| 13361. |
- Grignaschi, Silvia, et al.
(author)
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High fatigue scores in patients with idiopathic inflammatory myopathies : a multigroup comparative study from the COVAD e-survey
- 2023
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In: Rheumatology International. - : Springer. - 0172-8172 .- 1437-160X. ; 43:9, s. 1637-1649
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (IIMs) confer a significant risk of disability and poor quality of life, though fatigue, an important contributing factor, remains under-reported in these individuals. We aimed to compare and analyze differences in visual analog scale (VAS) scores (0-10 cm) for fatigue (VAS-F) in patients with IIMs, non-IIM systemic autoimmune diseases (SAIDs), and healthy controls (HCs). We performed a cross-sectional analysis of the data from the COVID-19 Vaccination in Autoimmune Diseases (COVAD) international patient self-reported e-survey. The COVAD survey was circulated from December 2020 to August 2021, and details including demographics, COVID-19 history, vaccination details, SAID details, global health, and functional status were collected from adult patients having received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. Fatigue experienced 1 week prior to survey completion was assessed using a single-item 10 cm VAS. Determinants of fatigue were analyzed in regression models. Six thousand nine hundred and eighty-eight respondents (mean age 43.8 years, 72% female; 55% White) were included in the analysis. The overall VAS-F score was 3 (IQR 1-6). Patients with IIMs had similar fatigue scores (5, IQR 3-7) to non-IIM SAIDs [5 (IQR 2-7)], but higher compared to HCs (2, IQR 1-5; P < 0.001), regardless of disease activity. In adjusted analysis, higher VAS-F scores were seen in females (reference female; coefficient -0.17; 95%CI -0.21 to -13; P < 0.001) and Caucasians (reference Caucasians; coefficient -0.22; 95%CI -0.30 to -0.14; P < 0.001 for Asians and coefficient -0.08; 95%CI -0.13 to 0.30; P = 0.003 for Hispanics) in our cohort. Our study found that patients with IIMs exhibit considerable fatigue, similar to other SAIDs and higher than healthy individuals. Women and Caucasians experience greater fatigue scores, allowing identification of stratified groups for optimized multidisciplinary care and improve outcomes such as quality of life.
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| 13362. |
- Grimaldi, Simone, et al.
(author)
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Detecting communication blackout in industrial Wireless Sensor Networks
- 2016
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In: 2016 IEEE World Conference on Factory Communication Systems (WFCS). - : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). - 9781509023394
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Communication blackout is one of the most serious pitfalls of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) in industrial automation context. The industrial radio channel exhibits pronounced effects of multipath fading and wireless LAN (WLAN) interference that can potentially lead to temporary communication failures, as well as complete isolation of network devices. The current IWSN standards adopt known countermeasures to cope with the harshness of the radio channel, but they lack solutions specifically oriented to detect blackouts and self-recover the communication fulfilling hard deadline constraints. In this work we focus on the problem of blackout detection with specific interest for the WirelessHART standard, introducing a Blackout Detection Service (BDS) expressly addressed to multi-hop periodic communication with sensors and actuators. The BDS monitors end-to-end acknowledgement messages and builds specific metrics to promptly identify communication outages, enabling three criticality classes. The algorithm is tested in the ns-2 network simulator and results show that the proposed system is able to detect blackout events with reaction delays of the order of 4-5 times the refresh rate of nodes and to discriminate between small and temporary network issues and serious blackout scenarios, opening the field for recovery strategies.
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| 13363. |
- Grimbeek, Marinette, 1982-
(author)
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A Newspeak of Extinction : The Disintegration of Meaning in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
- 2012
-
Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The contingency of language is one of the central concerns of Margaret Atwood’s speculative novel Oryx and Crake (2003), set in a severely climate-changed Canadian landscape. Atwood’s near-future world is the realisation of the negative effects of extreme globalisation, which, coupled with complete commercialisation, had resulted in utter environmental degradation and irreparable climate change on the one hand, and the development of increasingly daring biotechnologies on the other. One of the central themes of the novel is that of extinction – not just the impending extinction of the physical environment, but also the imminent extinction of various types of cultural expressions. As the protagonist has to mediate his experience of an increasingly foreign world, language is portrayed as under threat. In this paper I explore the notion that the world of Oryx and Crake has necessitated a breakdown in meaning which has resulted in a kind of Orwellian Newspeak – as for example manifested in the incongruous brand names used in the novel.
