Beyond "the Relationship between the Individual and Society": broadening and deepening relational thinking in group analysis

The question of ‘the relationship between the individual and society’ has troubled group analysis since its inception. This paper offers a reading of Foulkes that highlights the emergent, yet evanescent, psychosocial ontology in his writings, and argues for the development of a truly psychosocial group analysis, which moves beyond the individual/society dualism. It argues for a shift towards a language of relationality, and proposes new theoretical resources for such a move from relational sociology, relational psychoanalysis and the ‘matrixial thinking’ of Bracha Ettinger which would broaden and deepen group analytic understandings of relationality

Bodily relations and reciprocity in the art of Sonia Khurana

This article explores the significance of the ‘somatic’ and ‘ontological turn’ in locating the radical politics articulated in the contemporary performance, installation, video and digital art practices of New Delhi-based artist, Sonia Khurana (b. 1968). Since the late 1990s Khurana has fashioned a range of artworks that require new sorts of reciprocal and embodied relations with their viewers. While this line of art practice suggests the need for a primarily philosophical mode of inquiry into an art of the body, such affective relations need to be historicised also in relation to a discursive field of ‘difference’ and public expectations about the artist’s ethnic, gendered and national identity. Thus, this intimate, visceral and emotional field of inter- and intra-action is a novel contribution to recent transdisciplinary perspectives on the gendered, social and sentient body, that in turn prompts a wider debate on the ethics of cultural commentary and art historiography

Children and older adults exhibit distinct sub-optimal cost-benefit functions when preparing to move their eyes and hands

"© 2015 Gonzalez et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited"Numerous activities require an individual to respond quickly to the correct stimulus. The provision of advance information allows response priming but heightened responses can cause errors (responding too early or reacting to the wrong stimulus). Thus, a balance is required between the online cognitive mechanisms (inhibitory and anticipatory) used to prepare and execute a motor response at the appropriate time. We investigated the use of advance information in 71 participants across four different age groups: (i) children, (ii) young adults, (iii) middle-aged adults, and (iv) older adults. We implemented 'cued' and 'non-cued' conditions to assess age-related changes in saccadic and touch responses to targets in three movement conditions: (a) Eyes only; (b) Hands only; (c) Eyes and Hand. Children made less saccade errors compared to young adults, but they also exhibited longer response times in cued versus non-cued conditions. In contrast, older adults showed faster responses in cued conditions but exhibited more errors. The results indicate that young adults (18 -25 years) achieve an optimal balance between anticipation and execution. In contrast, children show benefits (few errors) and costs (slow responses) of good inhibition when preparing a motor response based on advance information; whilst older adults show the benefits and costs associated with a prospective response strategy (i.e., good anticipation)

Computational Indistinguishability between Quantum States and Its Cryptographic Application

We introduce a computational problem of distinguishing between two specific quantum states as a new cryptographic problem to design a quantum cryptographic scheme that is "secure" against any polynomial-time quantum adversary. Our problem, QSCDff, is to distinguish between two types of random coset states with a hidden permutation over the symmetric group of finite degree. This naturally generalizes the commonly-used distinction problem between two probability distributions in computational cryptography. As our major contribution, we show that QSCDff has three properties of cryptographic interest: (i) QSCDff has a trapdoor; (ii) the average-case hardness of QSCDff coincides with its worst-case hardness; and (iii) QSCDff is computationally at least as hard as the graph automorphism problem in the worst case. These cryptographic properties enable us to construct a quantum public-key cryptosystem, which is likely to withstand any chosen plaintext attack of a polynomial-time quantum adversary. We further discuss a generalization of QSCDff, called QSCDcyc, and introduce a multi-bit encryption scheme that relies on similar cryptographic properties of QSCDcyc.Comment: 24 pages, 2 figures. We improved presentation, and added more detail proofs and follow-up of recent wor

Microtubules gate tau condensation to spatially regulate microtubule functions.

Tau is an abundant microtubule-associated protein in neurons. Tau aggregation into insoluble fibrils is a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia1, yet the physiological state of tau molecules within cells remains unclear. Using single-molecule imaging, we directly observe that the microtubule lattice regulates reversible tau self-association, leading to localized, dynamic condensation of tau molecules on the microtubule surface. Tau condensates form selectively permissible barriers, spatially regulating the activity of microtubule-severing enzymes and the movement of molecular motors through their boundaries. We propose that reversible self-association of tau molecules, gated by the microtubule lattice, is an important mechanism of the biological functions of tau, and that oligomerization of tau is a common property shared between the physiological and disease-associated forms of the molecule

Bisphenol A exposure in Mexico City and risk of prematurity: a pilot nested case control study

