Search Results (5)

The essay offers an expansive and multi-stratified investigation into the role of esoteric traditions within the development of Russian modernity, reframing occultism not as an eccentric deviation but as a foundational epistemological regime integral to Russia’s aesthetic, philosophical, and political evolution. By analyzing the arc from Petrine-era alchemical statecraft to the techno-theurgical aspirations of Russian Cosmism and the esoteric visual regimes of the avant-garde, this essay discloses the deep ontological entanglement between sacral knowledge and modernist radical experimentation. The work foregrounds figures such as Jacob Bruce, Wassily Kandinsky, and Kazimir Malevich, situating them within broader transnational currents of Hermeticism, Theosophy, and Rosicrucianism, while interrogating the role of occult infrastructures in both late-imperial and Soviet paradigms. Drawing on recent theoretical frameworks in the global history of esotericism and modernist studies, the long-read article elucidates the metaphysical substrata animating Russian Symbolism, Abstraction, Malevich’s non-Euclidian Suprematism and Moscow Conceptualism. This study contends that esotericism in Russia—far from marginal—served as a generative matrix for radical aesthetic innovation and ideological reconfiguration. It proposes a reconceptualization of Russian cultural history as a palimpsest of submerged sacral structures, where utopia and apocalypse, magic and technology, converge in a distinctively Russian cosmopoietic horizon. Ultimately, this essay reframes Russian and European occultism as an alternate technology of cognition and a performative semiotic universe shaping not only artistic modernism but also the very grammar of Russian historical imagination. Full article

Public discourse on immigration and social services access has been contentious in immigrant-receiving countries. Scholars have examined immigrants’ marginalization as a form of civic stratification, where boundaries based on documentation status affect immigrants’ experiences and benefits granted by the state. This scholarship lacks a framework outlining existing documentation status categories and does not fully answer three research questions I pose in this article: (1) what is the alignment of documentation status categories relative to each other, (2) how does policy (re)configure those categories over time, and (3) how have documentation status categories shaped access to health care in the United States? This article answers those questions and argues that the documentation status continuum (DSC) framework fills these gaps. In the DSC, undocumented immigrants are at one end and citizens are at the other, with many documentation statuses in between. Public policy creates these statuses and generates stratification through allocating benefits based on one’s DSC position. Policy also shapes movement along the continuum, which shapes benefits eligibility. Using the 2006 Massachusetts Health Reform and national 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) Reform as policy examples and interviews conducted with 207 immigrants, healthcare professionals, and immigrant organization employees in Boston, this article demonstrates how healthcare access is stratified along the DSC between citizens and noncitizens. This has implications for various outcomes that social scientists examine amid increasing anti-immigrant sentiment in the US and beyond. Full article

Electric ships have been developed in recent years to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this system, inverters are the key equipment for the permanent-magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drive system. The cascaded insulated-gated bipolar transistor (IGBT)-based H-bridge inverter is one of the most attractive multilevel topologies for modern electric ship applications. Usually, the fault-tolerant control strategy is designed to keep the ship in operation for a certain period. However, the fault-tolerant control strategy with hardware redundancy is expensive and slow in response. In addition, after fault-tolerant control, the ship’s PMSM may experience shock and overheating, and IGBT life is reduced due to uneven switching frequency distribution. Therefore, a stratified reconfiguration carrier disposition Sinusoidal Pulse Width Modulation (SPWM) fault-tolerant control strategy is proposed. The proposed strategy can achieve fault tolerance without any extra hardware. A reconfiguration carrier is applied to improve the fundamental amplitude of inverter output voltage to maintain the operation of the ship’s PMSM. In addition, the available states of faulty H-bridge are fully used to contribute to the output. These can improve the life of IGBTs by reducing and balancing the power loss of each H-bridge. The principles of the proposed strategy are described in detail in this study. Taking a cascaded H-bridge seven-level inverter as an example, simulation and experimental results verify that the proposed strategy, in general, has a potential future application on electric ships. Full article

Lithium-ion battery energy storage systems are made from sets of battery packs that are connected in series and parallel combinations depending on the application’s needs for power. To achieve optimal control, advanced battery management systems (ABMSs) with health-conscious optimal control are required for highly dynamic applications where safe operation, extended battery life, and maximum performance are critical requirements. The majority of earlier research assumed that the battery cells in these energy storage systems were identical and would vary uniformly over time in terms of cell characteristics. However, in real-world situations, the battery cells might behave differently for a number of reasons. Overcharging and over-discharging are caused by an electrical imbalance that results from the cells’ differences in properties and capacity. Therefore in this study, a stratified real-time control scheme was developed for the dual purposes of minimizing the capacity fade and the energy losses of a battery pack. Each of the cells in the pack is represented by a degradation-conscious physics-based reduced-order equivalent circuit model. In view of the inconsistencies between cells, the proposed control scheme uses a state estimator such that the parametric values of the circuit elements in the cell model are determined and updated in a decentralized manner. The minimization of the capacity fade and energy losses is then formulated as a multiobjective optimization problem, from which the resulting optimal control strategy is realized through the switching actions of a modular multilevel series-parallel converter which interconnects the battery pack to an external AC system. A centralized controller ensures optimal switching sequence of the converter leading to the maximum utilization of the capacity of the battery pack. Both simulation and experimental results are used to verify the proposed methodologies which aim at minimizing the battery degradation by reconfiguring the battery cells dynamically in accordance with the state of health (SOH) of the pack. Full article

Independent individualization of multiple product attributes, such as dose and drug release, is a crucial overarching requirement of pharmaceutical products for individualized therapy as is the unified integration of individualized product design with the processes and production that drive patient access to such therapy. Individualization intrinsically demands a marked increase in the number of product variants to suit smaller, more stratified patient populations. One established design strategy to provide enhanced product variety is product modularization. Despite existing customized and/or modular product design concepts, multifunctional individualization in an integrated manner is still strikingly absent in pharma. Consequently, this study aims to demonstrate multifunctional individualization through a modular product design capable of providing an increased variety of release profiles independent of dose and dosage form size. To further exhibit that increased product variety is attainable even with a low degree of product modularity, the modular design was based upon a fixed target dosage form size of approximately 200 mm³ comprising two modules, approximately 100 mm³ each. Each module contained a melt-extruded and molded formulation of 40% w/w metoprolol succinate in a PEG1500 and Kollidon^® VA64 erodible hydrophilic matrix surrounded by polylactic acid and/or polyvinyl acetate as additional release rate-controlling polymers. Drug release testing confirmed the generation of predictable, combined drug release kinetics for dosage forms, independent of dose, based on a product’s constituent modules and enhanced product variety through a minimum of six dosage form release profiles from only three module variants. Based on these initial results, the potential of the reconfigurable modular product design concept is discussed for unified integration into a pharmaceutical mass customization/mass personalization context. Full article