The reproduction of violence in the works of Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant

This thesis compares the reproduction of violence in the fictional writings of two contemporary Martinican authors, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant. While existing scholarship provides significant examinations of both authors individually, this study builds on these foundations to carry out the first single extensive comparison of Chamoiseau and Confiant’s novels. Chamoiseau and Confiant’s literary and political movement of créolité has been the basis of much critical attention in recent years but the theme of the representation of violence in their novels remains relatively unexplored. This thesis explores how – and even whether – fiction can be a way of coming to terms with the brutal violence of their past. This study therefore examines – through close textual analysis – the literary strategies employed by the authors in their representation of the origins of the Antilles in order to address the painful, difficult issues arising out of these origins. In its comparative approach to the authors and in its focus on the reproduction of violence, this study makes two original contributions to the study of Antillean literature. In the Introduction, I outline the tensions surrounding the process of writing in the Antilles. Within this specific historical context the figure of the writer – real or imaginary – becomes a complex and difficult one, as it is clear that the violence of the colonial past continues to affect the authors and their writing. In the first chapter, I therefore return to those same brutal origins of the Antilles, examining how they are constructed in the author’s fiction. Chamoiseau and Confiant imply that the violence of the past acts as a mechanism of oppression. Drawing on colonial theory, the next chapter explores closely how this mechanism is represented in the author’s fictional work as a repetition of the original violence and one that continues to structure Antillena society, and from which no escape seems possible

Systemic conditioned medium treatment from interleukin-1 primed mesenchymal stem cells promotes recovery after stroke

This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC, UK) and Medical Research Council (MRC, UK) Centre for Doctoral Training in Regenerative Medicine studentship grant EP/L014904/1 and the Stroke Association (TSA 2017/03).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Selfish learning:the impact of self-referential encoding on children's literacy attainment

Self-referencing (i.e., thinking about oneself during encoding) can increase attention toward to-be-encoded material, and support memory for information in adults and children. The current inquiry tested an educational application of this 'self reference effect' (SRE) on memory. A selfreferential modification of literacy tasks (vocabulary spelling) was tested in two experiments. In Experiment 1, seven- to nine-year-old children (N = 47) were asked to learn the spelling of four nonsense words by copying the vocabulary and generating sentences. Half of the children were asked to include themselves as a subject in each sentence. Results showed that children in this self-referent condition produced longer sentences and increased spelling accuracy by more than 20%, relative to those in an other-referent condition. Experiment 2 (N = 32) replicated this pattern in real-word learning. These findings demonstrate the significant potential advantages of utilizing self-referential encoding in the classroom

The Soviet Union and the Post-World War II Foreign Policy of Czechoslovakia as Assessed by American Diplomacy

