The impact of Communism on sport

'Die kommunistische Sportpolitik, die während des Kalten Krieges den Sport Osteuropas dominierte, ist aus Europa verschwunden. Diese Zäsur ist ein geeigneter Anlass, sich rückblickend einige Charakteristika dieser Politik zu vergegenwärtigen. Vor allem die Verdienste, die dieser Politik zukamen, sollten nicht unterschätzt werden. Hierzu gehörte die Erleichterung sozialer Mobilität sowie Gleichstellung der Frauen, die Integration nationaler Minderheiten sowie die Modernisierung von Gesellschaften.' (Autorenreferat)'Communist sport policy in Europe, that dominated large parts of it during the Cold War, is dead. The collapse of Soviet-style communism gives an opportunity to look back on the characteristics of communist sports. Especially its achievements should not be underestimated, as it promoted social mobility, equal rights for women and helped integrating national minorities as well as modernising societies.' (author's abstract

Power, Ideology and ‘country politics’: Episodes from Derbyshire, c.1660-1760

By engaging with Western Marxism and recent developments in social history, this thesis will explore the popular social and political responses to capitalist development and state formation in early modern England. We will analyse the role that country Tory oppositional politics played in local society, its relationship to national politics and to local economic change. This will be done through a series of case studies and episodes from Derbyshire, 1660-1760. Attention will be paid to the politics of the labouring poor, such as the tenants of Robert Hayward and the Rossell family, the Peak lead miners, opponents of the Derwent navigation and plebeian Tories in Derby. Yet the primary focus of the thesis will be on the ‘middling sort of people’ like the local gentry families, tradesmen, parish officials, shopkeepers and smallholders. Rather than studying bourgeois, polite society and London coffee house culture, we will prioritise the social relations of the middling sort of people in one county community. Special attention will be paid to their political responses to socio-economic change, and their opposition to the Whig oligarchy after 1722. Opposition to Robert Walpole and wider economic change acted as a catalyst for variegated social alignments to be formed. They were often cross-class in nature and constitutionalist in scope. These alignments will be explored throughout the thesis, using concepts from Antonio Gramsci as well as the class analysis of E. P. Thompson

Angiotensin-I-Converting Enzyme and its Relatives

Angiotensin-I-converting enzyme (ACE) is a monomeric, membrane-bound, zinc- and chloridedependent peptidyl dipeptidase that catalyzes the conversion of the decapeptide angiotensin I to the octapeptide angiotensin II, by removing a carboxy-terminal dipeptide. ACE has long been known to be a key part of the renin angiotensin system that regulates blood pressure, and ACE inhibitors are important for the treatment of hypertension. There are two forms of the enzyme in humans, the ubiquitous somatic ACE and the sperm-specific germinal ACE, both encoded by the same gene through transcription from alternative promoters. Somatic ACE has two tandem active sites with distinct catalytic properties, whereas germinal ACE, the function of which is largely unknown, has just a single active site. Recently, an ACE homolog, ACE2, has been identified in humans that differs from ACE in being a carboxypeptidase that preferentially removes carboxy-terminal hydrophobic or basic amino acids; it appears to be important in cardiac function. ACE homologs (also known as members of the M2 gluzincin family) have been found in a wide variety of species, even in those that neither have a cardiovascular system nor synthesize angiotensin. X-ray structures of a truncated, deglycosylated form of germinal ACE and a related enzyme from Drosophila have been reported, and these show that the active site is deep within a central cavity. Structure-based drug design targeting the individual active sites of somatic ACE may lead to a new generation of ACE inhibitors, with fewer side-effects than currently available inhibitors

Towards real-time simulation of the sidescan sonar imaging process

peer-reviewedThis paper describes the functional theory and design of a modular simulator developed to generate physically representative spatio-temporal sidescan sonar echo data from a fractal model of the seafloor topography. The main contribution of this paper is in significantly reducing the computational bottleneck inherent in existing simulation models due to the size and resolution of the complex seafloor models required for acoustic reverberation modelling. Discovery of the individual faces within the footprint of the acoustic beam at each ping is considerably accelerated by successfully adapting and integrating an optimised mesh refinement scheme intended for interactive rendering of large-scale complex surfaces described by polygonal meshes. Operational features of the simulator permit direct visualisation of the sonar image formed from successive echo lines and synthetic images generated during simulation are presented.PUBLISHEDpeer-reviewe