to explore some hidden biophysical behaviors and provide a quantitative understanding of the inter-relationships on a selected medical output (symptom) versus either singular input or multiple inputs (root causes, risk factors, or influential inputs). The hidden biophysical behaviors and possible inter-relationships exist among lifestyle details, medical conditions, chronic diseases, and certain severe medical complications, such as heart attacks, stroke, cancers, dementia, and even longevity concerns. The chosen medical subjects with their associated data, multiple symptoms, and influential factors are “time-dependent” which means that all biomedical variables change from time to time because body living cells are dynamically changing. This is what Professor Norman Jones, the author’s adviser at MIT, suggested to him in December 2021 and why he utilizes the VGT tools from physics and engineering to conduct his medical research work since then. From 1980 to 1981, the author attended a college in California for his MBA degree, emphasizing finance and marketing. In addition, he spent many years managing a successful high-tech semiconductor business in Silicon Valley, where it involved many key factors of economics and finance, such as gross domestic product (GDP), inflation rate, consumer price index (CPI), NASDAQ stock performance, price/earnings ratio (P/E ratio), various investment decisions, return on investments (ROI), etc. As a result, he has a strong background in money topics associated with finance and economics. In addition, during the 9 years from 2002 to 2010, he self-studied psychology and established 4 psychotherapy centers to take care of 200+ abused women and abandoned children. Therefore, he has accumulated a considerable amount of knowledge on psychological behaviors, especially in the field of clinical psychology of abused victims. During his recent medical research work using the tool of viscoelastic or viscoplastic behavior theory, he suddenly realized a strong similarity between medicine and economics. The behaviors and patterns of economics variables (inputs and outputs) he observed are comparable to the behaviors and patterns of medical variables he studied and researched (causes and symptoms) in terms of their curve shape & waveforms, fluctuation patterns, moving trends, physical behaviors, etc. For example, he has applied the candlestick chart or K-line diagram from Wall Street as an effective glucose representation tool in medicine. Most importantly, variables in both medicine and economics possessed the common “time-dependent” characteristics.

The author has studied strength of materials and theory of elasticity through his undergraduate courses at the University of Iowa. He also conducted research work to earn a master’s degree in Biomechanics under Professor James Andrews. He remembers using the spring and dashpot models to simulate the behaviors of human joints, bones, muscles, and tendons to investigate the human-weapon interactions. Later, he went to MIT to pursue his PhD study under Professor Norman Jones, who taught him theory of plasticity and dynamic plastic behaviors of structure elements, and took additional graduate courses in the field of fluid dynamics and thermodynamics. Since then, many advancements have been made in biomechanics in a few application areas, especially tissues of the human body which possess viscoelastic characteristics, such as bone, muscle, cartilage, tendon (connect bone to muscle), ligament (connect bone to bone), fascia, and skin. For example, the night splint dorsiflexes forefoot at the back of the foot increases plantar fascia tension to offer stress-relaxation for plantar fascia pain. This model of muscles and tendons connecting the lower leg and foot is a type of viscoelastic problem. However, when dealing with the human internal organs, it is not easy to conduct live experiments to obtain accurate measurements of material properties. Although blood itself is a viscous material, the viscosity factor may fall between water, honey, syrup, or gel. However, the author’s research subject is “glucose”, the sugar amount in blood carried by cells, not the blood itself. It is nearly impossible to measure material geometry or certain engineering properties of glucose, for example, the viscosity of “glucose”. Therefore, the best he could do is to apply the “concept of viscoelasticity and/or viscoplasticity” to construct an analogy model of time-dependent glucose behaviors. The author’s background includes mathematics, physics, and various engineering disciplines, not including biology and chemistry. As a result, he can only investigate the observed biomedical phenomena using his ready-learned math-physical tools. He has already conducted some investigations of glucose behaviors using elasticity theory and plasticity theory and written a few articles from his findings. In the elasticity and plasticity papers, he utilized the postprandial plasma glucose (PPG) value as the strain along with carbs/sugar amount and post-meal exercise level as the stress. In a recent email from Professor Norman Jones, he said that: “I have wondered if the use of viscoelastic/viscoplastic materials might be of some value to your studies. These phenomena embrace time-dependent behaviour and I know that you have emphasized the time-dependence of various behaviours in the body. Just a thought.” His suggestion triggered the author’s interest and desire to research the subject of glucose behaviors further using viscosity theory. This particular article is a follow-up to his paper No. 578 which studies certain generic characteristics of viscoelastic glucose behaviors. In this paper, he uses a relative glucose level (individual PPG - average PPG) as the strain and the strain rate (dε/dt) multiplied with

The author is a mathematician and engineer who has conducted medical research work over the past 13 years. Thus far, he has written 670 medical research papers. Beginning with paper No. 578 dated 1/8/2022, he wrote a total of 80 medical research articles using the viscoelasticity and viscoplasticity theories (VGT) from physics and engineering disciplines on 80 different medical problems with their associated data. These papers aim to explore some hidden biophysical behaviors and provide a quantitative understanding of the inter-relationships of a selected medical output (symptom) versus singular input or multiple inputs (root causes, risk factors, or influential inputs). The hidden biophysical behaviors and possible inter-relationships exist among lifestyle details, medical conditions, chronic diseases, and certain severe medical complications, such as heart attacks, stroke, cancers, dementia, and even longevity concerns. The chosen medical subjects with their associated data, multiple symptoms, and influential factors are “time-dependent” which means that all of the biomedical variables are changing from time to time because body living cells are dynamically changing. This is what Professor Norman Jones, the author’s adviser at MIT, suggested to him in December 2021 and why he utilizes the VGT tools from physics and engineering to conduct his medical research work since then. From 1980 to 1981, the author attended a college in California for his MBA degree, emphasizing finance and marketing. In addition, he spent many years managing a successful high-tech semiconductor business in Silicon Valley, where it involved many key factors of economics and finance, such as gross domestic product (GDP), inflation rate, consumer price index (CPI), NASDAQ stock performance, price-earnings ratio (P/E ratio), various investment decisions, return on investments (ROI), etc. As a result, money subjects associated with finance and economics are not unfamiliar subjects to him. In addition, during the 9 years from 2002 to 2010, he self-studied psychology and established 4 psychotherapy centers to take care of 200+ abused women and abandoned children. Therefore, he has accumulated a considerable amount of knowledge on psychological behaviors, especially from the field of clinical psychology of abused victims. During his recent medical research work using the tool of viscoelastic or viscoplastic behavior theory, he suddenly realized that there is a strong similarity between medicine and economics. The behaviors and patterns of economic variables (inputs and outputs) he observed are comparable to the behaviors and patterns of medical variables he studied and researched (causes and symptoms), in terms of their curve shape & waveforms, fluctuation patterns, moving trends, physical behaviors, etc. For example, he has applied the candlestick chart or K-line diagram from Wall Street as an effective glucose representation tool in medicine. Most importantly, variables in both medicine and economics possessed the common “time-dependent” characteristics. The recent COVID-19 pandemic is a severe and unique experience to worldwide people that is comparable to the Spanish Flu that happened over a century ago. He wondered what type of economic impact or inter-relationship from this pandemic had on some of the current economic indices. Therefore, in this article, he selects the CPI of US cities as the output variable along with the COVID-19 death and infection cases in the USA as two input variables to conduct his combined study of both economics and medicine.

In this paper, we are concerned about the nature of information and how to gather and compose data with the help of so called FAIR digital objects (FDOs) in order to transform them to knowledge. FDOs are digital surrogates of real objects. The nature of information is intrinsically linked to the kind of questions one is asking. One might not ask a question or get philosophical about it. Answers depend on the data different disciplines gather about their objects of study. In Statistical Physics, classical Shannon entropy measures system order which in equilibrium just equals the heat exchanged with the environment. In cell biology, each protein carries certain functions which create specific information. Cognitive science describes how organisms perceive their environment via functional sensors and control behavior accordingly. Note that one can have function and control without meaning. In contrast, psychology is concerned with the assessment of our perceptions by assigning meaning and ensuing actions. Finally, philosophy builds logical constructs and formulates principles, in effect transforming facts into complex knowledge. All these statements make sense, but there is an even more concise way. Indeed, Luciano Floridi provides a precise and thorough classification of information in his central oeuvre On the Philosophy of Information (Floridi 2013). Especially, he performs a sequential construction to develop the attributes which data need to have in order to count as knowledge. Semantic information is necessarily well-formed, meaningful and truthful. Well-formed data becomes meaningful by action based-semantics of an autonomous-agent solving the symbol grounding problem (Taddeo and Floridi 2005) interacting with the environment. Knowledge is created then by being informed through relevant data accounted for. We notice that the notion of agency is crucial for defining meaning. The apparent gap between Sciences and Humanities (Bawden and Robinson 2020) is created by the very existence of meaning. Further, meaning depends on interactions & connotations which are commensurate with the effective complexity of the environment of a particular agent resulting in an array of possible definitions. In his classical paper More is different (Anderson 1972) discussed verbatim the hierarchical nature of science. Each level is made of and obeys the laws of its constituents from one level below with the higher-level exhibiting emergent properties like wetness of water assignable only to the whole system. As we rise through the hierarchies, there is a branch of science for each level of complexity; on each complexity level there are objects for which it is appropriate and fitting to build up vocabulary for the respective levels of description leading to formation of disciplinary languages. It is the central idea of causal emergence that on each level there is an optimal degree of coarse graining to define those objects in such a way that causality becomes maximal between them. This means there is emergence of informative higher scales in complex materials extending to biological systems and into the brain with its neural networks representing our thoughts in a hierarchy of neural correlates. A computational toolkit for optimal level prediction and control has been developed (Hoel and Levin 2020) which was conceptually extended to integrated information theory of consciousness (Albantakis et al. 2019). The large gap between sciences and humanities discussed above exhibits itself in a series of small gaps connected to the emergence of informative higher scales. It has been suggested that the origin of life may be identified as a transition in causal structure and information flow (Walker 2014). Integrated information measures globally how much the causal mechanisms of a system reduce the uncertainty about the possible causes for a given state. A measure of “information flow” that accurately captures causal effects has been proposed (Ay and Polani 2008). The state of the art is presented in (Ay et al. 2022) where the link between information and complexity is discussed. Ay et al single out hierarchical systems and interlevel causation. Even further, (Rosas et al. 2020) reconcile conflicting views of emergence via an exact information-theoretic approach to identify causal emergence in multivariate data. As information becomes differentially richer one eventually needs complexity measures beyond {Rn}. One may define generalized metrices on these spaces (Pirr&oacute 2009) measuring information complexity on ever higher hierarchical levels of information. As one rises through hierarchies, information on higher scale is usually gained by coarse graining to arrive at an effective, nevertheless exact description, on the higher scale. It is repeated coarse graining of syntactically well-ordered information layers which eventually leads to semantic information in a process which I conjecture to be reminiscent of renormalization group flow leading to a universal classification scheme. Thus, we identify scientific disciplines and their corresponding data sets as dual universality classes of physical and epistemic structure formation, respectively. Above the semantic gap, we may call this process quantification of the qualitative by semantic metrics. Indeed, (Kolchinsky and Wolpert 2018) explored for the first time quantitative semantic concepts in Physics in their 2018 seminal paper entitled Semantic information, autonomous agency and non-equilibrium statistical physics. Their measures are numeric variants of entropy. Semantic information is identified with ‘the information that a physical system has about its environment that is causally necessary for the system to maintain its own existence over time’. FDOs are employed in these processes in two fundamental ways. For practical implementations of FDO technology, see accompanying abstract (Wittenburg et al. 2022). First, the FAIR principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016) ensure that unconnected pieces of data may be percolated into an integrated data space. Percolation creates the information density needed to feed AI-driven built up of semantic space. Without FDOs we wouldn't have the gravity for this to occur. Second, the very structure of FDOs, capable of symmetry preserving or breaking fusion events into composed entities, makes them homologous to mathematical categories. This will proof to be a powerful tool to unravel the nature of information via analyzing its topological structure algebraically, especially when considering our conjecture concerning universality, classes of information and their possible instantiations on vastly different length and time scales, in effect explaining analogous structure formation.

