Frontal-posterior functional imbalance and aberrant function developmental patterns in schizophrenia

Schizophrenia (SZ) is a neurodevelopmental disorder. There remain significant gaps in understanding the neural trajectory across development in SZ. A major research focus is to clarify the developmental functional changes of SZ and to identify the specific timing, the specific brain regions, and the underlying mechanisms of brain alterations during SZ development. Regional homogeneity (ReHo) characterizing brain function was collected and analyzed on humans with SZ (hSZ) and healthy controls (HC) cross-sectionally, and methylazoxymethanol acetate (MAM) rats, a neurodevelopmental model of SZ, and vehicle rats longitudinally from adolescence to adulthood. Metabolomic and proteomic profiling in adult MAM rats and vehicle rats was examined and bioanalyzed. Compared to HC or adult vehicle rats, similar ReHo alterations were observed in hSZ and adult MAM rats, characterized by increased frontal (medial prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices) and decreased posterior (visual and associated cortices) ReHo. Longitudinal analysis of MAM rats showed aberrant ReHo patterns as decreased posterior ReHo in adolescence and increased frontal and decreased posterior ReHo in adulthood. Accordingly, it was suggested that the visual cortex was a critical locus and adolescence was a sensitive window in SZ development. In addition, metabolic and proteomic alterations in adult MAM rats suggested that central carbon metabolism disturbance and mitochondrial dysfunction were the potential mechanisms underlying the ReHo alterations. This study proposed frontal-posterior functional imbalance and aberrant function developmental patterns in SZ, suggesting that the adolescent visual cortex was a critical locus and a sensitive window in SZ development. These findings from linking data between hSZ and MAM rats may have a significant translational contribution to the development of effective therapies in SZ.

Smooth determinantal varieties and critical loci in multiview geometry

Linear projections from $$\mathbb {P}^k$$ P k to $$\mathbb {P}^h$$ P h appear in computer vision as models of images of dynamic or segmented scenes. Given multiple projections of the same scene, the identification of sufficiently many correspondences between the images allows, in principle, to reconstruct the position of the projected objects. A critical locus for the reconstruction problem is a variety in $$\mathbb {P}^k$$ P k containing the set of points for which the reconstruction fails. Critical loci turn out to be determinantal varieties. In this paper we determine and classify all the smooth critical loci, showing that they are classical projective varieties.

Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and “Failed” Nations: Haiti and Jewish Refugees in the 1930s

Using the field of humanitarianism as the critical locus, this essay reflects on what Haiti, called the “Republic of NGOs,” can teach us about unsettling the coloniality of being, power, and freedom if we acknowledge in our critical thought system the acts of humanitarianism this nation has performed. By pursuing the issue of agency otherwise denied to any organism—be it political or intellectual—that departs from Western paradigms, the author aims to contribute to the call on critics and historians to rethink the ideologies that have informed and continue to inform the patterns of research methodologies entrenched in various disciplines to address the vexed question of epistemic dependency. In response, the essay focuses on the episode of inter-minority solidarity between blacks and Jews when, following the 1938 Evian conference, the Haitian government offered asylum to the undesirables of Europe based on the principles of the 1804 Haitian Revolution.

Testing Our Mettle

Women’s and gender historians over the last fifty years have not suffered such physical horrors, they have had to test their mettle on the scholarly battlefield of Civil War history. Theirs has been a dogged fight in the face of strong opposition to gendering a past that traditional historians and popular culture have preferred to see as great battles between great men. Newer narratives that document white and black women’s resistance, agency, and leadership across the Civil War era have been contesting these persistent older accounts for several decades. Recently historians have disputed traditional historical approaches even more rigorously by exposing the cultural meanings of gender during wartime. They have argued that ideas about masculinity and femininity shaped Civil War political discourse, social thought, and economic roles, ultimately affecting the nature and outcome of the war. The Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH) has long been a critical locus of support for these scholars who are challenging outmoded conceptions of the Civil War that emanate from within the profession and across mainstream American media and culture.

Henry James across Borders

This essay explores the opposition between the figures of the cosmopolitan and the patriot in a selection of James’s letters and travel writings. It focuses on the crossing of borders as revelatory of the mutual haunting of the “native” and the “alien.” But crossing the frontier also entails encountering the representatives of State violence. Through James’s mise en scène of his ambivalent fascination for the martial figure of the soldier, the frontier becomes a critical locus for the queering of identities and affiliations.

Automatic from the people: Uber’s iconic interface and the automation of sociality

This article undertakes a content analysis of the Uber mobile interface as depicted in a patent application for a process that integrates and automates social media information to match potential UberPool riders. As depicted in the patent application, the Uber interface is a critical locus for incorporating social media information and rendering this information usable and palpable for users. By aligning the Uber interface with the communicative and symbolic richness of iconic imagery, I argue for the Uber interface as a juncture for critical abstractions between the manifestation of social interactions appearing to users on the Uber interface and Uber’s techno-economic motivations to shape, configure and guide user enactment of sociality. By designing for simplicity, the Uber interface abstracts between the push-button ease of undertaking sociality and the need to reflect on circumstances giving rise to these prescribed forms of sociality. Through this viewpoint, I specify abstractions between simplified forms of sociality presented to users and Uber techno-economic motivations configuring interfacial sociality, implicating algorithmic objectivity, connective friending and programmed sociality as unseen forces configuring and prescribing social interactions for user engagement.