Block and thread intercultural narratives and positioning: conversations with newly arrived postgraduate students

This paper considers how, in the process of positioning that is implicit in every interaction, all of us employ multiple and often competing narratives when we talk about cultural identity and our relationships with new cultural environments. In interviews with newly arrived postgraduate students about their experience of travelling to study abroad, the students employ competing block and thread narratives. Block narratives represent an essentialist discourse of culture. As such, they are easily converted into cultural prejudice by blocking the possibility for understanding and sharing at the point of tolerating an Other who can never be like ‘us’. These are default narratives because of the way in which we are brought up in our societies within a global positioning and politics. Thread narratives instead support a critical cosmopolitan discourse of cultural travel and shared meanings across structural boundaries that act against cultural prejudice. Threads need to be nurtured as alternative forms of engagement. Therefore, there is a place for the researchers to intervene with their own thread narratives. This intervention is both allowed within and supported by an understanding that researchers join with their participants in the creative intercultural events of the interview

‘I already have a culture.’ Negotiating competing grand and personal narratives in interview conversations with new study abroad arrivals

In an interview with a postgraduate student about her intercultural experience of recently arriving for study abroad, it was found that the two researchers and the student were engaged in a mutual exploration of cultural identity. The in- terview events became conversational and took the form of small culture formation on the go in which each participant employed diverse narratives to project, make sense of and negotiate expression of cultural identity. The stu- dent shifted between personal narratives drawn from her particular cultural trajectories and splintered from grand narratives of nation and global position- ing, between non- essentialist threads and essentialist blocks. The researchers learned from her and intervened to facilitate shifts to non-essentialist threads, drawing on narratives from their own personal cultural trajectories, but some- times also falling into essentialist blocks splintered from grand narratives. The roles of ideology and competing essentialist and non-essentialist discourses of culture were implicit in these negotiations, as were the personal agency of the student as she responded to the constraining conflicts, structures and hierarchies encountered through the events she spoke about. Rather than providing a picture of intercultural assimilation and integration, interculturality is revealed as a hesitant and searching negotiation, sometimes of vulnerability, wrong-footedness and occasional assault on identity

Cartilaginous Epiphyses in Extant Archosaurs and Their Implications for Reconstructing Limb Function in Dinosaurs

Extinct archosaurs, including many non-avian dinosaurs, exhibit relatively simply shaped condylar regions in their appendicular bones, suggesting potentially large amounts of unpreserved epiphyseal (articular) cartilage. This “lost anatomy” is often underappreciated such that the ends of bones are typically considered to be the joint surfaces, potentially having a major impact on functional interpretation. Extant alligators and birds were used to establish an objective basis for inferences about cartilaginous articular structures in such extinct archosaur clades as non-avian dinosaurs. Limb elements of alligators, ostriches, and other birds were dissected, disarticulated, and defleshed. Lengths and condylar shapes of elements with intact epiphyses were measured. Limbs were subsequently completely skeletonized and the measurements repeated. Removal of cartilaginous condylar regions resulted in statistically significant changes in element length and condylar breadth. Moreover, there was marked loss of those cartilaginous structures responsible for joint architecture and congruence. Compared to alligators, birds showed less dramatic, but still significant changes. Condylar morphologies of dinosaur limb bones suggest that most non-coelurosaurian clades possessed large cartilaginous epiphyses that relied on the maintenance of vascular channels that are otherwise eliminated early in ontogeny in smaller-bodied tetrapods. A sensitivity analysis using cartilage correction factors (CCFs) obtained from extant taxa indicates that whereas the presence of cartilaginous epiphyses only moderately increases estimates of dinosaur height and speed, it has important implications for our ability to infer joint morphology, posture, and the complicated functional movements in the limbs of many extinct archosaurs. Evidence suggests that the sizes of sauropod epiphyseal cartilages surpassed those of alligators, which account for at least 10% of hindlimb length. These data suggest that large cartilaginous epiphyses were widely distributed among non-avian archosaurs and must be considered when making inferences about locomotor functional morphology in fossil taxa

Loss of CSMD1 expression disrupts mammary duct formation while enhancing proliferation, migration and invasion