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| 13364. |
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| 13365. |
- Grimbeek, Marinette, 1982-
(author)
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Dangerous Connections and Dissolving Boundaries in Daisy Hildyard’s The Second Body and Emergency
- 2023
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Daisy Hildyard’s book-length essay The Second Body (2017) as well as her novel Emergency (2022) are concerned with interconnection, boundaries, and leakage between bodies on scales ranging from the individual to the planetary. Climate change looms large in The Second Body, which ranges from the Earthrise images to molecular biology, and from butcheries to floods. The titular ‘second body’ – each physical body’s uncanny embeddedness in a global ecosystem of consumption and emissions – encompasses more than an individual ecological footprint, and here the concept is used to read the dark pastoral sketched in Emergency. In the novel, the overwhelming production of interconnections not only threatens to dissolve individuals but also to fill the seemingly empty spaces of the represented countryside to overflowing. This proliferation of interconnections, however, shows little of the exuberance often used to describe entanglement, and instead both the recalled pastoral setting and the pandemic present of Emergency are shown to be overdetermined through interconnection.
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| 13366. |
- Grimbeek, Marinette, 1982-
(author)
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Dormant Agency : The Temporalities of Seeds
- 2023
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Seeds are both termini and beginnings. Inscribed with the past, they are simultaneously repositories of future potential. At a time of acute biodiversity loss and cascading environmental crises, seeds also figure large in fictional narratives concerned with issues of land, heritage, belonging, cultivation and food security. By juxtaposing the sterility of industrial agricultural monoculture with the promiscuity and unpredictable agency of open-pollinated heirloom varieties, authors like Leslie Marmon Silko, Ruth Ozeki, Diane Wilson and Barbara Kingsolver show how communities are shaped by their crops as much as they shape their crops through selective cultivation. In the work of these authors, dormant seeds have agency: they are the vehicles of complex intertwined histories of continuity and disruption that span generations, peoples and sometimes continents. Seeds narratively bridge past and future by genetically encoding local growing conditions, their breeding, displacement and survival. They further present a biological record of the collective experiences of the humans who sow, harvest and store seed. While seeds frequently signify abundance and diversity in the fiction under consideration, I here try to pay attention to the representation of their dormancy, to show how the theme of dormant agency is manifest in these texts.
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| 13367. |
- Grimbeek, Marinette, 1982-
(author)
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Forging hybrid identities in selected works by Margaret Atwood
- 2014
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Margaret Atwood’s speculative trilogy – Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013) – has a post-apocalyptic setting, but also includes frequent flashbacks to a pre-apocalyptic world that is recognisably an extrapolated version of our own. In this near-future world current technologies as well as environmental concerns have had time to develop to their full dystopian (and utopian) potential. In the MaddAddam trilogy our contemporary fear of the hybrid is exploited: by framing nature as hybrid (variable, changeable, dynamic) the boundaries between human–nonhuman and natural–artificial become somewhat blurred. Moreover, these novels are also in many ways generically and thematically hybrid.Although hybridity can perhaps most clearly be seen in Atwood’s recent trilogy, it is by no means confined to these three novels. In this paper I will look at Atwood’s use of hybridity in the trilogy in the light of some of her earlier work (such as her 1972 novel Surfacing and many of her short stories), in order to show that her concern with hybridity ranges beyond her speculative fiction and that hybridity plays an important role in her body of work.