Health Health is a production, a process, and not a goal. It is a means and not an end state, required “to liberate life wherever it is imprisoned by and within man, by and within organisms and genera” (Deleuze). We live our health as a network, within networks, within social, technological, political and biological networks, but how does the network concept understand health? And how does the network concept implicate health within other networks, for better or for worse? Biopolitical Relations In its diverse forms, network thinking institutes a relational ontology, an ontology of connection and of connectedness. Whether the connections being explored are those governing the proverbial ‘six degrees of separation’, the small world in which “no-one is more than a few handshakes from anyone else”, the rhizomatic imperative that not only is everything connected but it must be, or even the ordinality of the mathematical regimen of belonging (Alain Badiou), one gains the impression that network thinking is the expression of a common world-view, a zeitgeist. Yet to think in this way is not only to lose sight of the important qualitative differences evident in the manifold conceptions of ‘network’ but is also to overlook differences in descent in the genealogy of knowledges and hence the differential inscription of those knowledges in power relations (another network…). The case of immunology is analysed here as one line of descent in network thinking, selected here for its susceptibility to exemplify a series of biopolitical implications which may not be so evident in other scientific fields. What follows is an attempt to address some of these implications for our understanding of the materiality of communications. Self - Nonself Since the groundbreaking work of Sir Frank MacFarlane Burnett in the 1940s and 1950s, immunology has become known as the ‘science of self-nonself discrimination’. In the first half of the twentieth century, as Pauline Mazumdar has argued, immunology was caught up in a classificatory problematic of the nature of species and specificity. In the latter half of the twentieth century, it might be argued, this concern becomes a more general one of the nature of biological identity and the mechanisms of organic integrity. Yet it is licit to see in these innocently scientific concerns the play of another set of interests, another set of issues or, to put it slightly differently, another problematic. We can see in the autonymic definition of immunology as the ‘science of self-nonself discrimination’ a biopolitical concern with the nature, maintenance and protection of populations: a delegation of the health of the body to a set of autonomous biological mechanisms, an interiorisation of a social and political problematic parallel to the interiorisation of the social repression of desire traced out by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their Anti-Oedipus. There are a number of points which are relevant here. The intellectual roots of immunology are to be found in Darwinian theory. Socially, however, immunology develops out of a set of public health practices, a set of public health reforms. Immunology locates the mechanisms for maintaining the integrity of the organism ‘under the skin’ and in a sense shifts the focal point of the problem of health to the internal workings of the organism. In this way, it reconfigures the field of social action. The enormous success of vaccination programmes and a concentration on the ‘serologic’ of immunisation focalises immunological research on outer-directed reactions. We can find a trace of the social field to which immunology is related in the name of the discipline itself. The term ‘immunology’ derives from the Latin term ‘immunitas’ which signified an exemption from public duty. The mechanisms of the immune system are routinely figured as weapons in a war against the enemy (Paul Ehrlich: “magic bullets”). And war, as Agamben has argued, exemplifies a state of exception. Given the way in which immunology shifts health inside the body, its enemies become ‘any enemies whatever’, microphysical forces with no apparent connection to the socius. The ability to combat any enemy whatever offers decisive evidence of the miraculous abilities of the self, the sovereignty of its powers. The self which the immune system protects is imagined to be defined anterior to that system, on a genetic basis, independent of the rules governing interactions in the system itself. The ability of the immune system to respond to and destroy any enemy whatever and thus maintain the organism’s sovereign identity demonstrates its ‘intolerance for foreign matter’ (Macfarlane Burnet). The molecular terrain on which its combat is waged is only apparently divorced from the socius. Idiotypy Network theory offers an interesting response to this set of ideas. Niels Jerne developed idiotypic network theory as a way of overcoming some of the difficulties in the accepted version of how the immune system works. The immune system possesses the remarkable ability to distinguish between everything which is a friend of the organism and everything which is an enemy. The key question which this poses is this: how and on what basis does the immune system not react to self, why does it posses what Paul Ehrlich called ‘horror autotoxicus’? The standard wisdom is to maintain that those elements which can react to self are firstly only very small in number and, secondly, eliminated by a process of learning (‘clonal deletion’). Yet this view is wrong on both counts – there is a far higher concentration of ‘auto-antibodies’ in the individual organism than the standard theory suggests, and an organism which develops in the absence of contact with ‘antigens’ originating in the environment can nevertheless develop a perfectly functional immune system. Jerne’s theory develops as a piece of self-organisational wisdom. Everything in the immune system is connected. The activities of all the elements in the system are regulated by the activities of every other. One type of cell specifically recognises and thus is stimulated into action (i.e. the production of clones) by another. However, this reaction is dampened down by another recognition event: the proliferation of clones of the first type of cell is regulated by the response of a third (also a production), and so on. This cascading chain of stimulus-response events is called an idiotypic network, by Jerne, a recurrent set of ‘eigen-behaviours’, and it reverses the conventional wisdom about the way in which the immune system operates: the destructive response to the other is no longer an exception but a limiting case in the auto-consistent behaviour of a self-organising network. An immune reaction is not a characteristic of the miraculous power of the immune system but a consequence of the network’s loss of plasticity. Autopoiesis Francisco Varela and the so-called ‘Paris School’ have managed to draw out the radical consequences of this way of looking at organic processes. The first point they make is that idiotypic network theory substitutes an autonomous conception of immunity for the predominantly heteronomous view of immunity as a set of defensive mechanisms. A variant on the more general autopoietic postulate of the circular causality inhering in living systems, the eigen-behaviour used to characterise immune networks attempts to move our understanding of biological processes away from the biopolitical problematic of defence and security. As Varela and Anspach put it, “to say that immunity is fundamentally defence is as distorted as saying that the brain is fundamentally concerned with defence and avoidance. We certainly defend ourselves and avoid attack, but this is hardly what cognition is about, that is flexibility in living”. An idiotypic network is thus conceptualised as a radically autonomous system, which effectively knows no outside. The idea that the immune network has defence as its prime function is argued by Varela to result from the epistemically relative nature of the claims made by the biologist: it is a claim which makes sense from the specific point of view of the observer but does not – cannot – explain what the immune network is doing in its own terms. The place of the observer in biology is fundamentally contingent. The assertion of the contingent nature of the observation in biology is not, however, accompanied by an analysis of the immanent implication of these observations in the socius. As Maturana himself has noted, “the fact that science as a cognitive domain is constituted and validated in the operational coherences of the praxis of living of the standard observers as they operate in their experiential domains without reference to an independent reality does not make scientific statements subjective”. Certainly not, if these statements can be demonstrated to belong to a specific set of discursive ‘regularities’. The argument that the immune network does not have defence as its primary function of course raises the question of what the immune network is actually for. The research carried out by Varela and his associates suggests, and this is the second point, that the immune network is responsible for the assertion of organic identity. Far from being a secondary mechanism for the protection of a sovereign identity defined elsewhere and otherwise, the organisation of the immune network as a recurrent set of mutually reinforcing chemical interactions (in which defence is instead the result of an excessive perturbation of the system), suggests that the network has a primary role in defining identity. To put it another way, the immune network is a means of individuation. The field of theoretical immunology more generally has explored the logic of the network constitution of individuality. Experimental evidence suggests that vertebrate organisms replace up to 20% of the chemical components constituting the immune network daily, thus demonstrating a highly productive processual character, but how does this activity cohere into the development of a consistent set? Theoretical immunologists use some of the arguments of complexity theory to show that even the continuous random production of notional molecular compounds (which would correspond to the elements of the immune network – B-cells, T-cells and so on) can yield an organised consistent set. They argue that this set or network of interactions forms a ‘cognitive field’ which determines the sensitivity of the network to any one of its elements at any moment in time. The sensitivity of the network – equally its degree of connectedness – determines the likelihood that any element will be integrated or rejected. The less connected the network to any element, the more likely that element will be rejected. Interestingly, the shape of the cognitive field of the network – what it is sensitive to – varies over time, and the network is more flexible, or plastic, at earlier stage in its history than later. The crucial point, however, is that there are no necessarily enduring components to this network. A useful term to describe this is metastability: immune networks provide evidence for an ongoing process of individuation, itself a more or less chaotic process. Such a view is far from gaining univocal adherence in the immunological community and yet it certainly offers an interesting and inventive way of looking at the anomalies of currently available experimental evidence, not least the difficulties standard theory has of grasping auto-immune diseases. But does the network conception of immunity displace the biopolitical problematic ? As mentioned above, for Varela this view of the immune network as an autonomous, cognitive system offers a way out of the predominantly militaristic characterisation of the organism’s maintenance mechanisms, and thus permits the conceptualisation of what he calls ‘flexibility in living’. Yet, if the claim sketched out above concerning the link between immunology and biopolitics is correct, one is entitled to ask about the extent to which network thought as a way of grasping biological processes can really constitute a locus of resistance to contemporary biopolitical imperatives. Pacification To finish, it is worth noting firstly that with biopolitics, in the genealogy sketched out by Foucault, mutations in power are accompanied by a shift in its phenomenal manifestation: the noisy destructiveness of sovereignty, with its power over life and death, is replaced by the anonymity of the grey procedures of knowledge. Cognition could perhaps be another form of power. And power is for Foucault, of course, a network. Or, to take another view, contemporary power may be characterised by the state of the exception becoming the rule (Agamben): the exceptional response of the sovereign has spread across the whole social fabric or by the generalised diffusion of the death drive across the whole of the socius (Deleuze and Guattari). The diffuse cognitive qualities of the network conception of immunity might in this sense correspond to contemporary shifts in the nature of power and its exercise. As Francois Ewald has put it in his discussion of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, “[n]ormative knowledge appeals to nothing exterior to that which it works on, that which it makes visible. What precisely is the norm? It is the measure which simultaneously individualises, makes ceaseless individualisation possible and creates comparability”. Works Cited Giorgio Agamben Homo Sacer (Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1998) Albert-Làszló Barabàsi Linked: The New Science of Networks (Perseus, Cambridge MA,2002) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Anti-Oedipus (Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 1983) François Ewald ‘A power without an exterior’ in T.J. Armstrong (ed.) Michel Foucault Philosopher (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1992) Pauline Mazumdar Species and Specificity (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995) Francisco Varela and Mark Anspach ‘The Body Thinks: The Immune System in the Process of Somatic Individuation’ in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K.Ludwig Pfeiffer (eds.) Materialities of Communication (Stanford University Press, Stanford CA,1994) Cary Wolfe ‘In Search of Post-Humanist Theory: The Second-Order Cybernetics of Maturana and Varela’ in Cultural Critique (Spring 1995) 30:36 <http://www.santafe.edu/projects/immunology/> Links http://www.santafe.edu/projects/immunology/%20 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Goffey, Andrew. "Idiotypic Networks, Normative Networks" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/07-idiotypic.php>. APA Style Goffey, A. (2003, Aug 26). Idiotypic Networks, Normative Networks. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0308/07-idiotypic.php>

