Christ and Counterculture: Churches, Clergy, and Hippies in Toronto’s Yorkville, 1965-1970

Churches and clergy (Catholic, mainline Protestant and evangelical) engaged in various ways with countercultural youth in the Toronto neighbourhood of Yorkville between 1965 and 1970. When examined in the context of Canadian Christianity in the long sixties, these outreach efforts to hippies highlight the cultural changes underway in Canada’s leading denominations, particularly the growing divergence between mainline Protestants and evangelicals. These endeavours are significant, too, as examples of liminal spaces—middle grounds where two cultures meet. They constituted part of the broader context of churches’ engagement with youth in this period.Dans le quartier torontois de Yorkville, entre 1965 et 1970, les Églises et les membres du clergé (catholiques, protestants traditionnels ou évangélistes) sont entrés en relation de bien des façons avec les jeunes des mouvements contre- culturels. Dans le contexte du christianisme canadien des longues années 1960, ces efforts d’interaction avec les hippies mettent en lumière les changements culturels en cours au sein des principaux groupes confessionnels du pays, notamment l’écart de plus en plus marqué entre protestants traditionnels et évangélistes. Ces initiatives sont aussi importantes en ce sens qu’elles illustrent certains espaces frontières, c’est-à-dire les points de rencontre entre cultures. Au final, elles s’inscrivent dans le contexte plus large de l’engagement des Églises auprès des jeunes au cours de cette période

How Are ‘Barack Obama’ and ‘President Elect’ Differentially Stored in the Brain? An ERP Investigation on the Processing of Proper and Common Noun Pairs

BACKGROUND:One of the most debated issues in the cognitive neuroscience of language is whether distinct semantic domains are differentially represented in the brain. Clinical studies described several anomic dissociations with no clear neuroanatomical correlate. Neuroimaging studies have shown that memory retrieval is more demanding for proper than common nouns in that the former are purely arbitrary referential expressions. In this study a semantic relatedness paradigm was devised to investigate neural processing of proper and common nouns. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:780 words (arranged in pairs of Italian nouns/adjectives and the first/last names of well known persons) were presented. Half pairs were semantically related ("Woody Allen" or "social security"), while the others were not ("Sigmund Parodi" or "judicial cream"). All items were balanced for length, frequency, familiarity and semantic relatedness. Participants were to decide about the semantic relatedness of the two items in a pair. RTs and N400 data suggest that the task was more demanding for common nouns. The LORETA neural generators for the related-unrelated contrast (for proper names) included the left fusiform gyrus, right medial temporal gyrus, limbic and parahippocampal regions, inferior parietal and inferior frontal areas, which are thought to be involved in the conjoined processing a familiar face with the relevant episodic information. Person name was more emotional and sensory vivid than common noun semantic access. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE:When memory retrieval is not required, proper name access (conspecifics knowledge) is not more demanding. The neural generators of N400 to unrelated items (unknown persons and things) did not differ as a function of lexical class, thus suggesting that proper and common nouns are not treated differently as belonging to different grammatical classes

Assessment of the performance of CORDEX Regional Climate Models in Simulating Eastern Africa Rainfall

This study evaluates the ability of 10 regional climate models (RCMs) from the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) in simulating the characteristics of rainfall patterns over eastern Africa. The seasonal climatology, annual rainfall cycles, and interannual variability of RCM output have been assessed over three homogeneous subregions against a number of observational datasets. The ability of the RCMs in simulating large-scale global climate forcing signals is further assessed by compositing the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Indian Ocean dipole (IOD) events. It is found that most RCMs reasonably simulate the main features of the rainfall climatology over the three subregions and also reproduce the majority of the documented regional responses to ENSO and IOD forcings. At the same time the analysis shows significant biases in individual models depending on subregion and season; however, the ensemble mean has better agreement with observation than individual models. In general, the analysis herein demonstrates that the multimodel ensemble mean simulates eastern Africa rainfall adequately and can therefore be used for the assessment of future climate projections for the region

AI is a viable alternative to high throughput screening: a 318-target study

: High throughput screening (HTS) is routinely used to identify bioactive small molecules. This requires physical compounds, which limits coverage of accessible chemical space. Computational approaches combined with vast on-demand chemical libraries can access far greater chemical space, provided that the predictive accuracy is sufficient to identify useful molecules. Through the largest and most diverse virtual HTS campaign reported to date, comprising 318 individual projects, we demonstrate that our AtomNet® convolutional neural network successfully finds novel hits across every major therapeutic area and protein class. We address historical limitations of computational screening by demonstrating success for target proteins without known binders, high-quality X-ray crystal structures, or manual cherry-picking of compounds. We show that the molecules selected by the AtomNet® model are novel drug-like scaffolds rather than minor modifications to known bioactive compounds. Our empirical results suggest that computational methods can substantially replace HTS as the first step of small-molecule drug discovery