Vernon Lee’s The Ballet of the Nations: A Modern Morality, an Intermedial Mosaic

Vernon Lee’s The Ballet of the Nations: A Present-Day Morality (1915) documents the rise of nationalist discourses that led to World War I, as well as Lee’s zealous commitment to the promotion of pacifist values in contradiction to the rhetoric that had been fuelling the hostilities. The letter that she addressed to the secretary of the Women Suffrage Alliance, Rosika Schwimmer, which appeared in the Evening Post on 3 October 1914, is a blatant vindication of her activism. Besides stating the need for women across the world to take sides against the barbarity that was plaguing Europe, Lee offers a passionate summary of her engagement with contemporary politics

Development of biological and synthetic affinity ligands for human serum albumin

This work aimed the development of biological and synthetic affinity ligands for human serum albumin (HSA). The first approach was to optimize the expression of a biological ligand, named WW Clone 3, which was previously selected from a phage display library using HSA as a target. The expression of WW Clone 3 in Escherichia coli strain BL21 (DE3) was attempted at three different temperatures (18ºC, 25ºC and 30ºC), with 1mM Isopropyl-β-D-thiogalactopyranoside (IPTG). The best temperature for cell growth was 30ºC, producing a larger amount of total protein with approximately 45 mg/ml in the soluble fraction and 10mg/ml in the insoluble fraction. However, WW Clone 3 was difficult to produce. The second approach was to develop synthetic affinity ligands to HSA based on solid-phase synthesis of combinatorial libraries. The libraries were designed on the basis of amino acids from protein PAB (Peptostreptococcal albumin-binding) and drugs that bind naturally to the domain II of HSA. Two libraries were synthesized through the Ugi and Triazine reaction with 88 and 64 ligands, respectively. The libraries were screened for binding to pure HSA and pure immunoglobulin G (IgG), to assess the selectivity towards HSA. The ligands that had the highest affinity for HSA and lowest affinity for IgG were re-screened to confirm the results. Two ligands, A3A2 and A6A5 from the Triazine library appeared as the most selective for HSA and therefore more promising for the capture of this protein

Valence in the reading the mind in the eyes test : a brazilian study

The processes involved in social cognition are crucial to successful social interactions and adequate social functioning. One of the most important is emotion recognition abilities. Impairments in those processes have been documented in various psychopathologies, leading to a series of difficult outcomes. A very commonly used instrument to access those constructs is the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), a measure of decoding emotional states based on perceptual visual information. The test comprises 36 black and white images of only the eye and eyebrows region of several faces in which the respondent selects one of four emotional labels that best describes each picture. However, the instrument itself does not measure the valences of the mental states it presents. Thus, the goal of this study is to define the RMET items valences based on a Brazilian sample. We recruited 186 Brazilian adults that underwent an online cross- sectional quantitative data collection. From the 36 picture-words pairs, 7 items were classified as neutral, 12 as positive and 17 as negative, while in the 45 words-only items, 13 were classified as positive, 1 as neutral and 31 as negative. Our classification showed important differences when compared to a study from the United States, suggesting that culture models played an important role in emotional valence classification

Exploring ICT Skills Dynamics in Mozambique

The current state of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Mozambique is inadequate in terms of education, skills, infrastructure, government support, language, and culture. There is poor education available at all levels, and there is a lack of basic ICT skills countrywide. Language and cultural differences constitute barriers to ICT, due to English not being commonly spoken. The infrastructure of the country remains insufficient to fully reap the potential of ICT. As there is insufficient literature regarding ICT as a field in Mozambique, this study lays some of the groundwork in this regard, by inductively exploring the dynamics around ICT skills supply and demand, as perceived by local actors. The study was guided by a Case Study-Grounded Theory Methodology (CS-GTM), with data collected through in-depth interviews with various local stakeholders implicated in the ICT skills ecosystems. The findings reveal a never-ending loop of a lack of the supply of ICT opportunities (employment, education, and training) to gain ICT skills on the one hand, and a lack of skills available to demand ICT skills in the country as a result of the lack of current conditions for ICT growth, aided by a lack of support from the government for ICT on the other. Some of the dynamics raised that were insufficiently covered within the literature review were the centralisation and reliance on the capital city, the hierarchy of the different regions of the country, and the heavy reliance on foreign companies and talent. For future research, studying the role of the government may assist in better understanding the different dynamics at play. Interviewing participants from the different parts of the country will broaden understanding. Lastly, comparing the dynamics in Mozambique to dynamics in similar countries (in terms of development indicators) may provide further insight