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Pertussis is a highly contagious infectious disease and remains an important cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide. Over the last decade, vaccination has greatly reduced the burden of pertussis. Yet, uncertainty in individual vaccination coverage and ineffective case surveillance systems make it difficult to estimate burden and the related quantity of population-level susceptibility, which determines population risk. These issues are more pronounced in low-income settings where coverage is often overestimated, and case numbers are under-reported. Serological data provide a direct characterisation of the landscape of susceptibility to infection; and can be combined with vaccination coverage and basic theory to estimate rates of exposure to natural infection. Here, we analysed cross-sectional data on seropositivity against pertussis to identify spatial and age patterns of susceptibility in children in Madagascar. A large proportion of individuals surveyed were seronegative; however, there were patterns suggestive of natural infection in all the regions analysed. Improvements in vaccination coverage are needed to help prevent additional burden of pertussis in the country.
Positive symptoms are a useful predictor of aggression in schizophrenia. Although a similar pattern of abnormal brain structures related to both positive symptoms and aggression has been reported, this observation has not yet been confirmed in a single sample.
Method
To study the association between positive symptoms and aggression in schizophrenia on a neurobiological level, a prospective meta-analytic approach was employed to analyze harmonized structural neuroimaging data from 10 research centers worldwide. We analyzed brain MRI scans from 902 individuals with a primary diagnosis of schizophrenia and 952 healthy controls.
Results
The result identified a widespread cortical thickness reduction in schizophrenia compared to their controls. Two separate meta-regression analyses revealed that a common pattern of reduced cortical gray matter thickness within the left lateral temporal lobe and right midcingulate cortex was significantly associated with both positive symptoms and aggression.
Conclusion
These findings suggested that positive symptoms such as formal thought disorder and auditory misperception, combined with cognitive impairments reflecting difficulties in deploying an adaptive control toward perceived threats, could escalate the likelihood of aggression in schizophrenia.
Samsung recently introduced a new smartphone display with increased breaking resistance, which will probably be relevant for future cars as well. This example shows that subsystems, in general artefacts from former development processes can be relevant for subsequent projects. Their integration has to be planned, i.a. even before the original product is in the market and across branches. The research on supporting methods requires a suitable description model for this phenomenon. Research in design reuse and PGE – product generation engineering addresses this only partially yet. Design reuse focuses on the informational aspect, PGE refers primarily to reference products. This contribution aims at closing this gap as a basis for future research. Two case studies from industry projects by the authors and an example from foresight and product planning show the role of artefacts from former development processes in running projects. It is described which artefacts are used as a reference, why they are used and when. Based on these findings the authors propose the term “reference system” to depict the whole set of artefacts, which serves as a basis for every product development project.
Inpatients with blood cultures positive for Staphylococcus aureus, Enterococcus faecalis, E. faecium, Streptococcus pneumoniae, S. pyogenes, S. agalactiae, S. anginosus, Streptococcus spp., and Listeria monocytogenes during the 6 months before and after implementation of Verigene Gram-positive blood culture microarray (BC-GP) with an antimicrobial stewardship intervention.
METHODS
Before the intervention, no rapid diagnostic technology was used or antimicrobial stewardship intervention was undertaken, except for the use of peptide nucleic acid fluorescent in situ hybridization and MRSA agar to identify staphylococcal isolates. After the intervention, all Gram-positive blood cultures underwent BC-GP microarray and the antimicrobial stewardship intervention consisting of real-time notification and pharmacist review.
RESULTS
In total, 513 patients with bacteremia were included in this study: 280 patients with S. aureus, 150 patients with enterococci, 82 patients with stretococci, and 1 patient with L. monocytogenes. The number of antimicrobial switches was similar in the pre–BC-GP (52%; 155 of 300) and post–BC-GP (50%; 107 of 213) periods. The time to antimicrobial switch was significantly shorter in the post–BC-GP group than in the pre–BC-GP group: 48±41 hours versus 75±46 hours, respectively (P<.001). The most common antimicrobial switch was de-escalation and time to de-escalation, was significantly shorter in the post-BC-GP group than in the pre–BC-GP group: 53±41 hours versus 82±48 hours, respectively (P<.001). There was no difference in mortality or hospital length of stay as a result of the intervention.
