611 research outputs found

    Silence and writing: the voices that inhabit us (Woolf, Duras, Perec, Celati)

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    My thesis investigates the forms, modalities and issues related to the notion of 'silence' in the texts and poetics of Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec and Gianni Celati. This study relates to the 20th century European context and is set within the framework of music-literary studies, since silence is an acoustic phenomenon that concerns the whole word, thus also the written word. The material is structured according to a distribution that firstly involves the construction of a methodological framework that employs music-literary studies, the philosophy of language, the aesthetics of reception and psychoanalytic trauma studies; secondly, an analysis of some of the autobiographical works of the mentioned writers was undertaken, with a particular focus on the notion of trauma associated with silence; thirdly, the focus was placed on the theme of silence in the novelistic and fictional writings of the same authors; finally, a reflection on the poetics and aesthetics of silence was proposed. This study, which brings together several perspectives on silence, aims to shed light, through a comparative and transmedial approach, on the necessity of silence that is inherent in the word, and not a phenomenon opposed to it

    ACARORUM CATALOGUS IX. Acariformes, Acaridida, Schizoglyphoidea (Schizoglyphidae), Histiostomatoidea (Histiostomatidae, Guanolichidae), Canestrinioidea (Canestriniidae, Chetochelacaridae, Lophonotacaridae, Heterocoptidae), Hemisarcoptoidea (Chaetodactylidae, Hyadesiidae, Algophagidae, Hemisarcoptidae, Carpoglyphidae, Winterschmidtiidae)

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    The 9th volume of the series Acarorum Catalogus contains lists of mites of 13 families, 225 genera and 1268 species of the superfamilies Schizoglyphoidea, Histiostomatoidea, Canestrinioidea and Hemisarcoptoidea. Most of these mites live on insects or other animals (as parasites, phoretic or commensals), some inhabit rotten plant material, dung or fungi. Mites of the families Chetochelacaridae and Lophonotacaridae are specialised to live with Myriapods (Diplopoda). The peculiar aquatic or intertidal mites of the families Hyadesidae and Algophagidae are also included.Publishe

    The roles of Wnt signaling during mitosis

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    Wnt signaling is crucial for embryonic patterning, the formation of tissues during development, and tissue maintenance in the adult organism. The canonical Wnt pathway induces the transcription of β-catenin target genes, thereby controlling cell cycle progression during G1/S phase, stem cell self-renewal, and stem cell differentiation. However, besides its transcriptional roles, it emerged that Wnt signaling also takes post-translational functions during mitosis. Accordingly, a misregulation of the pathway causes severe mitotic defects, such as chromosome misalignments and chromosome segregation errors, which can ultimately lead to aneuploidy. In this work, I aimed to identify targets of Wnt signaling, which safeguard the correct progression through mitosis, and characterize the underlying molecular mechanisms to explain the emergence of mitotic defects upon Wnt disturbance. First, I revealed that the mitotic kinesin KIF2A is recruited by the Wnt component DVL. DVL localizes KIF2A to the mitotic spindle poles, where it regulates microtubule minus-end dynamics to ensure chromosome alignment before anaphase, both in somatic cells and pluripotent stem cells. This process is supported by the phosphorylation of KIF2A at serine 100 and the interaction with PLK1, which is positively regulated by active Wnt signaling and LRP6 signalosome formation. Second, I verified an S phase-dependent mechanism of Wnt signaling, ensuring the equal segregation of chromosomes in pluripotent stem cells during anaphase. At this, I hypothesize that Wnt signaling contributes to the error-free replication of DNA in S phase, which mediates microtubule plus-end assembly in mitosis, and thereby facilitates faithful chromosome segregation. The validation of both mechanisms in pluripotent stem cells emphasizes their relevance for the understanding of developmental defects, tissue degeneration, and cancer progression, which is often characterized by chromosomal instability. Besides, KIF2A was recruited by DVL also in interphase, indicating that the Wnt-mediated regulation of KIF2A may contribute to processes beyond mitosis, namely ciliogenesis and neurogenesis. Taken together, in my work, I revealed two novel Wnt-dependent mechanisms, which function directly in mitosis or through S phase to control microtubule minus- or plus-end dynamics respectively, ensuring the faithful progression through mitosis, preservation of euploidy, and possibly further post-mitotic processes

    Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy

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    'Modernism and Religion' argues that modernism participated in broader processes of religious change in the twentieth century. The new prominence accorded to immanence and immediacy in religious discourse is carried over into the modernist epiphany. Modernism became mystical. The emergence of Catholic theological modernism, human rights, Christian sociology, and philosophical personalism, which are explored here in relation to the work of David Jones, T. S. Eliot, and H.D., represented a strategic attempt on the part of diverse religious authorities to meet the challenge posed by new mysticism. Orthodoxy was itself made new in ways that resisted the secular demand that religion remain a private undertaking. Modernism and Religion presents the mechanical form and clashing registers of long poems by each of the aforementioned writers as an alternative to epiphanic modernism. Their wavering orthodoxy brings matters from which the secular had previously separated religion back once more into its purview

    Healing Grief: A Commentary on Seneca's Consolatio ad Marciam

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    Both our view of Seneca’s philosophical thought and our approach to the ancient consolatory genre have radically changed since the latest commentary on the Consolatio ad Marciam was written in 1981. The aim of this work is to offer a new book-length commentary on the earliest of Seneca’s extant writings, along with a revision of the Latin text and a reassessment of Seneca’s intellectual program, strategies, and context. A crucial document to penetrate Seneca’s discourse on the self in its embryonic stages, the Ad Marciam is here taken seriously as an engaging attempt to direct the persuasive power of literary models and rhetorical devices toward the fundamentally moral project of healing Marcia’s grief and correcting her cognitive distortions. Through close reading of the Latin text, this commentary shows that Seneca invariably adapts different traditions and voices – from Greek consolations to Plato’s dialogues, from the Roman discourse of gender and exemplarity to epic poetry – to a Stoic framework, so as to give his reader a lucid understanding of the limits of the self and the ineluctability of natural laws

    Offene-Welt-Strukturen: Architektur, Stadt- und Naturlandschaft im Computerspiel

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    Welche Rolle spielen Algorithmen für den Bildbau und die Darstellung von Welt und Wetter in Computerspielen? Wie beeinflusst die Gestaltung der Räume, Level und Topografien die Entscheidungen und das Verhalten der Spieler_innen? Ist der Brutalismus der erste genuine Architekturstil der Computerspiele? Welche Bedeutung haben Landschaftsgärten und Nationalparks im Strukturieren von Spielwelten? Wie wird Natur in Zeiten des Klimawandels dargestellt? Insbesondere in den letzten 20 Jahren adaptieren digitale Spielwelten akribischer denn je Merkmale der physisch-realen Welt. Durch aufwändige Produktionsverfahren und komplexe Visualisierungsstrategien wird die Angleichung an unsere übrige Alltagswelt stets in Abhängigkeit von Spielmechanik und Weltlichkeit erzeugt. Wie sich spätestens am Beispiel der Open-World-Spiele zeigt, führt die Übernahme bestimmter Weltbilder und Bildtraditionen zu ideologischen Implikationen, die weit über die bisher im Fokus der Forschung stehenden, aus anderen Medienformaten transferierten Erzählkonventionen hinausgehen. Mit seiner Theorie der Architektur als medialem Scharnier legt der Autor offen, dass digitale Spielwelten medienspezifische Eigenschaften aufweisen, die bisher nicht zu greifen waren und der Erforschung harrten. Durch Verschränken von Konzepten aus u.a. Medienwissenschaft, Game Studies, Philosophie, Architekturtheorie, Humangeografie, Landschaftstheorie und Kunstgeschichte erarbeitet Bonner ein transdisziplinäres Theoriemodell und ermöglicht anhand der daraus entwickelten analytischen Methoden erstmals, die komplexe Struktur heutiger Computerspiele - vom Indie Game bis zur AAA Open World - zu verstehen und zu benennen. Mit "Offene-Welt-Strukturen" wird die Architektonik digitaler Spielwelten umfassend zugänglich