The article was submitted on 24.06.2020.Исследуется проблема восприятия американскими дипломатами и экспертами по международным отношениям ориентиров и приоритетов чехословацкой внешней политики в период между окончанием Второй мировой войны и закреплением у власти в ЧСР коммунистов в 1948 г. Цель работы состоит в выявлении советского фактора в политике США в отношении Чехословакии, особенностей восприятия этой страны в контексте советско-американских отношений и общего генезиса холодной войны. Исследование базируется на анализе документальных источников из архивов Государственного департамента США, Министерства иностранных дел Чешской Республики, личного архива посла Л. А. Штейнгардта. Многие из них впервые вводятся в научный оборот. Архивные документы дополняют материалы американской прессы. Обосновывается вывод, что на протяжении указанного периода восприятие Чехословакии со стороны американцев носило противоречивый характер: с одной стороны, сохранение демократической многопартийной системы позволяло относить ее к Западу, но, с другой, просоветская внешняя политика побуждала помещать ЧСР за «железным занавесом». Конкретные внешнеполитические мероприятия чехословацкого правительства во главе с коммунистом К. Готвальдом прямо демонстрировали ориентацию Чехословакии на близкие отношения с СССР и лояльность Кремлю. Из-за этого степень зависимости Праги от Москвы была предметом серьезных дискуссий и размышлений среди американских специалистов по международным отношениям. Часть из них безоговорочно помещала ЧСР в ряд советских сателлитов, другая считала ее последним аванпостом демократии в Восточной Европе. Поворотным моментом в восприятии ЧСР стал ее отказ от участия в плане Маршалла, осуществленный под прямым давлением советского руководства. После этого для американцев стали очевидными неспособность Праги сопротивляться советскому давлению и ее зависимость от Москвы.This article examines how American diplomats and international relations experts perceived Czechoslovak foreign policy priorities between the end of World War II and the consolidation of communist power in the ČSR in 1948. The purpose of the work is to identify the Soviet factor in US policy towards Czechoslovakia, the peculiarities of the perception of the country in the general context of Soviet-American relations and the genesis of the Cold War. The research is based on documentary sources from different archives: the US National Archives, the Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, and the archive of Ambassador L. A. Steinhardt at the Library of Congress. Archival documents are supplemented by articles from the American press. The author concludes that during this period, the perception of Czechoslovakia by the Americans was ambivalent and controversial. On the one hand, the existence of a democratic multi-party system made it possible to consider the ČSR part of the West, but, on the other hand, its pro-Soviet foreign policy forced the Americans to regard it as being behind the Iron Curtain. The real foreign activities of the Czechoslovak government led by communist K. Gottwald directly demonstrated Czechoslovakia’s orientation toward close relations with the USSR and its loyalty to the Kremlin. Because of this, the degree of Prague’s dependence on Moscow was a subject of serious discussion and reflection among American experts in international relations. Some of them unconditionally placed the ČSR among the Soviet satellites, while others considered it the last outpost of democracy in Eastern Europe. A turning point in the perception of Czechoslovakia was its refusal to participate in the Marshall Plan under the direct pressure of the Soviet government. After that, Prague’s inability to resist Soviet pressure and its dependence on Moscow became apparent to the Americans

Stroke Induces Prolonged Changes in Lipid Metabolism, the Liver and Body Composition in Mice

Acknowledgements We would like to thank the Biological Services Facility at the University of Manchester for expert animal husbandry and Karen Davies who helped with the MRI. The Histology Facility equipment that was used in this study was purchased by the University of Manchester Strategic Fund. Special thanks goes to Peter Walker for their help with the histology. Funding information This work was supported by the Kohn Foundation, an Edward Bonham Carter Doctoral Scholarship, an EPSRC/MRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Regenerative Medicine studentship grant (EP/L014904/1), and the Medical Research Council (MR/K501311/1).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Translational models for vascular cognitive impairment: a review including larger species.

BACKGROUND: Disease models are useful for prospective studies of pathology, identification of molecular and cellular mechanisms, pre-clinical testing of interventions, and validation of clinical biomarkers. Here, we review animal models relevant to vascular cognitive impairment (VCI). A synopsis of each model was initially presented by expert practitioners. Synopses were refined by the authors, and subsequently by the scientific committee of a recent conference (International Conference on Vascular Dementia 2015). Only peer-reviewed sources were cited. METHODS: We included models that mimic VCI-related brain lesions (white matter hypoperfusion injury, focal ischaemia, cerebral amyloid angiopathy) or reproduce VCI risk factors (old age, hypertension, hyperhomocysteinemia, high-salt/high-fat diet) or reproduce genetic causes of VCI (CADASIL-causing Notch3 mutations). CONCLUSIONS: We concluded that (1) translational models may reflect a VCI-relevant pathological process, while not fully replicating a human disease spectrum; (2) rodent models of VCI are limited by paucity of white matter; and (3) further translational models, and improved cognitive testing instruments, are required

Fine-Scale Mapping of the 4q24 Locus Identifies Two Independent Loci Associated with Breast Cancer Risk

Background: A recent association study identified a common variant (rs9790517) at 4q24 to be associated with breast cancer risk. Independent association signals and potential functional variants in this locus have not been explored. Methods: We conducted a fine-mapping analysis in 55,540 breast cancer cases and 51,168 controls from the Breast Cancer Association Consortium. Results: Conditional analyses identified two independent association signals among women of European ancestry, represented by rs9790517 [conditional P = 2.51 × 10−4; OR, 1.04; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.02–1.07] and rs77928427 (P = 1.86 × 10−4; OR, 1.04; 95% CI, 1.02–1.07). Functional annotation using data from the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project revealed two putative functional variants, rs62331150 and rs73838678 in linkage disequilibrium (LD) with rs9790517 (r2 ≥ 0.90) residing in the active promoter or enhancer, respectively, of the nearest gene, TET2. Both variants are located in DNase I hypersensitivity and transcription factor–binding sites. Using data from both The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Molecular Taxonomy of Breast Cancer International Consortium (METABRIC), we showed that rs62331150 was associated with level of expression of TET2 in breast normal and tumor tissue. Conclusion: Our study identified two independent association signals at 4q24 in relation to breast cancer risk and suggested that observed association in this locus may be mediated through the regulation of TET2. Impact: Fine-mapping study with large sample size warranted for identification of independent loci for breast cancer risk

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Genome-Wide Meta-Analyses of Breast, Ovarian, and Prostate Cancer Association Studies Identify Multiple New Susceptibility Loci Shared by at Least Two Cancer Types.

UNLABELLED: Breast, ovarian, and prostate cancers are hormone-related and may have a shared genetic basis, but this has not been investigated systematically by genome-wide association (GWA) studies. Meta-analyses combining the largest GWA meta-analysis data sets for these cancers totaling 112,349 cases and 116,421 controls of European ancestry, all together and in pairs, identified at P < 10(-8) seven new cross-cancer loci: three associated with susceptibility to all three cancers (rs17041869/2q13/BCL2L11; rs7937840/11q12/INCENP; rs1469713/19p13/GATAD2A), two breast and ovarian cancer risk loci (rs200182588/9q31/SMC2; rs8037137/15q26/RCCD1), and two breast and prostate cancer risk loci (rs5013329/1p34/NSUN4; rs9375701/6q23/L3MBTL3). Index variants in five additional regions previously associated with only one cancer also showed clear association with a second cancer type. Cell-type-specific expression quantitative trait locus and enhancer-gene interaction annotations suggested target genes with potential cross-cancer roles at the new loci. Pathway analysis revealed significant enrichment of death receptor signaling genes near loci with P < 10(-5) in the three-cancer meta-analysis. SIGNIFICANCE: We demonstrate that combining large-scale GWA meta-analysis findings across cancer types can identify completely new risk loci common to breast, ovarian, and prostate cancers. We show that the identification of such cross-cancer risk loci has the potential to shed new light on the shared biology underlying these hormone-related cancers. Cancer Discov; 6(9); 1052-67. ©2016 AACR.This article is highlighted in the In This Issue feature, p. 932.The Breast Cancer Association Consortium (BCAC), the Prostate Cancer Association Group to Investigate Cancer Associated Alterations in the Genome (PRACTICAL), and the Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium (OCAC) that contributed breast, prostate, and ovarian cancer data analyzed in this study were in part funded by Cancer Research UK [C1287/A10118 and C1287/A12014 for BCAC; C5047/A7357, C1287/A10118, C5047/A3354, C5047/A10692, and C16913/A6135 for PRACTICAL; and C490/A6187, C490/A10119, C490/A10124, C536/A13086, and C536/A6689 for OCAC]. Funding for the Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study (COGS) infrastructure came from: the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement number 223175 (HEALTH-F2-2009-223175), Cancer Research UK (C1287/A10118, C1287/A 10710, C12292/A11174, C1281/A12014, C5047/A8384, C5047/A15007, C5047/A10692, and C8197/A16565), the US National Institutes of Health (CA128978) and the Post-Cancer GWAS Genetic Associations and Mechanisms in Oncology (GAME-ON) initiative (1U19 CA148537, 1U19 CA148065, and 1U19 CA148112), the US Department of Defence (W81XWH-10-1-0341), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) for the CIHR Team in Familial Risks of Breast Cancer, Komen Foundation for the Cure, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, and the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund [with donations by the family and friends of Kathryn Sladek Smith (PPD/RPCI.07)]. Additional financial support for contributing studies is documented under Supplementary Financial Support.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the American Association for Cancer Research via http://dx.doi.org/10.1158/2159-8290.CD-15-122