Forms of Life for Meaghan Morris

Meaghan once remarked (I think to the poet and art critic Ken Bolton) that she didn’t like poetry because of all the empty space on the page. A quarter of a century ago in 1992, in Ecstasy and Economics: American Essays for John Forbes, she said she was ‘a desultory reader of poetry’ and that reading poetry might induce a ‘scary cultural estrangement’.1 In the foreword, she extrapolates the ‘awkward’ place of poetry in cultural studies then as being more an American problem than an Australian one but nearly a quarter of a century later I wonder if poetry has made an individuated local spot for itself, or even if it cares to. I mean, ‘should poetry worry?

Evaluating the Cephalonia method of library induction

This is a PDF version of an article published in SCONUL Focus© 2007. SCONUL Focus is available online at http://www.sconul.ac.uk/publications/newsletterThis article discusses the results of a survey carried out at the University of Chester library into student feedback of the Cephalonia method of library induction

Learning Across A Lifetime of Learning: Stages of Teacher Development

This study presents a conceptual framework for examining the developmental stages of teachers and illustrates the differences found in student teachers as they develop. The research illustrates how by assessing a teacher candidate’s own perception of importance, mastery, and desire to improve, an instrument can be used to prioritize needs at different points of a teacher’s career as well as identify stages of development. The statistical data, analysis, and interpretation of a study utilizing the Teacher Need Assessment Questionnaire (TNAQ) with teacher candidates is displayed

Islandora: An Open Source Institutional Repository Solution

In the summer of 2013, Southwest Minnesota State University and Minneapolis College of Art and Design joined PALS as development partners for the Islandora Digital Repository Project. Islandora uses common open source components such as Drupal, Apache, and SOLR to build a dynamic, robust, and customizable Institutional Repository. This session will include a demonstration of Islandora and a discussion of the project, challenges, lessons learned, and successes. There will also be time for questions and answers about Islandora and PALS’ Islandora services. PALS’ goal is to provide Islandora to Minnesota libraries and archives

Reduction of pro-tumorigenic activity of human prostate cancer-associated fibroblasts using Dlk1 or SCUBE1

SUMMARY Human prostatic cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) can elicit malignant changes in initiated but non-tumorigenic human prostate epithelium, demonstrating that they possess pro-tumorigenic properties. We set out to reduce the pro-tumorigenic activity of patient CAFs using the Dlk1 and SCUBE1 molecules that we had previously identified in prostate development. Our hypothesis was that mesenchymally expressed molecules might reduce CAF pro-tumorigenic activity, either directly or indirectly. We isolated primary prostatic CAFs and characterised their expression of CAF markers, expression of Notch2, Dlk1 and SCUBE1 transcripts, and confirmed their ability to stimulate BPH1 epithelial cell proliferation. Next, we expressed Dlk1 or SCUBE1 in CAFs and determined their effects upon tumorigenesis in vivo following recombination with BPH1 epithelia and xenografting in SCID mice. Tumour size was reduced by about 75% and BPH1 proliferation was reduced by about 50% after expression of Dlk1 or SCUBE1 in CAFs, and there was also a reduction in invasion of BPH1 epithelia into the host kidney. Inhibition of Notch signalling, using inhibitor XIX, led to a reduction in BPH1 cell proliferation in CAF-BPH1 co-cultures, whereas inhibition of Dlk1 in NIH3T3-conditioned media led to an increase in BPH1 growth. Our results suggest that pro-tumorigenic CAF activity can be reduced by the expression of developmental pathways