Indigenous affairs: a quick guide to key internet links

Provides links to key resources for Indigenous affairs in Australia, including information on \u27Closing the Gap\u27 agreements, funding, geography, and government agencies. Summary This Quick Guide provides links to: the Council of Australian Government (COAG) key agreements under ‘Closing the Gap’ a listing of Australian Government departments with responsibility for Indigenous affairs and their key programmes statistics and funding a map of ‘Aboriginal Australia’ directories of Indigenous organisations and businesses key organisations outside Government departments state, territory and local government websites and overseas websites

Ancient literary conceptions of eastern scythian ethnography from the 7th to the 2nd Century B.C.

The Scythians were an idea. The ancient Iranian-speaking nomads of Eurasia (from the Carpathian mountains in the west to the Tien Shan in the east) left no written texts of their own. They left instead a trail through the records of the sedentary societies with which they came into contact. These records are numerous, but scattered. The perspectives they offer range from Urartian, Assyrian and Babylonian, to Ionian, mainland Greek, Persian, Bosporan, Alexandrian, Seleukid, Baktrian, Parthian and Chinese. The forms in which records are extant range from maritime and overland itineraries, military surveys, geographies, histories, and treatises on natural science, medicine, philosophy and politics, to poems, romances, titulary epigrams, historical inscriptions, letters and prayers. It is through these diverse records that the ethnographic history of ancient Eurasia is to be approached. As the ethnography of the Maeotis-Caucasus region and Central Asia are often closely linked by literary tradition and historical circumstances, the primary concern of the present work has been taken to be those records of most relevance to the ethnography of the nomads dwelling between the Don and Crimean Bosporos in the west and the Tien Shan and Pamir mountains in the east, nomads who might for convenience be called 'Eastern Scythians'. This work will not concern itself with those sources dealing with the so called 'Royal Scythians' of the Ukraine, Dobrudja and Crimea (e.g. most of Herodotos' Book IV). Western and Soviet scholars may be characterised as adopting fundamentally different approaches to the study of these nomads' ethnographic history. The western scholars favour philological investigation, migration theories, and a perspective from the periphery, while the Soviet scholars favour archaeological investigation, theories of indigenous ethnogenesis, and the periodisation of nomad social, economic and cultural change. Western scholars rarely stop to reflect upon either their own methodology or that of the Soviets, while Soviet scholars often reflect upon their own methodology and criticise that of the Western scholars. More significant, however, than these methodological differences are the methodological similarities. Common to nearly all modem scholars writing in the field of Scythian studies, Western and Soviet, archaeologist, philologists and historians, are two tendencies..

Two conceptions of the tribal geography of the Royal Scythian Empire in classical literary tradition

From the late 6th to the late 4th centuries B.C. there existed in the lands between the Danube and the Don a confederation of tribal peoples of various racial and linguistic backgrounds under the overlordship of a nomadic Iranian-speaking tribal group sometimes referred to by the Greeks as the Bασιλήιοι Σϰύϑαι or 'Royal Scythians'. It is necessary to use the word 'sometimes', as the subject of the present research is in fact the varied conceptions in Classical Greek literature of the tribal geography (the distribution and inter-relation of the tribes) of this confederation. For convenience the historical entity will be referred to throughout this paper as 'The Royal Scythian Empire'. It is not however the historical questions related to the birth, development and dis .integration of this Empire which are the concern of this research, but rather historiographical questions: not such questions as how in reality the Empire was organised, but how the Greek writers perceived the Empire to be organised

Commonwealth Indigenous-specific expenditure 1968-2008

This paper attempts to identify Commonwealth expenditure in the area of Indigenous affairs over the 40 years from 1968 to 2008 and to plot that expenditure by agency. It analyses trends in both the nominal and real expenditure, in the expenditure as a percentage of total Commonwealth outlays and gross domestic product, and in the per-capita expenditure. In nominal and real terms Commonwealth Indigenous-specific expenditure has trended up, but as a percentage of total outlays or Gross Domestic Product it has plateaued in more recent years. The per capita trend is found to be too problematic to characterise simply

