The politics of prison air: Breath, smell, and wind in Myanmar prisons

This article explores what air means and entails in penal settings and examines how carcerality attaches itself to air. With inspiration from social science approaches to the study of air, I propose that the lived experience of prison air can be fruitfully analyzed through the notions of breath, smell, and wind. This point is explored through two incidents about prison air drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in Myanmar. Together they illustrate a shift in Myanmar penality from a martial logic of destroying the enemy towards an internationally infused rationality of control and care. The first is a tale of an imprisoned engineer’s subversive effort to improve the air quality in prisons; the second, the design and building of tuberculosis wards in prisons that aim to bring prison air in line with international standards. The analysis of these incidents broadens the analytical sensorium of prison air by drawing attention to, on the one hand, a basic empirical and affective sensing of air, recognising air as a scarce and coveted resource that prison actors’ appropriate to survive. On the other hand, attention is drawn to the possibility of sensing with air, whereby the discourses, technologies, rules, and practices of air can be utilized as entry points for the analysis of prison governance and the transitional dynamics of penality.

Recent land cover and use in Romania: A conservation perspective

The study of land cover and use changes is important for sustainability, given that they are part of the global changes affecting our environment. In order to understand the mechanisms determining them, land cover and use changes must be studied based on their associated transitional dynamics. The present research aims to look at the most recent land cover and use changes from Romania, chosen as an example for post-socialists transitions. The methodology was based on applying geo-spatial analyses to data on land cover and use changes and natural protected areas. The results indicate that the most prominent transitional dynamics are deforestations and abandonment of cropland, rooted in the post-socialist property restitution. Furthermore, the study identified transitional dynamics indicating the human pressure within the natural protected areas, including urbanization, development of agriculture, and deforestation. Although subject to limitations bound to the use of CORINE data, the findings are important for understanding the environmental impact of socio-economic drivers, and provide additional evidence for the fact that emerging economies tend to sacrifice the environment during the economic crises.

Mind blanking is associated with a rigid spatio-temporal profile in typical wakefulness

Mind-blanking (MB) is the inability to report mental contents, challenging the view of a constantly thought-oriented mind during wakefulness. Using fMRI experience-sampling we show that MB is reported scarcely, fast, and has low transitional dynamics, pointing to its role as a transient mental relay. MB's cerebral profile is linked to an overall positive connectivity pattern, bearing great resemblance to neural configurations observed in local sleeps, possibly reflecting neuronal silencing during wakefulness. We also find less efficient information flow between the default mode (DMN) and other networks before reporting MB. The DMN-salience network segregation was further able to classify MB from other reports in fewer steps, suggestive of an early saliency evaluation of contentless phenomenology along the neurocognitive hierarchy. Collectively, MB's unique neurofunctional profile among thought-oriented reports supports the view of instantaneous mental absences happening during wakefuless, paving the way for more mechanistic investigations of this particular phenomenology during ongoing mentation.

Transitional dynamics in network game with heterogeneous agents: stochastic case

In this paper, stochastic parameters are introduced into the network games model with production and knowledges externalities. This model was formulated by V. Matveenko and A. Korolev and generalized two-period Romer model. Agents' productivities have deterministic and Wiener components. The research represents the dynamics of a single agent and the dynamics in a triangle which occurs in the process of unifying agents. Explicit expressions of the dynamics of a single agent and dyad agents in the form of Brownian random processes were obtained. A qualitative analysis of the solutions of stochastic equations and systems was carried out.

Single-cell transitional dynamics unravel stimulus- and cell type-dependent signaling outputs of distinct p53 regulatory feedback motifs

Despite myriad of systemic analysis, our quantitative understanding of signaling networks and their differential outputs is still limited, especially at the dynamic level. Here we employed a network motif approach to dissect key regulatory units of p53 pathway and determined how their collective activities generated context-specific dynamic responses. By combining single-cell imaging and mathematical modeling of dose-dependent p53 dynamics induced by three chemotherapeutics of distinct mechanism-of-action, including Etoposide, Nutlin-3a and 5-Fluouracil, and in five cancer cell types, we identified novel p53 dynamic modes and their mechanistic origins with new insight on previously unknown drug mediators and phenotypic heterogeneity of cancer cells. Our results established the functional roles of unique feedback motifs of p53 pathway in generating the stimulus- and cell type-specific signaling responses and demonstrated that transitional dynamics activated at intermediate stimulus levels can be exploited as novel quantitative readouts to uncover and elucidate the key building blocks of bio-networks.