The Moderating Effect of Judge’s Instructions on Victim Impact Testimony in Capital Cases

In this study, we addressed whether victim impact instructions served as a legal safeguard in a capital case involving victim impact testimony. We hypothesized that specific victim impact instructions would moderate the relation between victim impact testimony and death penalty recommendations. One hundred sixty-six participants viewed a simulated videotaped trial in which a victim impact statement was delivered in different emotional conditions. Judge’s instructions were varied as either general instructions or with the addition of specific victim impact instructions. Participant-jurors who heard specific victim impact instructions were less likely to recommend death compared to participants who heard general jury instructions. The value of victim impact instructions as a legal safeguard in capital trials is discussed

The Distributed Text: An Annotated Digital Edition of Franz Boas’ Pioneering Ethnography

Under the rubric of a new Franz Boas Critical Edition book series, we propose to reprint and annotate Boas's important 1897 monograph The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians in both print and as a multimedia website. Framed with scholarly essays and contemporary Kwakwaka'wakw perspectives, the new editions will re-unite the original text with widely distributed archival and museum collections that shed new light on the book. This project will reveal the nature of co-authorship in Boas's work, use multimedia to return sensory richness to his ethnography, and make this historic research more relevant to contemporary scholars and indigenous communities. The Digital Humanities Start Up Grant (level II) will be used to fund a workshop to plan the digital edition; for design of a wiki for collaborative research; for travel to determine the full range of materials to be digitized; for production of sample webpages to test interfaces and functionality; for salary toward project administration and digital technology assistance; and for development of innovative software to reproduce and render searchable the large amounts of Kwakw'ala-language materials

High frame-rate resolution of cell division during Candida albicans filamentation

Acknowledgements: Strain YMG7139 was supplied by Peter Sudbery, University of Sheffield. DDT was funded by a BBSRC-DTG, BB/F016964/1, at Aberdeen. ACB is funded by a Royal Society URFUF080611 and a MRC NIRG90671. JB was funded by the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) REA grant agreement number 303635; by an European Research Council Advanced Award, number 340087, RAPLODAPT, and an award from the Israel Science foundation (340/13).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Reconceptualising post-PhD research pathways: a model to create new postdoctoral positions and improve the quality of postdoctoral training in Australia

Focusing on the developmental needs of early career postdoctoral fellows – the lifeblood of an internationally competitive researchintensive university – this paper suggests an inextricably linked, two pronged approach to improving research performance at Australian universities. The first is to reconceptualise post-PhD research pathways and in doing so conceive a mechanism for creating new postdoctoral positions; the second is to develop a coherent programme of policies, processes and practices in postdoctoral education and training. In this way, Australian universities will increase their success in attracting and retaining the brightest and best postdoctoral students from all over the world and thereby improve research performanc

Sir2 regulates stability of repetitive domains differentially in the human fungal pathogen Candida albicans

DNA repeats, found at the ribosomal DNA locus, telomeres and subtelomeric regions, are unstable sites of eukaryotic genomes. A fine balance between genetic variability and genomic stability tunes plasticity of these chromosomal regions. This tuning mechanism is particularly important for organisms such as microbial pathogens that utilise genome plasticity as a strategy for adaptation. For the first time, we analyse mechanisms promoting genome stability at the rDNA locus and subtelomeric regions in the most common human fungal pathogen: Candida albicans In this organism, the histone deacetylase Sir2, the master regulator of heterochromatin, has acquired novel functions in regulating genome stability. Contrary to any other systems analysed, C. albicans Sir2 is largely dispensable for repressing recombination at the rDNA locus. We demonstrate that recombination at subtelomeric regions is controlled by a novel DNA element, the TLO Recombination Element, TRE, and by Sir2. While the TRE element promotes high levels of recombination, Sir2 represses this recombination rate. Finally, we demonstrate that, in C. albicans, mechanisms regulating genome stability are plastic as different environmental stress conditions lead to general genome instability and mask the Sir2-mediated recombination control at subtelomeres. Our data highlight how mechanisms regulating genome stability are rewired in C. albican

Aneuploidy and isochromosome formation in drug-resistant Candida albicans

Resistance to the limited number of available antifungal drugs is a serious problem in the treatment of Candida albicans. We found that aneuploidy in general and a specific segmental aneuploidy, consisting of an isochromosome composed of the two left arms of chromosome 5, were associated with azole resistance. The isochromosome forms around a single centromere flanked by an inverted repeat and was found as an independent chromosome or fused at the telomere to a full-length homolog of chromosome 5. Increases and decreases in drug resistance were strongly associated with gain and loss of this isochromosome, which bears genes expressing the enzyme in the ergosterol pathway targeted by azole drugs, efflux pumps, and a transcription factor that positively regulates a subset of efflux pump genes

Reorganizing The Social Organization: Collaborative Editing, Museum Collections, Indigenous Knowledges, and the Franz Boas/George Hunt Archives

Franz Boas's 1897 report, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, was a landmark in anthropology for its integrative approach to museum collections, photographs, and sound recordings as well as text. A result of participant observation and extensive collaboration with Indigenous partners—especially George Hunt—the book set a standard for both ethnography and museum practice. However, both Boas and Hunt remained dissatisfied with the published text, laboring for decades to correct and supplement a volume that would forever mediate global knowledge of the Kwakwaka’wakw people of British Columbia. They left behind a vast archive of unpublished materials relevant to the creation and afterlife of this groundbreaking text and its related museum collections. These materials are now widely distributed across institutional, disciplinary, and international borders. This paper will discuss an ongoing collaborative project to create a multimedia, web-based critical edition of the book that reassembles published and unpublished materials as well as Kwakwaka’wakw knowledge. Archival revelations about the truly co-authored nature of the original text allow us to better situate the contexts and methods of creating ethnographic knowledge in relation to the Indigenous ontologies that The Social Organization purports to represent. Moreover, the edition seeks to demonstrate ways in which digital technologies can harness multimedia to return sensory richness to Boas and Hunt’s synthetic text, to reactivate disparate and long dormant museum collections, and to restore cultural patrimony to its Indigenous inheritors

Haplotype Mapping of a Diploid Non-Meiotic Organism Using Existing and Induced Aneuploidies

Haplotype maps (HapMaps) reveal underlying sequence variation and facilitate the study of recombination and genetic diversity. In general, HapMaps are produced by analysis of Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) segregation in large numbers of meiotic progeny. Candida albicans, the most common human fungal pathogen, is an obligate diploid that does not appear to undergo meiosis. Thus, standard methods for haplotype mapping cannot be used. We exploited naturally occurring aneuploid strains to determine the haplotypes of the eight chromosome pairs in the C. albicans laboratory strain SC5314 and in a clinical isolate. Comparison of the maps revealed that the clinical strain had undergone a significant amount of genome rearrangement, consisting primarily of crossover or gene conversion recombination events. SNP map haplotyping revealed that insertion and activation of the UAU1 cassette in essential and non-essential genes can result in whole chromosome aneuploidy. UAU1 is often used to construct homozygous deletions of targeted genes in C. albicans; the exact mechanism (trisomy followed by chromosome loss versus gene conversion) has not been determined. UAU1 insertion into the essential ORC1 gene resulted in a large proportion of trisomic strains, while gene conversion events predominated when UAU1 was inserted into the non-essential LRO1 gene. Therefore, induced aneuploidies can be used to generate HapMaps, which are essential for analyzing genome alterations and mitotic recombination events in this clonal organism