David Stafford-Clark (1916-1999): seeing through a celebrity psychiatrist

This article uses the mass-media career of the British psychiatrist David Stafford-Clark (1916-1999) as a case study in the exercise of cultural authority by celebrity medical professionals in post-war Britain. Stafford-Clark rose to prominence in the mass media, particularly through his presenting work on medical and related topics for BBC TV and Radio, and was in the vanguard of psychiatrists and physicians who eroded professional edicts on anonymity. At the height of his career, he traded upon his celebrity status, and consequent cultural authority, to deliver mass media sermons on a variety of social, cultural, and political topics. Stafford-Clark tried to preserve his sense of personal and intellectual integrity by clinging to a belief that his authority in the public sphere was ultimately to be vindicated by his literary, intellectual, and spiritual significance. But as his credibility dwindled, he came to distrust the cultural intermediaries, such as broadcasters and publishers, who had supported him

Why Altered Carbon is not about the future – and nor is any other science fiction

Science fiction has a more important job to do – it allows us to see ourselves in a new light

Reflecting on science fiction

Sam Maggs, Hope Nicholson, Gavin Miller, and Cecil Castellucci respond to the prompt, "What has science fiction taught you about yourself?

Different strokes, smokes, for different folks: Naomi Mitchison's solution three

No abstract available

Review of: Nancy Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation

No abstract available

“Transsredizemnomorskaja Francija (ТРАНССРЕДИЗЕМНОМОРСКАЯ ФРАНЦИЯ)' (France and Algeria: Trans-Mediterranean society)

The colonization of Algeria had an important influence on French politics, culture and the economy during the nineteenth century. This article proposes examining France as a Trans-Mediterranean society characterized by both national and colonial elements. It attempts to question boundaries between nation-state and empire by focusing on the multiple and competing national imaginaries that often shaped understandings of France in an age of imperialism. Trans-Mediterranean France constituted one means of conceptualizing a national-imperial community and provides a framework for assessing French history as well as analyzing current issues relevant to identity politics and multiculturalism today

Engaging with a history of counselling, spirituality and faith in Scotland: a readers' theatre script

This paper presents an abbreviated version of a verbatim script developed from oral history interviews with individuals key to the development of counselling and psychotherapy in Scotland from 1960 to 2000. Earlier versions were used in workshops with counsellors and pastoral care practitioners to share counter-narratives of counselling and to provide opportunities for conversations about historical and contemporary relationships between faith, spirituality, counselling and psychotherapy. By presenting intertwined histories in a readers' theatre script, the narrative nature of lives lived in context was respected. By bringing oral histories into virtual dialogue with each other and with contemporary practitioners, whether through workshops or through publications, the interplay between individual, institutional and societal narratives remains visible and open to change

Recognizing and Curating Photo Albums via Event-Specific Image Importance

Automatic organization of personal photos is a problem with many real world ap- plications, and can be divided into two main tasks: recognizing the event type of the photo collection, and selecting interesting images from the collection. In this paper, we attempt to simultaneously solve both tasks: album-wise event recognition and image- wise importance prediction. We collected an album dataset with both event type labels and image importance labels, refined from an existing CUFED dataset. We propose a hybrid system consisting of three parts: A siamese network-based event-specific image importance prediction, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that recognizes the event type, and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-based sequence level event recognizer. We propose an iterative updating procedure for event type and image importance score prediction. We experimentally verified that image importance score prediction and event type recognition can each help the performance of the other.Comment: Accepted as oral in BMVC 201

Resistance-promoting effects of ependymoma treatment revealed through genomic analysis of multiple recurrences in a single patient

As in other brain tumors, multiple recurrences after complete resection and irradiation of supratentorial ependymoma are common and frequently result in patient death. This standard-of-care treatment was established in the pregenomic era without the ability to evaluate the effect that mutagenic therapies may exert on tumor evolution and in promoting resistance, recurrence, and death. We seized a rare opportunity to characterize treatment effects and the evolution of a single patient's ependymoma across four recurrences after different therapies. A combination of high-depth whole-genome and exome-based DNA sequencing of germline and tumor specimens, RNA sequencing of tumor specimens, and advanced computational analyses were used. Treatment with radiation and chemotherapies resulted in a substantial increase in mutational burden and diversification of the tumor subclonal architecture without eradication of the founding clone. Notable somatic alterations included a MEN1 driver, several epigenetic modifiers, and therapy-induced mutations that impacted multiple other cancer-relevant pathways and altered the neoantigen landscape. These genomic data provided new mechanistic insights into the genesis of ependymoma and pathways of resistance. They also revealed that radiation and chemotherapy were significant forces in shaping the increased subclonal complexity of each tumor recurrence while also failing to eradicate the founding clone. This raises the question of whether standard-of-care treatments have similar consequences in other patients with ependymoma and other types of brain tumors. If so, the perspective obtained by real-time genomic characterization of a tumor may be essential for making effective patient-specific and adaptive clinical decisions.</jats:p