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Many speech processing systems struggle in conditions with low signal-to-noise ratios and in changing acoustic environments. Adaptation at the transduction level with integrated signal processing could help to address this; in human hearing, transduction and signal processing are integrated and can be adaptively tuned for noisy conditions. Here we report a microelectromechanical cochlea as a bio-inspired acoustic sensor with integrated signal processing functionality. Real-time feedback is used to tune the sensing and processing properties, and dynamic switching between linear and nonlinear characteristics improves the detection of signals in noisy conditions, increases the sensor dynamic range and enables adaptation to changing acoustic environments. The transition to nonlinear behaviour is attributed to a Hopf bifurcation and we experimentally validate its dependence on sensor and feedback parameters. We also show that output-signal coupling between two coupled sensors can increase the frequency coverage.

The article examines arrest protocols drawn up from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s by local policemen investigating thousands of individuals denounced to the authorities for having voiced criticisms of the monarchy and approval of the campaign of terror in the reign of Alexander II. The discussion proceeds in two stages. It first argues that the arrest protocols constitute grounds for a revisionist challenge to the existing historiography which charts enduring, if gradually declining, popular support for the monarchy in the final decades of tsarism. It then argues for a reappraisal of the efforts by revolutionaries in the reign of Alexander II to destroy the sanctity of the autocracy through the use of “propaganda by the deed.” The campaign to assassinate the tsar emerges in the arrest protocols as an effective form of political messaging that gained real purchase in the popular imagination. It prompted lower-class Russians to articulate their own local grievances in terms of popular sovereignty, natural justice and political accountability.

Civil executions in Imperial Russia were punitive ceremonies that were staged before crowds and presaged a sentence of penal labour and lifelong exile in Siberia. Intended to underline the absolute supremacy of the autocracy, they choreographed the public humiliation of the criminal and collective condemnation from the crowds who gathered to witness the stripping away of the rights and entitlements that gave civil life in the autocracy its meaning. Many took place without incident, and followed the ritual of debasement and expulsion endorsed by the state. Yet when at the civil executions of revolutionaries during the reign of Alexander II both convicts and spectators departed from the state’s script of public humiliation and orderly opprobrium, the performance of monarchical power and autocratic justice proved liable to subversion. Russian radicals sometimes succeeded in hijacking the ceremony to denounce despotism and proclaim an alternative vision of activism, solidarity, and revolution. In so doing, they contested the autocrat’s position as the source of status, rights and, ultimately, of sovereignty. Building on studies of law, punishment, performance, and the revolutionary movement, this article demonstrates how radicals and their supporters recast “scenarios of power” as “scenarios of rebellion”.

Joint tissues consist of trabecular and cortical bone as well as calcified and hyaline cartilage, which presents a challenge for hard X-ray-based visualization on the sub-cellular level due to the wide range of local X-ray absorption values. The density of the calcified tissues requires rather high photon energy, which often leads to insufficient contrast within the cartilage and impedes the visualization of individual biological cells. Decalcification of the tissues reduces the total and local X-ray absorption values and allows for selecting a lower photon energy. Further contrast enhancement can be achieved by ethanol fixation and paraffin tissue embedding. In this study, we (i) searched for an appropriate visualization method to investigate lesions generated by a laser osteotome and (ii) visualized a decalcified porcine joint after ethanol fixation and subsequent paraffin embedding using laboratory- and synchrotron radiation-based microtomography. The experiments at the ANATOMIX beamline of Synchrotron SOLEIL were performed in off-axis scan mode with a pixel size of 1.3 um. Individual cells in all layers of the joint could be made visible and the effect of ethanol fixation and paraffin embedding demonstrated., Comment: 10 pages. Event: SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2022, San Diego, California, United States

10 years ago, the MEMS technology unexpectedly revolutionized the global microphone market. Will the MEMS technology have similar impact on the loudspeaker market? This article introduces MEMS loudspeakers. It covers the underlying manufacturing technology as well as technical requirements for the headphone and hearing aid market. It covers a section about artificial ear measurements for MEMS loudspeakers. Moreover, the article underlines the importance to use digital signal processing to increase MEMS performance and sound optimization. A section summarizes six different MEMS loudspeaker approaches from the literature. The descriptions contain technical specifications and the mechanical principle of sound reproduction. Finally, the article considers aspects of acoustics in very small systems. Here, thermoviscous boundary layer effects dominate acoustics.

