“Samples Are Precious”: Value Formations in the Potentiality and Practices of Biobanking in Singapore

Biobanking in Singapore is characterized by contested relations between funding ambitions and research practices, and different notions of what the (potential) value of storing samples and data for medical research is. Different biobanking efforts anticipate the production of public goods from stored materials in specifically situated ways. These efforts to produce public goods in the form of scientific and economic value can be fruitfully understood in terms of extraction, a complex sociotechnical process of retrieving (potential) value from raw materials, which both informs and is informed by specific social values. In exploring the extraction of potential value in relation to practice values, I propose the notion of value formations to account for the coproduction of and intersections between different forms of value(s) in scientific practices situated in particular social contexts. I trace value formations across the life span of biobanking collections, which range from recruitment, collection, and processing of samples to their storage, retrieval, and use. Observations along this life span show the social and temporal complexity of value-making in biobanking in Singapore, pointing to the contextual specificity of how biobanking is understood as a public good.

HANDLING TEMPORAL COMPLEXITY IN THE DESIGN OF NON-TRANSPORT SHIPS USING EPOCH-ERA ANALYSIS

The paper is very good, it makes us think that the “requirements of the owner” it is not so simple to achieve. The difficulty is the assembly of the various future scenarios and the care that must be taken in order to reduce the evaluated eras but not removing a likely to occur era. Did the authors perform a sensitive analyses of the figure of merit to evaluate the effect of the increase of the weight of the short term epoch, where uncertainties are lower, on the resultant optimum ship? If the weight of the short term is very high, I believe the resultant vessel shall be the vessel with lower cost that fulfills the short term contracts. How to calibrate this number and get the appropriate result?

HANDLING TEMPORAL COMPLEXITY IN THE DESIGN OF NON-TRANSPORT SHIPS USING EPOCH-ERA ANALYSIS

A core aspect of temporal complexity in the design of non-transport vessels is the uncertainty related to the future market and contract opportunities, and the corresponding changeability that should be incorporated into the ship design to meet this uncertainty. The development of an appropriate design specification for a new ship represents a core strategic decision for ship owners as part of a fleet renewal or expansion programme, with a high financial risk and a long time horizon of typically 20-30 years. This type of temporal complexity is one out of several complexity aspects to be handled as part of a ship design process. In this paper we model possible realizations of an uncertain future for a vessel using the Epoch-Era Analysis (EEA) method. Here, we use the epochs as the primary instrument for capturing major market developments, such as the opening of new offshore areas, new emission regulatory regimes, or the availability of new, disruptive technologies. From these, more specific epoch variables are derived, for which specific contract opportunities can be generated. The epoch-specific performance of the vessels is found by solving a Ship Design and Deployment Problem (SDDP) of concurrently identifying both a preferable ship design and the corresponding path of consecutive contracts that maximizes total revenue. We present a case study related to the design of an Anchor Handling Tug Supply (AHTS) vessel. The study illustrates the complexity in striking the correct balance between optimizing the vessel for an initial scenario, while at the same time providing addition performance capabilities to be competitive in the context of future market requirements.

Forms of Time in Nineteenth-Century Music: Geology, the Railway, and the Novel

European art music in the nineteenth century was characterized by both an expansion and a contraction of the timescale typical of earlier periods. On the one hand there was an outpouring of miniatures, primarily for piano; on the other there was a proliferation of instrumental works, especially symphonies, lasting anywhere from 40 minutes to over an hour. Although it is possible to refer these changes to developments in compositional technique, their wider significance derives from the era’s production of several new and epoch-making forms of time––that is, of ways to conceive, order, and experience time. Time literally changed during the nineteenth century, and music changed along with it. The long span of geological ‘deep time’, the compressed and precisely measured time of railway travel, and the temporal complexity of the multiply plotted novel all have musical parallels. Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 in D minor Op. 120 (1841), César Franck’s Symphony in D minor (1888), and Frédéric Chopin’s Prelude No. 18 in F minor Op. 28 (1835–9) provide pertinent examples.

Art and the Audiogram: How Skillful Observation Provides Insights to the History, Present, and Future

Although simple, audiograms are a dynamic tool that, much like fine art, can be used by experts to decipher the history, present, and probable future of its subject. Through close comparison with El Greco’s Burial of the Count Orgaz, a very well-known painting for its temporal complexity, a sample audiogram is examined through an artistic lens. That intimate relationship with time that El Greco’s piece and audiograms share offers not only a layered interpretive narrative but also a humanities-based perspective on how to approach diagnostic testing.