CONCLUSIONS
The combination of a rapid microarray diagnostic test with an antimicrobial stewardship intervention improved time to antimicrobial switch, especially time to de-escalation to optimal therapy, in patients with Gram-positive blood cultures.
Edited by
Simon Richter, Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,Richard Block, Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington
What does it mean to think “I,” to say “I,” to write “I”? These foundational questions of subjectivity inform Annette von Droste-Hulshoff's literary production to such an extent that one might arguably define her oeuvre in terms of the early German Romantic notion of autopoiesis, the self-reflexive, self-critical self-creation of the subject, das Ich (the I), in and through poesy. Yet in contradistinction to the unitary structure of early Romantic subjectivity, for Droste the self frequently is presented as an object, an object often watched by—and at times watching—the subject, an object that is irreconcilable with the subject. significantly, many of these scenes of objectified self-definition are explicitly presented as aesthetic events, indicating their programmatic status in Droste's poetics, and they recur emblematically throughout her writing.
The following analysis seeks to elucidate Droste's object-driven conception of subjectivity and poetic production through a series of examples. The first section considers the early prose fragment Ledwina (1818/19–26). The second presents brief readings of a selection of her more famous poems and ballads, written between 1840 and 1844: “Das Spiegelbild” (The mirror image), “Im Moose” (In the moss), “Das Fraulein von Rodenschild” (Lady von Rodenschild), “Das erste Gedicht” (The first poem), “Das alte schloss” (The old castle), “Im Grase” (In the grass), “Die todte Lerche” (The dead lark), “Die Taxuswand” (The yew wall), “Die Mergelgrube” (The marl pit) and “Lebt wohl” (Farewell).
Edited by
Simon Richter, Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,Richard Block, Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington
In 1807 Goethe formed a small chamber choir in Weimar, which he referred to on occasion as his “Singschule” (singing school), “Singechor” (singing choir), or “Singstunden” (singing class); in his diary he would often simply write that he spent time with “die Sänger” (the singers). Thanking Bettine Brentano for a packet of music she had sent him, he called the choir “meine kleine Hauscapelle” (my little chamber group) in a 24 February 1808 letter to her, and with irony he called the choir “meine kompendiose Hauskapelle” (my compendious chamber group) in a 22 April 1814 letter to his friend and musical advisor Carl Friedrich Zelter (MA 20.1:343). Years later in the Tag- und Jahreshefte he once again and more seriously referred to it as his “Hauskapelle” as he recalled its most successful season, 1810-11.
That the name recalls an earlier Hauskapelle, which Goethe created in the fictive world of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, is not accidental:
Serlo, ohne selbst Genie zur Musik zu haben, oder irgend ein Instrument zu spielen, wußte ihren hohen Wert zu schätzen; er suchte sich so oft als möglich diesen Genuß, der mit keinem andern verglichen werden kann, zu verschaffen. Er hatte wöchentlich einmal Konzert, und nun hatte sich ihm durch Mignon, den Harfenspieler und Laertes, der auf der Violine nicht ungeschickt war, eine wunderliche kleine Hauskapelle gebildet.
Edited by
Simon Richter, Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,Richard Block, Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington
Edited by
Simon Richter, Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,Richard Block, Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington
As many of his enemies have repeatedly emphasized, laughter is the devil. A long line of humorlessness, and especially a demonization of laughter, runs through the history of Christianity. Above all, it was the ancient Christian monkhood and the Church Fathers who accused laughter of being incompatible with human dignity. This tradition of an conservative hatred of laughter reaches from the seventeenth century's Jesuit and Jansenist critique of the comedy of the seventeenth century to Charles Baudelaire's essay De L'Essence du rire (1855), in which he reveals laughter to be the signature of fallen humanity, the trait of the satanic in mankind: “un des plus clairs signes sataniques de l'homme” (one of the clearest satanic signs of man). In paradise, laughter would have been unknown, and Christ never laughed—but he did cry—which, for Baudelaire, confirmed the antidivine character of laughter.
Two major works of modern art and literature, not least inspired by Baudelaire, have moved laughter into the sphere of evil. It is in Wagner's Parsifal that Kundry, the female main character, laughed at the cross-bearing Jesus on his journey of suffering and, as a result, was condemned like Ahasuerus, the eternal Jew, to wander through history until the end of days in “cursed laughter” (verfluchtem Lachen).
