• Title
  • Air pollution particles may be cause of dramatic drop in global insect numbers
• Date
  • July 12, 2023
• Publication
  • https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/07/230712124747.htm

Perhaps play helps to provide social lubrication, communication, and bonding between animals which may help in creating cooperation which improves survival or reproduction?

Gabriel Hébert-Mild™ ⓥ. (2022, March 10). 2/2 https://t.co/TJ03jvwkYN [Tweet]. @Gab_H_R. https://twitter.com/Gab_H_R/status/1501735460741292035

Yamasoba, D., Kimura, I., Nasser, H., Morioka, Y., Nao, N., Ito, J., Uriu, K., Tsuda, M., Zahradnik, J., Shirakawa, K., Suzuki, R., Kishimoto, M., Kosugi, Y., Kobiyama, K., Hara, T., Toyoda, M., Tanaka, Y. L., Butlertanaka, E. P., Shimizu, R., … Sato, K. (2022). Virological characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 BA.2 variant (p. 2022.02.14.480335). bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.02.14.480335

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin

1. Benjamin is part of the Frankfurt School at Institute of Social Studies in Germany.
2. They are trying to examine the failure of Marxist revolutionary social change.
3. The idea is that ideology disseminated through mass media are making it very difficult for Marx's prognotication are making it very difficult for social change to occur.
4. 19th century modernity: mass transportation, factory work, dissemination of capitalism, movement to cities and experience of urban life

 These convergent endeavors made predictable a situation which Paul Valéry pointed up in this sentence: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.” (op. cit., p. 226) Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations—the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film—have had on art in its traditional form.

Q: Why does it matter that film minimizes the aura?

At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of ‘pure’ art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter. (In poetry, Mallarmé was the first to take this position.) An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.7 From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics.<br> Ritual: pre-modern timesPolitics: Despite the political painting the art piece will be associated with the aura of original piece of art.

• Film is not auratic because in film: 1) spaces and times are constructed 2) actors performance is stitched together 3) actors do not share space with spectators 4) multiple points of view 5) appeals to a MASS AUDIENCE and a COLLECTIVE AUDIENCE 6) reveals new aspects of the thing reproduced (time alpse, slow motion).

How do institutions put the aura back into film?

In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance.

The superstar is a way to put the aura back into film

The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity. So long as the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art. We do not deny that in some cases today’s films can also promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property. However, our present study is no more specifically concerned with this than is the film production of Western Europe.

*Marx says capitalism produces the seeds of its demise. We can think of that as a guiding principle in which capitalism produces the neorosis that leads Chaplins character into a destructive set of behaviors that stops the Fordist capitalist production in a factory.

Feelings of belongoing and togetherness and being overhwemed by a mass you want to be a part of , but for Benjamin this is a trynanny where people feel they are in control but they are not really in control. Thus communism replies by politicizing art. Art for art's sake is harmful when put in the service of a facist regime. Art for political progress.

The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.21 The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

Film is not merely a translation of an in-person thetaer performance. Rather film is performing for future audiences and for the director and for cinematrography. This supports the idea that film is a collabroative creation that brings an object into the world.

One film can be playing multiple times around the world and so this can be distributed on mass scale.

Film is not merely a recording of reality. Film reproduced new aspects of the things reproduced through slow motion and it brings to light entirely new aspects of matter but discloses quite aspects within them. If Benjamin merely interested in the epistemological possibility of the film to expand our limited perceptual appartus, yes but think about how this reinforces his claim that film moves us away from the aura,...that if we can see unknown aspects by recording it then we can't rely on film to reproduce an original we have to keep in mind that the image is qualitatively distinct from our perceptual access to the thing. So film is not merely a copy of the thing that it records.

Benjamin flips things and says that maybe film isn't art the way we see an art and this will get us away from the trappings.

What is Benjamin's definition of art which he is defining with the aura, the transcendence of individual of ritual.

1. substructure or base: factors that produce commodities and economic relations that result from these concrete aspects
2. superstructure: culture, law, media that for a Marxist thinker emerges in the way that the economic structure functions; the more media/education/political cosumption that you do the less you are going to understand the conditions of your exploitation and the more you are going to think change is possible.
3. What role does cinema play in the move from cult and aura to mechanical reproduction? See snapshots.

Omicron largely evades immunity from past infection or two vaccine doses | Imperial News | Imperial College London. (n.d.). Imperial News. Retrieved December 21, 2021, from https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/modelling-suggests-rapid-spread-omicron-england/

Luoto, Severi, Marjorie L. Prokosch, Marco Antonio Correa Varella, Indrikis Krams, and Corey L. Fincher. “Editorial: Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) and Its Psychobehavioral Consequences.” Frontiers in Psychology 0 (2021). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.723282.

