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Before the publication of Infinite Jest in 1996, no less than a dozen excerpts from Wallace’s novel had already been published in various journals and magazines. The essay presents the first complete overview of these previously neglected excerpts and analyzes how they frame Infinite Jest. Drawing on theories by Bryant, McGann and Bhaskar, the analysis shows that the excerpts function as ‘paracontent’ that occupies a gray area between self-contained content and marketing. The essay then considers the sum of excerpts, which exhibits a surprising bias in favor of certain parts of Wallace’s novel, and discusses the implications of this imbalance.

Committee Mandate Mandate: Concern for the safety and structural reliability of subsea production systems for oil and gas offshore. This shall include subsea equipment for production and processing, flowlines and risers, with emphasis on design, fabrication, qualification, installation, inspection, maintenance, repair, life extension and decommissioning. Structural design for flow assurance and safe underwater operations shall be considered. Introduction The offshore and subsea industry is getting more complex with higher pressures, higher temperatures and increased water depths. Technology developments and impacts for the subsea industry are driven both by economic factors and by sustainability issues. These factors will enhance for novel subsea concepts like all-electric, new subsea processing technologies, further integration between process control and process safety systems and use of sensors to monitor process condition and integrity of safety systems. This report focuses mainly on the traditional subsea technology related to oil and gas fields where the attention will be on efficiency, safety, environment, digitalization and life extension. This is the second term of the Specialist Committee V.8 Subsea Technology and as the previous report provided a more introductory outline to subsea technology, the following report will focus more in depth on the main trends seen by the industry like autonomous operations and operational challenges to accommodate for higher pressures, temperatures and ultradeep waters. Hence, areas like installation of subsea equipment have only been briefly discussed and operation for emergencies has been left out since this was thoroughly addressed by the previous committee. The next level from electrification is to further explore the concept of subsea power distribution with the goal to provide power, ranging from 750 kW to more than 11 MW, to subsea systems, from pumps to compressors. All the major subsea players like GE Oil & Gas, ABB, TechnipFMC, Aker Subsea and Baker Hughes, are developing different concepts which are further discussed in Chapter 2. Another trend is the need for higher pressure and higher temperature (HPHT) and often in combination with ultradeep waters. One of the fields that have taken the new specifications for HPHT equipment is the 2,000psi rated subsea hydraulic junction plates including connection hardware for deployment at Chevron's Anchor development in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico just put in order. Hence, focus on safe design and new and updated design standards are presented in chapter 3. The demanding subsea environments challenge the boundaries of traditional engineering alloys and our understanding of degradation mechanisms that could lead to failure, new materials and fabrication of these have been discussed in chapter 4. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been identified as a key abatement technology for achieving a significant reduction in CO2 emissions to the atmosphere where pipelines are likely to be the primary means of transporting CO2 from point-of-capture to sites. There is currently a strong interest to explore the use of pipelines for hydrogen transport, hence new pipeline trends and design assessment like strain based and leak limit states are discussed in chapter 5. For the subsea industry, one of the main drivers is to put power on the seabed where subsea facilities are becoming all-electric. This technology will ensure huge capital cost savings for field developments and reduction in CO2 emission will become important. Chapter 6 deals with different riser concepts from traditional steel catenary, top tension and flexible risers to novel concepts like Thermoplastic Composite Pipe (TCP) and Carbon-Fibre-Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) risers and umbilicals. The Macondo accident was an eye opener for the whole industry, and the Petroleum Safety Authorities of various countries challenged the industry on different levels to mitigate above associated risks and implement barrier management at the design stage. One of the challenges is the increased focus on design of subsea production system for oil and gas offshore in terms of safety and structural reliability of the system and its inherent management. Chapter 7 deals with structural integrity management, including inspection methods and advances in repair systems. The subsea industry faces a combination of market forces from authority, strict regulation and societal pressure over climate change, chapter 8 addresses structural reliability assessment and safety of subsea systems. Several of the offshore fields are approaching the end of their design life and a cost-effective solution to maximize production is to document that life extension is feasible for an asset, different solutions are discussed in chapter 9 including decommissioning.

The digitization of the publishing business has provided publishers with new media and new means of distribution, which in turn have created new modes of reading. The impact of the digital revolution on the production and distribution of literature has already been widely discussed, but much less has been written about how current media developments have affected reading and readers. A central thesis of this special issue is that the phenomenon of reading should be studied from various disciplinary perspectives. Reading as a phenomenon evolves in the intersections among media developments, literary trends, and social practices. By bringing together scholars from literary theory, media studies, aesthetics, anthropology, psychology, and linguistics, the special issue explores different perspectives on how the technological, sensorial, cognitive, participatory, and aesthetic aspects of reading have evolved in recent decades. Reading practices are changing rapidly in close conjunction with the evolving formats in which literature is distributed to its readers. The purpose of the special issue is to provide a forum in which to rethink existing categories and challenge prevalent notions of reading.