    Application of network filtering techniques in finding hidden structures on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange

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    Dissertation (MSc (Financial Engineering))--University of Pretoria, 2023.Researchers from the field of econophysics have favoured the idea that financial markets are a complex adaptive system, consisting of entities that behave and interact in a diverse manner, leading to non-linear, emergent behaviour of the system. In the last twenty years, there has been an increasing focus on modelling complex adaptive systems using network theory. Correlation-based networks, where stocks are represented as entities in the network, and the relationships amongst the stocks are based on the strength of the co-movements of the stocks, have been widely studied. Network filtering tools, such as the Minimal Spanning Tree (MST), and the Planar Maximally Filtered Graph (PMFG), have been useful to attenuate the impact of noise in these networks, thereby allowing important macroscopic and mesoscopic structures to emerge. One of the main benefits of the PMFG is that it is accompanied by a hierarchical clustering algorithm called the Directed Bubble Hierarchical Tree (DBHT). This method has the benefit of being fully unsupervised in that it does not require the user to decide a priori on the number of clusters that the data should be split into. These techniques have been applied here to analyse the complex interactions amongst stocks on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. A structure emerged in which shares from similar ICB sectors tended to cluster together. However, the so-called Rand Hedge shares, and shares which exhibited low liquidity, tended to override the sector effect and clustered together. From a dynamic perspective, the MST and PMFG seemed to shrink during market crashes, while the Basic Materials sector was typically the most important or central sector over time. Over the long-term, the DBHT divided the stocks in the South African stock market into six clusters. This technique was compared to other popular hierarchical clustering algorithms, and the amount of economic information that each method extracted was quantified. The most recent PMFG and DBHT showed a changed structure as compared to the long-term data, highlighting that the way that market participants view South African shares can change over time.Mathematics and Applied MathematicsMSc (Financial Engineering)Unrestricte

    A New Dimension of Cancer Treatment: Analysing and Targeting High-Grade Glioma Invasion Using Three-Dimensional In Vitro Models

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    High-Grade Gliomas (HGG) are an extremely aggressive form of brain cancer with limited targeted treatments and dire prognosis. Despite global improvements in overall cancer survival, HGG survival rates have stagnated over the last three decades. This can be partly attributed to HGG’s characteristically invasive progression into the brain, where far-invaded cells are often missed by first-line therapies leading to tumour recurrence. The use of anti-invasive agents may limit extensive cell spread and improve efficacy of adjuvant anti-cancer therapies, thus, this study has investigated the novel anti-invasive PTU (p-tolyl-ureidopalmitic acid), an omega-3-derivative with the ability to cross the blood brain barrier. PTU was tested in primary patient-derived HGG cells cultured in 3D models designed to replicate discrete aspects of the 3D in vivo brain microenvironment. Across models, PTU treatment decreased the number of invading HGG cells and mitigated both single and collective invasion phenotypes. Importantly, this data demonstrates that 3D in vitro culture can reliably represent a whole-picture of HGG invasion. Additionally, this study involved the development of a dynamic, temporal reporter of transcriptional co-activators Yes-associated Protein and Transcriptional co-Activator with PDZ-binding motif (YAP/YAZ), which are mediators of a number of malignant processes and regulated by bio-mechanical signalling. This was achieved with an Adeno-associated-virus (AAV)-mediated gene delivery method, which also revealed a number of AAV capsid variants with tropism to primary patient-derived HGG cells. This reporter has potential future uses in revealing YAP/TAZ activity within the 3D biologically-relevant in vitro models. Together, these findings reveal potential successful therapeutic strategies for HGG and provide multiple insights into future research possibilities in the hopes of mitigating the extent of this truly debilitating and devastating disease
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