253 research outputs found
The exemplary poetry of Geoffrey Hill: authority and exemplarity in A Treatise of Civil Power
Geoffrey Hill's ethical anxieties turn on a tension between aesthetic autonomy and engagement with the polis, a tension illuminated by his adumbration of an exemplary poetics. ‘Exemplarity’ is characterized by a similar tension between intransitive and transitive activity, so that a poem can be ‘exemplary’ through its independent merit but also because it influences others. Exemplarity has become especially significant in Hill's ‘late style’: his intensifying rehearsals of despair at the degradation of public language have made the models offered by figures from the past (and the exemplary influence of his own work) an increasingly revealing element in his writing
Object lessons: Derek Mahon's material ekphrasis
Copyright © 2018 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. Derek Mahon, like many writers of ekphrastic poetry, uses the interartistic encounter as an opportunity to meditate on his own aesthetic practice. While the self-reflexive dimensions of Mahon's ekphrases have received considerable critical attention, the implications of his choice of source material remain underexamined. Many of Mahon's ekphrases respond not simply to paintings, but to works depicting three-dimensional objects and architectural spaces: indeed, he sometimes treats rooms and things as though they were the art objects in question. This is the case in a variety of poems, from “Courtyards in Delft” and “The Studio,” to later ekphrases like “Studio in Antibes,” and “New Space.” As these titles suggest, many of the objects and spaces he chooses are used in the production of further artworks-some of his best-known material ekphrases are responses to artists' rooms. This predilection repays critical attention, as the materiality of Mahon's ekphrastic writing shapes its metapoetic work in significant ways. Many of Mahon's aesthetic reflections concern abstraction, materiality, craft, and making, and these concerns take on additional complexity when the ekphrastic sources themselves involve physical things. Most importantly, Mahon's material ekphrases shed light on some of the ambivalence and ambiguity attending his aesthetic ideals
Is Walk Score associated with hospital admissions from chronic diseases? Evidence from a cross-sectional study in a high socioeconomic status Australian city-state
Objectives: To explore patterns of non-communicable
diseases (NCDs) in the Australian Capital Territory
(ACT).To ascertain the effect of the neighbourhood
built environmental features and especially walkability
on health outcomes, specifically for hospital
admissions from NCDs.
Design: A cross-sectional analysis of public hospital
episode data (2007–2013).
Setting: Hospitalisations from the ACT, Australia at
very small geographic areas.
Participants: Secondary data on 75 290 unique
hospital episodes representing 39 851 patients who
were admitted to ACT hospitals from 2007 to 2013. No
restrictions on age, sex or ethnicity.
Main exposure measures: Geographic Information
System derived or compatible measures of general
practitioner access, neighbourhood socioeconomic
status, alcohol access, exposure to traffic and Walk
Score walkability.
Main outcome measures: Hospitalisations of
circulatory diseases, specific endocrine, nutritional and
metabolic diseases, respiratory diseases and specific
cancers.
Results: Geographic clusters with significant high and
low risks of NCDs were found that displayed an overall
geographic pattern of high risk in the outlying suburbs
of the territory. Significant relationships between
neighbourhood walkability as measured by Walk Score
and the likelihood of hospitalisation with a primary
diagnosis of myocardial infarction (heart attack) were
found. A possible relationship was also found with the
likelihood of being hospitalised with 4 major lifestylerelated
cancers.
Conclusions: Our research augments the growing
literature underscoring the relationships between
the built environment and health outcomes. In
addition, it supports the importance of walkable
neighbourhoods, as measured by Walk Score, for
improved health.Full Tex
PrEP in Practice Research Summary Report: A Qualitative Study Investigating the Perspectives of Clinicians who Prescribe PrEP in Australia
Associations between the human immune system and gut microbiome with neurodevelopment in the first 5 years of life: A systematic scoping review
The aim of this review was to map the literature assessing associations between maternal or infant immune or gut microbiome biomarkers and child neurodevelopmental outcomes within the first 5 years of life. We conducted a PRISMA-ScR compliant review of peer-reviewed, English-language journal articles. Studies reporting gut microbiome or immune system biomarkers and child neurodevelopmental outcomes prior to 5 years were eligible. Sixty-nine of 23,495 retrieved studies were included. Of these, 18 reported on the maternal immune system, 40 on the infant immune system, and 13 on the infant gut microbiome. No studies examined the maternal microbiome, and only one study examined biomarkers from both the immune system and the gut microbiome. Additionally, only one study included both maternal and infant biomarkers. Neurodevelopmental outcomes were assessed from 6 days to 5 years. Associations between biomarkers and neurodevelopmental outcomes were largely nonsignificant and small in effect size. While the immune system and gut microbiome are thought to have interactive impacts on the developing brain, there remains a paucity of published studies that report biomarkers from both systems and associations with child development outcomes. Heterogeneity of research designs and methodologies may also contribute to inconsistent findings. Future studies should integrate data across biological systems to generate novel insights into the biological underpinnings of early development
Decade-long bacterial community dynamics in cystic fibrosis airways
The structure and dynamics of bacterial communities in the airways
of persons with cystic fibrosis (CF) remain largely unknown. We
characterized the bacterial communities in 126 sputum samples
representing serial collections spanning 8–9 y from six age-matched
male CF patients. Sputum DNA was analyzed by bar-coded pyrosequencing
of the V3–V5 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNA gene,
defining 662 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) from > 633,000
sequences. Bacterial community diversity decreased significantly
over time in patients with typically progressive lung disease but
remained relatively stable in patients with a mild lung disease phenotype.