This article examines the concept of self from the perspective of the self as manifest and reflected in consumption decisions. Within the consumer behaviour literature there is general acceptance for a high degree of autonomy in individuals' self-related consumption decisions. The assumption is that we can choose the type of person we want to be, and purchase, within income limits, the appropriate "props" to assist in achieving our goal. I argue that this view is simplistic and fails to appreciate the extent to which culture influences individuals' perceptions of the desirability of different "ways to be" and the objects that are considered appropriate to communicate specific personal attributes. The self-concept and consumption According to psychologists, individuals understand their self-concepts on the basis of observations of their own behaviours, as well as the reactions of others to these behaviours. If the self is viewed in terms of what actions are performed by the individual, consumption behaviours in modern consumer economies should be instrumental in the development and expression of the self-concept (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton). In the discipline of consumer behaviour, people are thought to derive their sense of self at least partially from the goods and services they consume. Through the consumption of the symbols contained in products, consumers attempt to enhance their self-concepts by using products to communicate particular personal characteristics to themselves and others. Consumption is thus argued to operate as an effective means of communicating identity and positioning oneself relative to others. Not just single products but constellations of products are required to effectively communicate this information to others (Solomon and Englis). Anthropologists recognise that every culture-member is both a source and a subject of judgements made according to object ownership. They also note the fracturing of social systems that have traditionally been considered suppliers of self-definition. These systems include family, religious, and community relationships, and their loss of influence allows greater individual control over self-concept formation and communication. As societies come to operate on a larger scale, the growing anonymity and diversification of duties result in identities being increasingly inferred from the ownership of symbolic possessions, rather than reliance on personal familiarity. In such an environment, stereotyping according to consumption is the norm. Stereotyping can be seen as a mechanism by which we can select between symbolic options to construct desirable versions of our selves. Advertising exists to inform us of the range of products and associated "selves" available, and thus provides a valuable service in our ongoing efforts to develop appropriate or desirable selves. In this sense the use of objects in the construction and maintenance of the self-concept is seen as a conscious, controllable process in which consumers engage to maximise their satisfaction (Ger). Consumers shop for a self-identity just as they would shop for a consumer good, and there is an assumed intentionality in their actions that stems from a conscious thought process. Another way of interpreting the relationship between the self and consumption is that communication of the self via consumption is not an optional activity, but one that is necessary for social survival. And not just one self, but multiple selves must be constructed and maintained for each of the different roles we play in life (Firat 1995). Some have suggested that an outcome of this need to exhibit multiple selves may be individuals who are alienated from themselves due to the discomfort of being unable to identify their own core selves (Havel; Ogilvy). Awareness of the stereotyping activities of others forces consumers into defensive modes of consumption that are designed to protect them from unwanted judgements. Self-representation via consumption thus requires planning and organisation, as opposed to being an optional pastime in which consumers can participate if they so desire. According to some analysts, this concern with presenting a desired image via consumption is actively encouraged as it is a source of ongoing consumption (Droge, Calantone, Agrawal, and Mackoy; Kilbourne, McDonagh, and Prothero). The close relationship between the self and consumption is seen as a necessary by-product of the need for high levels of consumption in capitalist markets (Murphy and Miller; Miller). Compelled into consumption designed to manage their images to others, consumers are not free to consume any products in any combinations, as such behaviour is unlikely to achieve the image outcomes they have been conditioned to desire. In order to communicate the appropriate self in a given situation, consumers must acquire specific products and consume them in specific ways. The power of choice of the individual in this scenario is more perceived than real, and this may leave consumers more susceptible to advertising and other forms of marketing communications than is currently acknowledged. The media can widely disseminate versions of social reality that consumers absorb as part of their understanding of their world (Davis 1997). For example, appropriate consumption patterns for individuals from different age, gender, and social class categories are specifically communicated in advertising messages (Holbrook and Hirschman). The role of culture The self as reflected in individuals' consumption decisions is culturally influenced in that different cultures and subcultures incorporate different objects into their sense of self (Belk). The relationship between the self and culture is reflected in the term "cultural anchoring", a term that describes the process by which certain products become part of an individual's self-concept (LaTour and Roberts). The self develops to operate within a culture, and in doing so reinforces that culture (Cushman). Consumers are conditioned to develop self-concepts that are appropriate to their age, gender, and social groupings (Levy). They feel compelled to fulfil the requirements of these classifications, usually accepting the role assigned to them by their culture (Firat 1991). Roles are culturally connected to a range of consumer goods that are considered crucial to the "correct" performance of the role, and culture is the force that specifically provides the associations between objects and social roles (Solomon). As described by Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton: "Thus, by a process whose beautiful inevitability recalls that of a cell duplicating and differentiating itself into a complex organism, the self through its own seemingly autonomous choices replicates the order of its culture and so becomes a part of that order and a means for its further replication." (105) The inherent nature of this drive to conform to societal expectations remains unapparent to consumers, allowing them the perception of free choice rather than coercion. In fact, the perception of free choice is of critical importance to the continuation of the prevailing system. But how is it that individuals do not appreciate the extent to which their efforts at self-development through consumption are culturally driven? Consumer researchers argue that people wish to feel unique in consumption, thus supposedly selecting objects that are somehow special or unique. Paradoxically, the objects selected are often mass-produced products and are thus common to many other consumers. The argument is that these products in their sameness can perform the valued function of communicating social integration, while permitting some degree of individuality in their combination. Fiske, Hodge, and Turner give the case of the ubiquitous T-shirt, explaining how this product simultaneously provides a mechanism for communicating group membership and individual difference. The generic form of the T-shirt symbolises conformity, while the vast range of T-shirt designs allows personal differentiation. To some, consumers' beliefs in their individuality are legitimate as small differences in product combinations are considered to be adequate to claim uniqueness. Another interpretation, however, is that such beliefs are a form of self-delusion, as small differences only camouflage the over-riding similarity between the consumption patterns of individuals. To conclude, consumption is used extensively in self-concept construction and maintenance in modern consumer economies. What is not always recognised is that the nature of the self-concept that is desired and the parameters for product usage to achieve the desired self-concept are highly specified by the cultural environment. The implication of this is that individuals are highly dependent on consumption for communication of their selves, to the point that the concept of the autonomous consumer who is free to choose between a multitude of product options can be viewed as a modern myth. References Belk, R. W. "Extended Self and Extending Paradigmatic Perspective" Journal of Consumer Research 16 (1989): 129-132. Csikszentmihalyi, M. and E. Rochberg-Halton. The Meaning of Things, Domestic Symbols and the Self. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Cushman, P. "Why the Self Is Empty" American Psychologist 45.5 (1990): 599-611. Davis, M. Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1997. Droge, C., R. Calantone, M. Agrawal, and R. Mackoy. "The Strong Consumption Culture and its Critiques: A Framework for Analysis" Journal of Macromarketing 13.2 (1993): 32-45. Firat, A. F. "The Consumer in Postmodernity" Advances in Consumer Research 18 (1991): 70-75. ---. "Consumer Culture or Culture Consumed?" In Marketing in a Multicultural World J. A. Costa and G. J. Bamossy eds. California: Sage Publications (1995): 105-125. Fiske, J., B. Hodge, G. Turner. Myths of Oz. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987. Ger, G. "Human Development and Humane Consumption: Well-Being Beyond the "Good Life"" Journal of Public Policy and Marketing 16.1 (1997): 110-125. Havel, V. "The Need for Tanscendence in the Post-Modern World" Journal for Quality and Participation 18.5 (1995): 26-29. Holbrook, M. B. and E. C. Hirschman. "The Experiential Aspects of Consumption: Consumer Fantasies, Feelings, and Fun" Journal of Consumer Research 9 (1982): 132-140. Kilbourne, W., P. McDonagh, and A. Prothero. "Sustainable Consumption and the Quality of Life: A Macromarketing Challenge to the Dominant Social Paradigm" Journal of Macromarketing 17.1 (1997): 4-24. LaTour, M. S. and S. D. Roberts. "Cultural Anchoring and Product Diffusion" The Journal of Consumer Marketing 9.4 (1992): 29-34. Levy, S. J. Meanings in Advertising Stimuli. Advertising and Consumer Psychology. J. Olson and K. Sentis eds. New York: Praeger. 3, 1986. Miller, D. Consumption and its Consequences. Consumption and Everyday Life. H. Mackay ed. London: Sage Publications, 1997. Murphy, P. L. and C. T. Miller. "Postdecisional Dissonance and the Commodified Self-Concept: A Cross-Cultural Examination" Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23.1 (1997): 50-62. Ogilvy, J. "This Postmodern Business" Marketing and Research Today (February 1990). Solomon, M., R. and B. G. Englis. "Observations: The Big Picture: Product Complementarity and Integrated Communications" Journal of Advertising Research 34.1 (1994): 57-63. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Pettigrew, Simone. "Consumption and the Self-Concept" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Pettigrew.html &gt. Chicago Style Pettigrew, Simone, "Consumption and the Self-Concept" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Pettigrew.html &gt ([your date of access]). APA Style Pettigrew, Simone. (2002) Consumption and the Self-Concept. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Pettigrew.html &gt ([your date of access]).

IntroductionIf human beings have become a geophysical force, capable of impacting the very crust and atmosphere of the planet, and if geophysical forces become objects of study, presences able to be charted over millions of years—one of our many problems is a 'naming' problem. - Bethany NowviskieThe anthropocene "denotes the present time interval, in which many geologically significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities" (S.Q.S.). Although the narrative and terminology of the anthropocene has not been officially legitimized by the scientific community as a whole, it has been adopted worldwide by a plethora of social and cultural studies. The challenges of the anthropocene demand interdisciplinary efforts and actions. New contexts, situations and environments call for original naming propositions: new terminologies are always illegitimate at the moment of their first appearance in the world.Against the background of the naming challenges of the anthropocene, we will map the emergence and tell the story of a tiny world within the world of media studies: the world of the term 'nanomedia' and its hyphenated sister 'nano-media'. While we tell the story of the uses of this term, its various meanings and applications, we will provide yet another possible interpretation and application to the term, one that we believe might be helpful to interdisciplinary media studies in the context of the anthropocene. Contemporary media terminologies are usually born out of fortuitous exchanges between communication technologies and their various social appropriations: hypodermic media, interactive media, social media, and so on and so forth. These terminologies are either recognised as the offspring of legitimate scientific endeavours by the media theory community, or are widely discredited and therefore rendered illegitimate. Scientific legitimacy comes from the broad recognition and embrace of a certain term and its inclusion in the canon of an epistemology. Illegitimate processes of theoretical enquiry and the study of the kinds of deviations that might deem a theory unacceptable have been scarcely addressed (Delborne). Rejected terminologies and theories are marginalised and gain the status of bastard epistemologies of media, considered irrelevant and unworthy of mention and recognition. Within these margins, however, different streams of media theories which involve conceptual hybridizations can be found: creole encounters between high culture and low culture (James), McLuhan's hybrid that comes from the 'meeting of two media' (McLuhan 55), or even 'bastard spaces' of cultural production (Bourdieu). Once in a while a new media epistemology arises that is categorised as a bastard not because of plain rejection or criticism, but because of its alien origins, formations and shape. New theories are currently emerging out of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary thinking which are, in many ways, bearers of strange features and characteristics that might render its meaning elusive and obscure to a monodisciplinary perspective. Radical transdisciplinary thinking is often alien and alienated. It results from unconventional excursions into uncharted territories of enquiry: bastard epistemologies arise from such exchanges. Being itself a product of a mestizo process of thinking, this article takes a look into the term nanomedia (or nano-media): a marginal terminology within media theory. This term is not to be confounded with the term biomedia, coined by Eugene Thacker (2004). (The theory of biomedia has acquired a great level of scientific legitimacy, however it refers to the moist realities of the human body, and is more concerned with cyborg and post-human epistemologies. The term nanomedia, on the contrary, is currently being used according to multiple interpretations which are mostly marginal, and we argue, in this paper, that such uses might be considered illegitimate). ’Nanomedia’ was coined outside the communications area. It was first used by scientific researchers in the field of optics and physics (Rand et al), in relation to flows of media via nanoparticles and optical properties of nanomaterials. This term would only be used in media studies a couple of years later, with a completely different meaning, without any acknowledgment of its scientific origins and context. The structure of this narrative is thus illegitimate, and as such does not fit into traditional modalities of written expression: there are bits and pieces of information and epistemologies glued together as a collage of nano fragments which combine philology, scientific literature, digital ethnography and technology reviews. Transgressions Illegitimate theories might be understood in terms of hybrid epistemologies that intertwine disciplines and perspectives, rendering its outcomes inter or transdisciplinary, and therefore prone to being considered marginal by disciplinary communities. Such theories might also be considered illegitimate due to social and political power struggles which aim to maintain territory by reproducing specific epistemologies within a certain field. Scientific legitimacy is a social and political process, which has been widely addressed. Pierre Bourdieu, in particular, has dedicated most of his work to deciphering the intricacies of academic wars around the legitimacy or illegitimacy of theories and terminologies. Legitimacy also plays a role in determining the degree to which a certain theory will be regarded as relevant or irrelevant:Researchers’ tendency to concentrate on those problems regarded as the most important ones (e.g. because they have been constituted as such by producers endowed with a high degree of legitimacy) is explained by the fact that a contribution or discovery relating to those questions will tend to yield greater symbolic profit (Bourdieu 22).Exploring areas of enquiry which are outside the boundaries of mainstream scientific discourses is a dangerous affair. Mixing different epistemologies in the search for transversal grounds of knowledge might result in unrecognisable theories, which are born out of a combination of various processes of hybridisation: social, technological, cultural and material.Material mutations are happening that call for new epistemologies, due to the implications of current technological possibilities which might redefine our understanding of mediation, and expand it to include molecular forms of communication. A new terminology that takes into account the scientific and epistemological