Background Men who have sex with men (MSM) are disproportionally affected by sexually transmitted infections (STI). STI are often extragenital and asymptomatic. Both can delay diagnosis and treatment. Approval of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) might have influenced sexual behaviour and STI-prevalence of HIV- MSM. We estimated STI-prevalence and risk factors amongst HIV- and HIV+ MSM in Germany to plan effective interventions. Methods We conducted a nationwide, cross-sectional study between February and July 2018. Thirteen MSM-friendly STI-practices screened MSM for Chlamydia trachomatis (CT), Mycoplasma genitalium (MG), Neisseria gonorrhea (NG), and Trichomonas vaginalis (TV) using self-collected rectal and pharyngeal swabs, and urine samples. APTIMA™ STI-assays (Hologic™ Inc., San Diego, USA) were used for diagnostics, and samples were not pooled. We collected information on socio-demographics, HIV-status, clinical symptoms, sexual behaviour within the last 6 months, and PrEP use. We combined HIV status and PrEP use for defining risk groups, and used directed acyclic graphs and multivariable logistic regression to identify risk factors for STI. Results Two thousand three hundred three MSM were included: 50.5% HIV+, median age 39 [18–79] years. Median number of male sex partners within the last 6 months was five. Sex without condom was reported by 73.6%, use of party drugs by 44.6%. 80.3% had a STI history, 32.2% of STI+ MSM reported STI-related symptoms. 27.6% of HIV- MSM used PrEP. Overall STI-prevalence was 30.1, 25.0% in HIV−/PrEP- MSM (CT:7.2%; MG:14.2%; NG:7.4%; TV:0%), 40.3% in HIV−/PrEP+ MSM (CT:13.8%; MG:19.4%; NG:14.8%; TV:0.4%), and 30.8% in HIV+ MSM (CT:10.1%; MG:18.4%; NG:8.6%; TV:0.1%). Being HIV+ (OR 1.7, 95%-CI 1.3–2.2), using PrEP (OR 2.0, 95%-CI 1.5–2.7), having > 5 sex partners (OR:1.65; 95%-CI:1.32–2.01.9), having condomless sex (OR:2.11.9; 95%-CI:1.65–2.86), and using party drugs (OR:1.65; 95%-CI:1.32–2.0) were independent risk factors for being tested positive for at least one STI. Conclusions We found a high STI-prevalence in MSM in Germany, especially in PrEP users, frequently being asymptomatic. As a relevant proportion of PrEP users will not use a condom, counselling and comprehensive STI screening is essential and should be low threshold and preferably free of cost. Counselling of PrEP users should also address use of party drugs.

Copolymers such as PCDTBT (poly(N-9'-heptadecanyl-2,7-carbazole-alt-5,5-(4',7'-di-2-thienyl- 2',1',3'-benzothiadiazole))) are commonly employed as donor material in bulk heterojunction solar cells. Recently, chemical defects such as homocouplings have been shown to form at the material synthesis stage, strongly reducing the short circuit current in organic photovoltaics. Here we show that both, low molecular weight and homocoupling defects reduce the short circuit current of solar cells because of limited exciton diffusion. We propose a model that unites and explains the influence of both chemical parameters with the distribution of conjugation lengths. The connection between limited exciton diffusion and short circuit current is revealed by kinetic Monte Carlo simulation of bulk heterojunctions. Our findings are likely applicable for copolymers in general.

This paper reports the concept, fabrication and characterization of a new kind of MEMS loudspeaker for in-ear applications. The piezoelectrically driven device is designed to operate without a closed membrane, which significantly improves the acoustic performance, efficiency, manufacturability and miniaturization capability. Measurements performed on prototypes mounted to an artificial ear simulator have revealed high sound pressure levels (SPL) of about 110 dB. In contrast to standard state-of-the-art in-ear speakers the SPL can be maintained up to 20 kHz leading to an extraordinarily flat frequency response using electronic equalization. Furthermore, low total harmonic distortion (THD) of less than 2 % and good energy efficiency of more than 105 dB/mW have been observed over almost the entire audio range.

