‘Dark am I, yet lovely’: Tracing diabolical evil and femininities in gothic fusion tribal belly dance

While belly dance as a dance genre has been recognised for its ‘ambivalence’ (Downey et al, 2010: 379) in terms of its empowerment of women’s identities and body types and essentialising of narrowly constructed femininities, it has nonetheless in the research literature generally been regarded positively in its influence on women’s spiritualities, corporalities, sexualities and overall well-being. But what about its attraction and allure in its ‘darker’ forms, as a way of empowering women, especially older women, and enabling them to negotiate and traverse a range of difficult, deviant, damaged and/or otherwise negative experiences? Based primarily on a participant observation of a six-week series of dance workshops held in the north of England and drawing on my other experiences as a dancer of other belly dance forms, this paper references Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of horror and the monstrous feminine to explore the meanings, experiences and performances of ‘darkness’ in what is belly dance’s darkest genre, Gothic Fusion Belly Dance (GFBD)

Looking Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Power, Leadership and the Black Female Professional

Despite a historical record of activism and leadership, African American women have largely gone unnoticed. Authors Allen and Lewis point out that this same treatment is widely evident today in all fora: the workplace, the classroom, academia, and government. Rather, intelligence, hard work, and technical competencies have either been dismissed or displaced, relegating the African American female leader to inferior status or resulting in wholly disparate and demeaning characterizations

Pigment Intensity in Dogs is Associated with a Copy Number Variant Upstream of KITLG.

Dogs exhibit a wide variety of coat color types, and many genes have been identified that control pigment production, appearance, and distribution. Some breeds, such as the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever (NSDTR), exhibit variation in pheomelanin pigment intensity that is not explained by known genetic variants. A genome-wide association study comparing light red to dark red in the NSDTR identified a significantly associated region on canine chromosome 15 (CFA 15:23 Mb-38 Mb). Coverage analysis of whole genome sequence data from eight dogs identified a 6 kb copy number variant (CNV) 152 kb upstream of KITLG. Genotyping with digital droplet PCR (ddPCR) confirmed a significant association between an increased copy number with the dark-red coat color in NSDTR (p = 6.1 × 10-7). The copy number of the CNV was also significantly associated with coat color variation in both eumelanin and pheomelanin-based Poodles (p = 1.5 × 10-8, 4.0 × 10-9) and across other breeds. Moreover, the copy number correlated with pigment intensity along the hair shaft in both pheomelanin and eumelanin coats. KITLG plays an important role in melanogenesis, and variants upstream of KITLG have been associated with coat color variation in mice as well as hair color in humans consistent with its role in the domestic dog

Prismatic adaptation modulates oscillatory EEG correlates of motor preparation but not visual attention in healthy participants

Prismatic adaption (PA) has been proposed as a tool to induce neural plasticity and is used to help neglect rehabilitation. It leads to a recalibration of visuo-motor coordination during pointing as well as to after-effects on a number of sensorimotor and attention tasks, but whether these effects originate at a motor or attentional level remains a matter of debate. Our aim was to further characterise PA after-effects by using an approach that allows distinguishing between effects on attentional and motor processes. We recorded electroencephalography (EEG) in healthy human participants (9 females and 7 males) while performing a new double step, anticipatory attention/motor preparation paradigm before and after adaptation to rightward shifting prisms, with neutral lenses as a control. We then examined PA after-effects through changes in known oscillatory EEG signatures of spatial attention orienting and motor preparation in the alpha and beta frequency bands. Our results were twofold. First, we found PA to rightward shifting prisms to selectively affect EEG signatures of motor but not attentional processes. More specifically, PA modulated preparatory motor EEG activity over central electrodes in the right hemisphere, contralateral to the PA-induced, compensatory leftward shift in pointing movements. No effects were found on EEG signatures of spatial attention orienting over occipito-parietal sites. Second, we found the PA effect on preparatory motor EEG activity to dominate in the beta frequency band. We conclude that changes to intentional visuo-motor rather than attentional visuo-spatial processes underlie the PA after-effect of rightward deviating prisms in healthy participants

