The non-magical realism of Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la Rosée

Gouverneurs de la rosée has received more critical attention than any other Haitian novel, and much of that attention has been focused on the "realist" credentials of that novel. That realism has been variously defined—from those who have read the novel as a thinly disguised Marxist treatise to those who see in it a kind of fictionalized ethnography, allowing the reader a glimpse of the "real" daily life of the peasants of the mornes.1 Not all such judgements have been favorable, and it is remarkable how many readings of the novel excoriate it for its failure to live up to the aims that they, in fact, ascribe to it. Thus, the novel has been criticized for purporting to address the real problems of the peasants while ignoring the documented historical travails of analogous peasant communities in the Plaine du Cul-de-Sac in the 1930s; Roumain has been accused of eluding the contradictions inherent in applying a Marxist revolutionary theory to an undeveloped agrarian society by transforming his hero, Manuel, from militant into messiah; ethnologists have drawn attention to Roumain's supposed ignorance of the informal laws of land tenure and succession observed in Haitian rural communities and of the way that Vodou was actually practiced by the peasants.

A Vain Fascination: Writing from and about Haiti after the Earthquake

In the wake of the huge earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January 2010, Haiti instantly became the focus of media attention across the world. At that moment, the tropes that had imprisoned Haiti for two centuries (barbarism, savagery, vodou, the land-that-God-forgot, etc.) began to resurface. Some Haitian intellectuals sought to combat those images, but in so doing they inadvertently revealed their complicity not only in the negative discursive construction of their country, but also in the economic and military re-colonisation of Haiti over the last decade. Adept in the fabrication of replicas of ‘post-political’ discourse, These Haitian intellectuals are in reality a subset of that country's morally bankrupt political class

Understanding methods of wound debridement

Autolytic debridement describes the body's natural method of wound-bed cleansing, helping it to prepare the wound bed for healing. In acute wounds, autolytic debridement occurs automatically and often does not require intervention, as during the inflammatory stage of a wound, neutrophils and macrophages digest and removes devitalised tissue, cell debris and contaminants, clearing the wound of any cellular barriers to healing. In chronic wounds, by contrast, healing is often delayed, frequently because of inadequate debridement. The autolytic process becomes overwhelmed by high levels of endotoxins released from damaged tissue (Broadus, 2013). Therefore wound debridement becomes an integral part of chronic-wound management and practitioners involved in wound care must be fully competent at wound-bed assessment and have an awareness of the options available for debridement. This article will review wound-bed assessment, highlighting variations in devitalised tissue, and explore options available for wound debridement, taking into consideration patients’ pain and quality of life

Comorbidity, Physical Function, and Quality of Life in Older Adults with Acute Myeloid Leukemia

Purpose of review: To describe the pathology, impact of comorbidities, functional limitations, symptoms, and quality of life (QOL) related to treatment of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in older adults. Recent findings: AML is a rare aggressive hematologic disease that occurs most often in older adults. The prognosis for older patients with AML is markedly worse due to genetic mutations and patient characteristics such as comorbidities and functional limitations. Patient characteristics may influence treatment decisions, as well as impact symptoms, functional ability, health-related outcomes and (QOL). Summary: As the population continues to age, the number of people diagnosed with AML is expected to increase. Better management of comorbidities is imperative to improving QOL and other treatment related outcomes. Prospective, longitudinal and multi-site studies are warranted to further understand the interaction between these characteristics on symptoms, outcomes and QOL

Tribological Evaluation of Candidate Gear Materials Operating Under Light Loads in Highly Humid Conditions

A series of pin-on-disk sliding wear tests were undertaken to identify candidate materials for a pair of lightly loaded timing gears operating under highly humid conditions. The target application involves water purification and thus precludes the use of oil, grease and potentially toxic solid lubricants. The baseline sliding pair is austenitic stainless steel operating against a carbon filled polyimide. The test load and sliding speed (4.9 N, 2.7 m/s) were chosen to represent average contact conditions of the meshing gear teeth. In addition to the baseline materials, the hard superelastic NiTiNOL 60 (60NiTi) was slid against itself, against the baseline polyimide, and against 60NiTi onto which a commercially deposited dry film lubricant (DFL) was applied. The alternate materials were evaluated as potential replacements to achieve a longer wear life and improved dimensional stability for the timing gear application. An attempt was also made to provide solid lubrication to self-mated 60NiTi by rubbing the polyimide against the disk wear track outside the primary 60NiTi-60NiTi contact, a method named stick or transfer-film lubrication. The selected test conditions gave repeatable friction and wear data and smooth sliding surfaces for the baseline materials similar to those in the target application. Friction and wear for self-mated stainless steel were high and erratic. Self-mated 60NiTi gave acceptably low friction (approx. 0.2) and modest wear but the sliding surfaces were rough and potentially unsuitable for the gear application. Tests in which 60NiTi pins were slid against DFL coated 60NiTi and DFL coated stainless steel gave low friction and long wear life. The use of stick lubrication via the secondary polyimide pin provided effective transfer film lubrication to self-mated 60NiTi tribological specimens. Using this approach, friction levels were equal or lower than the baseline polyimide-stainless combination and wear was higher but within data scatter observed in these preliminary tests. Based upon these results, self-mated 60NiTi gear teeth utilizing solid lubrication, is a reasonable approach for the target application

Mechanism Design in Social Networks

This paper studies an auction design problem for a seller to sell a commodity in a social network, where each individual (the seller or a buyer) can only communicate with her neighbors. The challenge to the seller is to design a mechanism to incentivize the buyers, who are aware of the auction, to further propagate the information to their neighbors so that more buyers will participate in the auction and hence, the seller will be able to make a higher revenue. We propose a novel auction mechanism, called information diffusion mechanism (IDM), which incentivizes the buyers to not only truthfully report their valuations on the commodity to the seller, but also further propagate the auction information to all their neighbors. In comparison, the direct extension of the well-known Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism in social networks can also incentivize the information diffusion, but it will decrease the seller's revenue or even lead to a deficit sometimes. The formalization of the problem has not yet been addressed in the literature of mechanism design and our solution is very significant in the presence of large-scale online social networks.Comment: In The Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, San Francisco, US, 04-09 Feb 201

Crops gone wild: evolution of weeds and invasives from domesticated ancestors.

The evolution of problematic plants, both weeds and invasives, is a topic of increasing interest. Plants that have evolved from domesticated ancestors have certain advantages for study. Because of their economic importance, domesticated plants are generally well-characterized and readily available for ecogenetic comparison with their wild descendants. Thus, the evolutionary history of crop descendants has the potential to be reconstructed in some detail. Furthermore, growing crop progenitors with their problematic descendants in a common environment allows for the identification of significant evolutionary differences that correlate with weediness or invasiveness. We sought well-established examples of invasives and weeds for which genetic and/or ethnobotanical evidence has confirmed their evolution from domesticates. We found surprisingly few cases, only 13. We examine our list for generalizations and then some selected cases to reveal how plant pests have evolved from domesticates. Despite their potential utility, crop descendants remain underexploited for evolutionary study. Promising evolutionary research opportunities for these systems are abundant and worthy of pursuit