scholarly journals ‘Your Womb, The Perfect Classroom’: Prenatal Sound Systems and Uterine Audiophilia

2020 ◽  
pp. 014177892095867
Author(s):  
Marie Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Development ◽  
Common Point ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Reproductive Politics ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Child ◽  
The Common ◽  
Culture Technology ◽  
Maternal Obligation

In this article, I explore the auditory technopolitics of prenatal sound systems, asking what kinds of futures, listeners and temporalities they seek to produce. With patents for prenatal audio apparatus dating back to the late 1980s, there are now a range of devices available to expectant parents. These sound technologies offer multiple benefits: from soothing away stress to increasing the efficiency of ultrasonic scans. However, one common point of emphasis is their capacity to accelerate foetal ‘learning’ and cognitive development. Taking as exemplary the Babypod and BabyPlus devices, I argue that prenatal sound systems make audible a particular figuration of pregnancy and gestational labour that combines divergent notions of responsibility and passivity. Contra the equation of neoliberalism with self-control and individualism, I argue that prenatal sound systems amplify neoliberal capitalism’s elision of personal, maternal and familial responsibility. As reproductive sound technologies, prenatal sound systems facilitate maternal–familial investment in the pre-born as future-child. Consequently, financialised notions of inheritance are substituted for biological inheritance. Drawing attention to the common rhetorical figuration of the sonic as womb-like, furthermore, I argue that prenatal sound systems exemplify what I refer to as uterine audiophilia. By treating the womb as ‘the perfect classroom’, prenatal sound systems imply an intense maternal obligation to invest in and impress upon the future-child, while also envisioning the pregnant person’s body as an occupied, resonant space. Cohering with a fidelity discourse that posits the reproductive medium as passive container and a source of noise that is to be overcome, uterine audiophilia relies upon politically regressive conceptualisations of pregnancy. I thus argue that these devices mark the hitherto under-theorised convergence of auditory culture, technology and reproductive politics.

KING PEPI’S ROLE IN FORMING MEMPHIS, THE FUTURE CAPITAL OF EGYPT

2020 ◽  
pp. 40-56
Author(s):  
R. A. Orekhov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Negative Influence ◽  
Common Point ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
High Priest ◽  
Old Kingdom ◽  
The Future ◽  
State Capital

There is a common point of view in Egyptology that Memphis was a state capital since the earliest times and that its protecting gods were Ptah and his spouse Sekhmet. Arguing this concept, the author tries to find the reason why a pyramid city of Pepi I — Mennefer — became a core of the future capital. The main conclusion is following: Constructing his pyramid complex, Pepi I probably included into it a cult center of Habes where Bastet and Imhotep, a high priest of Ra, were worshiped. Imhotep, a companion of the king Djoser, was known as a priest and charmer who tamed the fiery forces of Sirius associated with Bastet, after which the great drought was over. To commemorate this, New Year celebration and the first sun calendar were established. Imhotep’s tomb became an important cult place, where ceremonies important for surviving of the Egyptian state were conducted. In the second half of the Old Kingdom period the Nile started to flood much less, which led to the decline of agriculture. Thus, the role of the cult center of Habes and Imhotep grew greatly. By including Habes, Pepi protected the dominion of his pyramid city from negative influence of Bastet and decreased flooding. The fact that Mennefer was a successor of the aforementioned cult center determined its capital functions in future.

scholarly journals Zebrafish Models to Study New Pathways in Tauopathies

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (9) ◽  
pp. 4626
Author(s):  
Clément Barbereau ◽  
Nicolas Cubedo ◽  
Tangui Maurice ◽  
Mireille Rossel
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Deficits ◽  
Tau Protein ◽  
Common Point ◽  
Transgenic Models ◽  
Synaptic Loss ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Transgenic Lines ◽  
Functional Consequences ◽  
The Common

Tauopathies represent a vast family of neurodegenerative diseases, the most well-known of which is Alzheimer’s disease. The symptoms observed in patients include cognitive deficits and locomotor problems and can lead ultimately to dementia. The common point found in all these pathologies is the accumulation in neural and/or glial cells of abnormal forms of Tau protein, leading to its aggregation and neurofibrillary tangles. Zebrafish transgenic models have been generated with different overexpression strategies of human Tau protein. These transgenic lines have made it possible to highlight Tau interacting factors or factors which may limit the neurotoxicity induced by mutations and hyperphosphorylation of the Tau protein in neurons. Several studies have tested neuroprotective pharmacological approaches. On few-days-old larvae, modulation of various signaling or degradation pathways reversed the deleterious effects of Tau mutations, mainly hTauP301L and hTauA152T. Live imaging and live tracking techniques as well as behavioral follow-up enable the analysis of the wide range of Tau-related phenotypes from synaptic loss to cognitive functional consequences.