Antibiotic use, rather than patient age or lung function,was
the primary driver of decreasing diversity. Interpatient variability in
community structure exceeded intrapatient variability in serial samples.
Antibiotic treatment was associated with pronounced shifts in
community structure, but communities showed both short- and longterm
resilience after antibiotic perturbation. There was a positive
correlation between OTU occurrence and relative abundance, with
a small number of persistent OTUs accounting for the greatest abundance.
Significant changes in community structure, diversity, or total
bacterial density at the time of pulmonary exacerbation were not
observed. Despite decreasing community diversity in patients with
progressive disease, total bacterial density remained relatively stable
over time. These findings show the critical relationship between airway
bacterial community structure, disease stage, and clinical state
at the time of sample collection. These features are the key parameters
with which to assess the complex ecology of the CF airway.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91945/1/2012 PNAS Decade-long bacterial community dynamics in cystic fibrosis airways.pd
Distributed Text Services (DTS): A Community-Built API to Publish and Consume Text Collections as Linked Data
This paper presents the Distributed Text Service (DTS) API Specification, a community-built effort to facilitate the publication and consumption of texts and their structures as Linked Data. DTS was designed to be as generic as possible, providing simple operations for navigating collections, navigating within a text, and retrieving textual content. While the DTS API uses JSON-LD as the serialization format for non-textual data (e.g., descriptive metadata), TEI XML was chosen as the minimum required format for textual data served by the API in order to guarantee the interoperability of data published by DTS-compliant repositories. This paper describes the DTS API specifications by means of real-world examples, discusses the key design choices that were made, and concludes by providing a list of existing repositories and libraries that support DTS
Association Between Hemoglobin Levels and Efficacy of Intravenous Ferric Carboxymaltose in Patients With Acute Heart Failure and Iron Deficiency: An AFFIRM-AHF Subgroup Analysis
BACKGROUND: Iron deficiency, with or without anemia, is an adverse prognostic factor in heart failure (HF). In AFFIRM-AHF (a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trial comparing the effect of intravenous ferric carboxymaltose on hospitalizations and mortality in iron-deficient subjects admitted for acute heart failure), intravenous ferric carboxymaltose (FCM), although having no significant effect on the primary end point, reduced the risk of HF hospitalization (hHF) and improved quality of life versus placebo in iron-deficient patients stabilized after an acute HF (AHF) episode. These prespecified AFFIRM-AHF subanalyses explored the association between hemoglobin levels and FCM treatment effects. METHODS: AFFIRM-AHF was a multicenter, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial of FCM in hospitalized AHF patients with iron deficiency. Patients were stratified by baseline hemoglobin level (<12 versus ≥12 g/dL). In each subgroup, the primary composite (total hHF and cardiovascular death) and secondary (total hHF; total cardiovascular hospitalizations and cardiovascular death; time to cardiovascular death, and time to first/days lost due to hHF or cardiovascular death) outcomes were assessed with FCM versus placebo at week 52. Sensitivity analyses using the World Health Organization anemia definition (hemoglobin level <12 g/dL [women] or <13 g/dL [men]) were performed, among others. RESULTS: Of 1108 AFFIRM-AHF patients, 1107 were included in these subanalyses: 464 (FCM group, 228; placebo group, 236) had a hemoglobin level <12 g/dL, and 643 (FCM, 329; placebo, 314) had a hemoglobin level ≥12 g/dL. Patients with a hemoglobin level <12 g/dL were older (mean, 73.7 versus 69.1 years), with more frequent previous HF (75.0% versus 68.7%), serum ferritin <100 μg/L (75.4% versus 68.1%), and transferrin saturation <20% (87.9% versus 81.4%). For the primary outcome, annualized event rates per 100 patient-years with FCM versus placebo were 71.1 and 73.6 (rate ratio, 0.97 [95% CI, 0.66-1.41]), respectively, and 48.5 versus 72.9 (RR, 0.67 [95% CI, 0.48-0.93]) in the hemoglobin levels <12 and ≥12 g/dL subgroups, respectively. No significant interactions between hemoglobin subgroup and treatment effect were observed for primary (P=0.15) or secondary outcomes. Changes from baseline in hemoglobin, serum ferritin and transferrin saturation were significantly greater with FCM versus placebo in both subgroups between weeks 6 and 52. Findings were similar using the World Health Organization definition for anemia. CONCLUSIONS: The effects of intravenous FCM on outcomes in iron-deficient patients stabilized after an AHF episode, including improvements in iron parameters over time, did not differ between patients with hemoglobin levels <12 and ≥12 g/dL
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