The McDonagh Sisters

Isabel, Phyllis, and Paulette McDonagh were sisters, business partners, and creative collaborators who made films in Sydney, Australia, in the 1920s and 1930s. Isabel, the eldest, was the actress and star of all their films under the name Marie Lorraine. Phyllis took on the role of art director, publicist, and producer. Paulette, the youngest of the three, was the writer and director of all their films. The sisters grew up in the upper middle class suburb of Drummoyne in Sydney, Australia. Drummoyne House, the grand family home, was filled with antique furniture and became the movie set and backdrop for many of their films. The home was a hub of bohemia, with traveling theatrical and entertainment people visiting whenever in Sydney

Temporal and spatial evolution of a waxing then waning catastrophic density current revealed by chemical mapping

We reconstruct the behavior of a catastrophic sustained radial pyroclastic density current as it waxed then waned during its brief lifespan. By subdividing the deposit into 8 time slices using a chemical tracer, we show that the sustained current initially was topographically restricted, but that its leading edge advanced in all directions, encroaching upon and gradually ascending hills. During peak flow the current reached its maximum extent and overtopped all topographic highs. After this, and while the current direction from source was maintained, the leading edge gradually retreated sourceward. High-resolution analysis of the depositional architecture reveals how the flow dynamics evolved and runout distance of the sustained density current rapidly increased then decreased, reflecting the dominant influence of changing mass flux, as demonstrated in numerical models but not previously distinguished in a natural deposit

Student conceptions of employability: a phenomenographic study

Despite its everyday use in the higher education discourse, there is still ubiquity around the concept of employability where it continues to be used in a number of contexts and with reference to a range of meanings that include skills, knowledge and attributes in varying degrees of importance (Knight & Yorke, 2002; Moreland, 2006) to a multi-dimensional psycho-social construct based upon career identity, personal adaptability and social and human capital (Fugate, Kinicki & Ashworth, 2004). Although HEIs have placed a greater emphasis on developing employability support for students (Rae, 2007), employers are still finding graduates lack appropriate skills, aptitude and behaviours for the workplace (Tymon, 2013). Despite this extensive discussion, there is little that considers how well students understand the concept of employability and how this affects their job seeking behaviour. To investigate this understanding a sample of 35 undergraduate business students from a range of levels and programmes took part in an online survey asking them to reflect on their employability. These written accounts were then analysed phenomenographically to investigate the qualitatively different ways that business students conceive of employability. To maximise variation in the sample, participants were first to final year students, including some on placement, and were following a mixture of generalist business and specialist programmes, including accounting, marketing and IT. The responses were analysed in three phases (Marton & Säljö, 2005); sorting quotes into groups oriented around the meaning of employability, examining each group further as a decontextualized set of responses and then determining categories of description to represent the outcome space. This methodology was selected to fully appreciate the variety and breadth of conceptions students held, and identified a hierarchy of five distinct ways of understanding employability. The results of this study should be of value to educators and career support professionals in facilitating interventions that move students’ conceptions of employability from that of a possession, to one they must participate in, encouraging students to be more self-aware when entering the employment arena

Between resistance and resilience: a study of flood risk management in the Don catchment area (UK)

The river Don catchment area in Sheffield and Rotherham offers a good place for a case study of flood risk management, given the impact of a flooding event in 2007 and the way in which local events have become entwined with national and international policy shifts. To interpret local policy, a combination of systems-based and socio-cultural theory is used. Both the theories and the case study serve to disentangle the multiple meanings of resilience. Understood in opposition to flood resistance, resilience has only limited applicability in an area such as the case study where engineering works protect employment and infrastructure. Resilience as a policy discourse also lacks political transparency and a recognition of socio-cultural influences. Underlying the shift towards resilient styles of management is an appreciation of the importance of capacity, to learn and to act. The case study identifies blockages to the realisation of that capacity

Will Brexit Age Well? Cohorts, Seasoning and the Age–Leave Gradient: On the Evolution of UK Support for the European Union

In the UK's 2016 Brexit referendum, young voters were more likely than their elders to support remaining in the European Union. Using half a century of data and new techniques, we find that recent cohorts tend to be more pro‐European than their predecessors, but that voters also become more sceptical towards Europe as they age. Much of the pro‐Europeanism of recent cohorts is associated with greater years of education. We also document large nationwide swings in sentiment that have little to do with age or cohort effects. These time effects are plausibly associated with, inter alia, macroeconomic fluctuations, financial conditions and geopolitical circumstances, but they also could have other sources. They dominate the impact of the estimated age and cohort effects and will crucially determine future UK support for membership in the European Union

The NAD(P)H oxidase homolog Nox4 modulates insulin-stimulated generation of H\u3csub\u3e2\u3c/sub\u3e0\u3csub\u3e2\u3c/sub\u3e and plays an integral role in insulin signal transduction

Insulin stimulation of target cells elicits a burst of H2O2 that enhances tyrosine phosphorylation of the insulin receptor and its cellular substrate proteins as well as distal signaling events in the insulin action cascade. The molecular mechanism coupling the insulin receptor with the cellular oxidant-generating apparatus has not been elucidated. Using reverse transcription-PCR and Northern blot analyses, we found that Nox4, a homolog of gp91phox, the phagocytic NAD(P)H oxidase catalytic subunit, is prominently expressed in insulin-sensitive adipose cells. Adenovirus-mediated expression of Nox4 deletion constructs lacking NAD(P)H or FAD/NAD(P)H cofactor binding domains acted in a dominant-negative fashion in differentiated 3T3-L1 adipocytes and attenuated insulin-stimulated H2O2 generation, insulin receptor (IR) and IRS-1 tyrosine phosphorylation, activation of downstream serine kinases, and glucose uptake. Transfection of specific small interfering RNA oligonucleotides reduced Nox4 protein abundance and also inhibited the insulin signaling cascade. Overexpression of Nox4 also significantly reversed the inhibition of insulin-stimulated IR tyrosine phosphorylation induced by coexpression of PTP1B by inhibiting PTP1B catalytic activity. These data suggest that Nox4 provides a novel link between the IR and the generation of cellular reactive oxygen species that enhance insulin signal transduction, at least in part via the oxidative inhibition of cellular protein-tyrosine phosphatases (PTPases), including PTP1B, a PTPase that has been previously implicated in the regulation of insulin action

Ode to positive constructive daydreaming

Nearly 60 years ago, Jerome L. Singer launched a groundbreaking research program into daydreaming (Singer, 1955, 1975, 2009) that presaged and laid the foundation for virtually every major strand of mind wandering research active today (Antrobus, 1999; Klinger, 1999, 2009). Here we review Singer’s enormous contribution to the field, which includes insights, methodologies, and tools still in use today, and trace his enduring legacy as revealed in the recent proliferation of mind wandering studies. We then turn to the central theme in Singer’s work, the adaptive nature of positive constructive daydreaming, which was a revolutionary idea when Singer began his work in the 1950s and remains underreported today. Last, we propose a new approach to answering the enduring question: Why does mind wandering persist and occupy so much of our time, as much as 50% of our waking time according to some estimates, if it is as costly as most studies suggest