Virtualization is a promising technology that has facilitated cloud computing to become the next wave of the Internet revolution. Adopted by data centers, millions of applications that are powered by various virtual machines improve the quality of services. Although virtual machines are well-isolated among each other, they suffer from redundant boot volumes and slow provisioning time. To address limitations, containers were born to deploy and run distributed applications without launching entire virtual machines. As a dominant player, Docker is an open-source implementation of container technology. When managing a cluster of Docker containers, the management tool, Swarmkit, does not take the heterogeneities in both physical nodes and virtualized containers into consideration. The heterogeneity lies in the fact that different nodes in the cluster may have various configurations, concerning resource types and availabilities, etc., and the demands generated by services are varied, such as CPU-intensive (e.g. Clustering services) as well as memory-intensive (e.g. Web services). In this paper, we target on investigating the Docker container cluster and developed, DRAPS, a resource-aware placement scheme to boost the system performance in a heterogeneous cluster., Comment: The 36th IEEE International Performance Computing and Communications Conference(IPCCC'2017)

In February 1839, having been sentenced to 20 years of penal labor in the mines of Nerchinsk in eastern Siberia, the Polish revolutionary Justynian Rucinski found himself clapped in irons and tramping eastward in a marching convoy of exiles: A life began for us that is difficult to name, let alone adequately to describe. It seemed there can be no harsher existence on earth. It comprised daily marches of 18 to 25 versts in chains, overnighting in prisons on filthy wooden benches ..., lacking undergarments, clothes and boots, a starvation diet, extreme hunger, icy slush, heat, frosts, and all the time we had to keep marching onward and onward. There was the unceasing surveillance of the convicts, whose lives were full of the most cynical kinds of depravity, usually encouraged by corrupt convoy commanders.... Our bodies were terribly exhausted through physical exertion and our minds through anxiety and homesickness. That is but a pale rendering of our bitter fate. (1) Like many Siberian exiles before him and after him, Rucinski would look back on the 13-month-long journey as the most torturous aspect of his Siberian exile. Yet Rucinski's formal punishment--his term of penal servitude--began only when he finally reached Nerchinsk. As far as the authorities were concerned, the torments of the marching convoys were an incidental preamble to Rucinski's actual sentence. The yawning gulf between the state's own conception of deportation as a strictly logistical operation, on the one hand, and the convicts' experience of it as a brutal ordeal, on the other, reflected the weaknesses and limitations of the autocracy. By the beginning of the 19th century, exile to settlement and, for more serious crimes, exile to penal labor (katorga) in Siberia had come to represent different conceptions of penality. At its most fundamental, exile was an expression of sovereign power. The autocrat could move his subjects around the vast territories of his empire at will, to move them, as the 1649 Penal Code stipulated, "to wherever the sovereign shall direct." (2) The journey into exile was thus a measure of autocratic power; each footstep eastward a homage to the dominance of the state. From the mid-18th century on, the rituals of civil execution that presaged expulsion into the Siberian penal realm were a performance of the might of a patrimonial Russian statehood. (3) Penal labor replaced the gallows in an act of imperial clemency that underlined the power of the ruler. Exiles were deported beyond the frontiers of the metropole to sites at the periphery (or indeed beyond the imaginative frontiers) of the state. (4) From its earliest origins, however, Siberian exile further served an important economic function. The deployment of forced laborers to harvest raw materials at discrete labor sites under Peter the Great expanded over the course of the 18th century into a full-blown state-led project to colonize the Siberian landmass under Catherine the Great. (5) The demands of colonization implied some measure of disciplining, even rehabilitating, exiles. The eventual release of penal laborers to settlement assumed some level of readjustment of their "role as state subjects." (6) Over the course of the reign of Alexander I and Nicholas I, concern with social discipline supplemented the established colonial priorities of population transfer and resource extraction across Siberia. (7) As Abby Schrader and Andrew Gentes have shown, the state encouraged women to follow their husbands into exile, believing their presence would exert a pacifying, reforming influence over the men. Through the establishment of stable and productive family units, individual regeneration neatly dovetailed with the state's colonial agenda. (8) By the era of the Great Reforms, rehabilitation was an explicit justification for the exile system as a whole. (9) Exile embraced then overlapping modes of penality: sovereign, economic, colonial, and disciplinary. …