New study estimates mask wearing could cut R number by 25%, not 0.25—Full Fact. (n.d.). Retrieved July 15, 2021, from https://fullfact.org/online/andy-burnham-mayor-manchester-masks-misquote/

Reproduction number (R) and growth rate: Methodology—GOV.UK. (n.d.). Retrieved May 13, 2021, from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/reproduction-number-r-and-growth-rate-methodology/reproduction-number-r-and-growth-rate-methodology

Sy, Karla Therese L., Laura F. White, and Brooke E. Nichols. ‘Population Density and Basic Reproductive Number of COVID-19 across United States Counties’. PLOS ONE 16, no. 4 (21 April 2021): e0249271. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249271.

Volz, E., Mishra, S., Chand, M. et al. Assessing transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 lineage B.1.1.7 in England. Nature (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03470-x

Li, Y. (2020, October 18). Public health measures and R. Media Hopper Create. https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/1_1uhkv3uc

Chevallier, Coralie, Anne-Sophie Hacquin, and Hugo Mercier. ‘COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy: Shortening the Last Mile’. PsyArXiv, 3 March 2021. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/xchj6.

Ogbunu, B. C. (2020, October 27). The Science That Spans #MeToo, Memes, and Covid-19. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/the-science-that-spans-metoo-memes-and-covid-19/

Horton, Richard. ‘Offline: Science and Politics in the Era of COVID-19’. The Lancet 396, no. 10259 (24 October 2020): 1319. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32221-2.

Li, You, Harry Campbell, Durga Kulkarni, Alice Harpur, Madhurima Nundy, Xin Wang, and Harish Nair. ‘The Temporal Association of Introducing and Lifting Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions with the Time-Varying Reproduction Number (R) of SARS-CoV-2: A Modelling Study across 131 Countries’. The Lancet Infectious Diseases 21, no. 2 (1 February 2021): 193–202. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30785-4.

H, Yu, Yang J, Marziano V, Deng X, Guzzetta G, Zhang J, Trentini F, et al. “Can a COVID-19 Vaccination Program Guarantee the Return to a Pre-Pandemic Lifestyle?,” February 9, 2021. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-200069/v1.

Bredow, R., & Hackenbroch, V. (2021, January 22). Interview with Virologist Christian Drosten “I Am Quite Apprehensive about What Might Otherwise Happen in Spring and Summer.” Der Spiegel, Hamburg, Germany. https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/interview-with-virologist-christian-drosten-i-am-quite-apprehensive-about-what-might-otherwise-happen-in-spring-and-summer-a-f22c0495-5257-426e-bddc-c6082d6434d5

Estimating the impact of reopening schools on the reproduction number of SARS-CoV-2 in England, using weekly contact survey data. (2021, February 15). CMMID Repository. https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/comix-schools.html

Parag. K. V., Donnelly. C. A., (2020) Using information theory to optimise epidemic models for real-time prediction and estimation. PLOS. Retrieved from https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007990

Bauch, Chris T. “Estimating the COVID-19 R Number: A Bargain with the Devil?” The Lancet Infectious Diseases 0, no. 0 (October 22, 2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30840-9.

This demonstrates how FieldArray re-renders (field subscription fires) even when changing unrelated field. Wat?

Bug repro for https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/issues/2086

Fixed by: Bug 1:

• https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/pull/3172
• https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/pull/3172/commits/f4ca063c85e491b75d162f429ad243b6f443db13

Bug 2:

• https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/pull/3209
• https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/commit/2f08e34b41317619f9bc7bf6bc2418123fb06829

Fixed version here: https://svelte.dev/repl/a55ba18ceca44c898f2b011a0978de85?version=3.6.7

(although https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/pull/3172/commits/f4ca063c85e491b75d162f429ad243b6f443db13 indicates the fix was included in v3.6.6 tag, so I wonder why it's not fixed here)

supersedes https://codesandbox.io/s/epic-stonebraker-9cxhu?file=/index.js:0-32

Good example of how helpful it is to remove everything irrelevant and create minimal reproducible example.

COVID-19 and the Politics of Reproductive Health: Global Perspectives. (2020, August 18). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kex9O_cwMwo

Although, meta.valid works, meta.active, meta.dirty, meta.touched, meta.visited never change from false.