On Universals

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Etienne Balibar
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Multiple Modernities ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
The Future ◽  
Within Subjects ◽  
The Common ◽  
Performative Contradiction

Many on the Left have looked upon “universal” as a dirty word, one that signals liberalism's failure to recognize the masculinist and Eurocentric assumptions from which it proceeds. In rejecting universalism, we have learned to reorient politics around particulars, positionalities, identities, immanence, and multiple modernities. This book builds on these critiques of the tacit exclusions of Enlightenment thought, while at the same time working to rescue and reinvent what universal claims can offer for a revolutionary politics answerable to the common. In the contemporary quarrel of universals, the book shows, the stakes are no less than the future of our democracies. The book investigates the paradoxical processes by which the universal is constructed and deconstructed, instituted and challenged, in modern society. It shows that every statement and institution of the universal—such as declarations of human rights—carry an exclusionary, particularizing principle within themselves and that every universalism immediately falls prey to countervailing universalisms. Always equivocal and plural, the universal is thus a persistent site of conflict within societies and within subjects themselves. And yet, the book suggests, the very conflict of the universal—constituted as an ever-unfolding performative contradiction—also provides the emancipatory force needed to reinvigorate and reimagine contemporary politics and philosophy. In conversation with a range of thinkers from Marx, Freud, and Benjamin through Foucault, Derrida, and Scott, the book shows the power that resides not in the adoption of a single universalism but in harnessing the energies made available by claims to universality in order to establish a common answerable to difference.

Three-Phase and Five-Phase Motor Windings Common Point Potential Ripple with Respect to the Converter Zero Termina

Vestnik MEI ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-59
Author(s):  
Vladimir M. Tereshkin ◽  
◽  
Irshat L. Aitov ◽  
Dmitriy A. Grishin ◽  
Vyacheslav V. Tereshkin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Amplitude Modulation ◽  
Zero Point ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Common Point ◽  
Point Potential ◽  
Voltage Vector ◽  
Three Phase ◽  
Ripple Amplitude ◽  
The Common ◽  
Rotating Field

The aim of the study is to determine the parameters characterizing the ripple of a motor's three- and five-phase windings common point potentials (for the star winding connection diagram) with respect to the converter zero point. One of the reserves for decreasing electromagnetically induced vibration of an electric motor with a rotating field is to increase the number of working winding phases. The study subject is a five-phase motor winding connected to a bridge converter, namely, its ability to reduce electromagnetically induced vibration in comparison with that in using a three-phase winding. The common point potential ripple parameters are studied, and an approach is proposed to estimating the amplitude modulation of the space-time voltage vector of three- and five-phase windings under the influence of the common point potential ripple with respect to the converter zero point. Theoretical studies were carried out using the Fourier series expansion method and vector analysis methods. To confirm the theoretical results, experimental studies of the prototypes of three-phase and five-phase synchronous motors with inductors made on the basis of permanent magnets were carried out. The main results have shown the following. With increasing the number of phases of the rotating field motor working winding connected to a bridge converter, the common point potential ripple amplitude with respect to the converter zero point decreases, and the ripple frequency increases. The product of ripple amplitude by frequency remains unchanged. It is assumed that the common point potential ripple of the motor multiphase winding with respect to the converter zero terminal results in the amplitude modulation of the space-time voltage vector. With increasing the number of winding phases, the modulation amplitude decreases, and the modulation frequency increases. A five-phase motor has a lower level of the working winding common point potential ripple with respect to the converter zero point in comparison with a three-phase motor. Thus, it can be assumed that there will be a lower level of electromagnetically induced vibration in using a simple converter operation algorithm. The obtained results can be used in designing electric traction systems with vector control on the basis of multiphase motors. With increasing the number of phases, the common point potential ripple amplitude in a multiphase winding with respect to the converter zero point decreases, and the ripple frequency increases. Thus, the common point potential ripple amplitude in a five-phase winding is 5/3 times less than that in a three-phase winding, and the ripple frequency increases by 5/3 times, respectively. With increasing the number of working winding phases, the amplitude modulation of the resulting space-time voltage vector decreases. This circumstance has a positive effect on decreasing the electromagnetically induced vibration.

The Future of the Common Law

1913 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 595
Author(s):  
Robert Ludlow Fowler
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Common
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