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"Kampff, Joseph"
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Ray Bradbury and the Cold War
Readers will learn about one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, Ray Bradbury, and his experiences in youth, his passion for writing captivating and unknowingly prophetic stories, and the Cold War era that shaped him.
eBook
A World Consuming Itself: Posthuman Cannibals After the End of the World
This thesis investigates the growing trend in late 20 th- and early 21st-century post-apocalyptic fiction to feature cannibalism. I argue that these narratives reimagine the cannibal to reflect today’s global worldview. By comparing contemporary cannibal narratives such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Wachowskis’ film series The Matrix to H. G. Wells’s classic novel The Time Machine, I show that today’s cannibal narratives radically destabilize the binary oppositions of (usually Western) civilized humanity and its savage, cannibal-animal others that traditional cannibal narratives tend to underwrite. The traditional cannibal figure has been an essential element in not only the construction of the human but also the geographical and chronological mapping of the world. I argue that today’s cannibal narratives represent the collapse of distinctions between self and other, chronological distinctions of past, present, and future (that lead to a teleological historical sense), and geographical distinctions of here and there (that underpin nationalism). They accomplish this in their formal innovation—using self-cannibalizing forms evocative of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and the oroborus (a serpent consuming its own tail)—and thematically by reimagining the cannibal as an often unwitting self-cannibal that is typified by a new sense of intimacy. I argue that the act of self-cannibalization is a symptom of posthumanism after the end of the world. Following Timothy Morton’s analysis of hyperobjects in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, I claim that the figure of the cannibal appears in contemporary post-apocalyptic narratives not as a warning of some impending catastrophe, but as a traumatic repetition of the catastrophe that has already occurred. Hyperobjects such as global warming, globalization, and a new awareness of being enmeshed in a global totality has brought about the end of the world as it has traditionally been conceived. I conclude that Cloud Atlas and other contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction deploy the figure of the posthuman, self-cannibal as a means to write the world after the end of the world.
Dissertation
Beyoncé : singer, songwriter, and actress
\"Describes the life and success of Beyoncé Knowles\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Big behavioral data: psychology, ethology and the foundations of neuroscience
In this Perspective, the authors discuss the recent surge in the collection of \"big behavioral data\" and how it might contribute to the understanding of how the brain controls behavior. They also highlight the challenges of making sense of increasing amounts of behavioral data.
Behavior is a unifying organismal process where genes, neural function, anatomy and environment converge and interrelate. Here we review the current state and discuss the future effect of accelerating advances in technology for behavioral studies, focusing on rodents as an example. We frame our perspective in three dimensions: the degree of experimental constraint, dimensionality of data and level of description. We argue that 'big behavioral data' presents challenges proportionate to its promise and describe how these challenges might be met through opportunities afforded by the two rival conceptual legacies of twentieth century behavioral science, ethology and psychology. We conclude that, although 'more is not necessarily better', copious, quantitative and open behavioral data has the potential to transform and unify these two disciplines and to solidify the foundations of others, including neuroscience, but only if the development of new theoretical frameworks and improved experimental designs matches the technological progress.
Journal Article
A robust role for motor cortex
The role of motor cortex in non-primate mammals remains unclear. More than a century of stimulation, anatomical and electrophysiological studies has implicated neural activity in this region with all kinds of movement. However, following the removal of motor cortex, rats retain most of their adaptive behaviors, including previously learned skilled movements. Here we revisit these two conflicting views of motor cortex and present a new behavior assay, challenging animals to respond to unexpected situations while navigating a dynamic obstacle course. Surprisingly, rats with motor cortical lesions show clear impairments facing an unexpected collapse of the obstacles, while showing no impairment with repeated trials in many motor and cognitive metrics of performance. We propose a new role for motor cortex: extending the robustness of sub-cortical movement systems, specifically to unexpected situations demanding rapid motor responses adapted to environmental context. The implications of this idea for current and future research are discussed.
Journal Article
Bonsai: an event-based framework for processing and controlling data streams
The design of modern scientific experiments requires the control and monitoring of many different data streams. However, the serial execution of programming instructions in a computer makes it a challenge to develop software that can deal with the asynchronous, parallel nature of scientific data. Here we present Bonsai, a modular, high-performance, open-source visual programming framework for the acquisition and online processing of data streams. We describe Bonsai's core principles and architecture and demonstrate how it allows for the rapid and flexible prototyping of integrated experimental designs in neuroscience. We specifically highlight some applications that require the combination of many different hardware and software components, including video tracking of behavior, electrophysiology and closed-loop control of stimulation.
Journal Article
A robust role for motor cortex
The role of motor cortex in non-primate mammals remains unclear. More than a century of stimulation, anatomical and electrophysiological studies has implicated neural activity in this region with all kinds of movement. However, following the removal of motor cortex, rats retain most of their adaptive behaviours, including previously learned skilled movements. Here we revisit these two conflicting views of motor cortex and present a new behaviour assay, challenging animals to respond to unexpected situations while navigating a dynamic obstacle course. Surprisingly, rats with motor cortical lesions show clear impairments facing an unexpected collapse of the obstacles, while showing no impairment with repeated trials in many motor and cognitive metrics of performance. We propose a new role for motor cortex: extending the robustness of sub-cortical movement systems, specifically to unexpected situations demanding rapid motor responses adapted to environmental context. The implications of this idea for current and future research are discussed.
Paper