Communicating hands: ERPs elicited by meaningful symbolic hand postures.

Meaningful and meaningless hand postures were presented to subjects who had to carry out a semantic discrimination task while electrical brain responses were recorded. Both meaningful and control sets of hand postures were matched as closely as possible. The ERPs elicited by meaningless hand postures showed an anteriorly distributed N300 and a centro-posteriorly distributed N400 component. The N300 probably reflects picture-specific processes, whereas the N400-effect probably reflects processing in an amodal semantic network. The scalp-distribution of the N400-effect, which is more posterior than usually reported in picture processing, suggests that the semantic representations of the concepts expressed by meaningful hand postures have similar properties to those of abstract words

A DNA nanocapsule with aptamer-controlled open-closure function for targeted delivery

A DNA capsule fitted with aptamer controlled target sensing has been “woven” using a 7308-base single-stranded DNA “thread” and 196 staple oligonucleotides. The capsule enables logic-gated molecular cargo delivery to targeted cell surfaces

Staging Neoliberalism

While the by now popular term "posttruth" remains, as Jayson Harsin and others argue, a contested and problematic concept, as a periodizing term it is useful in that it encapsulates collective anxieties and cognitive effects brought on by the increased commodification of knowledge, the marketization of political discourse, and the emergence of new economies and technologies of attention that fragment and destabilize relations of trust and authority across fields of inquiry (e.g. science and medicine), knowledge institutions (e.g. news and universities), and media technologies (e.g. video and photography) traditionally seen as arbiters of truth and facticity within the hegemony of Anglo-American liberalism. This paper considers the role of neoliberalism in the emergence of posttruth performance by reflecting on the work of public relations companies deployed in 2017 to promote the construction of a new power plant in New Orleans, as well as the work of the pro-Brexit campaign group Leave.EU in the run up to the 2016 referendum. Through these case studies the article demonstrates ways in which theater and performance studies can offer important critical tools with which to understand and dissect the structural conditions of posttruth in the twenty-first century

Does archieving social policy goals insure positive outcomes: from welfare reliance of wage work in rural Louisiana

This research was Wave II of a longitudinal, qualitative study designed to describe the outcomes of welfare reform legislation on rural families in Louisiana as they tried to comply with provisions of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. This particular study looked at a subset of women (n=12) from Wave II and explored two questions: (a) Whether the decline in Louisiana welfare caseloads translated into rural women finding and keeping jobs; and (b) What is the likelihood that the women employed at the time of this study will be able to sustain their work efforts and realize self-sufficiency. Human ecology, rational choice, and behavioral change theories guided this research. Whether women adapt to changed societal expectations and successfully transition from welfare dependence to self-sufficiency is dependent upon the women\u27s micro and macro-environments and whether they can make a second-order behavioral change regarding work. Sustained second-order change requires that the women\u27s environments must also change. One-on-one interviews were conducted with the women in their homes using a semi-structured interview approach. The data were analyzed using predictor-outcome matrices. The simple answer to whether the women had found jobs was no, as only two (17%) of the twelve women were employed for pay. The women not employed, however, represented three distinct sets: volunteers, students, and women not engaged in any work-related activities. The volunteers and students were engaged in activities that allowed them to maintain their benefits. The second research question addressed whether the employed women would be likely to maintain their work effort and achieve self-sufficiency. This research provided evidence that these women may be likely to sustain work, but will probably not attain self-sufficiency without either altering the definition of self-sufficiency, or fundamentally restructuring the supports available to them in the socio-cultural environment. Implications for future research, policy, and programming include additional longitudinal studies on child outcomes, and policy and programming that considers the environmental factors that may assist or hinder women\u27s transition from welfare reliance to self-sufficiency

Preserved local but disrupted contextual figure-ground influences in an individual with abnormal function of intermediate visual areas

Visual perception depends not only on local stimulus features but also on their relationship to the surrounding stimulus context, as evident in both local and contextual influences on figure-ground segmentation. Intermediate visual areas may play a role in such contextual influences, as we tested here by examining LG, a rare case of developmental visual agnosia. LG has no evident abnormality of brain structure and functional neuroimaging showed relatively normal V1 function, but his intermediate visual areas (V2/V3) function abnormally. We found that contextual influences on figure-ground organization were selectively disrupted in LG, while local sources of figure-ground influences were preserved. Effects of object knowledge and familiarity on figure-ground organization were also significantly diminished. Our results suggest that the mechanisms mediating contextual and familiarity influences on figure-ground organization are dissociable from those mediating local influences on figure-ground assignment. The disruption of contextual processing in intermediate visual areas may play a role in the substantial object recognition difficulties experienced by LG