Re?thinking the Promotion of Women's Rights through Islam in India

Religiously framed approaches to women's rights advocacy, which include those that utilise religious discourses or work through religious leaders and institutions, have increasingly been adopted by a variety of actors, particularly in Muslim contexts. While the use of such approaches may often be an effective means of advocating for reform of laws on women's rights that are founded on principles deriving from religious jurisprudence, there remains a need for critical analysis of such engagements. This article examines the experiences of two Muslim women's rights networks in India, the Muslim Women's Rights Network and the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, both of which have attempted to work with religious institutions and through religious framings in order to secure women's matrimonial rights. This case study highlights both the possibilities and limitations of adopting religiously framed approaches and argues that the strategies of women's rights advocates must be grounded within political and social realities without being either essentialist or exclusionary

Living between languages: The politics of translation in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

This is the author's final draft post-refereeing as published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2012 47: 207 DOI:10.1177/0021989412440433. The online version of this article can be found at: http://jcl.sagepub.com/content/47/2/20

Category Theoretic Analysis of Hierarchical Protein Materials and Social Networks

Materials in biology span all the scales from Angstroms to meters and typically consist of complex hierarchical assemblies of simple building blocks. Here we describe an application of category theory to describe structural and resulting functional properties of biological protein materials by developing so-called ologs. An olog is like a “concept web” or “semantic network” except that it follows a rigorous mathematical formulation based on category theory. This key difference ensures that an olog is unambiguous, highly adaptable to evolution and change, and suitable for sharing concepts with other olog. We consider simple cases of beta-helical and amyloid-like protein filaments subjected to axial extension and develop an olog representation of their structural and resulting mechanical properties. We also construct a representation of a social network in which people send text-messages to their nearest neighbors and act as a team to perform a task. We show that the olog for the protein and the olog for the social network feature identical category-theoretic representations, and we proceed to precisely explicate the analogy or isomorphism between them. The examples presented here demonstrate that the intrinsic nature of a complex system, which in particular includes a precise relationship between structure and function at different hierarchical levels, can be effectively represented by an olog. This, in turn, allows for comparative studies between disparate materials or fields of application, and results in novel approaches to derive functionality in the design of de novo hierarchical systems. We discuss opportunities and challenges associated with the description of complex biological materials by using ologs as a powerful tool for analysis and design in the context of materiomics, and we present the potential impact of this approach for engineering, life sciences, and medicine.Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (N000141010562)United States. Army Research Office. Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (W911NF0910541)United States. Office of Naval Research (grant N000141010841)Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of MathematicsStudienstiftung des deutschen VolkesClark BarwickJacob Luri

Nutrient Enrichment and Food Web Composition Affect Ecosystem Metabolism in an Experimental Seagrass Habitat

Food web composition and resource levels can influence ecosystem properties such as productivity and elemental cycles. In particular, herbivores occupy a central place in food webs as the species richness and composition of this trophic level may simultaneously influence the transmission of resource and predator effects to higher and lower trophic levels, respectively. Yet, these interactions are poorly understood.Using an experimental seagrass mesocosm system, we factorially manipulated water column nutrient concentrations, food chain length, and diversity of crustacean grazers to address two questions: (1) Does food web composition modulate the effects of nutrient enrichment on plant and grazer biomasses and stoichiometry? (2) Do ecosystem fluxes of dissolved oxygen and nutrients more closely reflect above-ground biomass and community structure or sediment processes? Nutrient enrichment and grazer presence generally had strong effects on biomass accumulation, stoichiometry, and ecosystem fluxes, whereas predator effects were weaker or absent. Nutrient enrichment had little effect on producer biomass or net ecosystem production but strongly increased seagrass nutrient content, ecosystem flux rates, and grazer secondary production, suggesting that enhanced production was efficiently transferred from producers to herbivores. Gross ecosystem production (oxygen evolution) correlated positively with above-ground plant biomass, whereas inorganic nutrient fluxes were unrelated to plant or grazer biomasses, suggesting dominance by sediment microbial processes. Finally, grazer richness significantly stabilized ecosystem processes, as predators decreased ecosystem production and respiration only in the zero- and one- species grazer treatments.Overall, our results indicate that consumer presence and species composition strongly influence ecosystem responses to nutrient enrichment, and that increasing herbivore diversity can stabilize ecosystem flux rates in the face of perturbations