Abstract Background Presence of Bisphenol A (BPA) has been documented worldwide in a variety of human biological samples. There is growing evidence that low level BPA exposure may impact placental tissue development and thyroid function in humans. The aim of this present pilot study was to determine urinary concentrations of BPA during the last trimester of pregnancy among a small subset of women in Mexico City, Mexico and relate these concentrations to risk of delivering prematurely. Methods A nested case-control subset of 60 participants in the Early Life Exposure in Mexico to ENvironmental Toxicants (ELEMENT) study in Mexico City, Mexico were selected based on delivering less than or equal to 37 weeks of gestation and greater than 37 weeks of gestation. Third trimester archived spot urine samples were analyzed by online solid phase extraction coupled with high performance liquid chromatography isotope dilution tandem mass spectrometry. Results BPA was detected in 80.0% (N = 48) of the urine samples; total concentrations ranged from < 0.4 μg/L to 6.7 μg/L; uncorrected geometric mean was 1.52 μg/L. The adjusted odds ratio of delivering less than or equal to 37 weeks in relation to specific gravity adjusted third trimester BPA concentration was 1.91 (95%CI 0.93, 3.91, p-value = 0.08). When cases were further restricted to births occurring prior to the 37th week (n = 12), the odds ratio for specific-gravity adjusted BPA was larger and statistically significant (p < 0.05). Conclusions This is the first study to document measurable levels of BPA in the urine of a population of Mexican women. This study also provides preliminary evidence, based on a single spot urine sample collected during the third trimester, that pregnant women who delivered less than or equal to 37 weeks of gestation and prematurely (< 37 weeks) had higher urinary concentrations of BPA compared to women delivering after 37 weeks.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78251/1/1476-069X-9-62.xmlhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78251/2/1476-069X-9-62.pdfPeer Reviewe

Degradation levels of continuous speech affect neural speech tracking and alpha power differently

Making sense of a poor auditory signal can pose a challenge. Previous attempts to quantify speech intelligibility in neural terms have usually focused on one of two measures, namely low-frequency speech-brain synchronization or alpha power modulations. However, reports have been mixed concerning the modulation of these measures, an issue aggravated by the fact that they have normally been studied separately. We present two MEG studies analyzing both measures. In study 1, participants listened to unimodal auditory speech with three different levels of degradation (original, 7-channel and 3-channel vocoding). Intelligibility declined with declining clarity, but speech was still intelligible to some extent even for the lowest clarity level (3-channel vocoding). Low-frequency (1-7 Hz) speech tracking suggested a u-shaped relationship with strongest effects for the medium degraded speech (7-channel) in bilateral auditory and left frontal regions. To follow up on this finding, we implemented three additional vocoding levels (5-channel, 2-channel, 1-channel) in a second MEG study. Using this wider range of degradation, the speech-brain synchronization showed a similar pattern as in study 1 but further showed that when speech becomes unintelligible, synchronization declines again. The relationship differed for alpha power, which continued to decrease across vocoding levels reaching a floor effect for 5-channel vocoding. Predicting subjective intelligibility based on models either combining both measures or each measure alone, showed superiority of the combined model. Our findings underline that speech tracking and alpha power are modified differently by the degree of degradation of continuous speech but together contribute to the subjective speech understanding

A deimmunised form of the ribotoxin, α-sarcin, lacking CD4+ T cell epitopes and its use as an immunotoxin warhead

Fungal ribotoxins that block protein synthesis can be useful warheads in the context of a targeted immunotoxin. α-Sarcin is a small (17 kDa) fungal ribonuclease produced by Aspergillus giganteus that functions by catalytically cleaving a single phosphodiester bond in the sarcin–ricin loop of the large ribosomal subunit, thus making the ribosome unrecognisable to elongation factors and leading to inhibition of protein synthesis. Peptide mapping using an ex vivo human T cell assay determined that α-sarcin contained two T cell epitopes; one in the N-terminal 20 amino acids and the other in the C-terminal 20 amino acids. Various mutations were tested individually within each epitope and then in combination to isolate deimmunised α-sarcin variants that had the desired properties of silencing T cell epitopes and retention of the ability to inhibit protein synthesis (equivalent to wild-type, WT α-sarcin). A deimmunised variant (D9T/Q142T) demonstrated a complete lack of T cell activation in in vitro whole protein human T cell assays using peripheral blood mononuclear cells from donors with diverse HLA allotypes. Generation of an immunotoxin by fusion of the D9T/Q142T variant to a single-chain Fv targeting Her2 demonstrated potent cell killing equivalent to a fusion protein comprising the WT α-sarcin. These results represent the first fungal ribotoxin to be deimmunised with the potential to construct a new generation of deimmunised immunotoxin therapeutics