Background Drug costs are increasing in Europe, and there is a heightened need to reduce pressure on healthcare systems. In 2017, oncology, autoimmune disease, and diabetes featured as the three highest therapy areas for drug spend in the EU-28. However, the absolute 1-year drug spend growth for diabetes did not feature within the ten fastest growing therapy areas. Objective This study explores the association between drug spend and disease burden in oncology, autoimmune disease, and diabetes in the EU-28. Methods Oncology, autoimmune disease and diabetes therapeutic areas were investigated using four methodologies. Historical and forecasted drug spend was analysed using the IQVIA MIDAS® drug sales database. Clinical and economic burden was estimated from targeted literature reviews. Trend analyses compared changes in drug spend with clinical burden using the Global Burden of Disease tool as the epidemiological reference. Cost per quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) from UK health technology assessments were compared to interpret the health economic value. Results Oncology had the highest historical drug spend and growth compared with autoimmune disease and diabetes. Total drug spend and growth in oncology is forecasted to exceed diabetes by twofold. Increasing oncology drug spend historically did not correspond with reductions in mortality and morbidity. Diabetes had the lowest drug spend and greatest QALY/€1000 spent benefit. Conclusion This study indicates that drug spend may not correlate to clinical burden across diseases. Future research could stimulate debate on whether more equitable drug funding may improve disease management. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s41669-020-00253-4.

In a recent article, Kate Marshall identifies “an emerging body of US fiction located firmly within the strata and sediment of the Anthropocene,” focusing exclusively on twenty-first century literature. A similar chronological focus shapes discussions of the related concept of planetarity, which was first introduced in literary theory in Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003). The tendency to relegate anthropocenic and planetary concerns to this millennium is prevalent, and it is evident in the reception of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (both 2006). However, anthropocenic and planetary concerns have been around much longer in literary fiction, and the two authors have treated them much more elaborately in their most important works, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Blood Meridian (1985). Both novels were written before concepts of the Anthropocene and planetarity became theoretical staples, but I aim to show that their thoughts on humanity and the planet prefigure the recent literary works that critics have centered their discussions of the Anthropocene on. Furthermore, I will show how both novels reflect on language as yet another technology that violates nature’s continuum, and how language is thus presented by Pynchon and McCarthy as a significant force in the Anthropocene.

Digital media have provided new avenues of distribution for serial fiction and created new narrative possibilities for the form, including the widespread use of what Margolin labels "concurrent narration" and Page terms "real-time narration." This form of serial publication, where a story is distributed in installments coterminously with the events being reported, is enabled by the Internet's possibilities for instantaneous transmission, and it appears in narratives on various platforms that rely on the web for content distribution. To discuss this temporal confluence of the narrated, narration, and publication, we analyze the use of concurrent narration in two digitally distributed serialized narratives, David Mitchell's Twitter story "@I_Bombadil" (2015), and the Norwegian webserial Skam (2015–17), both of which were originally transmitted piecemeal in near-concurrence with the narrated events. Furthermore, we analyze the participation surrounding the two stories. Serial fiction has always encouraged the active engagement of its audience, and this tendency becomes especially pronounced when stories are distributed via social media that allow for rapid exchanges between readers. The participatory practices that emerge in the wake of digitalization are often conceived as inherently democratic forms of engagement, but this predominantly positive conception may be questioned, since participation is a complex concept that covers a range of different practices. By analyzing the participation that surrounds "@I_Bombadil" and Skam we nuance the perspective on digitally enabled participatory culture and thus contribute to a better understanding of how new digital forms of distribution affect the modes of narrating and engaging in serialized narratives today. (Less)

The importance of cancer- and other disease registries for planning, management and evaluation of healthcare systems has been shown repeatedly during the last 50 years. Complete and unbiased population-level analyses on routinely collected, individual data concerning health and personal characteristics can address significant concerns about risk factors for cancer and provide sound evidence about public health and the effectiveness of healthcare systems. The existence of quality controlled and comprehensive data in registries, allowed to be used for quality control, research and public health purposes are taken as granted by most health professionals and researchers. However, the current revision of the European Union (EU) data protection framework suggests a harmonisation of requirements for confidentiality and individual consent to data processing, likely at the expense of proper use of registry data in the health sector. Consequences of excessive confidentiality rules that may lead to missed data linkages have been simulated. The simulations provide one possible explanation for observed heterogeneity among some cancer incidence data. Further, public health, quality control and epidemiological research on large populations can no longer provide evidence for health interventions, if requirements for consent renders research impossible or where attempts to obtain consent from each data subject generates biased results. Health professionals should engage in the on-going debate on the Commission's proposal for a General Data Protection Regulation. The nature and use of registry data in public health research must be explained and known to policy-makers and the public. Use of cancer registry data and other epidemiological activity will terminate abruptly if an unnecessarily strict EU data protection regulation is adopted. Research based interventions, as well as the international recognised standing of cancer registries and register-based research institutions in Europe are at stake.