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| 13368. |
- Grimbeek, Marinette, 1982-
(author)
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Framing by Unveiling : Apocalyptic Extrapolation and Hybridity in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy
- 2014
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In: Framing Nature.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- As we face the prospect of imminent ecological disaster, the apocalyptic mode appears to be one of the dominant ways of framing nature and ecological discourse. Lawrence Buell famously called apocalypse in The Environmental Imagination “the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal” (287). Due to the grand scale often employed in apocalyptic narrative, Ursula K. Heise describes it in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet as “a particular form of imagining the global” (141). Additionally, in Why We Disagree about Climate Change Mike Hulme identifies “presaging apocalypse” as one of the four predominant narrative modes employed to frame climate change. In this paper I do not just use apocalypse in its modern sense as a synonym for catastrophe, but also return to the original meaning of the word to discuss the manner in which unveiling works as a framing device in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. Further, I argue that Atwood’s apocalyptic imagination is informed by the idea that meaning is created through hybridity and that her apocalyptic extrapolation provides an alternative, albeit ambiguous, to the nostalgia often associated with an environmental impetus.Atwood’s speculative trilogy – Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013) – has a post-apocalyptic setting, but also includes frequent flashbacks to a pre-apocalyptic world that is recognisably an extrapolated version of our own. In this near-future world current technologies as well as environmental concerns have had time to develop to their full dystopian (and utopian) potential. A speculative text is always to some extent at least doubly framed, since the intratextual world is by and large shown to be other by means of comparison to the historical situation at the text’s conception. Within an outer frame of comparison created through apocalyptic extrapolation, Atwood reveals a possible future principally based on the prevailing apocalyptic framing of nature. In the MaddAddam trilogy our contemporary fear of the hybrid is also exploited: by framing nature as hybrid (variable, changeable, dynamic) the boundaries between human–nonhuman and natural–artificial become blurred. In the trilogy hybridity and apocalypticism are intimately connected, and post-apocalyptic survival depends to a large degree on the acceptance of a hybrid framing of human and nonhuman nature.
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| 13369. |
- Grimbeek, Marinette, 1982-
(author)
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Förföriska tentakulära ekologier
- 2017
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In: Aiolos: Tidskrift för litteratur, teori och estetik. - Stockholm : Kulturföreningen Faethon. - 1400-7770. ; :56, s. 101-104
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Journal article (other academic/artistic)
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| 13370. |
- Grimbeek, Marinette, 1982-
(author)
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Girls Making Families : Agential Assemblage in Nnedi Okorafor’s Speculative Fiction
- 2023
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In: Populating the Future. - Gävle, Sweden : Kriterium/Gävle University Press. - 9789189593060 - 9789189593077 - 9789189593084 - 9789189593091 ; , s. 133-156
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- A girl or young woman facing new or dangerous challenges without the support of a family is a recurring motif in Nnedi Okorafor’s multiple award-winning fiction. Okorafor’s protagonists tend to reinvent traditional conceptions of families and create new family constellations through assemblage. These may include members of different human tribes, or even extraterrestrial, engineered or magical nonhuman creatures – and such assemblages are driven by the desire to find new ways of being in the world and relating to others. This chapter examines the kinmaking strategies of four of Okorafor’s protagonists to show how they form cross-culture and cross-species kinships. Binti, Onyesonwu, Phoenix, and Fatima/Sankofa all reinterpret traditions and create new families ranging beyond biological reproduction or kinship ties. To some extent, all the texts under discussion here could be classified as coming-of-age stories, in which assembled families complement and often replace biological families; the assembled families populating Okorafor’s texts are both vehicles of individual agency and utopian expressions of malleable traditions in an ecologically fragile world fraught with racial tension. Although agential assemblage through naming and storytelling has utopian implications in Who Fears Death (2010) and the Binti Trilogy (2015–18), assemblage is also central in the death and dying in The Book of Phoenix (2015) and Remote Control (2021). The assembled families populating Okorafor’s fiction are both vehicles of individual agency and utopian expressions of malleable traditions in an ecologically fragile world fraught with racial tension. Assemblage thus seems central to Okorafor’s utopian Africanfuturist impetus, and the chapter therefore concludes with a brief reflection on the role of narration in Okorafor’s agential assemblages.
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