implications of nanotechnology applied to communication [and that also go beyond cyborg metaphors of a marriage between biology and cibernetics] is necessary. Nanomedia and nanomediations are the terminologies proposed in this article as conceptual tools to allow these further explorations. Nanomedia is here understood as the combination of different nanotechnological mediums of communication that are able to create and disseminate meaning via molecular exchange and/ or assembly. Nanomediation is here defined as the process of active transmission and reception of signs and meaning using nanotechnologies. These terminologies might help us in conducting interdisciplinary research and observations that go deeper into matter itself and take into account its molecular spaces of mediation - moving from metaphor into pragmatics. Nanomedia(s)Within the humanities, the term 'nano-media' was first proposed by Mojca Pajnik and John Downing, referring to small media interventions that communicate social meaning in independent ways. Their use of term 'nano-media' proposes to be a revised alternative to the plethora of terms that categorise such media actions, such as alternative media, community media, tactical media, participatory media, etc. The metaphor of smallness implied in the term nano-media is used to categorise the many fragments and complexities of political appropriations of independent media. Historical examples of the kind of 'nano' social interferences listed by Downing (2),include the flyers (Flugblätter) of the Protestant Reformation in Germany; the jokes, songs and ribaldry of François Rabelais’ marketplace ... the internet links of the global social justice (otromundialista) movement; the worldwide community radio movement; the political documentary movement in country after country.John Downing applies the meaning of the prefix nano (coming from the Greek word nanos - dwarf), to independent media interventions. His concept is rooted in an analysis of the social actions performed by local movements scattered around the world, politically engaged and tactically positioned. A similar, but still unique, proposition to the use of the term 'nano-media' appeared 2 years later in the work of Graham St John (442):If ‘mass media’ consists of regional and national print and television news, ‘niche media’ includes scene specific publications, and ‘micro media’ includes event flyers and album cover art (that which Eshun [1998] called ‘conceptechnics’), and ‘social media’ refers to virtual social networks, then the sampling of popular culture (e.g. cinema and documentary sources) using the medium of the programmed music itself might be considered nano-media.Nano-media, according to Graham St John, "involves the remediation of samples from popular sources (principally film) as part of the repertoire of electronic musicians in their efforts to create a distinct liminalized socio-aesthetic" (St John 445). While Downing proposes to use the term nano-media as a way to "shake people free of their obsession with the power of macro-media, once they consider the enormous impact of nano-technologies on our contemporary world" (Downing 1), Graham St John uses the term to categorise media practices specific to a subculture (psytrance). Since the use of the term 'nano-media' in relation to culture seems to be characterised by the study of marginalised social movements, portraying a hybrid remix of conceptual references that, if not completely illegitimate, would be located in the border of legitimacy within media theories, I am hereby proposing yet another bastard version of the concept of nanomedia (without a hyphen). Given that neither of the previous uses of the term 'nano-media' within the discipline of media studies take into account the technological use of the prefix nano, it is time to redefine the term in direct relation to nanotechnologies and communication devices. Let us start by taking a look at nanoradios. Nanoradios are carbon nanotubes connected in such a way that when electrodes flow through the nanotubes, various electrical signals recover the audio signals encoded by the radio wave being received (Service). Nanoradios are examples of the many ways in which nanotechnologies are converging with and transforming our present information and communication technologies. From molecular manufacturing (Drexler) to quantum computing (Deutsch), we now have a wide spectrum of emerging and converging technologies that can act as nanomedia - molecular structures built specifically to act as communication devices.NanomediationsBeyond literal attempts to replicate traditional media artifacts using nanotechnologies, we find deep processes of mediation which are being called nanocommunication (Hara et al.) - mediation that takes place through the exchange of signals between molecules: Nanocommunication networks (nanonetworks) can be used to coordinate tasks and realize them in a distributed manner, covering a greater area and reaching unprecedented locations. Molecular communication is a novel and promising way to achieve communication between nanodevices by encoding messages inside molecules. (Abadal & Akyildiz) Nature is nanotechnological. Living systems are precise mechanisms of physical engineering: our molecules obey our DNA and fall into place according to biological codes that are mysteriously written in our every cell. Bodies are perfectly mediated - biological systems of molecular communication and exchange. Humans have always tried to emulate or to replace natural processes by artificial ones. Nanotechnology is not an exception. Many nanotechnological applications try to replicate natural systems, for example: replicas of nanostructures found in lotus flowers are now being used in waterproof fabrics, nanocrystals, responsible for resistance of cobwebs, are being artificially replicated for use in resistant materials, and various proteins are being artificially replicated as well (NNI 05). In recent decades, the methods of manipulation and engineering of nano particles have been perfected by scientists, and hundreds of nanotechnological products are now being marketed. Such nano material levels are now accessible because our digital technologies were advanced enough to allow scientific visualization and manipulation at the atomic level. The Scanning Tunneling Microscopes (STMs), by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer (1986), might be considered as the first kind of nanomedia devices ever built. STMs use quantum-mechanical principles to capture information about the surface of atoms and molecules, allowed digital imaging and visualization of atomic surfaces. Digital visualization of atomic surfaces led to the discovery of buckyballs and nanotubes (buckytubes), structures that are celebrated today and received their names in honor of Buckminster Fuller. Nanotechnologies were developed as a direct consequence of the advancement of digital technologies in the fields of scientific visualisation and imaging. Nonetheless, a direct causal relationship between nano and digital technologies is not the only correlation between these two fields. Much in the same manner in which digital technologies allow infinite manipulation and replication of data, nanotechnologies would allow infinite manipulation and replication of molecules. Nanocommunication could be as revolutionary as digital communication in regards to its possible outcomes concerning new media. Full implementation of the new possibilities of nanomedia would be equivalent or even more revolutionary than digital networks are today. Nanotechnology operates at an intermediate scale at which the laws of classical physics are mixed to the laws of quantum physics (Holister). The relationship between digital technologies and nanotechnologies is not just instrumental, it is also conceptual. We might compare the possibilities of nanotechnology to hypertext: in the same way that a word processor allows the expression of any type of textual structure, so nanotechnology could allow, in principle, for a sort of "3-D printing" of any material structure.Nanotechnologies are essentially media technologies. Nanomedia is now a reality because digital technologies made possible the visualization and computational simulation of the behavior of atomic particles at the nano level. Nanomachines that can build any type of molecular structure by atomic manufacturing could also build perfect replicas of themselves. Obviously, such a powerful technology offers medical and ecological dangers inherent to atomic manipulation. Although this type of concern has been present in the global debate about the social implications of nanotechnology, its full implications are yet not entirely understood. A general scientific consensus seems to exist, however, around the idea that molecules could become a new type of material alphabet, which, theoretically, would make possible the reconfiguration of the physical structures of any type of matter using molecular manufacturing. Matter becomes digital through molecular communication.Although the uses given to the term nano-media in the context of cultural and social studies are merely metaphorical - the prefix nano is used by humanists as an allegorical reference of a combination between 'small' and 'contemporary' - once the technological and scientifical realities of nanomedia present themselves as a new realm of mediation, populated with its own kind of molecular devices, it will not be possible to ignore its full range of implications anymore. A complexifying media ecosystem calls for a more nuanced and interdisciplinary approach to media studies.ConclusionThis article narrates the different uses of the term nanomedia as an illustration of the way in which disciplinarity determines the level of legitimacy or illegitimacy of an emerging term. We then presented another possible use of the term in the field of media studies, one that is more closely aligned with its scientific origins. The importance and relevance of this narrative is connected to the present challenges we face in the anthropocene. The reality of the anthropocene makes painfully evident the full extent of the impact our technologies have had in the present condition of our planet's ecosystems. For as long as we refuse to engage directly with the technologies themselves, trying to speak the language of science and technology in order to fully understand its wider consequences and implications, our theories will be reduced to fancy metaphors and aesthetic explorations which circulate around the critical issues of our times without penetrating them. The level of interdisciplinarity required by the challenges of the anthropocene has to go beyond anthropocentrism. Traditional theories of media are anthropocentric: we seem to be willing to engage only with that which we are able to recognise and relate to. Going beyond anthropocentrism requires that we become familiar with interdisciplinary discussions and perspectives around common terminologies so we might reach a consensus about the use of a shared term. For scientists, nanomedia is an information and communication technology which is simultaneously a tool for material engineering. For media artists and theorists, nano-media is a cultural practice of active social interference and artistic exploration. However, none of the two approaches is able to fully grasp the magnitude of such an inter and transdisciplinary encounter: when communication becomes molecular engineering, what are the legitimate boundaries of media theory? If matter becomes not only a medium, but also a language, what would be the conceptual tools needed to rethink our very understanding of mediation? Would this new media epistemology be considered legitimate or illegitimate? Be it legitimate or illegitimate, a new media theory must arise that challenges and overcomes the walls which separate science and culture, physics and semiotics, on the grounds that it is a transdisciplinary change on the inner workings of media itself which now becomes our vector of epistemological and empirical transformation. A new media theory which not only speaks the language of molecular technologies but that might be translated into material programming, is the only media theory equipped to handle the challenges of the anthropocene. ReferencesAbadal, Sergi, and Ian F. Akyildiz. "Bio-Inspired Synchronization for Nanocommunication Networks." Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM), 2011.Borisenko, V. E., and S. Ossicini. What Is What in the Nanoworld: A Handbook on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH, 2005.Bourdieu, Pierre. "The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason." Social Science Information 14 (Dec. 1975): 19-47.---. La Distinction: Critique Sociale du Jugement. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979. Delborne, Jason A. "Transgenes and Transgressions: Scientific Dissent as Heterogeneous Practice". Social Studies of Science 38 (2008): 509.Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity. London: Penguin, 2011.Downing, John. "Nanomedia: ‘Community’ Media, ‘Network’ Media, ‘Social Movement’ Media: Why Do They Matter? And What’s in a Name? Mitjans Comunitaris, Moviments Socials i Xarxes." InCom-UAB. Barcelona: Cidob, 15 March 2010.Drexler, E.K. "Modular Molecular Composite Nanosystems." Metamodern 10 Nov. 2008. Epstein, Steven. Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge. Vol. 7. U of California P, 1996.Hara, S., et al. "New Paradigms in Wireless Communication Systems." Wireless Personal Communications 37.3-4 (May 2006): 233-241.Holister, P. "Nanotech: The Tiny Revolution." CMP Cientifica July 2002.James, Daniel. Bastardising Technology as a Critical Mode of Cultural Practice. PhD Thesis. Wellington, New Zealand, Massey University, 2010.Jensen, K., J. Weldon, H. Garcia, and A. Zetti. "Nanotube Radio." Nano Letters 7.11 (2007): 3508–3511. Lee, C.H., S.W. Lee, and S.S. Lee. "A Nanoradio Utilizing the Mechanical Resonance of a Vertically Aligned Nanopillar Array." Nanoscale 6.4 (2014): 2087-93. Maasen. Governing Future Technologies: Nanotechnology and the Rise of an Assessment Regime. Berlin: Springer, 2010. 121–4.Milburn, Colin. "Digital Matters: Video Games and the Cultural Transcoding of Nanotechnology." In Governing Future Technologies: Nanotechnology and the Rise of an Assessment Regime, eds. Mario Kaiser, Monika Kurath, Sabine Maasen, and Christoph Rehmann-Sutter. Berlin: Springer, 2009.Miller, T.R., T.D. Baird, C.M. Littlefield, G. Kofinas, F. Chapin III, and C.L. Redman. "Epistemological Pluralism: Reorganizing Interdisciplinary Research". Ecology and Society 13.2 (2008): 46.National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI). Big Things from a Tiny World. 2008.Nowviskie, Bethany. "Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene". Nowviskie.org. 15 Sep. 2014 .Pajnik, Mojca, and John Downing. "Introduction: The Challenges of 'Nano-Media'." In M. Pajnik and J. Downing, eds., Alternative Media and the Politics of Resistance: Perspectives and Challenges. Ljubljana, Slovenia: Peace Institute, 2008. 7-16.Qarehbaghi, Reza, Hao Jiang, and Bozena Kaminska. "Nano-Media: Multi-Channel Full Color Image with Embedded Covert Information Display." In ACM SIGGRAPH 2014 Posters. New York: ACM, 2014. Rand, Stephen C., Costa Soukolis, and Diederik Wiersma. "Localization, Multiple Scattering, and Lasing in Random Nanomedia." JOSA B 21.1 (2004): 98-98.Service, Robert F. "TF10: Nanoradio." MIT Technology Review April 2008. Shanken, Edward A. "Artists in Industry and the Academy: Collaborative Research, Interdisciplinary Scholarship and the Creation and Interpretation of Hybrid Forms." Leonardo 38.5 (Oct. 2005): 415-418.St John, Graham. "Freak Media: Vibe Tribes, Sampledelic Outlaws and Israeli Psytrance." Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 26. 3 (2012): 437–447.Subcomission on Quartenary Stratigraphy (S.Q.S.). "What Is the Anthropocene?" Quaternary.stratigraphy.org.Thacker, Eugene. Biomedia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.Toffoli, Tommaso, and Norman Margolus. "Programmable Matter: Concepts and Realization." Physica D 47 (1991): 263–272.Vanderbeeken, Robrecht, Christel Stalpaert, Boris Debackere, and David Depestel. Bastard or Playmate? On Adapting Theatre, Mutating Media and the Contemporary Performing Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University, 2012.Wark, McKenzie. "Climate Science as Sensory Infrastructure." Extract from Molecular Red, forthcoming. The White Review 20 Sep. 2014.Wilson, Matthew W. "Cyborg Geographies: Towards Hybrid Epistemologies." Gender, Place and Culture 16.5 (2009): 499–515.

