A Very British Modernism? A review of Hugh Wood, Staking out the Territory and Other Writings on Music

Review articl

Thomas Adès, The Exterminating Angel, Haus für Mozart, Salzburg

The Salzburg Festival publicity office knew that it had a major musical event on its hands. Before the premiere of Thomas Adès's The Exterminating Angel on 28 July 2016, they held a reception for the world's press on a rooftop balcony overlooking the old town (which, in the name of investigative journalism, your intrepid TEMPO correspondent attended). The procession from such genteel surroundings and through the bustling Hofstallgasse into the auditorium, in which bells were already chiming in the orchestral pit and sheep were standing patiently on stage, enacted one of the central themes of the opera: that of the passage from bourgeois respectability (and, let's be frank, privilege) into a world that is less predictable, less explicable

Madness, Resistance, and Representation in Contemporary British and Irish Theatre

This thesis questions how theatre can act as a site of resistance against the political structures of madness. It analyzes a variety of plays from the past 25 years of British and Irish theatre in order to discern what modes of resistance are possible, and the conceptual lines upon which they follow. It questions how these modes of resistance are imbibed in the representation of madness. It discerns what way these modes relate specifically to the theatrical, and what it is the theatrical specifically has to offer these conceptualizations. It achieves this through a close textual and performative analysis of the selected plays, interrogating these plays from various theoretical perspectives. It follows and explores different conceptualizations across both political and ethical lay lines, looking at what composes the theatrical practical critique, how theatre can alter and play with space, how theatre capacitate the act of witnessing, and the possibility of re-invigorating the ethical encounter through theatrical means. It achieves this through a critical engagement with thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. Engaging with the heterogeneity of madness, it covers a variety of madness’s different attributes and logics, including: the constitution and institutional structures of the contemporary asylum; the cultural idioms behind hallucination; the means by which suicide is apprehended and approached; how testimony of the mad person is interpreted and encountered.AHR

Thomas Ades's 'The Exterminating Angel'

Thomas Adès's third opera, The Exterminating Angel, is based closely upon Luis Buñuel's 1962 film El ángel exterminador, in which the hosts and guests at a high-society dinner party find themselves inexplicably unable to leave the dining room. Initial critical response to the opera too often focused on superficial similarities and discrepancies between the two works at the expense of attending to the specifically musical ways in which Adès presented the drama. This article explores the role that repetition plays in the opera, and in particular how repetitions serve both as a means of critiquing bourgeois sensibilities and as a representation of (loss of) will. I conclude by drawing on the work of Deleuze in order to situate the climax of the opera against the notion of the eternal return, highlighting how the music articulates the dramatic failure of the characters to escape

Preservation of Ranking Order in the Expression of Human Housekeeping Genes

Housekeeping (HK) genes fulfill the basic needs for a cell to survive and function properly. Their ubiquitous expression, originally thought to be constant, can vary from tissue to tissue, but this variation remains largely uncharacterized and it could not be explained by previously identified properties of HK genes such as short gene length and high GC content. By analyzing microarray expression data for human genes, we uncovered a previously unnoted characteristic of HK gene expression, namely that the ranking order of their expression levels tends to be preserved from one tissue to another. Further analysis by tensor product decomposition and pathway stratification identified three main factors of the observed ranking preservation, namely that, compared to those of non-HK (NHK) genes, the expression levels of HK genes show a greater degree of dispersion (less overlap), stableness (a smaller variation in expression between tissues), and correlation of expression. Our results shed light on regulatory mechanisms of HK gene expression that are probably different for different HK genes or pathways, but are consistent and coordinated in different tissues

A Unified Representation of Gas-Phase Element Depletions in the Interstellar Medium

A study of gas-phase element abundances reported in the literature for 17 different elements sampled over 243 sight lines in the local part of our Galaxy reveals that the depletions into solid form (dust grains) are extremely well characterized by trends that employ only three kinds of parameters. One is an index that describes the overall level of depletion applicable to the gas in any particular sight line, and the other two represent linear coefficients that describe how to derive each element's depletion from this sight-line parameter. The information from this study reveals the relative proportions of different elements that are incorporated into dust at different stages of grain growth. An extremely simple scheme is proposed for deriving the dust contents and metallicities of absorption-line systems that are seen in the spectra of distant quasars or the optical afterglows of gamma-ray bursts. Contrary to presently accepted thinking, the elements sulfur and krypton appear to show measurable changes in their depletions as the general levels of depletions of other elements increase, although more data are needed to ascertain whether or not these findings truly compelling. Nitrogen appears to show no such increase. The incorporation of oxygen into solid form in the densest gas regions far exceeds the amounts that can take the form of silicates or metallic oxides; this conclusion is based on differential measurements of depletion and thus is unaffected by uncertainties in the solar abundance reference scale.Comment: 166 pages, 21 figures, pages 116-166 contain detailed tabulations that may not be of interest to most readers. Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa

