Culture, government, and spatiality: re-assessing the 'Foucault effect' in cultural-policy studies

This article critically discusses the reconceptualization of culture and governmentality in recent Australian ‘cultural–policy studies’. It argues that the further development of this conceptualization requires a more careful consideration of the complex relations between culture, power and the different spatialities of social practices. The assumptions of this literature regarding social-democratic public institutions and the nation-state are critically addressed in the light of contemporary processes of globalization. It is argued that the use made of Foucault in this paradigm privileges a model of disciplinary power which is dependent on a particular spatialization of social subjects and technologies of the self. As a result, an uncritical application of this model to all cultural practices supports a far too coherent image of practices of ‘government’ in producing sought-after subject-effects. It is suggested that the different articulations of spatio-temporal presence and absence in cultural technologies require a less totalizing understanding of the forms of power exercised through governmental practices

Structural optimization incorporating centrifugal and Coriolis effects

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/76888/1/AIAA-10798-921.pd

Localization of a 64-kDa phosphoprotein in the lumen between the outer and inner envelopes of pea chloroplasts

The identification and localization of a marker protein for the intermembrane space between the outer and inner chloroplast envelopes is described. This 64-kDa protein is very rapidly labeled by [γ-32P]ATP at very low (30 nM) ATP concentrations and the phosphoryl group exhibits a high turnover rate. It was possible to establish the presence of the 64-kDa protein in this plastid compartment by using different chloroplast envelope separation and isolation techniques. In addition comparison of labeling kinetics by intact and hypotonically lysed pea chloroplasts support the localization of the 64-kDa protein in the intermembrane space. The 64-kDa protein was present and could be labeled in mixed envelope membranes isolated from hypotonically lysed plastids. Mixed envelope membranes incorporated high amounts of 32P from [γ-32P]ATP into the 64-kDa protein, whereas separated outer and inner envelope membranes did not show significant phosphorylation of this protein. Water/Triton X-114 phase partitioning demonstrated that the 64-kDa protein is a hydrophilic polypeptide. These findings suggest that the 64-kDa protein is a soluble protein trapped in the space between the inner and outer envelope membranes. After sonication of mixed envelope membranes, the 64-kDa protein was no longer present in the membrane fraction, but could be found in the supernatant after a 110000 × g centrifugation

Dynamical modelling of the elliptical galaxy NGC 2974

In this paper we analyse the relations between a previously described oblate Jaffe model for an ellipsoidal galaxy and the observed quantities for NGC 2974, and obtain the length and velocity scales for a relevant elliptical galaxy model. We then derive the finite total mass of the model from these scales, and finally find a good fit of an isotropic oblate Jaffe model by using the Gauss-Hermite fit parameters and the observed ellipticity of the galaxy NGC 2974. The model is also used to predict the total luminous mass of NGC 2974, assuming that the influence of dark matter in this galaxy on the image, ellipticity and Gauss-Hermite fit parameters of this galaxy is negligible within the central region, of radius $0.5R_{\rm e}.$Comment: 7 figure

Culture, geography, and the arts of government

This paper endeavors to prise open the theoretical closure of the conceptualization of culture in contemporary human geography. Foucault's later work on government provides the basis for a useable definition of culture as an object of analysis which avoids problems inherent in abstract, generalizing and expansive notions of culture. The emergence of this Foucauldian approach in cultural studies is discussed, and the distinctive conceptualization of the relations between culture and power that it implies are elaborated. This re-conceptualization informs a critical project of tracking the institutional formation of the cultural and the deployment of distinctively cultural forms of regulation into the fabric of modern social life. It is argued that the culture-and-government approach needs to be supplemented by a more sustained consideration of the spatiality and scale of power-relations. It is also suggested that this approach might through into new perspective the dynamics behind geography's own cultural turn

Saartjie Baartman, Nelisiwe Xaba, and me: the politics of looking at South African bodies