Assessment of temporal complexity in functional MRI between rest and task conditions

Dynamic models of cortical activity, as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have recently brought out important insights into the organization of brain function. In terms of temporal complexity, these hemodynamic signals have been shown to exhibit critical behaviour at the edge between order and disorder. In this study, we aimed to revisit the properties and spatial distribution of temporal complexity in resting state and task fMRI of 100 unrelated subjects from the Human Connectome Project (HCP). First, we compared two common choices of complexity measures (i.e., Hurst exponent versus multiscale entropy) and reported high similarity between them. Second, we investigated the influence of experimental paradigms and found high task-specific complexity. We considered four mental tasks in the HCP database for the analysis: Emotion, Working memory, Social, and Language. Third, we tailored a recently-proposed statistical framework that incorporates the structural connectome, to assess the spatial distribution of complexity measures. These results highlight brain regions including parts of the default mode network and cingulate cortex with significantly stronger complex behaviour than the rest of the brain, irrespective of task. In sum, temporal complexity measures of fMRI are reliable markers of the cognitive status.

Specialist aphids feeding causes local activation of salicylic and jasmonic acid signaling in Arabidopsis veins

Aphids, the phloem sap feeders, probe into leaf tissues and activate a complex network of plant defence responses. Phytohormonal signaling plays a major role in this network; however, the dynamics of the signals spreading is yet to be clarified. Despite the growing knowledge about transcriptomic changes upon infestation, results often differ due to sampling, varying strongly between the tissues collected at the single feeding site, individual leaves, pooled infested leaves, or whole plant rosettes. This study focuses on activation of salicylic and jasmonic acid signals in Arabidopsis leaves during infestation by cabbage aphid (Brevicoryne brassicae) in high spatio-temporal resolution. We used genetically encoded fluorescent biosensors, histochemistry and qRT-PCR to precisely map activation of distinct branches of phytohormonal signaling. We found a rapid induction of salicylic and jasmonic acid signaling markers in cells surrounding stylet puncture, co-localizing with callose deposition. For both PR1 and JAZ10 we detected activation at 24 hpi, increasing and spreading along the veins until 72 hpi and, to a lesser extent, within the epidermal pavement cells. The SA signaling wave appeared in parallel with JA-associated, and continued to increase in time. Our results first show a local activation of SA- and JA-related responses after stylet penetration of Arabidopsis leaves and bring a detailed insight into the spatio-temporal complexity of plant defence activation during specialist aphid attack.

Parallel region growing of half-tone images based on selected average brightness of the area along the growth route

The problem of parallel segmentation of halftone images by brightness for implementation on the basis of programmable logic integrated circuits is considered. Segmentation divides an image into regions formed from pixels with approximately the same brightness, and is a computationally complex operation due to multiple checks of the value of each pixel for the possibility of joining an adjacent region. To speed up segmentation, parallel algorithms for growing areas have been developed, in which processing begins from the neighborhoods of preselected initial growth pixels. The condition of joining an adjacent pixel to an area takes into account the average brightness of the area to limit the variance of its pixel values. Therefore, when each new pixel is added to the area, its average brightness is recalculated. This leads to high time complexity. In some parallel algorithms, the sample mean is calculated in a small window, which makes it possible to slightly reduce the time complexity when matching the window size with the segment sizes. To significantly reduce the temporal complexity, the article proposes a model for the parallel growth of image regions based on a simplified condition for joining adjacent pixels to a region, taking into account the sample average value of the region's brightness along the growth route connecting the boundary pixel of the region and the initial growth pixel through a sequence of pixels used to attach the considered boundary pixel to area. A significant decrease in the temporal complexity of the proposed model of parallel growing of image regions in comparison with the known models is achieved due to a slight increase in the spatial complexity.

Politics of Time and Mourning in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene thesis makes it necessary for the social sciences to engage with temporality in novel ways. The Anthropocene highlights interconnections between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ non-linear temporal processes. However, accounts of humanity’s Anthropocene history often reproduce linear, progressive narratives of human development. This forecloses the possibilities that thinking with non-linear temporalities would offer to the political sciences. Engaging with the temporal complexity of the Anthropocene as a moment of rupture that highlights non-linearity allows to acknowledge more fully the affective impact of living on a disrupted planet. As a discourse about temporal rupture, the Anthropocene is a stocktaking of the already vast insecurities and losses brought about by exploitative relationships with earth and its inhabitants. In this form, the Anthropocene thesis highlights how material and social legacies of inequality and exploitation shape our present and delimit our imaginaries of the future. By including a reckoning of violent pasts into future practices, a productive politics of mourning could take shape.