Citizen Ship

Citizen Ship, artwork, 2017 Milton Keynes City Club with Milton Keynes Gallery. A mobile sculpture sited in five locations in Milton Keynes, including; Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes Art Centre, Art in the Park, Middleton Hall, Shopping centre, Feast of Fire Milton Keynes International Festival. Citizen Ship is a portable pavilion designed as a public meeting place and with a resemblance to Milton Keynes bus shelters. The artwork is part-public sculpture, part-kiosk and part-publishing laboratory. Citizen Ship extends the concept of participation in art by engaging new groups in the production of collective artworks that are displayed in and on the structure. Through conversations visitors and passer-bys developed new slogans and published them by making badges, vinyl lettering, ribbons and teletext messaging. The participatory art methods applied are directed at opinion formation in order to understand how communities create and perform collective values. Citizen Ship, was funded by Arts Council England and Milton Keynes Art Gallery

National Museum of Gallery Visitors and Museum Workers

A new manifesto 'National Museum of Gallery Visitors and Museum Workers' was developed for the summer programme at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. The work was commissioned to accompany the 'Wilderness Way' exhibition that takes as its departure point Margaret Thatcher’s visit to Teesside in 1987 to reflect on a decade that transformed the way we live. The manifesto operates as mini-dictionarium which describes key phrases that connect art and politics. The manifesto choir was performed collectively at Mima during teh exhibition. The manifesto choir is designed as a mechanism for the action of agreeing or disagreeing. Participants are requested to read the given text and make their own minds up about what part of it they subscribe to. When present at the group reading, the participants only read out the words of the manifesto they agree with

Football's coming home ? digital reterritorialization, contradictions in the transnational coverage of sport and the sociology of alternative football broadcasts.

This article critically utilizes the work of Manuel Castells to discuss the issue of parallel imported broadcasts (specifically including live-streams) in football. This is of crucial importance to sport because the English Premier League is premised upon the sale of television rights broadcasts to domestic and overseas markets, and yet cheaper alternative broadcasts endanger the price of such rights. Evidence is drawn from qualitative fieldwork and library/Internet sources to explore the practices of supporters and the politics involved in the generation of alternative broadcasts. This enables us to clarify the core sociological themes of ‘milieu of innovation’ and ‘locale’ within today's digitally networked global society

Treatment patterns among non-active users of maintenance asthma medication in the United Kingdom : a retrospective cohort study in the Clinical Practice Research Datalink

The authors are also grateful to Dr Michael Gibbs for providing a review of an early draft of this manuscript. Funding Editorial support was provided by Kate Hollingworth of Continuous Improvement Ltd and funded by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). This study was funded by GSK. DCG, BA, JFB, and MF are employees of GSK and hold GSK shares.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Design, Construction, and Performance of Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Facility

A mixed low-level radioactive waste (LLRW) and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) waste on-site disposal facility (OSDF) was constructed as part of the remediation of the U.S. Department of Energy Feed Material Production Center in Fernald, Ohio. The 56-acre OSDF is fully constructed, filled with waste, and closed. Post-closure monitoring is ongoing. This paper presents the design, construction, and performance of the OSDF. Waste acceptance criteria and waste placement requirements are described. Results from three sets of pre-design field and laboratory investigations are summarized. Currently available performance data for the OSDF’s leachate collection system and leakage detection system are reported. Post-closure monitoring activities are briefly described. The value of this case study is in providing a detailed framework for the conceptual and detailed design of land-based disposal facilities for mixed LLRW and RCRA waste

Ectopic expression of Thy-1 in the kidneys of transgenic mice induces functional and proliferative abnormalities.

