Mimesis stories: composing new nature music for the shakuhachi

Nature is a widespread theme in much new music for the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute). This article explores the significance of such music within the contemporary shakuhachi scene, as the instrument travels internationally and so becomes rooted in landscapes outside Japan, taking on the voices of new creatures and natural phenomena. The article tells the stories of five compositions and one arrangement by non-Japanese composers, first to credit composers’ varied and personal responses to this common concern and, second, to discern broad, culturally syncretic traditions of nature mimesis and other, more abstract, ideas about the naturalness of sounds and creative processes (which I call musical naturalism). Setting these personal stories and longer histories side by side reveals that composition creates composers (as much as the other way around). Thus it hints at much broader terrain: the refashioning of human nature at the confluence between cosmopolitan cultural circulations and contemporary encounters with the more-than-human world

Review Essay: Biopolitics 2.0 – Reclaiming the Power of Life in the Anthropocene

Biopolitics was once the preserve of critical Foucauldian-influenced theorists. This is no longer the case. The rise of new materialisms, networked and object-oriented ontologies and demands for the ‘renaturalization of politics’ (Grosz, 2011; Sharp, 2011) have turned the political into the biopolitical in much of radical contemporary political theory. Here, the biopolitical is often in tension with the Foucauldian discourses of the last few decades, affirming alternative possibilities rather than merely critiquing regimes of power (Malabou, 2008; Kirby, 2011; Taussig, 2018). One factor in this shift has been the impact of anthropogenic climate change and global warming on the contemporary political imagination, increasingly refracted through conceptualizations of the Anthropocene (Tsing, 2015; Cohen et al, 2016; Chandler, 2018). A second factor has been that the life sciences no longer appear to support understandings of deterministic differences but rather to cast evolution in sympoietic and entangled ways, making biology appear as no longer essentialising but as increasingly importable into politics, in ways which disrupt modernist or liberal conceptions of the culture/nature divide (Haraway, 2016). Two important but very different engagements, which reflect these affirmative readings of biopolitics, are reviewed here, from the fields of postcolonial literature and gender and race in international politics

Nigerian scam e-mails and the charms of capital

So-called '419' or 'advance-fee' e-mail frauds have proved remarkably successful. Global losses to these scams are believed to run to billions of dollars. Although it can be assumed that the promise of personal gain which these e-mails hold out is part of what motivates victims, there is more than greed at issue here. How is it that the seemingly incredible offers given in these unsolicited messages can find an audience willing to treat them as credible? The essay offers a speculative thesis in answer to this question. Firstly, it is argued, these scams are adept at exploiting common presuppositions in British and American culture regarding Africa and the relationships that are assumed to exist between their nations and those in the global south. Secondly, part of the appeal of these e-mails lies in the fact that they appear to reveal the processes by which wealth is created and distributed in the global economy. They thus speak to their readers’ attempts to map or conceptualise the otherwise inscrutable processes of that economy. In the conclusion the essay looks at the contradictions in the official state response to this phenomena

Counterparts: Clothing, value and the sites of otherness in Panapompom ethnographic encounters

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Anthropological Forum, 18(1), 17-35, 2008 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00664670701858927.Panapompom people living in the western Louisiade Archipelago of Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea, see their clothes as indices of their perceived poverty. ‘Development’ as a valued form of social life appears as images that attach only loosely to the people employing them. They nevertheless hold Panapompom people to account as subjects to a voice and gaze that is located in the imagery they strive to present: their clothes. This predicament strains anthropological approaches to the study of Melanesia that subsist on strict alterity, because native self‐judgments are located ‘at home’ for the ethnographer. In this article, I develop the notion of the counterpart as a means to explore these forms of postcolonial oppression and their implications for the ethnographic encounter

New evidence on Allyn Young's style and influence as a teacher

This paper publishes the hitherto unpublished correspondence between Allyn Abbott Young's biographer Charles Blitch and 17 of Young's former students or associates. Together with related biographical and archival material, the paper shows the way in which this adds to our knowledge of Young's considerable influence as a teacher upon some of the twentieth century's greatest economists. The correspondents are as follows: James W Angell, Colin Clark, Arthur H Cole, Lauchlin Currie, Melvin G de Chazeau, Eleanor Lansing Dulles, Howard S Ellis, Frank W Fetter, Earl J Hamilton, Seymour S Harris, Richard S Howey, Nicholas Kaldor, Melvin M Knight, Bertil Ohlin, Geoffrey Shepherd, Overton H Taylor, and Gilbert Walker

