Inheritance and expression in diploid and triploid Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha): Segregation distortion at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) and microsatellite loci

In order to investigate the influence of triploidy on genetic inheritance and expression, DNA and mRNA were extracted from diploid and triploid offspring of a single breeding pair of Chinook salmon. Neutral (microsatellite) and a functional markers (class I major histocompability complex (MHC)) were used to analyze the DNA samples for meiotic bias. Significant segregation distortion (P\u3c0.02) was found in the distribution of maternal-origin alleles in the triploid samples at two microsatellite loci and at the MHC locus. No bias was found in the diploid samples, indicating that the distortion was due to maternal dosage effects. This could be the result of a biochemical imbalance caused by dilution of the paternally-derived gene product, or to gene dosage effects of functional, deleterious, maternally-derived proteins. MRNA, converted to cDNA, was also used as a template for MHC amplification and, as expected, the MHC expression in the triploid offspring displayed a dosage effect pattern.Dept. of Biological Sciences. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2006 .J36. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-01, page: 0224. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2006

Picturing Midlife: Aging and the Limits of Narrative in Carol Shields’s Larry’s Party

This paper approaches Larry’s Party (1997) by Carol Shields as a detailed investigation into the political and representational issues at stake in writing about midlife by focusing on moments when the middle-aged Larry is describedas attempting to “visualize” his life (169). Highlighting Larry’s conviction that “his life is not ... a story” (267), his engagement with visual images raises questions about the centrality of narrative to how midlife is explained and imagined in contemporary literature and culture. Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s influential theorization of midlife and midlife fiction celebrates the sequential and teleological aspects of narrative as enabling a kind of life storytelling that characterizes the entry into middle age as progress toward an improved self. Questioning this conceptualization of a life as a linear, upward trajectory, Shields’s text foregrounds the assumptions about class implicit in the “progress novel” as Larry resists the devaluation of his working-class origins that would seem to accompany the imperative that he esteem his midlife self as better than his previous selves. Associating the fixity of the visual image with other non- narrative qualities such as touch, taste, and affective states characterized by stasis rather than momentum, Larry’s Party invites readers to question the cultural valorization of progress that continues to shape our assumptions about what it means to grow older

“A Sorrow of Stones”: Death, Burial, and Mourning in the Writing of Anne Wilkinson

Much of Anne Wilkinson’s writing on death and bereavement articulates a sense of being caught between two different cultures of mourning: the Victorian, with its formalized and public rituals which enabled the expression and resolution of sorrow; and the mid-twentieth-century, which divested itself completely of mourning rituals. The twentieth-century denial of grief that Wilkinson criticizes is nowhere more pronounced than in the culture of silence that has surrounded infant death, a form of loss with which Wilkinson herself was personally acquainted. In poems such as “Nursery Rhymes” and “Lullaby,” Wilkinson draws upon the kinds of consolatory tropes common to a nineteenth-century tradition of popular infant elegies; however, she uses those conventions in resistant ways. Rather than idealizing motherhood as women’s primary social role, Wilkinson registers her own struggle to balance the demands of motherhood and of art in a postwar culture that similarly positioned women as naturally and exclusively maternal.

LoLa: Low-Latency Realtime Video Conferencing over Multiple Cellular Carriers

LoLa is a novel multi-path system for video conferencing applications over cellular networks. It provides significant gains over single link solutions when the link quality over different cellular networks fluctuate dramatically and independently over time, or when aggregating the throughput across different cellular links improves the perceived video quality. LoLa achieves this by continuously estimating the quality of available cellular links to decide how to strip video packets across them without inducing delays or packet drops. It is also tightly coupled with state-of-the-art video codec to dynamically adapt video frame size to respond quickly to changing network conditions. Using multiple traces collected over 4 different cellular operators in a large metropolitan city, we demonstrate that LoLa provides significant gains in terms of throughput and delays compared to state-of-the-art real-time video conferencing solution.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure

Essential Work: Using A Social Reproduction Lens to Investigate the Re-Organisation of Work During the COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 has shaken a foundational pillar of global capitalism: the organisation of work. Whilst workers have commonly been categorised based on skills, during the pandemic the ‘essential worker’ categorisation has taken prominence. This paper explores the concept of essential work from a global feminist social reproduction perspective. The global perspective is complemented by a zoom-in on Mozambique as a low-income country in the Global South, occupying a peripheral position in global and regional economies and with a large share of vulnerable and essential workers. We show that the meaning of essential work is more ambiguous and politicised than it may appear and, although it can be used as a basis to reclaim the value of socially reproductive work, its transformative potential hinges on the possibility to encompass the most precarious and transnational dimensions of (re)productio

Global and mitosis-specific interobserver variation in mitotic count scoring and implications for malignant melanoma staging

AIMS Staging is the gold standard for predicting malignant melanoma outcome but changes in its criteria over time indicate ongoing evolution. One notable recent change from the 8 edition of the AJCC staging manual was removal of mitotic count. We explore the extent that this feature is limited by interobserver error in order to find ways to improve its fitness for use should it be revisited in future staging versions. METHODS AND RESULTS In a cohort of 476 patients with melanoma ≤ 1.0 mm, a mitotic count of 0 vs 1 was significant for metastasis-free survival, but not melanoma-specific or overall survival. In 10 melanomas that were 0.9 to 1.0 mm thick, the mitotic count intra-class correlation coefficient for histopathologists was 0.58 (moderate agreement). Uniquely, we also assessed agreement for specific putative mitotic figures, identifying precise reasons why specific mitotic figures qualified for scoring or elimination. A kappa score was 0.54 (moderate agreement). We also gathered data on other staging features. Breslow thickness had an intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.41 (moderate agreement) and there was a systematic difference between histopathologists across cases (p = 0.04). Every case had a range that crossed the AJCC8 0.8 mm pT1a/pT1b staging boundary. Ulceration was only identified in 2 out the 10 cases. For ulceration, kappa agreement score was 0.31 (fair). CONCLUSION This study supports the removal of mitotic count from staging but shows that its scoring is substantially affected by interobserver variation, suggesting that more prescriptive guidelines might have a beneficial impact on its prognostic value

Advanced EFL learners' beliefs about language learning and teaching: a comparison between grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary

This paper reports on the results of a study exploring learners’ beliefs on the learning and teaching of English grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary at tertiary level. While the importance of learners’ beliefs on the acquisition process is generally recognized, few studies have focussed on and compared learners’ views on different components of the language system. A questionnaire containing semantic scale and Likert scale items probing learners’ views on grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary was designed and completed by 117 native speakers of Dutch in Flanders, who were studying English at university. The analysis of the responses revealed that (i) vocabulary was considered to be different from grammar and pronunciation, both in the extent to which an incorrect use could lead to communication breakdown and with respect to the learners’ language learning strategies, (ii) learners believed in the feasibility of achieving a native-like proficiency in all three components, and (iii) in-class grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary exercises were considered to be useful, even at tertiary level. The results are discussed in light of pedagogical approaches to language teaching