Genus and Genre: The Old French Verse Roman d'Alexandre, Alexander and Dindimus, and MS Bodl. 264

This essay argues that genres as positive entities are fantasies that texts project, and proposes to study how such projection occurs. Drawing on Derrida’s account of genre as law, it explores how Agamben’s work on genus might extend into poetics. Through content, form, and treatment of the philosophical question of the limits of human being, three medieval artefacts, each foregrounding Alexander the Great, position themselves relative to law, and therefore to genre. By invoking two genres (roman antique and chanson de geste) without conforming to either, the Old French Roman d’Alexandre carves out a position at once subject to and exempted from the law. Contrastingly, the Middle English Alexander and Dindimus claims exemplary obedience to the law as the perfect alliterative debate poem. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 264, treats Alexander and Dindimus as an interpolation completing the Roman d’Alexandre, adding a French prose Marco Polo and a program of illustrations. Bodl. 264 presents itself as supplementing the law when it overrides textual, formal, and linguistic boundaries in the name of Christian expansionism. In each artefact, relations to poetic laws interact with political and philosophical stances, inviting different audience responses

Form and/as mode of existence

Part of a special number, “Category Crossings: Bruno Latour and Medieval Modes of Existence”. This essay focuses on two of the 'modes of existence' posited by Latour in his recent An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME). The essay compares and contrasts the modes of REF and FIC with a famous digression reflecting on historiographical practice in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum (1125 and after, Latin prose). I argue that AIME offers analytical rigour to medievalists’ discussions of the notorious overlap between ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ in this case (and by implication, in other cases); I also argue that William’s bold use of FIC to advance REF is in the spirit of AIME’s project, but goes further in trusting FIC than AIME is always willing to do. Thus, an instance of medieval historiography leads the way in overcoming a residual Modern suspicion of FIC. The essay also argues that, although AIME’s restriction of crossings to two modes is useful for defining each individual mode, in practice more than two are often found ‘plaited’. I make this argument through a discussion of the practice of using brackets to mark verse form and rhyme scheme in some medieval manuscripts: an example of the TEC.FIC.REF plaiting. Finally, I argue for a development of the multimodal possibilities of ‘form’, which AIME flags but does not pursue. I suggest that FOR might be another ‘mode of existence’ to add to the list

GeneRank: Using search engine technology for the analysis of microarray experiments

Copyright @ 2005 Morrison et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Background: Interpretation of simple microarray experiments is usually based on the fold-change of gene expression between a reference and a "treated" sample where the treatment can be of many types from drug exposure to genetic variation. Interpretation of the results usually combines lists of differentially expressed genes with previous knowledge about their biological function. Here we evaluate a method – based on the PageRank algorithm employed by the popular search engine Google – that tries to automate some of this procedure to generate prioritized gene lists by exploiting biological background information. Results: GeneRank is an intuitive modification of PageRank that maintains many of its mathematical properties. It combines gene expression information with a network structure derived from gene annotations (gene ontologies) or expression profile correlations. Using both simulated and real data we find that the algorithm offers an improved ranking of genes compared to pure expression change rankings. Conclusion: Our modification of the PageRank algorithm provides an alternative method of evaluating microarray experimental results which combines prior knowledge about the underlying network. GeneRank offers an improvement compared to assessing the importance of a gene based on its experimentally observed fold-change alone and may be used as a basis for further analytical developments

Ami et Amile and Jean-Luc Nancy: Friendship vs Community?