Blame and the Messengers: Journalism as a Puritan Prism for Cultural Policies in Britain

This study proposes that legacies of Puritanism are reflected in the way journalists cover a range of events and processes. The consequences are ambiguous: sometimes they may be harmful, other times they are laudable. Media coverage of the death of Peter Connelly (Baby P) in 2007 is chosen as an example of the social production of cultures of guilt and blame. In particular, journalists’ productive efforts perform significant and active roles in colouring public responses to events. Thereby journalists may reflect in their secularised ethics the hidden influences of nineteenth-century Evangelical traditions and earlier Calvinist ones. Following the analysis of Weber, the paper argues that media approaches to rationality also reflect an impress of lingering Puritan structures of thought. The argument contrasts journalism with the Bohemian writing traditions, which were perhaps suffocated by more urgent Calvinistic approaches alongside the development of industrial capitalism. The paper concludes that newsroom practices and values amount to implicit or covert cultural policies of their own

Clouds of Small Things: Provisioning Infrastructure-as-a-Service from within Community Networks

Community networks offer a shared communication infrastructure where communities of citizens build and own open networks. While the IP connectivity of the networking devices is successfully achieved, the number of services and applications available from within the community network is typically small and the usage of the community network is often limited to providing Internet access to remote areas through wireless links. In this paper we propose to apply the principle of resource sharing of community networks, currently limited to the network bandwidth, to other computing resources, which leads to cloud computing in community networks. Towards this vision, we review some characteristics of community networks and identify potential scenarios for community clouds. We simulate a cloud computing infrastructure service and discuss different aspects of its performance in comparison to a commercial centralized cloud system. We note that in community clouds the computing resources are heterogeneous and less powerful, which affects the time needed to assign resources. Response time of the infrastructure service is high in community clouds even for a small number of resources since resources are distributed, but tends to get closer to that of a centralized cloud when the number of resources requested increases. Our initial results suggest that the performance of the community clouds highly depends on the community network conditions, but has some potential for improvement with network-aware cloud services. The main strength compared to commercial cloud services, however, is that community cloud services hosted on community-owned resources will follow the principles of community network and will be neutral and open

Between' Poetry and Philosophy: Rene Char and Martin Heidegger

1996-01-01

Vitamin C attenuates the toxic effect of nutmeg on primary visual occipital cortex in rats

Background: Nutmeg is neurotoxic in rats and possibly neurotoxic also in hu- mans. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of nutmeg on the primary visual occipital cortex of adult male rat and to evaluate the possible protective role of vitamin C.  Materials and methods: Fifty Sprague-Dawley adults male rats were randomly divided into three main groups; control, nutmeg-treated (500 and 1000 mg/kg/ /day) and protected groups (nutmeg + vitamin C [500 mg/kg/day]). All rats were treated orally by gavage for 5 days per week for 6 weeks. At the end of the experiment, primary visual occipital cerebral cortex was subjected to histological, immunohistochemical and genetic analyses.  Results: Our results revealed toxic effects of nutmeg on the primary visual occipital cerebral cortex in adult male albino rat. This was indicated by histopathological alterations, including pyknotic nuclei surrounded with vacuolations by light micro- scopic studies and degenerations of organelles by electron microscopic studies. In addition, we detected an increase in immunoreactivity for GFAP and caspase-3 by immunohistochemical assessments. Apoptotic bands appeared in genetic studies. Co-administration of vitamin C ameliorated nutmeg-induced toxic alterations on the primary visual occipital cerebral cortex.  Conclusions: Nutmeg administration caused histopathological and genetic changes in the primary visual occipital cerebral cortex in adult male albino rats. These changes were improved by co-administration of vitamin C.