Discourse, justification and critique: towards a legitimate digital copyright regime?

Digitization and the internet have posed an acute economic challenge to rights holders in the cultural industries. Faced with a threat to their form of capital accumulation from copyright infringement, rights holders have used discourse strategically in order to try and legitimate and strengthen their position in the digital copyright debate with governments and media users. In so doing, they have appealed to general justificatory principles – about what is good, right, and just – that provide some scope for opposition and critique, as other groups contest their interpretation of these principles and the evidence used to support them. In this article, we address the relative lack of academic attention paid to the role of discourse in copyright debates by analysing user-directed marketing campaigns and submissions to UK government policy consultations. We show how legitimacy claims are justified and critiqued, and conclude that amid these debates rests some hope of achieving a more legitimate policy resolution to the copyright wars – or at least the possibility of beginning a more constructive dialogue

Neural Bases of Financial Decision Making: From Spikes to Large-Scale Brain Connectivity

The human brain is able to perceive and retrieve different pieces of information, to integrate them by weighing their relative importance, and to initiate informed actions. Therefore, we can see our brain as an extremely powerful information processing and prediction machine, allowing us to make complex financial decisions. From a neural perspective, decision making is investigated on different levels. While some neuroeconomists aim to understand the relationship between single-cell activity, utility, and choices, others focus on the joint activity of entire neuronal populations within a brain region, as well as the interaction of different brain regions in decision making. In this chapter, we aim to give an overview of several approaches to the investigation of neural activity and its relation to financial decision making. We start by outlining the basic principles of neural information processing and continue by presenting the most important methods applied in neuroeconomics. Then we discuss the crucial role of the reward system in mediating financial decision making. Finally, we describe a computational framework that provides a psychologically as well as neurobiologically plausible account of how decisions emerge in the brain

More than a century of biological control against invasive alien plants in South Africa: a synoptic view of what has been accomplished

Invasive alien plant species negatively affect agricultural production, degrade conservation areas, reduce water supplies, and increase the intensity of wild fires. Since 1913, biological control agents ie plant-feeding insects, mites, and fungal pathogens, have been deployed in South Africa to supplement other management practices (herbicides and mechanical controls) used against these invasive plant species. We do not describe the biological control agent species

Identifying polyglutamine protein species in situ that best predict neurodegeneration.

Polyglutamine (polyQ) stretches exceeding a threshold length confer a toxic function to proteins that contain them and cause at least nine neurological disorders. The basis for this toxicity threshold is unclear. Although polyQ expansions render proteins prone to aggregate into inclusion bodies, this may be a neuronal coping response to more toxic forms of polyQ. The exact structure of these more toxic forms is unknown. Here we show that the monoclonal antibody 3B5H10 recognizes a species of polyQ protein in situ that strongly predicts neuronal death. The epitope selectively appears among some of the many low-molecular-weight conformational states assumed by expanded polyQ and disappears in higher-molecular-weight aggregated forms, such as inclusion bodies. These results suggest that protein monomers and possibly small oligomers containing expanded polyQ stretches can adopt a conformation that is recognized by 3B5H10 and is toxic or closely related to a toxic species