Historically, science and medicine have been a great source of inspiration for fiction writers. Mary Shelley, in the 1831 introduction to her novel Frankenstein said she was been inspired, in part, by discussions about scientific experiments, including those of Darwin and Galvani. Shelley states “perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth” (10). Countless other authors have followed her lead, from H.G. Wells, whose mad scientist Dr Moreau takes a lead from Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein, through to popular contemporary writers of adult fiction, such as Michael Crichton and Kathy Reichs, who have drawn on their scientific and medical backgrounds for their fictional works. Science and medicine themed fiction has also proven popular for younger readers, particularly in dystopian settings. Reichs has extended her writing to include the young adult market with Virals, which combines forensic science with the supernatural. Alison Allen-Grey’s 2009 novel, Lifegame, deals with cloning and organ replacement. Nathan Hobby’s The Fur is based around an environmental disaster where an invasive fungal-fur grows everywhere, including in people’s internal organs. Catherine Jinks’ Piggy in the Middle incorporates genetics and biomedical research into its horror-science fiction plot. Brian Caswell’s young adult novel, Cage of Butterflies uses elements of neuroscience as a plot device. However, although Caswell’s novel found commercial and critical success—it was shortlisted in the 1993 Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Book of the Year Awards Older Readers and was reprinted several times—neuroscience is a field that writers of young adult fiction tend to either ignore or only refer to on the periphery. This paper will explore how neuroscientific and dystopian elements interact in young adult fiction, focusing on the current trend for neuroscientific elements to be something that adolescent characters are subjected to rather than something they can use as a tool of positive change. It will argue that the time is right for a shift in young adult fiction away from a dystopian world view to one where the teenaged characters can become powerful agents of change. The term “neuroscience” was first coined in the 1960s as a way to hybridise a range of disciplines and sub-disciplines including biophsyics, biology and chemistry (Abi-Rached and Rose). Since then, neuroscience as a field has made huge leaps, particularly in the past two decades with discoveries about the development and growth of the adolescent brain; the dismissal of the nature versus nurture dichotomy; and the acceptance of brain plasticity. Although individual scientists had made discoveries relating to brain plasticity in adult humans as far back as the 1960s, for example, it is less than 10 years since neuroplasticity—the notion that nerve cells in human brains and nervous systems are malleable, and so can be changed or modified by input from the environment—was accepted into mainstream scientific thinking (Doidge). This was a significant change in brain science from the once dominant principle of localisation, which posited that specific brain functions were fixed in a specific area of the brain, and that once damaged, the function associated with a brain area could not improve or recover (Burrell; Kolb and Whishaw; Doidge). Furthermore, up until the late 1990s when neuroscientist Jay Giedd’s studies of adolescent brains showed that the brain’s grey matter, which thickens during childhood, thins during adolescence while the white matter thickens, it was widely accepted the human brain stopped maturing at around the age of twelve (Wallis and Dell). The research of Giedd and others showed that massive changes, including those affecting decision-making abilities, impulse control and skill development, take place in the developing adolescent brain (Carr-Gregg). Thus, within the last fifteen years, two significant discoveries within neuroscience—brain plasticity and the maturation of the adolescent brain­—have had a major impact on the way the brain is viewed and studied. Brian Caswell’s Cage of Butterflies, was published too early to take advantage of these neuroscientific discoveries. Nevertheless the novel includes some specific details about how the brains of a group of children within the story, the Babies, have been altered by febrile convulsions to create an abnormality in their brain anatomy. The abnormality is discovered by a CAT scan (the novel predates the use of fMRI brain scans). Due to their abnormal brain anatomy, the Babies are unable to communicate verbally but can communicate telepathically as a “shared mind” with others outside their small group. It is unlikely Caswell would have been aware of brain plasticity in the early 1990s, nevertheless, in the narrative, older teens are able to slowly understand the Babies by focusing on their telepathic messages until, over time, they can understand them without too much difficulty. Thus Caswell has incorporated neuroscientific elements throughout the plot of his novel and provided some neuroscientific explanation for how the Babies communicate. In recent years, several young adult novels, both speculative and contemporary, have used elements of neuroscience in their narratives; however, these novels tend to put neuroscience on the periphery. Rather than embracing neuroscience as a tool adolescent characters can use for their benefit, as Caswell did, neuroscience is typically something that exists around or is done to the characters; it is an element over which they have no control. These novels are found across several sub-genres of young adult fiction, including science fiction, speculative fiction and contemporary fiction. Most place their narratives in a dystopian world view. The dystopian settings reinforce the idea that the world is a dangerous place to live, and the teenaged characters living in the world of the novels are at the mercy of powerful oppressors. This creates tension within the narrative as the adolescents battle authorities for power. Without the ability to use neuroscientific advantages for their own gain, however, the characters’ power to change their worlds remains in the hands of adult authorities and the teenaged characters ultimately lose the fight to change their world. This lack of agency is evident in several dystopian young adult novels published in recent years, including the Uglies series and to a lesser extent Brain Jack and Dark Angel. Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series is set in a dystopian future world and uses neuroscientific concepts to both reinforce the power of the ruling regime and give limited agency to the protagonists. In the first book in the series, Uglies, the science supports the narrative where necessary but is always subservient to the action. Westerfeld’s intended the Uglies series to focus on action. Westerfield states “I love a good action sequence, and this series is of full of hoverboard chases, escapes through ancient ruins, and leaps off tall buildings in bungee jackets” (Books). Nevertheless, the brain’s ability to rewire itself—the neuroscientific concept of brain plasticity—is a central idea within the Uglies series. In book one, the protagonist Tally Youngblood is desperate to turn 16 so she can join her friends and become a Pretty. However, she discovers the operation to become a Pretty involves not just plastic surgery to alter her looks: a lesion is inflicted on the brain, giving each Pretty the equivalent of a frontal lobotomy. In the next book, Pretties, Tally has undergone the procedure and then becomes one of the elite Specials, and in the third instalment she eventually rejects her Special status and returns to her true nature. This latter process, one of the characters explains, is possible because Tally has learnt to rewire her brain, and so undo the Pretty operation and the procedure that made her a Special. Thus neuroscientific concepts of brain injury and recovery through brain plasticity are prime plot devices. But the narrative offers no explanations for how Tally and some others have the ability to rewire their brains to undo the Pretty operation while most do not. The apparent complexity of the neuroscience is used as a surface plot device rather than as an element that could be explored to add narrative depth. In contrast, the philosophical implications of recent neuroscientific discoveries, rather than the physical, are explored in another recent young adult novel, Dark Angel. David Klass’ novel, Dark Angel, places recent developments in neuroscience in a contemporary setting to explore the nature of good and evil. It tells the story of 17-year-old Jeff, whose ordinary, small-town life implodes when his older brother, Troy, comes home on parole after serving five years for manslaughter. A school assignment forces Jeff to confront Troy’s complex nature. The science teacher asks his class “where does our growing knowledge of the chemical nature of the brain leave us in terms of... the human soul? When we think, are we really making choices or just following chemical pathways?” (Klass 74). This passage introduces a neuroscientific angle into the plot, and may refer to a case brought before the US Supreme Court in 2005 where the court admitted a brief based on brain scans showing that adolescent brains work differently than adult brains (Madrigal). The protagonist, Jeff, explores the nature of good and evil through this neuroscientific framework as the story's action unfolds, and examines his relationship with Troy, who is described in all his creepiness and vulnerability. Again through the teacher, Klass incorporates trauma and its impact on the brain from a neuroscientific perspective: There are psychiatrists and neurologists doing studies on violent lawbreakers...who are finding that these felons share amazingly similar patterns of abusive childhoods, brain injuries, and psychotic symptoms. (Klass 115)Jeff's story is infused with the fallout of his brother’s violent past and present, yet there is no hint of any trauma in Jeff’s or Troy’s childhoods that could be seen as a cause for Troy’s aberrant behaviour. Thus, although Klass’ novel explores more philosophical aspects of neuroscience, like Westerfeld’s novel, it uses developments in neuroscience as a point of interest. The neuroscience in Dark Angel is not embedded in the story but is a lens through which to view the theme of whether people are born evil or made evil. Brain Jack and Being are another two recent young adult novels that explore physical and philosophical aspects of modern neuroscience to some extent. Technology and its possible neurological effects on the brain, particularly the adolescent brain, is a field of research popularised by English neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield. Brian Falkner’s 2010 release, Brain Jack, explores this branch of neuroscience with its cautionary tale of a hands-free device—a cap with small wires that attach to your head called the neuro-headset­—that allows you to control your computer with your thoughts. As more and more people use the neuro-headset, the avatar designed to help people learn to use the software develops consciousness and its own moral code, destroying anyone who it considers a threat by frying their brains. Like Dark Angel and Uglies, Brain Jack keeps the neuroscience on the periphery as an element over which the characters have little or no control, and details about how the neuro-headset affects the brain of its wearers, and how the avatar develops consciousness, are not explored. Conversely, Kevin Brooks’ novel Being explores the nature of consciousness outside the field of neuroscience. The protagonist, Robert, goes into hospital for a routine procedure and discovers that instead of internal organs, he has some kind of hardware. On the run from authorities who are after him for reasons he does not understand, Robert tries frantically to reconstruct his earliest memories to give him some clue as to who, or what, he really is: if he does not have normal human body parts, is he human? However, whether or not he has a human brain, and the implications of either answer for his consciousness, is never addressed. Thus, although the novels discussed above each incorporate neuroscience to some degree, they do so at a cursory level. In the case of Being this is understandable as neuroscience is never explicitly mentioned; rather it is a possible sub-text implied through the theme of consciousness. In Dark Angel, through the teacher as mouthpiece, neuroscience is offered up as a possible explanation for criminal behaviour, which causes the protagonist to question his beliefs and judgements about his brother. However, in Uglies, and to a lesser extent in Brain Jack, neuroscience is glossed over when more detail may have added extra depth and complexity to the novels. Fast-paced action is a common element in much contemporary young adult fiction, and thus it is possible that Westerfeld and Falkner both chose to sacrifice complexity for the sake of action. In Uglies, it is likely this is the case, given Westerfeld’s love of action sequences and his attention to detail about objects created exclusively for his futuristic world. However, Brain Jack goes into explicit detail about computer hacking. Falkner’s dismissal of the neuroscientific aspects of his plot, which could have added extra interest, most likely stems from his passion for computer science (he studied computer science at university) rather than a distaste for or ignorance of neuroscience. Nevertheless Falkner, Westerfeld, Brooks, and to a lesser extent Klass, have each glossed over a source of potential power that could turn the dystopian worlds of their novels into one where the teenaged protagonists hold the power to make lasting change. In each of these novels, neuroscientific concepts are generally used to support a bleak or dystopian world view. In Uglies, the characters have two choices: a life as a lobotomised Pretty or a life on the run from the authorities, where discovery and capture is a constant threat. The USA represented in Brain Jack descends into civil war, where those unknowingly enslaved by the avatar’s consciousness fight against those who refuse to wear the neuro-headsets. The protagonist in Being lives in hiding from the secret authorities who seek to capture and destroy him. Even in Dark Angel, the neuroscience is not a source of comfort or support for the protagonist, whose life, and that of his family, falls apart as a consequence of his older brother’s criminal actions. It is only in the 1990s novel, Cage of Butterflies, that characters use a neuroscientific advantage to improve their situation. The Babies in Caswell’s Cage of Butterflies are initially victims of their brain abnormality; however, with the help of the teenaged characters, along with two adult characters, they are able to use their “condition” to help create a new life for themselves. Telepathically communicating through their “shared mind,” the Babies coordinate their efforts with the others to escape from the research scientists who threaten their survival. In this way, what starts as a neurological disability is turned into an advantage. Cage of Butterflies illustrates how a young adult novel can incorporate neuroscience into its narrative in a way that offers the young adults agency to make positive changes in their lives. Furthermore, with recent neuroscientific discoveries showing that adolescence is a vital time for brain development and growth, there is potential for neuroscience to be explored as an agent of positive change in a new wave of young adult fiction, one that adopts a non-dystopian (if not optimistic) world view. Dystopian young adult fiction has been enjoying enormous popularity in western publishing in the past few years with series such as Chaos Walking, Hunger Games and Maze Runner trilogies topping bestseller lists. Dystopian fiction’s appeal to young adult audiences, states Westerfeld, is because: Teenagers’ lives are constantly defined by rules, and in response they construct their identities through necessary confrontations with authority, large and small. Imagining a world in which those authorities must be destroyed by any means necessary is one way of expanding that game. ("Teenage Wastelands")Teenagers often find themselves in trouble, and are almost as often like to cause trouble. Placing them in a fictional dystopian world gives them room to fight authority; too often, however, the young adult protagonists are never able to completely escape the world the adults impose upon them. For example, the epilogue of James Dashner’s The Maze Runner tells the reader the surviving group have not escaped the makers of the maze, and their apparent rescuers are part of the same group of adult authorities. Caswell’s neurologically evolved Babies, along with their high IQ teenage counterparts, however, provide a model for how young protagonists can take advantage of neuroscientific discoveries to cause trouble for hostile authorities in their fictional worlds. The power of the brain harnessed by adolescents, alongside their hormonal changes, is by its nature a recipe for trouble: it has the potential to give young people an agency and power adults may fear. In the everyday, lived world, neuroscientific tools are always in the hands of adults; however, there needs to be no such constraint in a fictional world. The superior ability of adolescents to grow the white matter of their brains, for example, could give rise to a range of fictional scenarios where the adolescents could use their brain power to brainwash adults in authority. A teenage neurosurgeon might not work well in a contemporary setting but could be credible in a speculative fiction setting. The number of possible scenarios is endless. More importantly, however, it offers a relatively unexplored avenue for teenaged characters to have agency and power in their fictional worlds. Westerfeld may be right in his assertion that the current popularity of dystopian fiction for young adults is a reaction to the highly monitored and controlled world in which they live ("Teenage Wastelands"). However, an alternative world view, one where the adolescents take control and defeat the adults, is just as valid. Such a scenario has been explored in Cory Doctorow’s For the Win, where marginalised and exploited gamers from Singapore and China band together with an American to form a global union and defeat their oppressors. Doctorow uses online gaming skills, a field of expertise where youth are considered superior to adults, to give his characters power over adults in their world. Similarly, the amazing changes that take place in the adolescent brain are a natural advantage that teenaged characters could utilise, particularly in speculative fiction, to gain power over adults. To imbue adolescent characters with such power has the potential to move young adult fiction beyond the confines of the dystopian novel and open new narrative pathways. The 2011 Bologna Children’s Book Fair supports the view that western-based publishing companies will be looking for more dystopian young adult fiction for the next year or two (Roback). However, within a few years, it is possible that the popularity of zombies, werewolves and vampires—and their dominance of fictional dystopian worlds—will pass or, at least change in their representations. The “next big thing” in young adult fiction could be neuroscience. Moreover, neuroscientific concepts could be incorporated into the standard zombie/vampire/werewolf trope to create yet another hybrid to explore: a zombie virus that mutates to give a new breed of undead creature superior intelligence, for example; or a new cross-breed of werewolf that gives humans the advantages of the canine brain with none of the disadvantages. The capacity and complexity of the human brain is enormous, and thus it offers enormous potential to create exciting young adult fiction that explores new territory, giving the teenaged reader a sense of their own power and natural advantages. In turn, this is bound to give them infinite potential to create fictional trouble. References Abi-Rachedm, Rose. “The Birth of the Neuromolecular Gaze.” History of the Human Sciences 23 (2010): 11-36. Allen-Gray, Alison. Lifegame. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Brooks, Kevin. Being. London: Puffin Books, 2007. Burrell, Brian. Postcards from the Brain Museum. New York: Broadway, 2004. Carr-Gregg, Michael. The Princess Bitchface Syndrome. Melbourne: Penguin Books. 2006. Caswell, Brian. A Cage of Butterflies. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1992. Dashner, James. The Maze Runner. Somerset, United Kingdom: Chicken House, 2010. Doctorow, Cory. For the Win. New York: Tor, 2010. Doidge, Norman. The Brain That Changes Itself. Melbourne: Scribe, 2007. Falkner, Brian. Brain Jack. New York: Random House, 2009. Hobby, Nathan. The Fur. Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2004. Jinks, Catherine. Piggy in the Middle. Melbourne: Penguin, 1998. Klass, David. Dark Angel. New York: HarperTeen, 2007. Kolb, Bryan, and Ian Whishaw. Fundamentals of Human Neuropscychology, New York, Worth, 2009. Lehrer, Jonah. “The Human Brain Gets a New Map.” The Frontal Cortex. 2011. 10 April 2011 ‹http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/04/the-human-brain-atlas/›. Madrigal, Alexis. “Courtroom First: Brain Scan Used in Murder Sentencing.” Wired. 2009. 16 April 2011 ‹http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/brain-scan-murder-sentencing/›. Reichs, Kathy. Virals. London: Young Corgi, 2010. Roback, Diane. “Bologna 2011: Back to Business at a Buoyant Fair.” Publishers Weekly. 2011. 17 April 2011 ‹http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/46698-bologna-2011-back-to-business-at-a-buoyant-fair.html›. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. London: Arrow Books, 1973. Wallis, Claudia, and Krystina Dell. “What Makes Teens Tick?” Death Penalty Information Centre. 2004. 10 April 2011 ‹http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/what-makes-teens-tick-flood-hormones-sure-also-host-structural-changes-brain-can-those-explain-behav›. Wells, H.G. The Island of Dr Moreau. Melbourne: Penguin, 1896. Westerfeld, Scott. Uglies. New York: Simon Pulse, 2005. ———. Pretties. New York: Simon Pulse, 2005. ———. Specials. New York: Simon Pulse, 2006. ———. Books. 2008. 1 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.scottwesterfeld.com/author/books.htm›. ———. “Teenage Wastelands: How Dystopian YA Became Publishing’s Next Big Thing.” Tor.com 2011. 17 April 2011 ‹http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/04/teenage-wastelands-how-dystopian-ya-became-publishings-next-big-thing›.