Hybrid human--mouse Thy-1.1 genes were injected into pronuclei of Thy-1.2 mice to produce transgenic animals. A hybrid gene composed of the 5' part of the mouse Thy-1.1 gene combined with the 3' human untranslated regions was expressed abnormally in the kidney podocytes, which resulted in severe protein-uria and subsequent death in several founder mice. A hybrid Thy-1 gene composed of the human coding region with the 5' and 3' flanking regions of the mouse gene was expressed abnormally in a different part of the kidney (the tubular epithelia), which resulted in a proliferative kidney disorder. In addition, a neoplasm was found in the brain of one of these mice. These results show that the Thy-1 protein can play an important role in the activation, proliferation, and differentiation of many different cell types

Meteor light curves: the relevant parameters

We investigate a uniform sample of 113 light curves (LCs) of meteors collected at the Wise Observatory in November 2002 while observing the Leonid meteor shower. We use previously defined descriptors such as the skewness F and a recently defined pointedness parameter along with a number of other measurable or derived quantities to explore the parameter space in search of meaningful LC descriptors. We make extensive use of statistical techniques to reveal links among the variables and to understand their relative importance. In particular, we show that meteors with long-duration trails rise slowly to their maximal brightness and also decay slowly from there while showing milder flaring than other meteors. Early skewed LCs show a fast rise to the peak. We show that the duration of te luminous phase of the meteor is th emost important variable differentiating among the 2002 LCs. The skewness parameter F appears only as the 2nd or 3rd in explaining the LC variance. We suggest that the pointedness parameter P could possibly be useful to discriminate among meteors from different showers, or to compare observations and model predictions.Comment: 10 pages (2 figures) in press with MNRA

A Test of the Standard Hypothesis for the Origin of the HI Holes in Holmberg II

The nearby irregular galaxy Holmberg II has been extensively mapped in HI using the Very Large Array (VLA), revealing intricate structure in its interstellar gas component (Puche et al. 1992). An analysis of these structures shows the neutral gas to contain a number of expanding HI holes. The formation of the HI holes has been attributed to multiple supernova events occurring within wind-blown shells around young, massive star clusters, with as many as 10-200 supernovae required to produce many of the holes. From the sizes and expansion velocities of the holes, Puche et al. assigned ages of ~10^7 to 10^8 years. If the supernova scenario for the formation of the HI holes is correct, it implies the existence of star clusters with a substantial population of late-B, A and F main sequence stars at the centers of the holes. Many of these clusters should be detectable in deep ground-based CCD images of the galaxy. In order to test the supernova hypothesis for the formation of the HI holes, we have obtained and analyzed deep broad-band BVR and narrow-band H-alpha images of Ho II. We compare the optical and HI data and search for evidence of the expected star clusters in and around the HI holes. We also use the HI data to constrain models of the expected remnant stellar population. We show that in several of the holes the observed upper limits for the remnant cluster brightness are strongly inconsistent with the SNe hypothesis described in Puche et al. Moreover, many of the HI holes are located in regions of very low optical surface brightness which show no indication of recent star formation. Here we present our findings and explore possible alternative explanations for the existence of the HI holes in Ho II, including the suggestion that some of the holes were produced by Gamma-ray burst events.Comment: 30 pages, including 6 tables and 3 images. To appear in Astron. Journal (June 1999

Dampened activity of ryanodine receptor channels in mutant skeletal muscle lacking TRIC-A

The type A trimeric intracellular cation channel (TRIC-A) is a major component of the nuclear and sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) membranes of cardiac and skeletal muscle, and is localized closely with ryanodine receptor (RyR) channels in the SR terminal cisternae. The skeletal muscle of Tric-a knockout (KO) mice is characterized by Ca2+ overloaded and swollen SR and by changes in the properties of SR Ca2+ release. We therefore investigated whether RyR1 gating behaviour is modified in the SR from Tric-a KO mice by incorporating native RyR1 into planar phospholipid bilayers under voltage-clamp conditions. We find that RyR1 channels from Tric-a KO mice respond normally to cytosolic Ca2+, ATP, adenine, caffeine and to luminal Ca2+. However, the channels are more sensitive to the inactivating effects of divalent cations, thus, in the presence of Mg2+, ATP is inadequate as an activator. Additionally, channels are not characteristically activated by protein kinase A even though the phosphorylation levels of Ser2844 are similar to controls. The results of the present study suggest that TRIC-A functions as an excitatory modulator of RyR1 channels within the SR terminal cisternae. Importantly, this regulatory action of TRIC-A appears to be independent of (although additive to) any indirect consequences to RyR1 activity that arise as a result of K+ fluxes across the SR via TRIC-A