Impure Thinking Practices and Clinical Acts: The Sonorous Becomings of Heidi Fast

This article introduces the recent sound works of Heidi Fast, a Finnish voice and performance artist. Fast’s creative practice operates between art and philosophy, and articulates several ‘zones of becoming’: what Fast designates as ‘the clinical’, ‘the virtual’ and ‘vocal thought-material’. Using a methodology of routing, the article shows how these zones emerge as aesthetic, ethical and political concerns within Fast’s work. Since 2005, Fast’s sound works have variously taken shape as miniature concerts, social sculptures, imaginary soundscapes and environmental music performances. Drawing upon the writings of theorists who have helped shape her practice, this article argues that Fast uses sound and voice to propose an ‘actualising philosophy’. This philosophy actualises virtualities (unrealised potentials), affecting transformative shifts through tiny mutations in perceptions and behaviours.

Effect of self-generated magnetic fields on fast-electron beam divergence in solid targets

The collimating effect of self-generated magnetic fields on fast-electron transport in solid aluminium targets irradiated by ultra-intense, picosecond laser pulses is investigated in this study. As the target thickness is varied in the range of 25 mu m to 1.4 mm, the maximum energies of protons accelerated from the rear surface are measured to infer changes in the fast-electron density and therefore the divergence of the fast-electron beam transported through the target. Purely ballistic spreading of the fast-electrons would result in a much faster decrease in the maximum proton energy with increasing target thickness than that measured. This implies that some degree of 'global' magnetic pinching of the fast-electrons occurs, particularly for thick (>400 mu m) targets. Numerical simulations of electron transport are in good agreement with the experimental data and show that the pinching effect of the magnetic field in thin targets is significantly reduced due to disruption of the field growth by refluxing fast-electrons.

Time of flight mass spectrometry for quantitative data analysis in fast transient studies using a Temporal Analysis of Products (TAP) reactor

A Time of flight (ToF) mass spectrometer suitable in terms of sensitivity, detector response and time resolution, for application in fast transient Temporal Analysis of Products (TAP) kinetic catalyst characterization is reported. Technical difficulties associated with such application as well as the solutions implemented in terms of adaptations of the ToF apparatus are discussed. The performance of the ToF was validated and the full linearity of the specific detector over the full dynamic range was explored in order to ensure its applicability for the TAP application. The reported TAP-ToF setup is the first system that achieves the high level of sensitivity allowing monitoring of the full 0-200 AMU range simultaneously with sub-millisecond time resolution. In this new setup, the high sensitivity allows the use of low intensity pulses ensuring that transport through the reactor occurs in the Knudsen diffusion regime and that the data can, therefore, be fully analysed using the reported theoretical TAP models and data processing.

Low power field programmable gate array implementation of fast digital signal processing algorithms: characterisation and manipulation of data locality

Dynamic power consumption is very dependent on interconnect, so clever mapping of digital signal processing algorithms to parallelised realisations with data locality is vital. This is a particular problem for fast algorithm implementations where typically, designers will have sacrificed circuit structure for efficiency in software implementation. This study outlines an approach for reducing the dynamic power consumption of a class of fast algorithms by minimising the index space separation; this allows the generation of field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementations with reduced power consumption. It is shown how a 50% reduction in relative index space separation results in a measured power gain of 36 and 37% over a Cooley-Tukey Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)-based solution for both actual power measurements for a Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA implementation and circuit measurements for a Xilinx Virtex-5 implementation. The authors show the generality of the approach by applying it to a number of other fast algorithms namely the discrete cosine, the discrete Hartley and the Walsh-Hadamard transforms.

Generation and optimization of electron currents along the walls of a conical target for fast ignition

The interaction of an ultraintense laser pulse with a conical target is studied by means of numerical particle-in-cell simulations in the context of fast ignition. The divergence of the fast electron beam generated at the tip of the cone has been shown to be a crucial parameter for the efficient coupling of the ignition laser pulse to the precompressed fusion pellet. In this paper, we demonstrate that a focused hot electron beam is produced at the cone tip, provided that electron currents flowing along the surfaces of the cone sidewalls are efficiently generated. The influence of various interaction parameters over the formation of these wall currents is investigated. It is found that the strength of the electron flows is enhanced for high laser intensities, low density targets, and steep density gradients inside the cone. The hot electron energy distribution obeys a power law for energies of up to a few MeV, with the addition of a high-energy Maxwellian tail.

Development and characterization of 10 polymorphic microsatellite loci for the blue shark, Prionace glauca, and their cross shark-species amplification.

Ten polymorphic nuclear microsatellite loci were developed from a microsatellite enriched genomic library of the blue shark, Prionace glauca. The utility of these markers for genetic studies of this globally distributed, heavily exploited, oceanic predator was assessed by screening 120 specimens sampled from six locations throughout the species’ range. Both moderately and highly polymorphic marker loci were identified. Three to 35 alleles were found to be segregating per locus (mean 10.1) with observed heterozygosities ranging from 24 to 91%. Evaluation of the cross-species amplification of these markers across 18 additional shark species indicates that these microsatellites are potentially useful for genetic studies of other species of conservation concern.