Functional Cytology of the Hepatopancreas of Palaemonetes argentinus (Crustacea, Decapoda, Caridea) Under Osmotic Stress

The present work describes the effect of different salinities on the functional morphology of the P. argentinus hepatopancreas and analyses the tissue recovery after re-acclimation to freshwater. Adult prawns of both sexes at sexual rest were collected from a tributary of the Mar Chiquita coastal lagoon. The prawns were acclimated in aquaria to four salinity conditions: 0 (control), 8, 16 and 24‰. To evaluate the possible tissular recovery, after 60 days individuals from all the treatments were gradually acclimated to freshwater and maintained for other 30 days. Hepatopancreas samples were processed at the beginning of the trial and every 30 days using standard histological techniques for OM and TEM. The individuals from all the treatments, except the controls, showed a continuous weight decrease, and survival was lower when higher the salinity. At 30 days from the beginning of the experiment, hepatopancreas from 16 and 24‰ salinities showed an enlarged tubular lumen and an infolded basal lamina. Ultratructurally, nuclear retraction, cytoplasmolysis, and RER membranes separated with electron-dense content were observed in all the treatments except 0‰. After 60 days, profound alterations were observed with the three treatments. After the re-acclimation period, there was no reestablishment of the functional cytology. The tolerance to short-term salinity changes explains the capability of this prawn to inhabit in estuarine environments

Stochastic tuning of gene expression enables cellular adaptation in the absence of pre-existing regulatory circuitry

Cells adapt to familiar changes in their environment by activating predefined regulatory programs that establish adaptive gene expression states. These hard-wired pathways, however, may be inadequate for adaptation to environments never encountered before. Here, we reveal evidence for an alternative mode of gene regulation that enables adaptation to adverse conditions without relying on external sensory information or genetically predetermined cis-regulation. Instead, individual genes achieve optimal expression levels through a stochastic search for improved fitness. By focusing on improving the overall health of the cell, the proposed stochastic tuning mechanism discovers global gene expression states that are fundamentally new and yet optimized for novel environments. We provide experimental evidence for stochastic tuning in the adaptation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae to laboratory-engineered environments that are foreign to its native gene-regulatory network. Stochastic tuning operates locally at individual gene promoters, and its efficacy is modulated by perturbations to chromatin modification machinery

A U-shaped relationship between haematocrit and mortality in a large prospective cohort study

Background: Only a limited number of studies have investigated the correlation between haematocrit (HCT) and mortality in the general population, and few of those studies have had data on a wide range of low and high levels of HCT. We investigated the association between baseline HCT and mortality in a prospective cohort study of 49 983 adult subjects in Iran with a broad spectrum of HCT values. Methods: Data on socio-demographic and life-style factors, past medical history, and levels of HCT were collected at enrollment. During a mean follow-up of 5 years (follow-up success rate ±99%), 2262 deaths were reported. Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to estimate hazard ratios and corresponding 95% confidence intervals. Results: There was a U-shaped relationship between categories of HCT and mortality in both sexes: both low and high levels of HCT were associated with increased overall mortality and mortality from cardiovascular disease. The U-shaped relationship persisted after several sensitivity analyses were done, including analyses restricted to non-smokers and non-users of opium; analyses excluding deaths from accidents and other external causes as well as deaths of persons with self-reported ischemic heart disease at the baseline interview for the study; and analyses excluding the first 2 years of follow-up. Self-reported past medical history and lack of data about lipids and other cellular blood components were the major limitations of the study. Conclusions: Low and high levels of HCT are associated with increased mortality in the general population. The findings in the present study can be of particular importance for low- and middle-income countries in which a substantial proportion of the population lives with suboptimal levels of HCT. © Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association 2013