The CUB and sushi multiple domains 1 (CSMD1) gene maps to chromosome 8p23, a region deleted in many cancers. Loss of CSMD1 expression is associated with poor prognosis in breast cancer suggesting that it acts as a tumour suppressor in this cancer. However, the function of CSMD1 is largely unknown. Herein, we investigated CSMD1 functions in cell line models. CSMD1 expression was suppressed in MCF10A and LNCaP cells using short hairpin RNA. Functional assays were performed focusing on the 'normal' MCF10A cell line. Suppression of CSMD1 significantly increased the proliferation, cell migration and invasiveness of MCF10A cells compared to shcontrols. shCSMD1 cells also showed significantly reduced adhesion to Matrigel and fibronectin. In a three-dimensional Matrigel model of MCF10A cells, reduced CSMD1 expression resulted in the development of larger and more poorly differentiated breast acini-like structures that displayed impaired lumen formation. Loss of CSMD1 expression disrupts a model of mammary duct formation while enhancing proliferation, migration and invasion. Our data suggest that CSMD1 is involved in the suppression of a transformed phenotype

Rapid Quantification of Molecular Diversity for Selective Database Acquisition

There is an increasing need to expand the structural diversity of the molecules investigated in lead-discovery programs. One way in which this can be achieved is by acquiring external datasets that will enhance an existing database. This paper describes a rapid procedure for the selection of external datasets using a measure of structural diversity that is calculated from sums of pairwise intermolecular structural similarities

A PROTEÇÃO PROCESSUAL DA POSSE NOS CONFLITOS COLETIVOS INTERÉTNICOS

Os conflitos étnicos entre o homem branco europeu e os povos autóctones pela posse dos territórios, estão presentes em todos os continentes do planeta,desde os inuits da região circumpolar aos maoris da Nova Zelândia, passando pelos papuas insulares da Indonésia até alcançar os índios das Américas. Embora sejam perenes e universais, suas causas, consequências e soluções ainda são pouco exploradas pelas ciências sociais e pela antropologia jurídica. A compreensão desse embate secular pela ocupação da terra é o fio condutor dessa pesquisa, adotando-se como método investigativo o levantamento histórico, filosófico, sociológico e jurídico do direito de posse e propriedade, desde sua legitimação pelo direito de conquista e da guerra justa, até sua conformação nos regimes constitucionais democráticos atuais. Uma primeira aproximação com o tema revela que a legislação lusitana da colônia e do império jamais cogitaram atribuir direitos possessórios ao índios, ou mesmo a restituição do domínio de suas terras, servindo apenas a um veículo político de embuste e dominação. A teoria do indigenato de João Mendes Junior (1912), ao invocar um direito nativo congênito, não encontrou acolhimento no direito positivo. A Constituição Federal de 1988, embora reconhecendo aos índios o direito a uma organização social, uma identidade étnica e um habitat, vinculou a posse usufrutuária da terra a fatos objetivos,subordinados a ocupação tradicional e habitação permanente, anteriores a 05.10.1988. Interpretações influenciadas pelos conceitos da antropologia, sem o rigor jurídico-dogmático, passaram a admitir o ressurgimento de comunidades indígenas extintas, reivindicando terras com ocupação consolidada por não-índios. Essas etnogêneses resultaram em um imediato processo sistêmico de invasões (retomadas) de propriedades rurais, muitas delas expropriadas antes mesmo dos procedimentos legais de demarcação. A agressão à posse e à propriedade sem observância dos preceitos constitucionais, entre eles o devido processo legal, transferiu ao judiciário a solução desse litígio estrutural de largas proporções, motivando a multiplicação de tutelas possessórias interditais. Ponderadas as razões sociais, políticas, ideológicas e jurídicas que circundam essa disputa coletiva, o manejo dos instrumentos processuais são a garantia de concretude dos direitos fundamentais envolvidos. Ao final será possível verificar que ciência processual possui mecanismos de mediação dessa tensão campesina coletiva, seja para garantir aos indígenas a posse de seus territórios tradicionais reconhecidos pelo Estado, seja para repelir agressão injusta ao patrimônio dos não índios. Palavras chave: Direito processual civil. Ações possessórias.Posse indígena. Conflitos de etnia. Direito de propriedade. Função social da posse

Is EC class predictable from reaction mechanism?