See also: https://github.com/final-form/react-final-form-arrays/issues/147

for: https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/issues/4927

Tim spector on Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved September 25, 2020, from https://twitter.com/timspector/status/1308873677807792129

Report 13—Estimating the number of infections and the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in 11 European countries. (n.d.). Imperial College London. Retrieved September 18, 2020, from http://www.imperial.ac.uk/medicine/departments/school-public-health/infectious-disease-epidemiology/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/report-13-europe-npi-impact/

https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/issues/5388

Fixed in: https://svelte.dev/repl/ba980bfbd031448b8f49500f5900f305?version=3.25.1

Peston, R. (2020, September 7). SAGE scientist warns coronavirus cases “increasing exponentially.” ITV News. https://www.itv.com/news/2020-09-07/exclusive-sage-scientist-tells-peston-coronavirus-cases-increasing-exponentially

Stephen Griffin on Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved September 2, 2020, from https://twitter.com/SGriffin_Lab/status/1300572439374630917

Kretzschmar, M. E., Rozhnova, G., Bootsma, M. C. J., Boven, M. van, Wijgert, J. H. H. M. van de, & Bonten, M. J. M. (2020). Impact of delays on effectiveness of contact tracing strategies for COVID-19: A modelling study. The Lancet Public Health, 5(8), e452–e459. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(20)30157-2

Adam, D. (2020). A guide to R — the pandemic’s misunderstood metric. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02009-w

Starnini, M., Aleta, A., Tizzoni, M., & Moreno, Y. (2020). Impact of the accuracy of case-based surveillance data on the estimation of time-varying reproduction numbers. MedRxiv, 2020.06.26.20140871. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.26.20140871

Farboodi, M., Jarosch, G., & Shimer, R. (2020). Internal and External Effects of Social Distancing in a Pandemic (Working Paper No. 27059; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27059

Barnett, M., Buchak, G., & Yannelis, C. (2020). Epidemic Responses Under Uncertainty (Working Paper No. 27289; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27289

Hong, H., Wang, N., & Yang, J. (2020). Implications of Stochastic Transmission Rates for Managing Pandemic Risks (Working Paper No. 27218; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27218

Aguas, R., Corder, R. M., King, J. G., Goncalves, G., Ferreira, M. U., & Gomes, M. G. M. (2020). Herd immunity thresholds for SARS-CoV-2 estimated from unfolding epidemics. MedRxiv, 2020.07.23.20160762. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160762

Pindyck, R. S. (2020). COVID-19 and the Welfare Effects of Reducing Contagion (Working Paper No. 27121; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27121

Althouse, B. M., Wenger, E. A., Miller, J. C., Scarpino, S. V., Allard, A., Hébert-Dufresne, L., & Hu, H. (2020). Stochasticity and heterogeneity in the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2. ArXiv:2005.13689 [Physics, q-Bio]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2005.13689

Matthias #WashYourHands Egger on Twitter: “The effective reproduction number Re is now above 1 in #Switzerland: 1.28 (95% 1.06-1.53). We urgently need an in-depth understanding of transmission dynamics, the effectiveness of contact tracing etc. And #MaskUp https://t.co/24E5o4jYiS” / Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved June 30, 2020, from https://twitter.com/eggersnsf/status/1276882802173247490

Adam Kucharski on Twitter: “I’m getting asked more about the ‘k’ parameter that describes variation in the reproduction number, R (i.e. describes superspreading). But what does this parameter actually mean? A short statistical thread... 1/” / Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved June 4, 2020, from https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/1267737631481364480

Davis, N. (2020, May 4). Rival Sage group says Covid-19 policy must be clarified. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/04/rival-sage-group-covid-19-policy-clarified-david-king

Arenas, A., Cota, W., Gomez-Gardenes, J., Gomez, S., Granell, C., Matamalas, J. T., Soriano-Panos, D., & Steinegger, B. (2020). Derivation of the effective reproduction number R for COVID-19 in relation to mobility restrictions and confinement [Preprint]. Epidemiology. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.06.20054320

Puleo, M., & Staff Writer (2020 March 18). New study says “high temperature and high relative humidity significantly reduce” spread of COVID-19. https://www.accuweather.com/en/health-wellness/new-study-says-high-temperature-and-high-relative-humidity-significantly-reduce-spread-of-covid-19/703418

Liu, Y., Eggo, R. M., & Kucharski, A. J. (2020). Secondary attack rate and superspreading events for SARS-CoV-2. The Lancet, 395(10227), e47. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30462-1

