Paper-work: what module guides have to say about assessment practices

Documents are usually circulated as carriers of transparent information. They can serve as evidence of accountability. In fact, they embody the most desired value of managerialism, where the culture of audit and compliance is fully served and delivered in written and textual form. This article explores assessment by attending to its principal instrument – the document – through which it is organised, monitored and implemented in higher education. It is an invitation to ‘see’ what documents, such as, module guides, ‘do’ for universities and the assessment practices of academics. Under close scrutiny, documents ‘do’ more than record and transfer information. Their associated paper-work expresses and reproduces norms, patterns of thoughts and work habits that are accepted and assumed to be shared in the prevailing outcome-based assessment systems of higher education. This article provides a critical account based on practice-oriented and material-semiotic approaches to assessment. It bears witness to the past and persistent norms and standards that are shaped by documents, paper-work, control, compliance and surveillance and less by pedagogical and student engagement

Borders of Time: The temporalities of academic mobility

This article challenges the claim that highly skilled international academics who have obtained advanced degrees and transnational identities are offered almost seamless mobility. The state border or territory is not the only line that highly skilled academics must cross as international subjects of mobility. They experience a range of insecurities to do with their immigration status. This includes, but is not limited to, the waiting and processing times associated with immigration rules and visa requirements, which could temporarily suspend mobility rights. The notion of a temporal border is enacted to explore the insecurities that highly skilled academics face. Border crossing for highly skilled migrants is not just a matter of entry passing through territorial lines of nation-states. The border has a ‘thickness’ that stretches through time. Simply put, it takes time to fully cross borders

Rhythms of Academic Mobility

Academic mobility has been discursively circulated in at least two ways: as the cause of transnational identity capital and as the resource for knowledge transfer worldwide. Instead of a preoccupation with neoliberalist and human capital accounts, this article offers a rhythmic perspective and analysis that shifts the matter of academic mobility away from a purely discursive frame of reference. It explores the rhythms of a mobile and migrant academic in an auto-ethnographic and everyday account of human-body encounters. It engages with the unintended realities of the body as the border, especially when it comes to ethnicity and place of origin

An Obscure Case of Hepatic Subcapsular Hematoma

Spontaneous liver bleeding is often reported in preeclampsia. It is otherwise rare and has been linked to gross anatomical lesions and coagulopathy. We report a case of subcapsular hematoma of the liver without any apparent lesion and in the absence of coagulopathy. A 41-year-old male, paraplegic for 16 years, presented to the emergency department 3 days after sudden onset of right upper quadrant and shoulder pain. He had been on vitamins and 5,000 units subcutaneous heparin 12-hourly at the nursing home for the last month. He was in no distress, afebrile, with stable vitals. Physical examination showed a diverting colostomy, tender hepatomegaly and sacral decubiti. A fecal occult blood test was negative. There was spastic paraplegia below the level of T12. Two days after admission, the patient was afebrile and hemodynamically stable. PTT, PT, liver profile, BUN and creatinine were all normal, however his hemoglobin had dropped from 11.3 to 7.6 g/dl. An abdominal CT scan revealed an isolated 9.0 × 1.8 cm subcapsular hematoma. The patient received blood transfusion in the intensive care unit and was discharged 7 days later. In conclusion, spontaneous liver hemorrhage occurs in the nonobstetrical population in the setting of gross anatomical lesions or coagulopathy. This is the first report of an isolated subcapsular liver hematoma

Metabolic alterations during the growth of tumour spheroids

Solid tumours undergo considerable alterations in their metabolism of nutrients in order to generate sufficient energy and biomass for sustained growth and proliferation. During growth, the tumour microenvironment exerts a number of influences (e.g. hypoxia and acidity) that affect cellular biology and the flux or utilisation of fuels including glucose. The tumour spheroid model was used to characterise the utilisation of glucose and describe alterations to the activity and expression of key glycolytic enzymes during the tissue growth curve. Glucose was avidly consumed and associated with the production of lactate and an acidified medium, confirming the reliance on glycolytic pathways and a diminution of oxidative phosphorylation. The expression levels and activities of hexokinase, phosphofructokinase-1, pyruvate kinase and lactate dehydrogenase in the glycolytic pathway were measured to assess glycolytic capacity. Similar measurements were made for glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase, the entry point and regulatory step of the pentose-phosphate pathway (PPP) and for cytosolic malate dehydrogenase, a key link to TCA cycle intermediates. The parameters for these key enzymes were shown to undergo considerable variation during the growth curve of tumour spheroids. In addition, they revealed that the dynamic alterations were influenced by both transcriptional and posttranslational mechanisms

Metabolic alterations during the growth of tumour spheroids

Solid tumours undergo considerable alterations in their metabolism of nutrients in order to generate sufficient energy and biomass for sustained growth and proliferation. During growth, the tumour microenvironment exerts a number of influences (e.g. hypoxia and acidity) that affect cellular biology and the flux or utilisation of fuels including glucose. The tumour spheroid model was used to characterise the utilisation of glucose and describe alterations to the activity and expression of key glycolytic enzymes during the tissue growth curve. Glucose was avidly consumed and associated with the production of lactate and an acidified medium, confirming the reliance on glycolytic pathways and a diminution of oxidative phosphorylation. The expression levels and activities of hexokinase, phosphofructokinase-1, pyruvate kinase and lactate dehydrogenase in the glycolytic pathway were measured to assess glycolytic capacity. Similar measurements were made for glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase, the entry point and regulatory step of the pentose-phosphate pathway (PPP) and for cytosolic malate dehydrogenase, a key link to TCA cycle intermediates. The parameters for these key enzymes were shown to undergo considerable variation during the growth curve of tumour spheroids. In addition, they revealed that the dynamic alterations were influenced by both transcriptional and posttranslational mechanisms

Virulence of 32 Salmonella Strains in Mice

Virulence and persistence in the BALB/c mouse gut was tested for 32 strains of Salmonella enterica for which genome sequencing is complete or underway, including 17 serovars within subspecies I (enterica), and two representatives of each of the other five subspecies. Only serovar Paratyphi C strain BAA1715 and serovar Typhimurium strain 14028 were fully virulent in mice. Three divergent atypical Enteritidis strains were not virulent in BALB/c, but two efficiently persisted. Most of the other strains in all six subspecies persisted in the mouse intestinal tract for several weeks in multiple repeat experiments although the frequency and level of persistence varied considerably. Strains with heavily degraded genomes persisted very poorly, if at all. None of the strains tested provided immunity to Typhimurium infection. These data greatly expand on the known significant strain-to-strain variation in mouse virulence and highlight the need for comparative genomic and phenotypic studies