Twin Traditions:The biopic and the composed film in British art cinema

This chapter focuses on some of the overlaps between this anti-realist tradition and British art cinema. It does this through an examination of two small, but artistically significant traditions in British filmmaking, the composed film and the artist’s biopic, and assesses how these forms have been exploited by two key figures in British art cinema: Russell and Peter Greenaway. Attention is paid to Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers, and Peter Greenaway’s Nightwatching, Goltzius and the Pelican Company and Eisenstein in Guanajuato. Before this, however, this chapter briefly examines the influence of Powell and Pressburger on the composed film. ‘Composed film’ was Michael Powell’s adopted term for a work that was substantially or entirely shot to a pre-existing music score. Particular attention is paid to The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffman

British art cinema, 1975-2000 : context and practice

This thesis shall largely concern itself with examining two general aspects of British art cinema between 1975 and 2000; namely, how the British art cinema operates as an art cinema in the context of its 1960s and 1970s European counterparts54 and how the individual filmmaking practices of these British directors both conform to and deviate from classic definitions of art cinema. In this way, this thesis shall demonstrate the ways in which British art cinema can be characterised not only as a belated continuation of classic European art cinema but also a significant development from it. Therefore, it shall examine the work of key British art filmmakers in the context of art cinema history, linking it with earlier movements in European art cinema such as Italian neo-realism and the French Nouvelle Vague, individual forebears such as Resnais, Godard, Pasolini and Wenders, and previous examples of art films in Britain.Furthermore in examining the filmmaking practices of these leading British art cinema directors this thesis will demonstrate British art cinema's stylistic and thematic eclecticism. Taken as a whole, it engages not only with its European counterpart, but with a wide range of influences including classical Hollywood, pop art, structural cinema and music videos as well as more typically British cinematic traditions such as the documentary and social realism. British art film directors have also experimented with new and existing filmmaking technologies and techniques, and made advances in cinematic style and the treatment of subject matter from their European colleagues of the 1960s and 1970s.To investigate these claims, the chapters in this thesis shall not address individual films or filmmakers, but rather, to allow a greater breadth of analysis, will examine their individual attitudes towards factors such as realism and film narrative, and their ties with the cinematic avant-garde and Hollywood as well as European art cinema, that can help to contextualise their films in the traditions of both European art cinema and British cinema itself. Chapter One will provide a brief critical overview of art cinema in Britain before 1975, thereby contextualising contemporary British art cinema's place in British film history, and highlighting the changes in the British film industry that made the growth of British art cinema possible. Several key aspects of British art cinema shall then be examined individually to illustrate the way in which these factors have helped to shape and characterise British art cinema. Chapter Two will analyse the attitudes of British art filmmakers towards the modes of cinematic realism that have perhaps come to dominate British film history. Chapter Three addresses the attitudes of British art filmmakers towards narrative, and will examine the degree to which they have rejected the classical Hollywood narrative in favour of modernist, structuralist, and other less traditional methods of cinematic storytelling. Chapter Four will examine the avant-garde roots of several contemporary British art filmmakers and illustrate the ways in which some of the ideas and techniques of avant-garde filmmaking have carried over into their subsequent work in art-house feature films. Finally, Chapter Five will address the influence of both Hollywood and European art-house styles of filmmaking on British art cinema. It shall also demonstrate how these often contradictory influences have helped to mould the latter's distinctive shape, and highlight the disparity amongst British filmmakers between those who look towards Hollywood for inspiration and financial backing and those who choose to operate in the culturally richer but financially poorer European cinema

Landscape Predictions for the Higgs Boson and Top Quark Masses

If the Standard Model is valid up to scales near the Planck mass, and if the cosmological constant and Higgs mass parameters scan on a landscape of vacua, it is well known that the observed orders of magnitude of these quantities can be understood from environmental selection for large-scale structure and atoms. If in addition the Higgs quartic coupling scans, with a probability distribution peaked at low values, environmental selection for a phase having a scale of electroweak symmetry breaking much less than the Planck scale leads to a most probable Higgs mass of 106 GeV. While fluctuations below this are negligible, the upward fluctuation is 25/p GeV, where p measures the strength of the peaking of the a priori distribution of the quartic coupling. If the top Yukawa coupling also scans, the most probable top quark mass is predicted to lie in the range (174--178) GeV, providing the standard model is valid to at least 10^{17} GeV. The downward fluctuation is 35 GeV/ \sqrt{p}, suggesting that p is sufficiently large to give a very precise Higgs mass prediction. While a high reheat temperature after inflation could raise the most probable value of the Higgs mass to 118 GeV, maintaining the successful top prediction suggests that reheating is limited to about 10^8 GeV, and that the most probable value of the Higgs mass remains at 106 GeV. If all Yukawa couplings scan, then the e,u,d and t masses are understood to be outliers having extreme values induced by the pressures of strong environmental selection, while the s, \mu, c, b, \tau Yukawa couplings span only two orders of magnitude, reflecting an a priori distribution peaked around 10^{-3}. Extensions of these ideas allow order of magnitude predictions for neutrino masses, the baryon asymmetry and important parameters of cosmological inflation.Comment: 41 pages; v4: threshold corrrections for top Yukawa are correcte