Salje, H., Tran Kiem, C., Lefrancq, N., Courtejoie, N., Bosetti, P., Paireau, J., Andronico, A., Hozé, N., Richet, J., Dubost, C.-L., Le Strat, Y., Lessler, J., Levy-Bruhl, D., Fontanet, A., Opatowski, L., Boelle, P.-Y., & Cauchemez, S. (2020). Estimating the burden of SARS-CoV-2 in France. Science, eabc3517. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abc3517

Jing, Q.-L., Liu, M.-J., Yuan, J., Zhang, Z.-B., Zhang, A.-R., Dean, N. E., Luo, L., Ma, M.-M., Longini, I., Kenah, E., Lu, Y., Ma, Y., Jalali, N., Fang, L.-Q., Yang, Z.-C., & Yang, Y. (2020). Household Secondary Attack Rate of COVID-19 and Associated Determinants [Preprint]. Epidemiology. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.11.20056010

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It is interesting. The level of cooperation, and the number of people involved vastly change the calculation of available energy, so at the very least these two ideas are intimately related.

In the original German, 'prevails' is rendered "herrscht." Herrscht shares a common root with the ordinary German word Herr (Mister, or, more evocatively, Master). 'Lordship' (as, in the chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, on 'Lordship and Bondage' is rendered Herrschaft.)

My own reading of Capital tends to center upon the question of domination in capitalist societies, and throughout chapter 1 (in particular, in The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof) Marx is especially attuned to the distinguishing how the forms of domination that are prevalent in capitalist societies are distinct from the relations of "personal dependence" that characterize pre-capitalist modes of production.

It seems prudent, therefore, to take note of the way that the seemingly innocuous notion of 'prevalence' is, for Marx, in his original formulation, already evocative of the language of mastery, domination, perhaps even something like 'hegemony'.

Furthermore, the capitalist mode of production prevails--it predominates. Yet, as Louis Althusser observes in his discussion of the concept of the 'mode of production' in On the Reproduction of Capitalism, every concrete social formation can be classified according to the mode of production that is dominant (that prevails--herrscht). In order to dominate, something must implicitly be dominated, or subordinate. "In every social formation," Althusser writes, "there exists more than one mode of production: at least two and often many more." Althusser cites Lenin, who in his analysis of the late 19th c. Russian social formation, observes that four modes of production can be distinguished (Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Verso 2014, p. 19.)

In our analysis of social formations, the concrete specificity of each can be articulated by carefully examining the multiplicity of modes of production that coincide within it, and examine the way in which capitalism tends to dominate a multiplicity of subordinate modes of production that, on the one hand, survive from past modes of production but which may also, on the other, be emerging in the present (i.e. communism). Thus even if capitalism tends towards the formation of a contiguous world-system dominated by its particular imperatives, this does not mean that this process is homogenous or unfolds in the same way in each instance.

For some commentators, capitalism is defined by the prevalence of wage labor and the specific dynamics that obtain therefrom. Yet this has often led to confusion over, whether, in analyzing the North American social formation prior to 1865, in which slavery coexists with wage-labor, the mode of production based on slave-labor is pre-capitalist. Yet as we find here in ch. 1, what determines the commodity as a commodity is not that it is the product of wage labor, rather that it is produced for exchange. As Marx writes on p. 131, "He who satisfies his own need with the product of his own labor admittedly creates use-values, but not commodities. Insofar as the slave-system in North America produced commodities (cotton, tobacco, etc.) for exchange on the world market, the fact that these commodities were produced under direct conditions of domination does not have any bearing on whether or not we identify this system of production as 'capitalist'. Wage-labor is therefore not likely the determinative factor; the determinative factor is the production of commodities for exchange. It is only insofar as commodities confront one another as exchange-values that the various modes of useful labor appear as expressions of a homogenous common substance, labor in the abstract

It is in this sense that we can observe one of the ways that the capitalist mode of production prevails over other modes of production, as it subordinates these modes of production to production for exchange, and thus the law of value, regardless of whether wage-labor represents the dominant form of this relation. Moreover, it provides a clue to how we can examine, for example, the persistence of unwaged work within the family, which has important consequences for Social Reproduction Theory.

Nonetheless, we can say that insofar as commodities confront each other on the market in a scene of exchange that they implicitly contain some 'third thing' which enables us to compare them as bearers of a magnitude of value. This 'third thing', as Marx's demonstration shows, is 'socially necessary labour time', which anticipates the way that wage-labor will become a dominant feature of capitalist society.

We might broadly see the fantasy of real-time surveillance of crime in neighborhoods as emergingfrom “smart cities” rhetoric, practices with mobile media, and the perceived availability of data. [...] It would perpetuate systemic inequality that is already exacerbated through the media and the housing market.