Dance Artist/Choreographer Nelisiwe Xaba’s They Look at Me and That Is All They Think (2006) ‘refers to the story of Sara[tjie] Baartman […] the “Hottentot Venus”’ (2006. 9th Jomba! Contemporary dance experience 2006 programme, p. 7) who was taken from her homeland South Africa, and exhibited in Europe in the nineteenth century. After Baartman died in 1815, her remains were displayed in a museum in Paris until 1982. Xaba parallels the story of Baartman to her own experience of performing in Europe as a black South African woman. This article considers how They Look at Me and That Is All They Think exposes the politics surrounding the act of looking at a particular racial and gendered body in both the historical and contemporary context, and how the concept and articulation of the ‘superior’ European subject was dependent on the classification of Baartman, and other black Africans, as exotic others. In my practice-based research project How I Chased a Rainbow And Bruised My Knee (2007), which was a choreographic response to Xaba’s work, I theatricalize my identity as a white South African woman to make visible whiteness, its associated privilege, and how it is dependent on the representation of a particular type of blackness

Data hosting infrastructure for primary biodiversity data

© The Author(s), 2011. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in BMC Bioinformatics 12 Suppl. 15 (2011): S5, doi:10.1186/1471-2105-12-S15-S5.Today, an unprecedented volume of primary biodiversity data are being generated worldwide, yet significant amounts of these data have been and will continue to be lost after the conclusion of the projects tasked with collecting them. To get the most value out of these data it is imperative to seek a solution whereby these data are rescued, archived and made available to the biodiversity community. To this end, the biodiversity informatics community requires investment in processes and infrastructure to mitigate data loss and provide solutions for long-term hosting and sharing of biodiversity data. We review the current state of biodiversity data hosting and investigate the technological and sociological barriers to proper data management. We further explore the rescuing and re-hosting of legacy data, the state of existing toolsets and propose a future direction for the development of new discovery tools. We also explore the role of data standards and licensing in the context of data hosting and preservation. We provide five recommendations for the biodiversity community that will foster better data preservation and access: (1) encourage the community's use of data standards, (2) promote the public domain licensing of data, (3) establish a community of those involved in data hosting and archival, (4) establish hosting centers for biodiversity data, and (5) develop tools for data discovery. The community's adoption of standards and development of tools to enable data discovery is essential to sustainable data preservation. Furthermore, the increased adoption of open content licensing, the establishment of data hosting infrastructure and the creation of a data hosting and archiving community are all necessary steps towards the community ensuring that data archival policies become standardized

Entrepreneurial sons, patriarchy and the Colonels' experiment in Thessaly, rural Greece

Existing studies within the field of institutional entrepreneurship explore how entrepreneurs influence change in economic institutions. This paper turns the attention of scholarly inquiry on the antecedents of deinstitutionalization and more specifically, the influence of entrepreneurship in shaping social institutions such as patriarchy. The paper draws from the findings of ethnographic work in two Greek lowland village communities during the military Dictatorship (1967–1974). Paradoxically this era associated with the spread of mechanization, cheap credit, revaluation of labour and clear means-ends relations, signalled entrepreneurial sons’ individuated dissent and activism who were now able to question the Patriarch’s authority, recognize opportunities and act as unintentional agents of deinstitutionalization. A ‘different’ model of institutional change is presented here, where politics intersects with entrepreneurs, in changing social institutions. This model discusses the external drivers of institutional atrophy and how handling dissensus (and its varieties over historical time) is instrumental in enabling institutional entrepreneurship

Genome-wide association scan meta-analysis identifies three Loci influencing adiposity and fat distribution.

To identify genetic loci influencing central obesity and fat distribution, we performed a meta-analysis of 16 genome-wide association studies (GWAS, N = 38,580) informative for adult waist circumference (WC) and waist-hip ratio (WHR). We selected 26 SNPs for follow-up, for which the evidence of association with measures of central adiposity (WC and/or WHR) was strong and disproportionate to that for overall adiposity or height. Follow-up studies in a maximum of 70,689 individuals identified two loci strongly associated with measures of central adiposity; these map near TFAP2B (WC, P = 1.9x10(-11)) and MSRA (WC, P = 8.9x10(-9)). A third locus, near LYPLAL1, was associated with WHR in women only (P = 2.6x10(-8)). The variants near TFAP2B appear to influence central adiposity through an effect on overall obesity/fat-mass, whereas LYPLAL1 displays a strong female-only association with fat distribution. By focusing on anthropometric measures of central obesity and fat distribution, we have identified three loci implicated in the regulation of human adiposity

Long-term Psychological and Occupational Effects of Providing Hospital Healthcare during SARS Outbreak

TOC Summary Line: Healthcare workers in hospitals affected by SARS experience increased psychological stress 1–2 years after the outbreak