The social, political and legal aspects of Text and Data Mining (TDM)

The ideas of textual or data mining (TDM) and subsequent analysis go back hundreds if not thousands of years. Originally carried out manually, textual and data analysis has long been a tool which has enabled new insights to be drawn from text corpora. However, for the potential benefits of TDM to be unlocked, a number of non-technological barriers need to be overcome. These include legal uncertainty resulting from complicated copyright, database rights and licensing, the fact that some publishers are not currently embracing the opportunities TDM offers the academic community, and a lack of awareness of TDM among many academics, alongside a skills gap

The role of histone modifications in severe asthma

Severe asthma is an airways disease that causes restriction of airflow to the lung leading to difficulty breathing, where even high doses of medication does not alleviate the symptoms. There are studies that have demonstrated differentially expressed genes in both CD8+ T-cells and the bronchial epithelium of severe asthmatics, however the causes of the changes in gene expression have not been elucidated. Histones, proteins which store DNA, can be acetylated or methylated which changes their binding of DNA allowing for modified transcription. I hypothesise that modifying the histone modification of Bronchial Epithelium and CD8+ T-cells would be able to limit the inflammatory effects of severe asthma, that measuring changes in histone modifications would show differences between severe and non-serere asthmatics and that by using modern analysis of gene expression and histone modifications it would be possible to discover novel genes and pathways involved in asthma. The Bromodomain and Extra terminal domain mimic JQ1 was able to suppress release of Interleukin-6 and Interleukin-8 and SGC-CBP30 the CBP/p300 inhibitor limited proliferation in bronchial epithelium. CD8+ T-cells from a small group of severe and non-severe asthmatics had gene arrays carried out and were analysed by weighted geneome coexpression network analysis which found modules containing genes involved in intracellular motility and vesicle formation that linked strongly to % predicted Forced Expiratory volume in one second. CD8+ ChIP-Seq studies of T-cell histone modifications were attempted, but not successful. A pilot test on Severe asthmatics CD8+ T-cells treated with SGC-CBP30 showed a reduction in the release of the inflammatory mediator MIP1α and suggested that this was without affecting its mRNA production or cell viability, however higher numbers of patients would be needed to confirm this.Open Acces

Gravitational Stability of Vortices in Bose-Einstein Condensate Dark Matter

We investigate a simple model for a galactic halo under the assumption that it is dominated by a dark matter component in the form of a Bose-Einstein condensate involving an ultra-light scalar particle. In particular we discuss the possibility if the dark matter is in superfluid state then a rotating galactic halo might contain quantised vortices which would be low-energy analogues of cosmic strings. Using known solutions for the density profiles of such vortices we compute the self-gravitational interactions in such halos and place bounds on the parameters describing such models, such as the mass of the particles involved.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, submitted to CQ

As the story goes …

In the rubric Texts around Theatre (TaT) we present various perspectives on theatre – historical and contemporary, intercultural and culture-specific, unexpectedly weird, unusually suspenseful, disturbedly gripping, fascinatingly enigmatic etc. Through the following story renowned theatre director Peter Brook reminds us that what happens on the theatre stage has to be of interest to everyone in the audience, and he leaves us with the question: How can this be achieved? God, seeing how desperately bored everyone was on the seventh day of creation, racked his overstretched imagination to find something more to add to the completeness he had just conceived. Suddenly his inspiration burst even beyond his own limitless bounds and he saw a further aspect of reality: its possibility to imitate itself. So he invented theatre. He called his angels together and announced this in the following terms, which are still contained in an ancient Sanskrit document. “The theatre will be the field in which people can learn to understand the sacred mysteries of the universe. And at the same time,” he added with deceptive casualness, “it will be a comfort to the drunkard and to the lonely.”The angels were very excited and could hardly wait for there to be ..