Introduction: Conceptualizing DisabilityThe two most prominent models for understanding disability are the medical model and the social model (“Disability”). The medical model locates disability in the person and emphasises the possibility of a cure, reinforcing the idea that disability is the fault of the disabled person, their body, their genes, and/or their upbringing. The social model, formulated as a response to the medical model, presents disability as a failure of the surrounding environment to accommodate differently abled bodies and minds. Closely linked to identity politics, the social model argues that disability is not a defect to be fixed but a source of human experience and identity, and that to disregard the needs of people with disability is to discriminate against them by being “ableist.”Both models have limitations. On the one hand, simply being a person with disability or having any other minority identity/-ies does not by itself lead to exclusion and discrimination (Nocella 18); an element of social valuation must be present that goes beyond a mere numbers game. On the other hand, merely focusing on the social aspect neglects “the realities of sickness, suffering, and pain” that many people with disability experience (Mollow 196) and that cannot be substantially alleviated by any degree of social change. The body is irreducible to discourse and representation (Siebers 749). Disability exists only at the confluence of differently abled minds and bodies and unaccommodating social and physical environs. How a body “fits” (my word) its environment is the focus of the “ecosomatic paradigm” (Cella 574-75); one example is how the drastically different environment of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) reorients the coordinates of ability and impairment (Cella 582–84). I want to examine a novel that, conversely, features a change not in environment but in body.Alien LegsTim Farnsworth, the protagonist of Joshua Ferris’s second novel, The Unnamed (2010), is a high-powered New York lawyer who develops a condition that causes him to walk spontaneously without control over direction or duration. Tim suffers four periods of “walking,” during which his body could without warning stand up and walk at any time up to the point of exhaustion; each period grows increasingly longer with more frequent walks, until the fourth one ends in Tim’s death. As his wife, Jane, understands it, these forced excursions are “a hijacking of some obscure order of the body, the frightened soul inside the runaway train of mindless matter” (24). The direction is not random, for his legs follow roads and traffic lights. When Tim is exhausted, his legs abruptly stop, ceding control back to his conscious will, whence Tim usually calls Jane and then sleeps like a baby wherever he stops. She picks him up at all hours of the day and night.Contemporary critics note shades of Beckett in both the premise and title of the novel (“Young”; Adams), connections confirmed by Ferris (“Involuntary”); Ron Charles mentions the Poe story “The Man of the Crowd” (1845), but it seems only the compulsion to walk is similar. Ferris says he “was interested in writing about disease” (“Involuntary”), and disability is at the core of the novel; Tim more than once thinks bitterly to himself that the smug person without disability in front of him will one day fall ill and die, alluding to the universality of disability. His condition is detrimental to his work and life, and Stuart Murray explores how this reveals the ableist assumptions behind the idea of “productivity” in a post-industrial economy. In one humorous episode, Tim arrives unexpectedly (but volitionally) at a courtroom and has just finished requesting permission to join the proceedings when his legs take him out of the courtroom again; he barely has time to shout over his shoulder, “on second thought, Your Honor” (Ferris Unnamed 103). However, Murray does not discuss what is unique about Tim’s disability: it revolves around walking, the paradigmatic act of ability in popular culture, as connoted in the phrase “to stand up and walk.” This makes it difficult to understand Tim’s predicament solely in terms of either the medical or social model. He is able-bodied—in fact, we might say he is “over-able”—leading one doctor to label his condition “benign idiopathic perambulation” (41; my emphasis); yet the lack of agency in his walking precludes it from becoming a “pedestrian speech act” (de Certeau 98), walking that imbues space with semiotic value. It is difficult to imagine what changes society could make to neutralize Tim’s disability.The novel explores both avenues. At first, Tim adheres to the medical model protocol of seeking a diagnosis to facilitate treatment. He goes to every and any (pseudo)expert in search of “the One Guy” who can diagnose and, possibly, cure him (53), but none can; a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine documents psychiatrists and neurologists, finding nothing, kicking the can between them, “from the mind to body back to the mind” (101). Tim is driven to seek a diagnosis because, under the medical model, a diagnosis facilitates understanding, by others and by oneself. As the Farnsworths experience many times, it is surpassingly difficult to explain to others that one has a disease with no diagnosis or even name. Without a name, the disease may as well not exist, and even their daughter, Becka, doubts Tim at first. Only Jane is able to empathize with him based on her own experience of menopause, incomprehensible to men, gesturing towards the influence of sex on medical hermeneutics (Mollow 188–92). As the last hope of a diagnosis comes up empty, Tim shifts his mentality, attempting to understand his condition through an idiosyncratic idiom: experiencing “brain fog”, feeling “mentally unsticky”, and having “jangly” nerves, “hyperslogged” muscles, a “floaty” left side, and “bunched up” breathing—these, to him, are “the most precise descriptions” of his physical and mental state (126). “Name” something, “revealing nature’s mystery”, and one can “triumph over it”, he thinks at one point (212). But he is never able to eschew the drive toward understanding via naming, and his “deep metaphysical ache” (Burn 45) takes the form of a lament at misfortune, a genre traceable to the Book of Job.Short of crafting a life for Tim in which his family, friends, and work are meaningfully present yet detached enough in scheduling and physical space to accommodate his needs, the social model is insufficient to make sense of, let alone neutralize, his disability. Nonetheless, there are certain aspects of his experience that can be improved with social adjustments. Tim often ends his walks by sleeping wherever he stops, and he would benefit from sensitivity training for police officers and other authority figures; out of all the authority figures who he encounters, only one shows consideration for his safety, comfort, and mental well-being prior to addressing the illegality of his behaviour. And making the general public more aware of “modes of not knowing, unknowing, and failing to know”, in the words of Jack Halberstam (qtd. in McRuer and Johnson 152), would alleviate the plight not just of Tim but of all sufferers of undiagnosed diseases and people with (rare forms of) disability.After Tim leaves home and starts walking cross-country, he has to learn to deal with his disability without any support system. The solution he hits upon illustrates the ecosomatic paradigm: he buys camping gear and treats his walking as an endless hike. Neither “curing” his body nor asking accommodation of society, Tim’s tools mediate a fit between body and environs, and it more or less works. For Tim the involuntary nomad, “everywhere was a wilderness” (Ferris Unnamed 247).The Otherness of the BodyProblems arise when Tim tries to fight his legs. After despairing of a diagnosis, he internalises the struggle against the “somatic noncompliance” of his body (Mollow 197) and refers to it as “the other” (207). One through-line of the novel is a (failed) attempt to overcome cartesian duality (Reiffenrath). Tim divides his experiences along cartesian lines and actively tries to enhance while short-circuiting the body. He recites case law and tries to take up birdwatching to maintain his mind, but his body constantly stymies him, drawing his attention to its own needs. He keeps himself ill-clothed and -fed and spurns needed medical attention, only to find—on the brink of death—that his body has brought him to a hospital, and that he stops walking until he is cured and discharged. Tim’s early impression that his body has “a mind of its own” (44), a situation comparable to the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886; Ludwigs 123–24), is borne out when it starts to silently speak to him, monosyllabically at first (“Food!” (207)), then progressing to simple sentences (“Leg is hurting” (213)) and sarcasm (“Deficiency of copper causes anemia, just so you know” (216)) before arriving at full-blown taunting:The other was the interrogator and he the muttering subject […].Q: Are you aware that you can be made to forget words, if certain neurons are suppressed from firing?A: Certain what?Q: And that by suppressing the firing of others, you can be made to forget what words mean entirely? Like the word Jane, for instance.A: Which?Q: And do you know that if I do this—[inaudible]A: Oof!Q: —you will flatline? And if I do this—[inaudible]A: Aaa, aaa…Q: —you will cease flatlining? (223–24; emphases and interpolations in original except for bracketed ellipsis)His Jobean lament turns literal, with his mind on God’s side and his body, “the other”, on the Devil’s in a battle for his eternal soul (Burn 46). Ironically, this “God talk” (Ferris Unnamed 248) finally gets Tim diagnosed with schizophrenia, and he receives medication that silences his body, if not stilling his legs. But when he is not medicated, his body can dominate his mind with multiple-page monologues.Not long after Tim’s mind and body reach a truce thanks to the camping gear and medication, Tim receives word on the west coast that Jane, in New York, has terminal cancer; he resolves to fight his end-of-walk “narcoleptic episodes” (12) to return to her—on foot. His body is not pleased, and it slowly falls apart as Tim fights it eastward cross-country. By the time he is hospitalized “ten miles as the crow flies from his final destination”, his ailments include “conjunctivitis”, “leg cramps”, “myositis”, “kidney failure”, “chafing and blisters”, “shingles”, “back pain”, “bug bites, ticks, fleas and lice”, “sun blisters”, “heatstroke and dehydration”, “rhabdomyolysis”, “excess [blood] potassium”, “splintering [leg] bones”, “burning tongue”, “[ballooning] heels”, “osteal complications”, “acute respiratory distress syndrome”, “excess fluid [in] his peritoneal cavity”, “brain swelling”, and a coma (278–80)—not including the fingers and toes lost to frostbite during an earlier period of walking. Nevertheless, he recovers and reunites with Jane, maintaining a holding pattern by returning to Jane’s hospital bedside after each walk.Jane recovers; the urgency having dissipated, Tim goes back on the road, confident that “he had proven long ago that there was no circumstance under which he could not walk if he put his mind to it” (303). A victory for mind over body? Not quite. The ending, Tim’s death scene, planned by Ferris from the beginning (Ferris “Tracking”), manages to grant victory to both mind and body without uniting them: his mind keeps working after physical death, but its last thought is of a “delicious […] cup of water” (310). Mind and body are two, but indivisible.Cartesian duality has relevance for other significant characters. The chain-smoking Detective Roy, assigned the case Tim is defending, later appears with oxygen tank in tow due to emphysema, yet he cannot quit smoking. What might have been a mere shortcut for characterization here carries physical consequences: the oxygen tank limits Roy’s movement and, one supposes, his investigative ability. After Jane recovers, Tim visits Frank Novovian, the security guard at his old law firm, and finds he has “gone fat [...] His retiring slouch behind the security post said there was no going back”; recognising Tim, Frank “lifted an inch off [his] chair, righting his jellied form, which immediately settled back into place” (297; my emphases). Frank’s physical state reflects the state of his career: settled. The mind-body antagonism is even more stark among Tim’s lawyer colleagues. Lev Wittig cannot become sexually aroused unless there is a “rare and extremely venomous snak[e]” in the room with no lights (145)—in direct contrast to his being a corporate tax specialist and the “dullest person you will ever meet” (141). And Mike Kronish famously once billed a twenty-seven-hour workday by crossing multiple time zones, but his apparent victory of mind over matter is undercut by his other notable achievement, being such a workaholic that his grown kids call him “Uncle Daddy” (148).Jane offers a more vexed case. While serving as Tim’s primary caretaker, she dreads the prospect of sacrificing the rest of her life for him. The pressures of the consciously maintaining her wedding vows directly affects her body. Besides succumbing to and recovering from alcoholism, she is twice tempted by the sexuality of other men; the second time, Tim calls her at the moment of truth to tell her the walking has returned, but instead of offering to pick him up, she says to him, “Come home” (195). As she later admits, asking him to do the impossible is a form of abandonment, and though causality is merely implied, Tim decides a day later not to return. Cartesian duality is similarly blurred in Jane’s fight against cancer. Prior to developing cancer, it is the pretence for Tim’s frequent office absences; she develops cancer; she fights it into remission not by relying on the clinical trial she undergoes, but because Tim’s impossible return inspires her; its remission removes the sense of urgency keeping Tim around, and he leaves; and he later learns that she dies from its recurrence. In multiple senses, Jane’s physical challenges are inextricable from her marriage commitment. Tim’s peripatetic condition affects both of them in homologous ways, gesturing towards the importance of disability studies for understanding the experience both of people with disability and of their caretakers.Becka copes with cartesian duality in the form of her obesity, and the way she does so sets an example for Tim. She gains weight during adolescence, around the time Tim starts walking uncontrollably, and despite her efforts she never loses weight. At first moody and depressed, she later channels her emotions into music, eventually going on tour. After one of her concerts, she tells Tim she has accepted her body, calling it “my one go-around,” freeing her from having to “hate yourself till the bitter end” (262) to instead enjoy her life and music. The idea of acceptance stays with Tim; whereas in previous episodes of walking he ignored the outside world—another example of reconceptualizing walking in the mode of disability—he pays attention to his surroundings on his journey back to New York, which is filled with descriptions of various geographical, meteorological, biological, and