Integrated dataset for air travel and reported Zika virus cases in Colombia (Data and Resources Paper)

This open-access dataset provides consistent records of air travel volumes between 205 airport catchments in Colombia and the associated number of reported human cases of Zika virus within these catchments during the arbovirus outbreak between October 2015 and September 2016. We associated in this dataset the monthly air travel volumes provided by the Colombian Civil Aviation Authority (AEROCIVIL) with the reported human cases of Zika Virus published by The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). Our methodology consists of geocoding all the reported airports and identifying the catchment of each airport using the municipalities' boundaries since reported human cases of Zika Virus are available at the municipal level. In addition, we calculated the total population at risk in each airport catchment by combining the total population count in a catchment with the environmental suitability of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the vector for the Zika virus. We separated the monthly air travel volumes into domestic and international based on the location of the origin airport. The current dataset includes the total air travel volumes of 23,539,364 passengers on domestic flights and 11,592,197 on international ones. We validated our dataset by comparing the monthly aggregated air travel volumes between airport catchments to those predicted by the gravity model. We hope the novel dataset will provide a resource to researchers studying the role of human mobility in the spread of mosquito-borne diseases and modeling disease spread in realistic networks

Characterizing weekly self-reported antihypertensive medication nonadherence across repeated occasions

BackgroundLittle is known about weekly variability in medication nonadherence both between and within persons.PurposeTo characterize medication nonadherence across repeated, closely spaced occasions.MethodsThis prospective cohort study comprised four unannounced telephone assessment occasions, each separated by approximately 2 weeks. On each occasion, adult outpatients taking at least a single antihypertensive medication completed a measure of extent of, and reasons for, nonadherence.ResultsTwo hundred and sixty-one participants completed 871 (83%) of 1,044 occasions. Nonadherence was reported on 152 (17.5%) of 871 occasions by 93 (36%) of 261 participants. The most commonly endorsed reasons for nonadherence were forgetting (39.5%), being busy (23.7%), and traveling (19.7%). Among 219 participants completing at least three occasions, 50% of the variability in extent of nonadherence was a result of within-person fluctuations, and 50% was a result of between-person differences.ConclusionInterventions to reduce nonadherence should be informed by variability in the extent of nonadherence and specific reasons for nonadherence

Analysis of the transcriptome of the protozoan Theileria parva using MPSS reveals that the majority of genes are transcriptionally active in the schizont stage

Massively parallel signature sequencing (MPSS) was used to analyze the transcriptome of the intracellular protozoan Theileria parva. In total 1 095 000, 20 bp sequences representing 4371 different signatures were generated from T.parva schizonts. Reproducible signatures were identified within 73% of potentially detectable predicted genes and 83% had signatures in at least one MPSS cycle. A predicted leader peptide was detected on 405 expressed genes. The quantitative range of signatures was 4–52 256 transcripts per million (t.p.m.). Rare transcripts (<50 t.p.m.) were detected from 36% of genes. Sequence signatures approximated a lognormal distribution, as in microarray. Transcripts were widely distributed throughout the genome, although only 47% of 138 telomere-associated open reading frames exhibited signatures. Antisense signatures comprised 13.8% of the total, comparable with Plasmodium. Eighty five predicted genes with antisense signatures lacked a sense signature. Antisense transcripts were independently amplified from schizont cDNA and verified by sequencing. The MPSS transcripts per million for seven genes encoding schizont antigens recognized by bovine CD8 T cells varied 1000-fold. There was concordance between transcription and protein expression for heat shock proteins that were very highly expressed according to MPSS and proteomics. The data suggests a low level of baseline transcription from the majority of protein-coding genes

Eukaryotic cell biology is temporally coordinated to support the energetic demands of protein homeostasis.

Yeast physiology is temporally regulated, this becomes apparent under nutrient-limited conditions and results in respiratory oscillations (YROs). YROs share features with circadian rhythms and interact with, but are independent of, the cell division cycle. Here, we show that YROs minimise energy expenditure by restricting protein synthesis until sufficient resources are stored, while maintaining osmotic homeostasis and protein quality control. Although nutrient supply is constant, cells sequester and store metabolic resources via increased transport, autophagy and biomolecular condensation. Replete stores trigger increased H+ export which stimulates TORC1 and liberates proteasomes, ribosomes, chaperones and metabolic enzymes from non-membrane bound compartments. This facilitates translational bursting, liquidation of storage carbohydrates, increased ATP turnover, and the export of osmolytes. We propose that dynamic regulation of ion transport and metabolic plasticity are required to maintain osmotic and protein homeostasis during remodelling of eukaryotic proteomes, and that bioenergetic constraints selected for temporal organisation that promotes oscillatory behaviour