Death is undoubtedly the theme of Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Murray Siskind, a College-on-the-Hill professor who is obsessed with the exploration and reinterpretation of American popular culture, talks about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the German mentor of Jack Gladney has been using the Egyptian Book of the Dead, translated into German. The core episode of the story is the Airborne Toxic Event, the associate of Heinrich (Jack’s teenage son), Orestes Mercator, dreams of becoming one of the great figures in the Guinness Book by challenging and confronting death by enclosing himself in a glass pen jam-packed with poisonous snakes, and Heinrich challenges an imprisoned mass murderer in a chess game. The scholarly expertise of Jack centers on the leading organizer of mass slaughter—Hitler—whereas Murray Siskind and his associates in the American Environments movement are fascinated with the melancholy related to the passing away of superstars and the killing of political figures, and the image of death in mainstream culture. In this paper, Don DeLillo’s White Noise is analyzed in relation to the fear of death with the guidance of the characters of the novel. Similar to others, Jack, who is the head of the Hitler course at the College-on-the-Hill and the storyteller of the narrative, and Babette, the wife of Jack who takes care of an old blind man and gives lecture on adult education, have been preoccupied with the concept of death due to their inexplicable fear of it. They are unable to admit or recognize death as a normal part of human existence. They are too absorbed by their fear of death that their emotions, thoughts, and everyday interactions are frequently disrupted by the uncertainty of death. Both of them assert their desire to die before the other because neither of them can endure the difficulty of surviving without the other. Yet, it is absurd that neither of them wishes to pass on first since the two of them dread death extremely.
In this paper, fire resistance and residual capacity tests were carried out on encased pultruded glass fiber-reinforced polymer (GFRP) I-beams with high-strength concrete beams. The specimens were loaded concurrently under 25% of the ultimate load and fire exposure (an increase in temperature of 700 °C) for 70 min. Subsequently, the fire-damaged specimens were allowed to cool and then were loaded statically until failure to explore the residual behaviors. The effects of using shear connectors and web stiffeners on the residual behavior were investigated. Finite Element (FE) analysis was developed to simulate the encased pultruded GFRP I-beams under the effect of fire loading. The thermal analyses were performed using the general-pu
... Show MoreObjectives The strategies of tissue-engineering led to the development of living cell-based therapies to repair lost or damaged tissues, including periodontal ligament and to construct biohybrid implant. This work aimed to isolate human periodontal ligament stem cells (hPDLSCs) and implant them on fabricated polycaprolactone (PCL) for the regeneration of natural periodontal ligament (PDL) tissues. Methods hPDLSCs were harvested from extracted human premolars, cultured, and expanded to obtain PDL cells. A PDL-specific marker (periostin) was detected using an immunofluorescent assay. Electrospinning was applied to fabricate PCL at three concentrations (13%, 16%, and 20% weight/volume) in two forms, which were examined through field emission
... Show MoreIn this research, the effect of reinforcing epoxy resin composites with a filler derived from chopped agriculture waste from oil palm (OP). Epoxy/OP composites were formed by dispersing (1, 3, 5, and 10 wt%) OP filler using a high-speed mechanical stirrer utilizing a hand lay-up method. The effect of adding zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles, with an average size of 10-30 nm, with different wt% (1,2,3, and 5wt%) to the epoxy/oil palm composite, on the behavior of an epoxy/oil palm composite was studied with different ratios (1,2,3, and 5wt%) and an average size of 10-30 nm. Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectrometry and mechanical properties (tensile, impact, hardness, and wear rate) were used to examine the composites. The FTIR
... Show MoreIn this work, the study of
During the last few years, the greener additives prepared from bio-raw materials with low-cost and multifunctional applications have attracted considerable attention in the field of lubricant industry. In the present work, copolymers derived from sunflower and linseed oils with decyl methacrylate were synthesized by a thermal method using benzoyl peroxide (BPO) as a radical initiator. Direct polymerization of fatty acid double bonds in the presence of a free radical initiator results in the development of environmentally friendly copolymeric additives (Co-1 and Co-2). Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) and Proton Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (1H-NMR) were used to characterize the resulting copolymers. Thermal decomposition of copolymers was de
... Show MoreImage classification is the process of finding common features in images from various classes and applying them to categorize and label them. The main problem of the image classification process is the abundance of images, the high complexity of the data, and the shortage of labeled data, presenting the key obstacles in image classification. The cornerstone of image classification is evaluating the convolutional features retrieved from deep learning models and training them with machine learning classifiers. This study proposes a new approach of “hybrid learning” by combining deep learning with machine learning for image classification based on convolutional feature extraction using the VGG-16 deep learning model and seven class
... Show MoreNew substituted coumarins derivatives were synthesized by using nitration reaction to produce different nitro coumarin isomers which were separated from these isomers by using different solvent, and the reduction of nitro compounds was done to give corresponding amino coumarins. Temperature and reaction time of reaction were very important factors in determining the most productive nitro isotopes. A low temperature for three hours was sufficient to give a high product of a compound 6-nitro coumarin while increasing the temperature for a period of twenty-four hours that gave a high product of 8-nitro-coumarin. The synthesized compounds were confirmed by FT-IR,1 H-NMR, and13 C-NMR spectroscopy and all final compounds were tested for their ant
... Show MoreThe development of economic and environmentally friendly extractants to recover cobalt metal is required due to the increasing demand for this metal. In this study, solvent extraction of Co(II) from aqueous solution using a mixture of N,N0-carbonyl difatty amides (CDFAs) synthesised from palm oil as the extractant was carried out. The effects of various parameters such as acid, contact time, extractant concentration, metal ion concentration and stripping agent and the separation of Co(II) from other metal ions such as Fe(II), Ni(II), Zn(III) and Cd(II) were investigated. It was found that the extraction of Co(II) into the organic phase involved the formation of 1:1 complexes. Co(II) was successfully separated from commonly associated metal
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