Elective surgery cancellations due to the COVID-19 pandemic: global predictive modelling to inform surgical recovery plans.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted routine hospital services globally. This study estimated the total number of adult elective operations that would be cancelled worldwide during the 12 weeks of peak disruption due to COVID-19. METHODS: A global expert response study was conducted to elicit projections for the proportion of elective surgery that would be cancelled or postponed during the 12 weeks of peak disruption. A Bayesian β-regression model was used to estimate 12-week cancellation rates for 190 countries. Elective surgical case-mix data, stratified by specialty and indication (surgery for cancer versus benign disease), were determined. This case mix was applied to country-level surgical volumes. The 12-week cancellation rates were then applied to these figures to calculate the total number of cancelled operations. RESULTS: The best estimate was that 28 404 603 operations would be cancelled or postponed during the peak 12 weeks of disruption due to COVID-19 (2 367 050 operations per week). Most would be operations for benign disease (90·2 per cent, 25 638 922 of 28 404 603). The overall 12-week cancellation rate would be 72·3 per cent. Globally, 81·7 per cent of operations for benign conditions (25 638 922 of 31 378 062), 37·7 per cent of cancer operations (2 324 070 of 6 162 311) and 25·4 per cent of elective caesarean sections (441 611 of 1 735 483) would be cancelled or postponed. If countries increased their normal surgical volume by 20 per cent after the pandemic, it would take a median of 45 weeks to clear the backlog of operations resulting from COVID-19 disruption. CONCLUSION: A very large number of operations will be cancelled or postponed owing to disruption caused by COVID-19. Governments should mitigate against this major burden on patients by developing recovery plans and implementing strategies to restore surgical activity safely

Keratan sulfate, a complex glycosaminoglycan with unique functional capability

From an evolutionary perspective keratan sulfate (KS) is the newest glycosaminoglycan (GAG) but the least understood. KS is a sophisticated molecule with a diverse structure, and unique functional roles continue to be uncovered for this GAG. The cornea is the richest tissue source of KS in the human body but the central and peripheral nervous systems also contain significant levels of KS and a diverse range of KS-proteoglycans with essential functional roles. KS also displays important cell regulatory properties in epithelial and mesenchymal tissues and in bone and in tumor development of diagnostic and prognostic utility. Corneal KS-I displays variable degrees of sulfation along the KS chain ranging from non-sulfated polylactosamine, mono-sulfated and disulfated disaccharide regions. Skeletal KS-II is almost completely sulfated consisting of disulfated disaccharides interrupted by occasional mono-sulfated N-acetyllactosamine residues. KS-III also contains highly sulfated KS disaccharides but differs from KS-I and KS-II through 2-O-mannose linkage to serine or threonine core protein residues on proteoglycans such as phosphacan and abakan in brain tissue. Historically, the major emphasis on the biology of KS has focused on its sulfated regions for good reason. The sulfation motifs on KS convey important molecular recognition information and direct cell behavior through a number of interactive proteins. Emerging evidence also suggest functional roles for the poly-N-acetyllactosamine regions of KS requiring further investigation. Thus further research is warranted to better understand the complexities of KS

Genome-wide association study of thyroid-stimulating hormone highlights new genes, pathways and associations with thyroid disease

Thyroid hormones play a critical role in regulation of multiple physiological functions and thyroid dysfunction is associated with substantial morbidity. Here, we use electronic health records to undertake a genome-wide association study of thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) levels, with a total sample size of 247,107. We identify 158 novel genetic associations, more than doubling the number of known associations with TSH, and implicate 112 putative causal genes, of which 76 are not previously implicated. A polygenic score for TSH is associated with TSH levels in African, South Asian, East Asian, Middle Eastern and admixed American ancestries, and associated with hypothyroidism and other thyroid disease in South Asians. In Europeans, the TSH polygenic score is associated with thyroid disease, including thyroid cancer and age-of-onset of hypothyroidism and hyperthyroidism. We develop pathway-specific genetic risk scores for TSH levels and use these in phenome-wide association studies to identify potential consequences of pathway perturbation. Together, these findings demonstrate the potential utility of genetic associations to inform future therapeutics and risk prediction for thyroid diseases