Prematurity and respiratory outcomes program (PROP): Study protocol of a prospective multicenter study of respiratory outcomes of preterm infants in the United States

Background With improved survival rates, short- and long-term respiratory complications of premature birth are increasing, adding significantly to financial and health burdens in the United States. In response, in May 2010, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) funded a 5-year $18.5 million research initiative to ultimately improve strategies for managing the respiratory complications of preterm and low birth weight infants. Using a collaborative, multi-disciplinary structure, the resulting Prematurity and Respiratory Outcomes Program (PROP) seeks to understand factors that correlate with future risk for respiratory morbidity. Methods/Design The PROP is an observational prospective cohort study performed by a consortium of six clinical centers (incorporating tertiary neonatal intensive care units [NICU] at 13 sites) and a data-coordinating center working in collaboration with the NHLBI. Each clinical center contributes subjects to the study, enrolling infants with gestational ages 23 0/7 to 28 6/7 weeks with an anticipated target of 750 survivors at 36 weeks post-menstrual age. In addition, each center brings specific areas of scientific focus to the Program. The primary study hypothesis is that in survivors of extreme prematurity specific biologic, physiologic and clinical data predicts respiratory morbidity between discharge and 1 year corrected age. Analytic statistical methodology includes model-based and non-model-based analyses, descriptive analyses and generalized linear mixed models. Discussion PROP incorporates aspects of NICU care to develop objective biomarkers and outcome measures of respiratory morbidity in the <29 week gestation population beyond just the NICU hospitalization, thereby leading to novel understanding of the nature and natural history of neonatal lung disease and of potential mechanistic and therapeutic targets in at-risk subjects

Relationships between Specific Airway Resistance and Forced Expiratory Flows in Asthmatic Children

. The first aim was to assess the relationships between forced expiratory flows and sRaw in a large group of asthmatic children in a transversal study. We then performed a longitudinal study in order to determine whether sRaw of preschool children could predict subsequent impairment of forced expiratory flows at school age.Pulmonary function tests (sRaw and forced expiratory flows) of 2193 asthmatic children were selected for a transversal analysis, while 365 children were retrospectively selected for longitudinal assessment from preschool to school age. (% predicted) (−0.09, 95% CI, −0.20 to 0). and could be used in preschool children to predict subsequent mild airflow limitation

Adipocytes disrupt the translational programme of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia to favour tumour survival and persistence

The specific niche adaptations that facilitate primary disease and Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (ALL) survival after induction chemotherapy remain unclear. Here, we show that Bone Marrow (BM) adipocytes dynamically evolve during ALL pathogenesis and therapy, transitioning from cellular depletion in the primary leukaemia niche to a fully reconstituted state upon remission induction. Functionally, adipocyte niches elicit a fate switch in ALL cells towards slow-proliferation and cellular quiescence, highlighting the critical contribution of the adipocyte dynamic to disease establishment and chemotherapy resistance. Mechanistically, adipocyte niche interaction targets posttranscriptional networks and suppresses protein biosynthesis in ALL cells. Treatment with general control nonderepressible 2 inhibitor (GCN2ib) alleviates adipocyte-mediated translational repression and rescues ALL cell quiescence thereby significantly reducing the cytoprotective effect of adipocytes against chemotherapy and other extrinsic stressors. These data establish how adipocyte driven restrictions of the ALL proteome benefit ALL tumours, preventing their elimination, and suggest ways to manipulate adipocyte-mediated ALL resistance

Semi-automated Magnetic Bead-Based Antibody Selection from Phage Display Libraries

Phage display of combinatorial antibody libraries is a very efficient method for selecting recombinant antibodies against a wide range of molecules. It has been applied very successfully for the generation of therapeutic antibodies for more than a decade. To increase robustness and reproducibility of the selection procedure, we developed a semi-automated selection method for the generation of recombinant antibodies from phage display libraries. In this procedure, the selection targets are specifically immobilised to magnetic particles which can then by automatically handled by a magnetic particle processor. At present up to 96 samples can be handled simultaneously. Applying the processor allows standardisation of panning parameters such as washing conditions, incubation times, or to perform parallel selections on same targets under different buffer conditions. Additionally, the whole protocol has been streamlined to carry out bead loading, phage selection, phage amplification between selection rounds and magnetic particle ELISA for confirmation of binding activity in microtiter plate formats. Until now, this method has been successfully applied to select antibody fragments against different types of target, such as peptides, recombinant or homologous proteins, or chemical compounds