Imagining decline or sustainability: Hope, fear, and ideological discourse in Hollywood speculative fiction

Continuous fat-free mass decline in COPD: fact or fiction?

Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) generally have lower fat-free mass (a surrogate marker of skeletal muscle mass) compared with their healthy peers [1, 2], and this is associated with decreased functional capacity [3], the presence of other comorbidities (e.g. osteoporosis and renal impairment) [4] and increased mortality risk [5]. To date, longitudinal observational st...

Speculative Optimizations without Fear

Just-in-time (JIT) language implementations make heavy use of speculative optimizations, based on assumptions that might become invalid. This requires the implementation to support a bailout mechanism to undo invalidated optimizations. The interaction between assumptions and optimizations is a major source of complexity for JIT implementers: how should optimizations preserve bailout information...

Sri Aurobindo, India, and ideological discourse

The first part of this essay considers Sri Aurobindo’s nationalism and contextualizes it within the colonial-national interchange and the modern understanding of the nation. It then problematizes Hindutva’s attempts to reductively appropriate Sri Aurobindo’s pluralistic and evolutionary nationalism. In the second part, a close reading is conducted of a well-known nationalist speech of Sri Aurob...

Avian killer flu pandemic: fact, fear, or fiction.

The Discourse of Fear in American TV Fiction: A Furedian Reading of "Person of Interest"

Inserted in the ongoing discussion about the post-9/11 cultural archive, this paper analyzes the TV series Person of Interest (CBS, 2011–2016), created by Jonathan Nolan, through Frank Furedi’s theories about the discursive formation of fear as presented in his texts Politics of Fear. Beyond Left and Right (2005), Invitation to Terror. The Expanding Empire of the Unknown (2007), The Only Thing ...