sociological phenomena, all while his body slowly breaks down. By the time he leaves home forever, he has acquired the habit of constant observation and the ability to enjoy things moment by moment. “Beauty, surprisingly, was everywhere” (279), he thinks. Invoking the figure of the flâneur, which Ferris had in mind when writing the novel (Ferris “Involuntary”), Peter Ferry argues that “becoming a 21st century incarnation of the flâneur gives Tim a greater sense of selfhood, a belief in the significance of his own existence within the increasingly chaotic and disorientating urban environment” (59). I concur, with two caveats: the chaotic and disorienting environment is not merely urban; and, contrary to Ferry’s claim that this regained selfhood is in contrast to “disintegrating” “conventional understandings of masculinity” (57), it instead incorporates Tim’s new identity as a person with disability.Conclusion: The Experience of DisabilityMore than specific insights into living with disability, the most important contribution of The Unnamed to disability studies is its exploration of the pure experience of disability. Ferris says, “I wanted to strip down this character to the very barest essentials and see what happens when sickness can’t go away and it can’t be answered by all [sic] of the medical technology that the country has at its disposal” (“Tracking”); by making Tim a wealthy lawyer with a caring family—removing common complicating socioeconomic factors of disability—and giving him an unprecedented impairment—removing all medical support and social services—Ferris depicts disability per se, illuminating the importance of disability studies for all people with(out) disability. After undergoing variegated experiences of pure disability, Tim “maintained a sound mind until the end. He was vigilant about periodic checkups and disciplined with his medication. He took care of himself as best he could, eating well however possible, sleeping when his body required it, […] and he persevered in this manner of living until his death” (Ferris Unnamed 306). This is an ideal relation to maintain between mind, body, and environment, irrespective of (dis)ability.ReferencesAdams, Tim. “The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris.” Fiction. Observer, 21 Feb. 2010: n. pag. 19 Sep. 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/21/the-unnamed-joshua-ferris>.Burn, Stephen J. “Mapping the Syndrome Novel.” Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome. Eds. T.J. Lustig and James Peacock. New York: Routledge, 2013. 35-52.Cella, Matthew J.C. “The Ecosomatic Paradigm in Literature: Merging Disability Studies and Ecocriticism.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20.3 (2013): 574–96.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. 1980. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.Charles, Ron. “Book World Review of Joshua Ferris’s ‘The Unnamed.’” Books. Washington Post 20 Jan. 2010: n. pag. 19 Sep. 2018 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/19/AR2010011903945.html>.“Disability.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia 17 Sep. 2018. 19 Sep. 2018 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability>.Ferris, Joshua. “Involuntary Walking; the Joshua Ferris Interview.” ReadRollShow. Created by David Weich. Sheepscot Creative, 2010. Vimeo, 9 Mar. 2010. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://www.vimeo.com/10026925>. [My transcript.]———. “Tracking a Man’s Life, in Endless Footsteps.” Interview by Melissa Block. All Things Considered, NPR, 15 Feb. 2010. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=123650332>.———. The Unnamed: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2010.Ferry, Peter. “Reading Manhattan, Reading Masculinity: Reintroducing the Flâneur with E.B. White’s Here Is New York and Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed.” Culture, Society & Masculinities 3.1 (2011): 49–61.Ludwigs, Marina. “Walking as a Metaphor for Narrativity.” Studia Neophilologica 87.1 (Suppl. 1) (2015): 116–28.McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006.McRuer, Robert, and Merri Lisa Johnson. “Proliferating Cripistemologies: A Virtual Roundtable.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8.2 (2014): 149–69.Mollow, Anna. “Criphystemologies: What Disability Theory Needs to Know about Hysteria.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8.2 (2014): 185–201.Murray, Stuart. “Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work: Speed and Embodiment in Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed and Michael Faber’s Under the Skin.” Disability Studies Quarterly 37.4 (2017). 20 May 2018 <http://dsq–sds.org/article/view/6104/4823/>.Nocella, Anthony J., II. “Defining Eco–Ability: Social Justice and the Intersectionality of Disability, Nonhuman Animals, and Ecology.” Earth, Animal, and Disability Liberation: The Rise of the Eco–Ability Movement. Eds. Anthony J. Nocella II, Judy K.C. Bentley, and Janet M. Duncan. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. 3–21.Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man of the Crowd.” 1845. PoeStories.com. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://poestories.com/read/manofthecrowd>.Reiffenrath, Tanja. “Mind over Matter? Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed as Counternarrative.” [sic] – a journal of literature, culture and literary translation 5.1 (2014). 20 May 2018 <https://www.sic–journal.org/ArticleView.aspx?aid=305/>.Siebers, Tobin. “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body.” American Literary History 13.4 (2001): 737–54.“The Young and the Restless.” Review of The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris. Books and Arts. Economist, 28 Jan. 2010: n. pag. 19 Sep. 2018 <https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2010/01/28/the-young-and-the-restless>.

Introduction The first “Aquarius Festival” came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971 and was reprised in 1973 in the small rural town of Nimbin, in northern New South Wales. Both events reflected the Zeitgeist in what was, in some ways, an inchoate expression of the so-called “counterculture” (Roszak). Rather than attempting to analyse the counterculture as a discrete movement with a definable history, I enlist the theory of cultural memes to read the counter culture as a Dawkinsian cluster meme, with this paper offered as “testimonio”, a form of quasi-political memoir that views shifts in the culture through the lens of personal experience (Zimmerman, Yúdice). I track an evolving personal, “internal” topography and map its points of intersection with the radical social, political and cultural changes spawned by the “consciousness revolution” that was an integral part of the counterculture emerging in the 1970s. I focus particularly on the notion of “consciousness raising”, as a Dawkinsian memetic replicator, in the context of the idealistic notions of the much-heralded “New Age” of Aquarius, and propose that this meme has been a persistent feature of the evolution of the “meme cluster” known as the counterculture. Mimesis and the Counterculture Since evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins floated the notion of cultural memes as a template to account for the evolution of ideas within political cultures, a literature of commentary and criticism has emerged that debates the strengths and weaknesses of his proposed model and its application across a number of fields. I borrow the notion to trace the influence of a set of memes that clustered around the emergence of what writer Marilyn Ferguson called The Aquarian Conspiracy, in her 1980 book of that name. Ferguson’s text, subtitled Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time, was a controversial attempt to account for what was known as the “New Age” movement, with its late millennial focus on social and personal transformation. That focus leads me to approach the counterculture (a term first floated by Theodore Roszak) less as a definable historical movement and more as a cluster of aspirational tropes expressing a range of aspects or concerns, from the overt political activism through to experimental technologies for the transformation of consciousness, and all characterised by a critical interrogation of, and resistance to, conventional social norms (Ferguson’s “personal and social transformation”). With its more overtly “spiritual” focus, I read the “New Age” meme, then, as a sub-set of this “cluster meme”, the counterculture. In my reading, “New Age” and “counterculture” overlap, sharing persistent concerns and a broad enough tent to accommodate the serious—the combative political action of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), say, (see Elbaum)—to the light-hearted—the sport of frisbee for example (Stancil). The interrogation of conventional social and political norms inherited from previous generations was a prominent strategy across both movements. Rather than offering a sociological analysis or history of the ragbag counterculture, per se, my discussion here focuses in on the particular meme of “consciousness raising” within that broader set of cultural shifts, some of which were sustained in their own right, some dropping away, and many absorbed into the dominant mainstream culture. Dawkins use of the term “meme” was rooted in the Greek mimesis, to emphasise the replication of an idea by imitation, or copying. He likened the way ideas survive and change in human culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. While the transmission of memes does not depend on a physical medium, such as the DNA of biology, they replicate with a greater or lesser degree of success by harnessing human social media in a kind of “infectivity”, it is argued, through “contagious” repetition among human populations. Dawkins proposed that just as biological organisms could be said to act as “hosts” for replicating genes, in the same way people and groups of people act as hosts for replicating memes. Even before Dawkins floated his term, French biologist Jacques Monod wrote that ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. (165, emphasis mine) Ideas have power, in Monod’s analysis: “They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighbouring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains” (Monod, cited in Gleick). Emblematic of the counterculture were various “New Age” phenomena such as psychedelic drugs, art and music, with the latter contributing the “Aquarius” meme, whose theme song came from the stage musical (and later, film) Hair, and particularly the lyric that runs: “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”. The Australian Aquarius Festivals of 1971 and 1973 explicitly invoked this meme in the way identified by Monod and the “Aquarius” meme resonated even in Australia. Problematising “Aquarius” As for the astrological accuracy of the “Age of Aquarius meme”, professional astrologers argue about its dating, and the qualities that supposedly characterise it. When I consulted with two prominent workers in this field for the preparation of this article, I was astonished to find their respective dating of the putative Age of Aquarius were centuries apart! What memes were being “hosted” here? According to the lyrics: When the moon is in the seventh house And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars. (Hair) My astrologer informants assert that the moon is actually in the seventh house twice every year, and that Jupiter aligns with Mars every two years. Yet we are still waiting for the outbreak of peace promised according to these astrological conditions. I am also informed that there’s no “real” astrological underpinning for the aspirations of the song’s lyrics, for an astrological “Age” is not determined by any planet but by constellations rising, they tell me. Most important, contrary to the aspirations embodied in the lyrics, peace was not guiding the planets and love was not about to “steer the stars”. For Mars is not the planet of love, apparently, but of war and conflict and, empowered with the expansiveness of Jupiter, it was the forceful aggression of a militaristic mind-set that actually prevailed as the “New Age” supposedly dawned. For the hippified summer of love had taken a nosedive with the tragic events at the Altamont speedway, near San Francisco in 1969, when biker gangs, enlisted to provide security for a concert performance by The Rolling Stones allegedly provoked violence, marring the event and contributing to a dawning disillusionment (for a useful coverage of the event and its historical context see Dalton). There was a lot of far-fetched poetic licence involved in this dreaming, then, but memes, according to Nikos Salingaros, are “greatly simplified versions of patterns”. “The simpler they are, the faster they can proliferate”, he writes, and the most successful memes “come with a great psychological appeal” (243, 260; emphasis mine). What could be retrieved from this inchoate idealism? Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind’s true liberation Aquarius, Aquarius. (Hair) In what follows I want to focus on this notion: “mind’s true liberation” by tracing the evolution of this project of “liberating” the mind, reflected in my personal journey. Nimbin and Aquarius I had attended the first Aquarius Festival, which came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971. I travelled there from Perth, overland, in a Ford Transit van, among a raggedy band of tie-dyed hippie actors, styled as The Campus Guerilla Theatre Troupe, re-joining our long-lost sisters and brothers as visionary pioneers of the New Age of Aquarius. Our visions were fueled with a suitcase full of potent Sumatran “buddha sticks” and, contrary to Biblical prophesies, we tended to see—not “through a glass darkly” but—in psychedelic, pop-, and op-art explosions of colour. We could see energy, man! Two years later, I found myself at the next Aquarius event in Nimbin, too, but by that time I inhabited a totally different mind-zone, albeit one characterised by the familiar, intense idealism. In the interim, I had been arrested in 1971 while “tripping out” in Sydney on potent “acid”, or LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide); had tried out political engagement at the Pram Factory Theatre in Melbourne; had camped out in protest at the flooding of Lake Pedder in the Tasmanian wilderness; met a young guru, started meditating, and joined “the ashram”—part of the movement known as the Divine Light Mission, which originated in India and was carried to the “West” (including Australia) by an enthusiastic and evangelical following of drug-toking drop-outs who had been swarming through India intent on escaping the dominant culture of the military-industrial complex and the horrors of the Vietnam War. Thus, by the time of the 1973 event in Nimbin, while other festival participants were foraging for “gold top” magic mushrooms in farmers’ fields, we devotees had put aside such chemical interventions in conscious awareness to dig latrines (our “service” project for the event) and we invited everyone to join us for “satsang” in the yellow, canvas-covered, geodesic dome, to attend to the message of peace. The liberation meme had shifted through a mutation that involved lifestyle-changing choices that were less about alternative approaches to sustainable agriculture and more about engaging directly with “mind’s true liberation”. Raising Consciousness What comes into focus here is the meme of “consciousness raising”, which became the persistent project within which I lived and worked and had my being for many years. Triggered initially by the ingestion of those psychedelic substances that led to my shocking encounter with the police, the project was carried forward into the more disciplined environs of my guru’s ashrams. However, before my encounter with sustained spiritual practice I had tried to work the shift within the parameters of an ostensibly political framework. “Consciousness raising” was a form of political activism borrowed from the political sphere. Originally generated by Mao Zedong in China during the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the vested colonial interests that were choking Chinese nationalism in the 1940s, to our “distant, foreign brains” (Monod), as Western revolutionary romantics, Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book were taken up, in a kind of international counterculture solidarity with revolutionaries everywhere. It must be admitted, this solidarity was a fairly superficial gesture. Back in China it might be construed as part of a crude totalitarian campaign to inculcate Marxist-Leninist political ideas among the peasant classes (see Compestine for a fictionalised account of traumatic times; Han Suyin’s long-form autobiography—an early example of testimonio as personal and political history—offers an unapologetic account of a struggle not usually construed as sympathetically by Western commentators). But the meme (and the processes) of consciousness raising were picked up by feminists in the United States in the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Brownmiller 21) and it was in this form I encountered it as an actor with the politically engaged theatre troupe, The Australian Performing Group, at Carlton’s Pram Factory Theatre in late 1971. The Performance Group I performed as a core member of the Group in 1971-72. Decisions as to which direction the Group should take were to be made as a collective, and the group veered towards anarchy. Most of the women were getting together outside of the confines of the Pram Factory to raise their consciousness within the Carlton Women’s Liberation Cell Group. While happy that the sexual revolution was reducing women’s sexual inhibitions, some of the men at the Factory were grumbling into their beer, disturbed that intimate details of their private lives—and their sexual performance—might be disclosed and raked over by a bunch of radical feminists. As they began to demand equal rights to orgasm in the bedroom, the women started to seek equal access within the performance group, too. They requested rehearsal time to stage the first production by the Women’s Theatre Group, newly formed under the umbrella of the wider collective. As all of the acknowledged writers in the Group so far were men—some of whom had not kept pace in consciousness raising—scripts tended to be viewed as part of a patriarchal plot, so Betty Can Jump was an improvised piece, with the performance material developed entirely by the cast in workshop-style rehearsals, under the direction of Kerry Dwyer (see Blundell, Zuber-Skerritt 21, plus various contributors at www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/). I was the only male in the collective included in the cast. Several women would have been more comfortable if no mere male were involved at all. My gendered attitudes would scarcely have withstood a critical interrogation but, as my partner was active in launching the Women’s Electoral Lobby, I was given the benefit of the doubt. Director Kerry Dwyer liked my physicalised approach to performance (we were both inspired by the “poor theatre” of Jerzy Grotowski and the earlier surrealistic theories of Antonin Artaud), and I was cast to play all the male parts, whatever they would be. Memorable material came up in improvisation, much of which made it into the performances, but my personal favorite didn’t make the cut. It was a sprawling movement piece where I was “born” out of a symbolic mass of writhing female bodies. It was an arduous process and, after much heaving and huffing, I emerged from the birth canal stammering “SSSS … SSSS … SSMMMO-THER”! The radical reversioning of culturally authorised roles for women has inevitably, if more slowly, led to a re-thinking of the culturally approved and reinforced models of masculinity, too, once widely accepted as entirely biologically ordained rather than culturally constructed. But the possibility of a queer re-versioning of gender would be recognised only slowly. Liberation Meanwhile, Dennis Altman was emerging as an early spokesman for gay, or homosexual, liberation and he was invited to address the collective. Altman’s stirring book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, had recently been published, but none of us had read it. Radical or not, the Group had shown little evidence of sensitivity to gender-queer issues. My own sexuality was very much “oppressed” rather than liberated and I would have been loath to use “queer” to describe myself. The term “homosexual” was fraught with pejorative, quasi-medical associations and, in a collective so divided across strict and sometimes hostile gender boundaries, deviant affiliations got short shrift. Dennis was unsure of his reception before this bunch of apparent “heteros”. Sitting at the rear of the meeting, I admired his courage. It took more self-acceptance than I could muster to confront the Group on this issue at the time. Somewhere in the back of my mind, “homosexuality” was still something I was supposed to “get over”, so I failed to respond to Altman’s implicit invitation to come out and join the party. The others saw me in relationship with a woman and whatever doubts they might have carried about the nature of my sexuality were tactfully suspended. Looking back, I am struck by the number of simultaneous poses I was trying to maintain: as an actor; as a practitioner of an Artaudian “theatre of cruelty”; as a politically committed activist; and as a “hetero”-sexual. My identity was an assemblage of entities posing as “I”; it was as if I were performing a self. Little gay boys are encouraged from an early age to hide their real impulses, not only from others—in the very closest circle, the family; at school; among one’s peers—but from themselves, too. The coercive effects of shaming usually fix the denial into place in our psyches before we have any intellectual (or political) resources to consider other options. Growing up trying to please, I hid my feelings. In my experience, it could be downright dangerous to resist the subtle and gross coercions that applied around gender normativity. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, of the British object-relations school, argues that when the environment does not support the developing personality and requires the person to sacrifice his or her own spontaneous needs to adapt to environmental demands, there is not even a resting-place for individual experience and the result is a failure in the primary narcissistic state to evolve an individual. The “individual” then develops as an extension of the shell rather than that of the core [...] What there is left of a core is hidden away and is difficult to find even in the most far-reaching analysis. The individual then exists by not being found. The true self is hidden, and what we have to deal with clinically is the complex false self whose function is to keep this true self hidden. (212) How to connect to that hidden core, then? “Mind’s true liberation...” Alienated from the performative version of selfhood, but still inspired by the promise of liberation, even in the “fuzzy” form for which my inchoate hunger yearned (sexual liberation? political liberation? mystical liberation?), I was left to seek out a more authentic basis for selfhood, one that didn’t send me spinning along the roller-coaster of psychedelic drugs, or lie to me with the nostrums of a toxic, most forms of which would deny me, as a sexual, moral and legal pariah, the comforts of those “anchorage points to the social matrix” identified by Soddy (cited in Mol 58). My spiritual inquiry was “counter” to these institutionalised models of religious culture. So, I began to read my way through a myriad of books on comparative religion. And to my surprise, rather than taking up with the religions of antique cultures, instead I encountered a very young guru, initially as presented in a simply drawn poster in the window of Melbourne’s only vegetarian restaurant (Shakahari, in Carlton). “Are you hungry and tired of reading recipe books?” asked the figure in the poster. I had little sense of where that hunger would lead me, but it seemed to promise a fulfilment in ways that the fractious politics of the APG offered little nourishment. So, while many of my peers in the cities chose to pursue direct political action, and others experimented with cooperative living in rural communes, I chose the communal lifestyle of the ashram. In these different forms, then, the conscious raising meme persisted when other challenges raised by the counterculture either faded or were absorbed in the mainstream. I finally came to realise that the intense disillusionment process I had been through (“dis-illusionment” as the stripping away of illusions) was the beginning of awakening, in effect a “spiritual initiation” into a new way of seeing myself and my “place” in the world. Buddhist teachers might encourage this very kind of stripping away of false notions as part of their teaching, so the aspiration towards the “true liberation” of the mind expressed in the Aquarian visioning might be—and in my case, actually has been and continues to be—fulfilled to a very real extent. Gurus and the entire turn towards Eastern mysticism were part of the New Age meme cluster prevailing during the early 1970s, but I was fortunate to connect with an enduring set of empirical practices that haven’t faded with the fashions of the counterculture. A good guitarist would never want to play in public without first tuning her instrument. In a similar way, it is now possible for me to tune my mind back to a deeper, more original source of being than the socially constructed sense of self, which had been so fraught with conflicts for me. I have discovered that before gender, and before sexuality, in fact, pulsing away behind the thicket of everyday associations, there is an original, unconditioned state of beingness, the awareness of which can be reclaimed through focused meditation practices, tested in a wide variety of “real world” settings. For quite a significant period of time I worked as an instructor in the method on behalf of my guru, or mentor, travelling through a dozen or so countries, and it was through this exposure that I was able to observe that the practices worked independently of culture and that “mind’s true liberation” was in many ways a de-programming of cultural indoctrinations (see Marsh, 2014, 2013, 2011 and 2007 for testimony of this process). In Japan, Zen roshi might challenge their students with the koan: “Show me your original face, before you were born!” While that might seem to be an absurd proposal, I am finding that there is a potential, if unexpected, liberation in following through such an inquiry. As “hokey” as the Aquarian meme-set might have been, it was a reflection of the idealistic hope that characterised the cluster of memes that aggregated within the counterculture, a yearning for healthier life choices than those offered by the toxicity of the military-industrial complex, the grossly exploitative effects of rampant Capitalism and a politics of cynicism and domination. The meme of the “true liberation” of the mind, then, promised by the heady lyrics of a 1970s hippie musical, has continued to bear fruit in ways that I could not have imagined. References Altman, Dennis. Homosexual Oppression and Liberation. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972. Blundell, Graeme. The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts. Sydney: Hachette, 2011. Brownmiller, Susan. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. New York: The Dial Press, 1999. Compestine, Ying Chang. Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party. New York: Square Fish, 2009. Dalton, David. “Altamont: End of the Sixties, Or Big Mix-Up in the Middle of Nowhere?” Gadfly Nov/Dec 1999. April 2014 ‹http://www.gadflyonline.com/archive/NovDec99/archive-altamont.html›. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976. Elbaum, Max. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London and New York: Verso, 2002. Ferguson, Marilyn. The Aquarian Conspiracy. Los Angeles: Tarcher Putnam, 1980. Gleick, James. “What Defines a Meme?” Smithsonian Magazine 2011. April 2014 ‹http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Defines-a Meme.html›. Hair, The American Tribal Love Rock Musical. Prod. Michael Butler. Book by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; Lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; Music by Galt MacDermot; Musical Director: Galt MacDermot. 1968. Han, Suyin. The Crippled Tree. 1965. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. A Mortal Flower. 1966. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. Birdless Summer. 1968. Reprinted. Chicago: Academy Chicago P, 1985. ---. The Morning Deluge: Mao TseTung and the Chinese Revolution 1893-1954. Boston: Little Brown, 1972. ---. My House Has Two Doors. New York: Putnam, 1980. Marsh, Victor. The Boy in the Yellow Dress. Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan Press, 2014. ---. “A Touch of Silk: A (Post)modern Faerie Tale.” Griffith Review 42: Once Upon a Time in Oz (Oct. 2013): 159-69. ---. “Bent Kid, Straight World: Life Writing and the Reconfiguration of ‘Queer’.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 15.1 (April 2011). ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/april11/marsh.htm›. ---. “The Boy in the Yellow Dress: Re-framing Subjectivity in Narrativisations of the Queer Self.“ Life Writing 4.2 (Oct. 2007): 263-286. Mol, Hans. Identity and the Sacred: A Sketch for a New Social-Scientific Theory of Religion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1976. Monod, Jacques. Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Doubleday, 1968. Salingaros, Nikos. Theory of Architecture. Solingen: Umbau-Verlag, 2006. Stancil, E.D., and M.D. Johnson. Frisbee: A Practitioner’s Manual and Definitive Treatise. New York: Workman, 1975 Winnicott, D.W. Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papers. 1958. London: Hogarth Press, 1975. Yúdice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.” Latin American Perspectives 18.3 (1991): 15-31. Zimmerman, Marc. “Testimonio.” The Sage Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods. Eds. Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Alan Bryman and Tim Futing Liao. London: Sage Publications, 2003. Zuber-Skerritt, Ortrun, ed. Australian Playwrights: David Williamson. Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1988.