Editors’ Introduction: An Overview of the Educational Administration and Leadership Curriculum: Traditions of Islamic Educational Administration and Leadership in Higher Education

This chapter provides an overview of several topics relevant to constructing an approach to teaching educational administration and leadership in Muslim countries. First, it places the topic in the context of the changing nature and critiques of the field that argue for a greater internationalisation to both resist some of the negative aspects of globalisation and to represent countries’ traditions in the professional curriculum. Then, it identifies literature that presents the underlying principles and values of Islamic education that guide curriculum and pedagogy and shape its administration and leadership including the Qur’an and Sunnah and the classical educational literature which focuses on aims, values and goals of education as well as character development upon which a ‘good’ society is built. This is followed by a section on the Islamic administration and leadership traditions that are relevant to education, including the values of educational organisations and how they should be administered, identifying literature on the distinctive Islamic traditions of leadership and administrator education and training as it applies to education from the establishment of Islam and early classical scholars and senior administrators in the medieval period who laid a strong foundation for a highly sophisticated preparation and practice of administration in philosophical writings and the Mirrors of Princes writings, and subsequent authors who have built upon it up to the contemporary period. The final section provides an overview of the chapters in this collection

Modeling rare gene variation to gain insight into the oldest biomarker in autism: construction of the serotonin transporter Gly56Ala knock-in mouse

Alterations in peripheral and central indices of serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5-HT) production, storage and signaling have long been associated with autism. The 5-HT transporter gene (HTT, SERT, SLC6A4) has received considerable attention as a potential risk locus for autism-spectrum disorders, as well as disorders with overlapping symptoms, including obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Here, we review our efforts to characterize rare, nonsynonymous polymorphisms in SERT derived from multiplex pedigrees carrying diagnoses of autism and OCD and present the initial stages of our effort to model one of these variants, Gly56Ala, in vivo. We generated a targeting vector to produce the Gly56Ala substitution in the Slc6a4 locus by homologous recombination. Following removal of a neomycin resistance selection cassette, animals exhibiting germline transmission of the Ala56 variant were bred to establish a breeding colony on a 129S6 background, suitable for initial evaluation of biochemical, physiological and behavioral alterations relative to SERT Gly56 (wildtype) animals. SERT Ala56 mice were achieved and exhibit a normal pattern of transmission. The initial growth and gross morphology of these animals is comparable to wildtype littermate controls. The SERT Ala56 variant can be propagated in 129S6 mice without apparent disruption of fertility and growth. We discuss both the opportunities and challenges that await the physiological/behavioral analysis of Gly56Ala transgenic mice, with particular reference to modeling autism-associated traits

Trophic consequences of non-native pumpkinseed Lepomis gibbosus for native pond fishes

Introduced non-native fishes can cause considerable adverse impacts on freshwater ecosystems. The pumpkinseed Lepomis gibbosus, a North American centrarchid, is one of the most widely distributed non-native fishes in Europe, having established self-sustaining populations in at least 28 countries, including the U.K. where it is predicted to become invasive under warmer climate conditions. To predict the consequences of increased invasiveness, a field experiment was completed over a summer period using a Control comprising of an assemblage of native fishes of known starting abundance and a Treatment using the same assemblage but with elevated L. gibbosus densities. The trophic consequences of L. gibbosus invasion were assessed with stable isotope analysis and associated metrics including the isotopic niche, measured as standard ellipse area. The isotopic niches of native gudgeon Gobio gobio and roach Rutilus rutilus overlapped substantially with that of non-native L. gibbosus, and were also substantially reduced in size compared to ponds where L. gibbosus were absent. This suggests these native fishes shifted to a more specialized diet in L. gibbosus presence. Both of these native fishes also demonstrated a concomitant and significant reduction in their trophic position in L. gibbosus presence, with a significant decrease also evident in the somatic growth rate and body condition of G. gobio. Thus, there were marked changes detected in the isotopic ecology and growth rates of the native fish in the presence of non-native L. gibbosus. The implications of these results for present and future invaded pond communities are discussed