Edited by
Simon Richter, Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,Richard Block, Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington
Jane Brown'sThe Persistence of Allegory (2007) brilliantly rethinks the history of the neoclassical aesthetic in literature and the visual arts over the past three hundred years. The study's interpretive frame, which Brown describes as “morphological in Goethe's sense of the word,” allows her to revisit the fluid relationship between the mimetic interests of an array of neoclassicisms from Shakespeare to Wagner and the disruptive allegorical interests of a variety of nonillusionist stage-practices. The following comments on Goethe's architectural idea are indebted to Brown's analysis of how the allegorical impulse “persisted” by adaptively reinscribing itself within the practices of neoclassical drama. Despite the enlistment of Aristotelian mimesis by the practitioners of literary neoclassicism, who displaced allegory with the illusion of reality, Brown repeatedly shows how allegory found ways to survive. Ultimately, allegory came to “haunt” the neoclassical stage for Brown in the sense that it unsettled the closely regulated household of dramatic verisimilitude, whether grounded in Aristotle's “material causality and psychological realism” or Vitruvius's perspectival stage-illusion (Persistence 113).
Following a similar line of argumentation, I contend that even after Goethe fell under the spell of Italy's ancient monuments, the gothic persevered in his system of architectural accounting whenever he took stock of what buildings are and how they should be perceived.
Edited by
Simon Richter, Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,Richard Block, Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington
Edited by
Simon Richter, Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,Richard Block, Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington
Es wird unmöglich sein, aus dem Modernismus von Hegels Diagnose neuerer Kunst die Prognose von deren Zukunft zu tilgen, ohne seine Theorie insgesamt umzuformulieren. An ihre Leistungen kann nur der anknüpfen, der die Bedingungen erkennt, unter denen ihre Defekte zustande kamen. Und seiner Fundamente kann man sich nur bedienen, wenn man erkennt, auf welchen Grund sie gelegt sind.
[It will be impossible to cut away the aspect of Hegel's forecast about the future of art from the general modernity of his diagnosis of recent art without reformulating his theory of art as a whole. Only one who knows the conditions under which its defects arose can begin this task of reformulation; one can make use of its foundations only when one understands the grounds on which the foundations were laid.]
I.
“History” is a paradigm that emerges from what the conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck calls the Sattelzeit, the period between 1750 and 1850; in other words, the concept of history itself has a history. For although history “als Kunde, Erzählung und Wissenschaft” (in the form of tidings, storytelling and scientific inquiry), as he explains, has been “ein alter Befund europäischer Kultur” (a part of European culture since antiquity), and although “das Geschichten-Erzählen zur Geselligkeit des Menschen [gehört]” (the telling of stories is inseparably bound up with human sociability), the notion that “es in der Geschichte um ‘Geschichte selber’ geht und nicht um eine Geschichte von etwas” (what is at stake in history is “history itself,” and not the history of something or other), is “eine moderne, eine neuzeitliche Formulierung” (a formulation specific to the modern era).
Invoking Goethe's name has become fashionable again. With new methods and technologies of reading threatening to render literature virtual and insubstantial, we have the sense that "Goethe's ghosts" - the otherwise neglected voices and traditions that, finding their most trenchant expression in Goethe, inform the Western storehouse of literature - can show us long-forgotten dimensions of literature. Inspired by the distinguished Goethe scholar Jane Brown, whose life's work has called attention to the allegorical modes haunting the mimetic forms that dominate modern literature, the contributors to this volume take a rich variety of approaches to Goethe: cultural studies, history of the book, semiotics, deconstruction, colonial studies, feminism, childhood studies, and eco-criticism. The persistence, omnipresence, and modalities of the "ghosts" they find suggest that more than influence or standards is at issue here. Goethe's work informs current debates on nineteenth-century nationalism, while his Faust increasingly serves to express contemporary culture's anxiety about new technologies. The stubborn reappearance of these revenants testifies to more fundamental issues concerning the status of literature and the task of the reader. As the contributors demonstrate, these questions acquire renewed urgency in writers as diverse as Hegel, Adorno, Benn, Droste-Hülshoff, and Nietzsche. Each of the essays testifies to the enduring salience and presence of Goethe. Contributors: Helmut Ammerlahn, Benjamin Bennett, Richard Block, Dieter Borchmeyer, Franz-Josef Deiters, Richard T. Gray, Martha B. Helfer, Meredith Lee, Clark Muenzer, Andrew Piper, Simon Richter, Jürgen Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Patricia Simpson, Robert Tobin, David Wellbery, Sabine Wilke. Simon Richter is Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Richard Block is Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington.