We thank the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance (SULSA) and the Scottish Overseas Research Student Awards Scheme of the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) for financial support.Background: We investigate the relationships between the EC (Enzyme Commission) class, the associated chemical reaction, and the reaction mechanism by building predictive models using Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF) and k-Nearest Neighbours (kNN). We consider two ways of encoding the reaction mechanism in descriptors, and also three approaches that encode only the overall chemical reaction. Both cross-validation and also an external test set are used. Results: The three descriptor sets encoding overall chemical transformation perform better than the two descriptions of mechanism. SVM and RF models perform comparably well; kNN is less successful. Oxidoreductases and hydrolases are relatively well predicted by all types of descriptor; isomerases are well predicted by overall reaction descriptors but not by mechanistic ones. Conclusions: Our results suggest that pairs of similar enzyme reactions tend to proceed by different mechanisms. Oxidoreductases, hydrolases, and to some extent isomerases and ligases, have clear chemical signatures, making them easier to predict than transferases and lyases. We find evidence that isomerases as a class are notably mechanistically diverse and that their one shared property, of substrate and product being isomers, can arise in various unrelated ways. The performance of the different machine learning algorithms is in line with many cheminformatics applications, with SVM and RF being roughly equally effective. kNN is less successful, given the role that non-local information plays in successful classification. We note also that, despite a lack of clarity in the literature, EC number prediction is not a single problem; the challenge of predicting protein function from available sequence data is quite different from assigning an EC classification from a cheminformatics representation of a reaction.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Mental health in UK Biobank - development, implementation and results from an online questionnaire completed by 157 366 participants: a reanalysis

Background UK Biobank is a well-characterised cohort of over 500 000 participants including genetics, environmental data and imaging. An online mental health questionnaire was designed for UK Biobank participants to expand its potential. Aims Describe the development, implementation and results of this questionnaire. Method An expert working group designed the questionnaire, using established measures where possible, and consulting a patient group. Operational criteria were agreed for defining likely disorder and risk states, including lifetime depression, mania/hypomania, generalised anxiety disorder, unusual experiences and self-harm, and current post-traumatic stress and hazardous/harmful alcohol use. Results A total of 157 366 completed online questionnaires were available by August 2017. Participants were aged 45–82 (53% were ≥65 years) and 57% women. Comparison of self-reported diagnosed mental disorder with a contemporary study shows a similar prevalence, despite respondents being of higher average socioeconomic status. Lifetime depression was a common finding, with 24% (37 434) of participants meeting criteria and current hazardous/harmful alcohol use criteria were met by 21% (32 602), whereas other criteria were met by less than 8% of the participants. There was extensive comorbidity among the syndromes. Mental disorders were associated with a high neuroticism score, adverse life events and long-term illness; addiction and bipolar affective disorder in particular were associated with measures of deprivation. Conclusions The UK Biobank questionnaire represents a very large mental health survey in itself, and the results presented here show high face validity, although caution is needed because of selection bias. Built into UK Biobank, these data intersect with other health data to offer unparalleled potential for crosscutting biomedical research involving mental health

Identification of a Cyanine-dye labeled peptidic ligand for Y₁R and Y₄R, based upon the Neuropeptide Y C-terminal analogue, BVD-15

Traceable truncated Neuropeptide Y (NPY) analogues with Y₁ receptor (Y₁R) affinity and selectivity are highly desirable tools in studying receptor location, regulation, and biological functions. A range of fluorescently labeled analogues of a reported Y₁R/Y₄R preferring ligand BVD-15 have been prepared and evaluated using high content imaging techniques. One peptide, [Lys²(sCy5), Arg⁴]BVD-15, was characterized as an Y₁R antagonist with a pKD of 7.2 measured by saturation analysis using fluorescent imaging. The peptide showed 8-fold lower affinity for Y₄R (pKD = 6.2) and was a partial agonist at this receptor. The suitability of [Lys²(sCy5), Arg⁴]BVD-15 for Y₁R and Y₄R competition binding experiments was also demonstrated in intact cells. The nature of the label was shown to be critical with replacement of sCy5 by the more hydrophobic Cy5.5 resulting in a switch from Y₁R antagonist to Y₁R partial agonist