Contributors to Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature consider the multiplicity and instability of identity in medieval French literature, examining the ways in which literary identity can be created and re-created, adopted, refused, imposed, and self-imposed. Moreover, it is possible to take one’s place in a group while remaining foreign to it. Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal provides the perfect example of the latter. The tale opens with Perceval hunting alone in the forest, absorbed in his own pursuits, world, and thoughts. His “alone-ness” and self-absorption are evident as he moves toward an integration into a society from which he emerges both accepted and yet even more “different.” The ability to exist simultaneously inside and outside of a community serves as the focal point for the volume, which illustrates the breadth of perspectives from which one may view the “Other Within.” The chapters study identity through a wide range of lenses, from marginal characters to gender to questions of religious difference and of voice and naming. The works analyzed span genres—chanson de geste, romance, lyric poetry, hagiography—and historical periods, ranging from the twelfth century to the late Middle Ages. In so doing, they highlight the fluidity and complexity of identity in medieval French texts, underscoring both the richness of the literature and its engagement with questions that are at once more and less modern than they may initially appear

The written word: literacy across languages

Discusses the various ways in which different languages are used in British (mainly English) manuscripts, 10th to 15th centuries, emphasizing fluidity across modern linguistic boundaries and the essentially comparative nature of literacy in a context where there were no literate monoglots. One section builds on theories of diglossia to address how a language might at times be presented as a prestigious 'book language' and at others as a 'non-book language' accessing different kinds of affectivity and experience. Another discusses how medieval knowledge was 'found in translation', such that transmission between languages was foundational to knowledge discourses. According to the Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs, the Middle Ages was a Golden Age when translators could ‘omit passages and insert commentaries to an extent never again equalled in the history of translation in the West’

A scoping review of ‘think-family’ approaches in healthcare

ABSTRACT Background ‘Think-family’ child health approaches treat child and parent/carer health as inter-related. They are promoted within health policy internationally (also called ‘family paediatrics’ or ‘whole-family’, ‘family-centred’ approaches or ‘child-centred’ approaches within adult services). Methods We reviewed publications of think-family interventions. We developed a typology of these interventions using thematic analysis of data extracted from the included studies. Results We included 62 studies (60% USA and 18% UK); 45/62 (73%) treated the parent as patient, helping the child by addressing parental mental health, substance and alcohol misuse and/or domestic violence. Our typology details three common mechanisms of change in relevant interventions: screening, health promotion and developing relationships (inter-professional and parent-professional). Conclusions Policy-makers, practitioners and researchers can use our typology to develop and evaluate think-family approaches within healthcare. Strong relationships between parents and professionals are key in think-family approaches and should be considered in service design. Although helping the child through the parent may be a good place to start for service development, care is needed to ensure parental need does not eclipse child need. Strategies that reach out to the parent behind the child (child as patient) and which work simultaneously with parent and child warrant attention

Combinatorial Bounds and Characterizations of Splitting Authentication Codes

We present several generalizations of results for splitting authentication codes by studying the aspect of multi-fold security. As the two primary results, we prove a combinatorial lower bound on the number of encoding rules and a combinatorial characterization of optimal splitting authentication codes that are multi-fold secure against spoofing attacks. The characterization is based on a new type of combinatorial designs, which we introduce and for which basic necessary conditions are given regarding their existence.Comment: 13 pages; to appear in "Cryptography and Communications

Naked mole-rats have distinctive cardiometabolic and genetic adaptations to their underground low-oxygen lifestyles.

The naked mole-rat Heterocephalus glaber is a eusocial mammal exhibiting extreme longevity (37-year lifespan), extraordinary resistance to hypoxia and absence of cardiovascular disease. To identify the mechanisms behind these exceptional traits, metabolomics and RNAseq of cardiac tissue from naked mole-rats was compared to other African mole-rat genera (Cape, Cape dune, Common, Natal, Mahali, Highveld and Damaraland mole-rats) and evolutionarily divergent mammals (Hottentot golden mole and C57/BL6 mouse). We identify metabolic and genetic adaptations unique to naked mole-rats including elevated glycogen, thus enabling glycolytic ATP generation during cardiac ischemia. Elevated normoxic expression of HIF-1α is observed while downstream hypoxia responsive-genes are down-regulated, suggesting adaptation to low oxygen environments. Naked mole-rat hearts show reduced succinate levels during ischemia compared to C57/BL6 mouse and negligible tissue damage following ischemia-reperfusion injury. These evolutionary traits reflect adaptation to a unique hypoxic and eusocial lifestyle that collectively may contribute to their longevity and health span