Edited by
Simon Richter, Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,Richard Block, Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington
Edited by
Simon Richter, Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,Richard Block, Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington
Commentators have been practically unanimous about the general atmosphere of Goethe's little poem “Über allen Gipfeln.” Release of tension, imminent repose, harmony, and so on, make up the general view. My own sense of the poem—at least of its final version, as it appeared in print from 1815 on—is different. I find in it mainly nothing but dissonances, incongruities, and contradictions. And in the end, I think, the recognition of these qualities produces a distinctly better overall reading of the text than most others.
1. The first jarring element is the title: “Ein gleiches” (Of the same sort). Ordinarily we do not expect a poem's title to present interpretive difficulties—or if it does, then only after we have worked our way through the poem itself, as in the case of “Ganymed.” But the title “Ein gleiches”—with lower-case “g,” hence requiring to be completed by an understood noun—compels us to look elsewhere to discover what it refers to. For most commentators, “look elsewhere” means simply “look elsewhere on the same page”—in either the 1815 edition or the “Ausgabe letzter Hand”—where we find above our poem the poem “Wandrers Nachtlied” (Wanderer's night-song).
Edited by
Simon Richter, Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,Richard Block, Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington
Hans Blumenberg's early historical examination of the metaphorology of the shipwreck, Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer (Shipwreck with spectator), lays out the existential import this image held for Western thought from antiquity through to philosophical modernism. For Blumenberg, the metaphor of the ocean voyage assumes a place along-side that of air flight and the Promethean theft of fire as one of the staple concretizations of human arrogance in its attempts to challenge and tame the laws of nature (14–15). The sea voyage in particular encapsulates, according to Blumenberg, a paradigmatic moment of human blasphemy, codified in the attempt to transgress those natural conditions that bind human existence to terra firma, and to venture out into that element that paradigmatically embodies the forces of incalculability, lawlessness, and total lack of orientation: the infinitely vast and wholly unpredictable ocean (10). Blumenberg identifies precisely that liminal space between terra firma and the immeasurable expanse of the ocean as the place that embodies and symbolically invokes this constant human drive toward transgression of its existential limitations. Blumenberg's language points immediately to the relevance this model holds specifically for Faust in part 2 of Goethe's drama: “Daß hier, an der Grenze vom festen Land zum Meer, zwar nicht der Sündenfall, aber doch der Verfehlungsschritt ins Ungemäße und Maßlose zuerst getan wurde, ist von der Anschaulichkeit, die dauerhafte Topoi trägt” (11; The fact that this border between firm land and the sea marks the place where, to be sure, not the fall from grace per se, but the first transgressive step into inexpedience and immoderation was taken, has the vividness that only lasting topoi possess).
Edited by
Simon Richter, Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,Richard Block, Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington
Edited by
Simon Richter, Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,Richard Block, Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington
Perhaps it isn't so foolish to wonder what the old men—Faust and his creator—thought about ghosts and those who see them.
—”Faust and the Gothic Novel,” 68
My goal is that the ghosts be recognized and their insubstantiality welcomed into our discourse rather than left to haunt its margins.
—The Persistence of Allegory, 241
Apartment 50 in Bolshaya Sadovaya ulitsa 302-bis in the Moscow of Mikhael Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita is known as the evil apartment. Behind its inconspicuous door the most incongruous and untoward events occur. On Walpurgis Night, the newly rejuvenated Margarita obliges the request of Woland, a mid-twentieth-century version of Goethe's Mephisto who appears to have strayed into Soviet-era Moscow, and agrees to serve as hostess to the ghostly souls who rise from hell for the festive occasion. The confines of the apartment prove elastic, easily expanding to absorb hundreds and thousands of guests and presenting them with an elegance unknown to Muscovites. Clad only with a necklace bearing the image of a black poodle, Margarita greets them all with easy grace. Among them is Frida, a young woman haunted by the daily appearance of a checkered table cloth like the one with which she suffocated her newborn infant, the result of a rape. The discrepancy between her plight and that of Goethe's Gretchen makes the allusion all the more pointed and poignant.
Edited by
Simon Richter, Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,Richard Block, Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington
Edited by
Simon Richter, Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,Richard Block, Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington
Edited by
Simon Richter, Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,Richard Block, Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington