Between Catastrophe and Carnival: Creolized Identities, Cityspace, and Life Narratives

This cluster of Life Stories from the Creole City brings together essays that focus on figures negotiating subjectivity within different creole cities at specific historical junctures, as these urban spaces become compelling sites for narrating subjectivity in negotiation with forces of globalization, diaspora, and cosmopolitanism. The essays variously illuminate the difficulties and payoffs associated with narrating lives in—and of—porous urban space

Introduction: Carnival in the Creole City: Place, Race and Identity in the Age of Globalization

This cluster of Life Stories from the Creole City brings together essays that focus on figures negotiating subjectivity within different creole cities at specific historical junctures, as these urban spaces become compelling sites for narrating subjectivity in negotiation with forces of globalization, diaspora, and cosmopolitanism. The essays variously illuminate the difficulties and payoffs associated with narrating lives in—and of—porous urban space

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Evaluation of appendicitis risk prediction models in adults with suspected appendicitis

Background Appendicitis is the most common general surgical emergency worldwide, but its diagnosis remains challenging. The aim of this study was to determine whether existing risk prediction models can reliably identify patients presenting to hospital in the UK with acute right iliac fossa (RIF) pain who are at low risk of appendicitis. Methods A systematic search was completed to identify all existing appendicitis risk prediction models. Models were validated using UK data from an international prospective cohort study that captured consecutive patients aged 16–45 years presenting to hospital with acute RIF in March to June 2017. The main outcome was best achievable model specificity (proportion of patients who did not have appendicitis correctly classified as low risk) whilst maintaining a failure rate below 5 per cent (proportion of patients identified as low risk who actually had appendicitis). Results Some 5345 patients across 154 UK hospitals were identified, of which two‐thirds (3613 of 5345, 67·6 per cent) were women. Women were more than twice as likely to undergo surgery with removal of a histologically normal appendix (272 of 964, 28·2 per cent) than men (120 of 993, 12·1 per cent) (relative risk 2·33, 95 per cent c.i. 1·92 to 2·84; P < 0·001). Of 15 validated risk prediction models, the Adult Appendicitis Score performed best (cut‐off score 8 or less, specificity 63·1 per cent, failure rate 3·7 per cent). The Appendicitis Inflammatory Response Score performed best for men (cut‐off score 2 or less, specificity 24·7 per cent, failure rate 2·4 per cent). Conclusion Women in the UK had a disproportionate risk of admission without surgical intervention and had high rates of normal appendicectomy. Risk prediction models to support shared decision‐making by identifying adults in the UK at low risk of appendicitis were identified

Mapping Black Movement, Containing Black Laughter: Ralph Ellison\u27s New York Essays

This essay analyzes Ralph Ellison’s nonfiction about New York during the Harlem Renaissance—especially his essay “An Extravagance of Laughter” and its redacted version as Esquire magazine’s “New York, 1936”—as way to engage with larger questions of movement in and through what Houston Baker dubs “the American geography of race.” Ellison’s 1986 account of his mapping of the inscrutable spaces of the urban North fifty years earlier yields, I argue, important insights into the cultural geography of race, the problematic historiographies of the Great Migration, and the adaptive, if psychically treacherous, performativity of (African) American identity. I unpack Ellison’s figure of the laughing barrel as a trope for Jim Crow–era attempts to control the spectacle of Black bodies and the unsettling sonics of Black laughter / Black sound. I then track the trajectory of Ellison’s essay itself, from Going to the Territory’s mapping of hypervisual/invisible Black bodies/spaces to Esquire’s nostalgic travelogue as instantiations of ongoing (failed) strategies of containment of African American bodies and full expressive humanity. Ellison’s papers from the Library of Congress and a critical synthesis of African American studies, cultural geography, and cultural studies inform the argument