On the afternoon of 19 November 1877, an unprepossessing 56-foot schooner, the Dawn (Utrenniaia zaria), anchored alongside the customs house on Vasil'evskii Island in St. Petersburg. An excited crowd of onlookers had gathered to catch a glimpse of the ship, her crew, and her cargo. (1) The sailboat had just completed the first ever successful maritime voyage from the Enisei River in eastern Siberia, through the Kara Sea and the Barents Sea, around the northern coast of Scandinavia to Varde, and then by way of Christiana (Oslo), Stockholm, and Helsingfors (Helsinki) to the Russian capital. By common consensus in Russia and abroad, this was a prodigious feat of seamanship: a half-decked sailboat without a keel and with a crew of only five had navigated the ice floes and storms of the Kara and Barents seas, both barely charted and notoriously dangerous waters. The ship had already enjoyed a triumphal passage through coastal towns and cities of Norway, Sweden, and the Kingdom of Finland--where it had been enthusiastically received by crowds of well-wishers, its crew celebrated in the national press and treated to feasts in their honor. Yet by the time the Dawn reached the Customs House on Vasil'evskii Island, it bore only four of the five crew members who had set out from the Enisei River on 9 August. Andrei Ivanovich Tsybulenko was absent, as Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti dryly noted, "for reasons beyond his control." (2) Tsybulenko had been arrested that morning when the ship docked in the naval base of Kronshtadt following a tip off from the Russian consul in Christiana. Tsybulenko was, it had emerged, an exile from Eniseisk province, who had illegally made the passage from Siberia back to European Russian and was, therefore, a fugitive from justice. On orders from the minister of the interior, he was taken into custody and detained in the Kronshtadt fortress. The authorities intended to deport Tsybulenko overland back to Eniseisk province, where he was to remain in exile for the rest of his life. Yet by January 1878, Tsybulenko had been released from custody, had received an official pardon from Mexander II and awards and commendations from the influential Imperial Society for the Advancement of Russian Merchant Shipping (hereafter Society for Merchant Shipping) and the Ministry of Trade. This remarkable succession of reversals of fortune--from exile in eastern Siberia to member of a celebrity crew of intrepid seamen, prisoner of the state in Kronshtadt, then pardoned fugitive--stands at the intersection of the conflicting purposes of Siberian exile. Shifting official and public perceptions of the nature of the Siberian landmass itself underlay the twin and ultimately irreconcilable imperatives of punishment and colonization. From the middle of the 19th century, the established image of frozen, inhospitable wasteland, destined to act as a place of banishment for the empire's criminals, would be subject to increasingly vocal and persuasive challenges. Leading figures in Russia's scientific and entrepreneurial communities began to argue for a redefinition of Siberia as a rich economic colony, neglected by the state and crippled by the exile system but harboring a wealth of natural resources that were only awaiting exploration and development. Their arguments, with their implicit challenge to the very existence of Siberian exile, would be laid bare in the tale of Andrei Tsybulenko. Colonization versus Punishment in Siberia Officially, colonization and punishment were compatible, and their ostensible compatibility was embedded in the very nature of the exile system. The Speranskii reforms of 1822 had envisioned the eventual exiles' and penal laborers' conversion into disciplined and motivated settlers who would populate Siberia and bind it to Russia with their culture and their industry. As Andrew Gentes has demonstrated in a forensic examination of the exile system in the first half of the 19th century, however, the reality of the exile system--one of chaos and underfunding--made a mockery of such ambitions. …

In May 1828 the authorities in eastern Siberia uncovered plans, hatched by the Decembrist Ivan Sukhinov, to stage an armed rebellion among the penal laborers of the Nerchinsk mines. Sukhinov was planning to march on Chita in order to liberate his fellow Decembrists from captivity. Found guilty of the charges, the ringleaders were executed and Sukhinov committed suicide. Yet the conspiracy was a fantasy, conjured into being by the chaotic conditions of penal labor and official fears of exiled revolutionaries directing insurgencies in Siberia. The state's destruction of Sukhinov and his alleged co-conspirators created the fictional memory of a revolutionary hero and a noble, if doomed, rebellion. In their memoirs published in the postreform era, the Decembrists offered contemporaries an inspiring tale of insurgency and martyrdom in Siberia. The “Zerentui conspiracy” articulated new possibilities of revolutionary protest in exile

PLoS one 11(1), e0146325- (2016). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0146325, Published by PLoS, Lawrence, Kan.

Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace, first published in 1869, contains a memorable scene depicting the lynching of a young man. Vereshchagin stands accused of disseminating defeatist literature in Moscow as Napoleon’s army sweeps eastward. On the eve of the city’s fall in September 1812, a crowd of fearful and panicked Muscovites assembles in front of the residence of the city’s governor, Count Rostopchin. Disconcerted by its unpredictable and riotous potential, Rostopchin pronounces the prisoner responsible for Moscow’s surrender and orders his dragoons to cut Vereshchagin down in front of the crowd. Yet events quickly run out of control

Drawing on the writings of criminologists and psychiatrists in the late imperial and early Soviet periods, the article argues that Soviet biopsychological constructions of the socially deviant have their origins in the efforts of tsarist liberals to identify and contain the crime and social disorder that accompanied Russia’s modernization. While the historiography has traditionally portrayed the Bolshevik Revolution as a tragic overthrow of liberal ideas and values, the article points to important continuities that span the 1917 divide. In the late imperial period, the human sciences began to categorize individuals who posed a biopsychological threat, a “social danger,” to the social order. In the wake of the revolution, these ideas became radicalized under the impact of Soviet Marxism to generate indictments of entire social groups and classes.

ions, like ‘the utopian mentality’ or the collective ‘Freudian’ psyche. We might pause, in our disillusionment with tired forms of explanation, before attributing the course of these events to the influence of metaphors invented by intellectuals like ourselves” (Engelstein, “Paradigms, Pathologies,” 877).

This chapter examines not the changing moral and sexual codes of Russian society in the decades of reform and revolution, but rather the notions of moral agency and subjectivity that contemporaries believed found expression in the observance, subversion and violation of these codes. Competing understandings of human motivation and behaviour informed the public representation of acts of infidelity, sexual corruption, rape, petty crime, suicide and murder. Drawing on a wide range of literary, journalistic, political and medico-legal texts, the chapter explores both the rise and the fall of the autonomous moral agent in Russian culture between the Great Reforms and the New Economic Policy.

La polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR) est une pathologie relativement fre­ quente affectant presque exclusivement des personnes de plus de 50 ans, se manifestant principalement par des douleurs des ceintures scapulaire et pelvienne, et une raideur matinale. Le diagnostic de PMR repose sur la presentation clinique caracteristique, l'elevation des parametres inflammatoires biologiques (VS et CRP), une valeur de procalcitonine classiquement normale, la reponse rapide aux corticosteroides et l'exclusion de pathologies confondantes. Une arterite gigantocellulaire (AGC) sous­jacente ou une autre affection doivent etre suspectees chez des patients restant symptomatiques ou conservant des parametres inflammatoires eleves malgre une corticothe­ rapie bien conduite. Dans la phase de sevrage des corticosteroides, une recidive des symptomes et une re­ascension des marqueurs inflammatoires peuvent survenir chez 25 a 50% des patients. En cas de recidives cliniques successives lors du sevrage de la corticotherapie, un traitement immunosuppresseur de fond a visee d'epargne des corticosteroides peut etre considere, en particulier si des effets secondaires lies a la corticotherapie sont constates.

Bei der Polymyalgia rheumatica handelt es sich um ein relativ haufiges Leiden, das fast nur bei Personen uber 50 vorkommt. Sie aussert sich hauptsachlich durch Schmerzen am Schulter- und Beckengurtel sowie Morgensteifigkeit.

Detention is a severe and psychologically traumatising form of withdrawal from society of people who, often, are already jeopardized or suffering from psychical or somatic diseases. Yet, the individual deprived of freedom has fundamental rights to obtain medical care that should be of equal quality than the general population. One of the numerous missions of the penitentiary practitioner is to fulfil his practice with total independence within a repressive environment, with multiple constraints of order, respecting both security and judiciary requirements and the fundamental ethical principles of penitentiary medicine.

David L. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 . Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2011. Pp. 344. £27.95 (hardback). ISBN 9-780-801446-...