In his 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, David Foster Wallace famously proclaimed postmodern authors like John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and Vladimir Nabokov to be his real enemies, patriarchs for his patricide. This unambiguous statement of aesthetic intent laid down a clear set of guidelines for literary critics, and much of the subsequent critical reception of Wallace has followed the path set down by Wallace in the early 1990s. While there are obvious advantages to following Wallace's guidelines, an exclusive focus on his complex agon with his literary forebears runs the risk of obscuring some of the pronounced continuities between Wallace and his postmodern predecessors. One of these continuities is the crucial theme of paying attention. This theme is at the centre of much of Wallace's fiction, but it also plays a decisive part in novels written by the patriarchs for Wallace's patricide, and by tracing the theme through Wallace's work as well as through novels by Nabokov and Pynchon the article argues...

Drawing on various theories of the materiality and mediality of literature, the essay argues that a focus on the material history of any given literary work can provide a more nuanced understanding of various literary historical processes than traditional textual analysis. Taking different physical editions of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 as its starting point, the essay traces the constantly evolving exchanges between the progressive material incarnations of Pynchon's novel and the cultural context, laying bare some of the complex literary historical, cultural, and institutional processes that contributed to the canonization of The Crying of Lot 49.

The final part of the recent anthology Serialization in Popular Culture (2014) is called ‘Digital serialization’ and is devoted to ‘the influence of digital technologies on serial form’. The chapters throughout the anthology focus on modern serial phenomena such as TV series and computer games, but apart from a chapter on serial fiction in the 19th century, literature is conspicuously absent. However, the digital revolution has also left its mark on literature and given rise to new publishing strategies, including a resurgence of different forms of serialization. Some of the most notable examples of digital serial fiction are published via Twitter, and through analyses of recent Twitter stories by Jennifer Egan and David Mitchell, the article discusses how the micro-serialization of Twitter fiction both differs from and draws on the pre-digital tradition of serial fiction. In order to address these differences and similarities, the analyses focus on two interrelated aspects of serialization, temporality and interaction. Furthermore, they discuss the promotional dimension of Twitter fiction that arises as the financial dictates of legacy publishing intersect with fiction distributed via digital social media.

Limited research has been conducted on owner-managers’ responses to the working environment (occupational health and safety). This should be understood in the light of the way owner-managers develop identity from their business, and a better understanding is needed to develop preventive programmes that fit the owner-managers’ interpretation of the working environment. Qualitative interviews were carried out with the owner-managers or the managers responsible for the working environment in 23 small firms from the construction and metal industries. The interviews were analysed for attitudes on the working environment, understanding of risk, responsibility for the working environment, and attitudes towards regulation. The analysis revealed both a great heterogeneity of views on the working environment and groups of owners who share important characteristics. Most owner-managers take a positive approach to the working environment, but also try to ‘talk risk down’, criticize regulation as bureaucracy and push a part of the employer responsibility on to the employees. They try to follow what they experience as a generally acceptable standard for the working environment among the stakeholders in the sector, but some owner-managers also tend to neglect the working environment. The reason for the down grading of risk and the push to share responsibility can be found in the close social relationships and the identity work processes of the owner-managers with their business. They try to act as decent people and thus avoid personal guilt and blame if employees should get injured.

Tore Rye Andersen: “Hello?: Episodes in the Literary History of the Telephone”Through analyses of three American novels – Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010) – this article traces the major impact that the invention of the telephone has had on both society and the culture that reflects it. The medium of the telephone has thoroughly restructured the social space that is one of literature’s most important topics, and it has provided authors with new narrative strategies, new metaphors, new topics and new props, some of which are discussed in the article. The three analyses focus on different stages in the technological development of the telephone, and together they demonstrate how changes in the medium of the telephone also result in changed possibilities for literature.

Anmeldelse af Haruki Murakami: Hardboiled wonderland og verdens ende

Anmeldelse af E. L. Doctorows Marchen

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Anmeldelse af Cormac McCarthys Blodets meridian

Taking the late David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as its starting points, the article traces the significant influence of paratextual matters, in this case dust jackets, on the critical construction of the literary work. The essay combines textual analysis with a focus on the materiality and mediality of the text and book, and situates itself in the space between literary history and book history.

This sober exchange between the two title characters marks the beginning of Austrian Leopold Maurer’s new graphic novel, Miller & Pynchon . The two characters are measuring the world, like the characters in another recent Germanic work, Daniel Kehlmann’s wonderful novel Measuring the World (2005, English translation 2006), a story of the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and the explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Through a fictionalized account of their travails in the early nineteenth century, Kehlmann’s bestseller tells the story of how during the Enlightenment scientific rationality conquered the world and changed it forever.