Ultra-fast processing of gigapixel Tissue MicroArray images using high performance computing.

BACKGROUND:
tissue MicroArrays (TMAs) are a valuable platform for tissue based translational research and the discovery of tissue biomarkers. The digitised TMA slides or TMA Virtual Slides, are ultra-large digital images, and can contain several hundred samples. The processing of such slides is time-consuming, bottlenecking a potentially high throughput platform.
METHODS:
a High Performance Computing (HPC) platform for the rapid analysis of TMA virtual slides is presented in this study. Using an HP high performance cluster and a centralised dynamic load balancing approach, the simultaneous analysis of multiple tissue-cores were established. This was evaluated on Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer TMAs for complex analysis of tissue pattern and immunohistochemical positivity.
RESULTS:
the automated processing of a single TMA virtual slide containing 230 patient samples can be significantly speeded up by a factor of circa 22, bringing the analysis time to one minute. Over 90 TMAs could also be analysed simultaneously, speeding up multiplex biomarker experiments enormously.
CONCLUSIONS:
the methodologies developed in this paper provide for the first time a genuine high throughput analysis platform for TMA biomarker discovery that will significantly enhance the reliability and speed for biomarker research. This will have widespread implications in translational tissue based research.

How Wonderful Days became Sky Blue: The Transnational Circulation of South Korean Animation

This article examines the transnational circulation of South Korean animation, with a particular focus on the production and release of "Wonderful Days" in Korea and around the world, arguing that Korean animation's international identity is defined in relation to the more visible Japanese cinema.

Synthesis of nucleoside analogues in a ball mill: fast, chemoselective and high yielding acylation without undesirable solvents

The chemoselective acylation of primary aliphatic amines has been achieved in under ten minutes (and for aromatic amines under 120 min) using vibration ball-milling, avoiding undesirable solvents which are typically employed for such reactions (e.g. DMF). Under optimised conditions, the synthesis of amides in the presence of both primary and secondary alcohol functions was achieved in high to excellent yields (65-94%). Overall, the methods described have significant practical advantages over conventional approaches based upon bulk solvents including greater yields, higher chemoselectivity and easier product separation.

Fast automatic two-stage nonlinear model identification based on the extreme learning machine

It is convenient and effective to solve nonlinear problems with a model that has a linear-in-the-parameters (LITP) structure. However, the nonlinear parameters (e.g. the width of Gaussian function) of each model term needs to be pre-determined either from expert experience or through exhaustive search. An alternative approach is to optimize them by a gradient-based technique (e.g. Newton’s method). Unfortunately, all of these methods still need a lot of computations. Recently, the extreme learning machine (ELM) has shown its advantages in terms of fast learning from data, but the sparsity of the constructed model cannot be guaranteed. This paper proposes a novel algorithm for automatic construction of a nonlinear system model based on the extreme learning machine. This is achieved by effectively integrating the ELM and leave-one-out (LOO) cross validation with our two-stage stepwise construction procedure [1]. The main objective is to improve the compactness and generalization capability of the model constructed by the ELM method. Numerical analysis shows that the proposed algorithm only involves about half of the computation of orthogonal least squares (OLS) based method. Simulation examples are included to confirm the efficacy and superiority of the proposed technique.

Investigating the mechanism of the H 2-assisted selective catalytic reduction (SCR) of NOx with octane using fast cycling transient in situ DRIFTS-MS analysis

A mechanistic study of the H-2-assisted Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) of NOx with octane as reductant over a Ag/Al2O3 catalyst was carried out using a modified DRIFTS cell coupled to a mass spectrometer Using fast transient cycling switching of H-2 with a time resolution of a few seconds It was possible to differentiate potential reaction intermediates from other moieties that are clearly spectator species Using such a periodic operation mode effects were uncovered that are normally hidden in conventional transient studies which typically consist of a single transient In experiments based on a single transient addition of H-2 to or removal of H-2 from the SCR feed it was found that the changes in the concentrations of gaseous species (products and reactants) were not matched by changes at comparable timescales of the concentration of surface species observed by IR This observation indicates that the majority of sur face species observed by DRIFTS under steady-state reaction conditions are spectators In contrast under fast cycling experimental conditions It was found that a surface isocyanate species had a temporal response that matched that of N-15(2) This suggests that some of the isocyanate species observed by infrared spectroscopy could be important intermediates in the hydrogen-assisted SCR reaction although it is emphasised that this may be dependent on the way in which the infrared spectra are obtained It is concluded that the use of fast transient cycling switching techniques may provide useful mechanistic information under certain circumstances.