Valuing Governance

Book Summary: As has been abundantly documented in the popular and academic press, the humanities are facing challenging times marked by national debate regarding the importance of the humanities in higher education, program and budget cuts, and an ever-decreasing number of tenure-track jobs. In addition, the humanities face quite literally a quantification of their value as the Academy adopts a more corporate mindset. This volume provides advice to professionals in the humanities on how to forge a useful, compelling, and productive career. The book’s 13 chapters address professional approaches to developing and maintaining an active research agenda, fomenting the ideals of the teacher-scholar model, managing the service demands within and outside the college or university, and navigating institutional politics. The collection offers practical and theoretical approaches to higher education, personal anecdotes, intelligent advice, and interviews with colleagues in the humanities. Specific themes addressed include the transition from graduate student to humanities professional, diverging from prescribed paths, the humanities professor as creative writer, moving from secondary to post-secondary education, humanities in an international, market-based context, and participation in governance structures. [From the publisher] Chapter Summary: This essay focuses on providing insight and practical advice on how committed participation in the governance process offers many positives at any stage of the academic ladder. Drawing upon a practical, theoretical, and anecdotal approach, this article reflects on four areas that are enhanced by participation in governance: 1) visibility; 2) knowledge of the institution and its culture; 3) establishing meaningful friendships campus-wide; and 4) governance as a resource of invaluable advice

Personalised dosing: Printing a dose of one's own medicine

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Ink-jet printing is a versatile, precise and relatively inexpensive method of depositing small volumes of solutions with remarkable accuracy and repeatability. Although developed primarily as a technology for image reproduction, its areas of application have expanded significantly in recent years. It is particularly suited to the manufacture of low dose medicines or to short production runs and so offers a potential manufacturing solution for the paradigm of personalised medicines. This review discusses the technical and clinical aspects of ink-jet printing that must be considered in order for the technology to become widely adopted in the pharmaceutical arena and considers applications in the literature

Thermal Influences on Life-History Traits and Reproductive Effort of Introduced Pumpkinseed Sunfish Lepomis Gibbosus in the River Moselle Basin (Northeastern France)

International audienceThe influence of local thermal regimes on juvenile growth rates, life-history traits, and reproductive effort of introduced populations of pumpkinseed Lepomis gibbosus was examined in 11 water bodies in the River Moselle basin (northeastern France). Female pumpkinseed were collected during their reproductive period in mid-June in 2009 and 2010, and water temperature was assessed over a 12-month period in 2010. Annual thermal degree-days above 10 °C varied from 1529 in a headwater site to 2722 in the Mirgenbach Reservoir, heated by cooling water from a nuclear power plant. Mean age at maturity varied from 1.3 to 2.2 and was inversely related to annual thermal degree-days. The proportion of mature age-1 females also increased with temperature, but neither mean total length at maturity nor gonadosomatic index was related to waterbody thermal regime. Body size at the end of the first year of life was unrelated to thermal regime, but the growth rate of immature age-1 females in their second growing season was positively related to thermal degree-days in the spring. Warmer water bodies showed elevated reproductive effort in age-1 females when either early season gain in mass or mass at the beginning of the second growing season was controlled for; however, reproductive effort was unrelated to thermal regime in age-2 and age-3 females. Mean age at maturity was related to mean length at age 1 but not to mean length at age 2, in contrast to native North American and introduced European populations. We conclude that the life-history response of pumpkinseed to warmer temperatures occurs primarily in age-1 individuals and predict that climate warming will produce changes in pumpkinseed life-history traits that will make the species more invasive in parts of Europe where the species is present but not actively spreading

A pilot study on transcriptome data analysis of folliculogenesis in pigs

hree different stages of pig antral follicles have been studied in a granulosa-cell transcriptome analysis on nylon microarrays (1152 clones). The data have been generated from seven RNA follicle pools and several technical replicates were made. The objective of this paper was to state the feasibility of a transcriptomic protocol for the study of folliculogenesis in the pig. A statistical analysis was chosen, relying on the linear mixed model (LMM) paradigm. Low variability within technical replicates was hence checked with a LMM. Relevant genes that might be involved in the studied process were then selected. For the most significant genes, statistical methods such as principal component analysis and unsupervised hierarchical clustering were applied to assess their relevance, and a random forest analysis proved their predictive value. The selection of genes was consistent with previous studies and also allowed the identification of new genes whose role in pig folliculogenesis will be further investigated