CG dinucleotide clustering is a species-specific property of the genome

Cytosines at cytosine-guanine (CG) dinucleotides are the near-exclusive target of DNA methyltransferases in mammalian genomes. Spontaneous deamination of methylcytosine to thymine makes methylated cytosines unusually susceptible to mutation and consequent depletion. The loci where CG dinucleotides remain relatively enriched, presumably due to their unmethylated status during the germ cell cycle, have been referred to as CpG islands. Currently, CpG islands are solely defined by base compositional criteria, allowing annotation of any sequenced genome. Using a novel bioinformatic approach, we show that CG clusters can be identified as an inherent property of genomic sequence without imposing a base compositional a priori assumption. We also show that the CG clusters co-localize in the human genome with hypomethylated loci and annotated transcription start sites to a greater extent than annotations produced by prior CpG island definitions. Moreover, this new approach allows CG clusters to be identified in a species-specific manner, revealing a degree of orthologous conservation that is not revealed by current base compositional approaches. Finally, our approach is able to identify methylating genomes (such as Takifugu rubripes) that lack CG clustering entirely, in which it is inappropriate to annotate CpG islands or CG clusters

A Genome-Wide Study of DNA Methylation Patterns and Gene Expression Levels in Multiple Human and Chimpanzee Tissues

The modification of DNA by methylation is an important epigenetic mechanism that affects the spatial and temporal regulation of gene expression. Methylation patterns have been described in many contexts within and across a range of species. However, the extent to which changes in methylation might underlie inter-species differences in gene regulation, in particular between humans and other primates, has not yet been studied. To this end, we studied DNA methylation patterns in livers, hearts, and kidneys from multiple humans and chimpanzees, using tissue samples for which genome-wide gene expression data were also available. Using the multi-species gene expression and methylation data for 7,723 genes, we were able to study the role of promoter DNA methylation in the evolution of gene regulation across tissues and species. We found that inter-tissue methylation patterns are often conserved between humans and chimpanzees. However, we also found a large number of gene expression differences between species that might be explained, at least in part, by corresponding differences in methylation levels. In particular, we estimate that, in the tissues we studied, inter-species differences in promoter methylation might underlie as much as 12%–18% of differences in gene expression levels between humans and chimpanzees

Meta-Analysis and Gene Set Enrichment Relative to ER Status Reveal Elevated Activity of MYC and E2F in the “Basal” Breast Cancer Subgroup

10.1371/journal.pone.0004710PLoS ONE43

Dimethyl fumarate in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 (RECOVERY): a randomised, controlled, open-label, platform trial

Dimethyl fumarate (DMF) inhibits inflammasome-mediated inflammation and has been proposed as a treatment for patients hospitalised with COVID-19. This randomised, controlled, open-label platform trial (Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy [RECOVERY]), is assessing multiple treatments in patients hospitalised for COVID-19 (NCT04381936, ISRCTN50189673). In this assessment of DMF performed at 27 UK hospitals, adults were randomly allocated (1:1) to either usual standard of care alone or usual standard of care plus DMF. The primary outcome was clinical status on day 5 measured on a seven-point ordinal scale. Secondary outcomes were time to sustained improvement in clinical status, time to discharge, day 5 peripheral blood oxygenation, day 5 C-reactive protein, and improvement in day 10 clinical status. Between 2 March 2021 and 18 November 2021, 713 patients were enroled in the DMF evaluation, of whom 356 were randomly allocated to receive usual care plus DMF, and 357 to usual care alone. 95% of patients received corticosteroids as part of routine care. There was no evidence of a beneficial effect of DMF on clinical status at day 5 (common odds ratio of unfavourable outcome 1.12; 95% CI 0.86-1.47; p = 0.40). There was no significant effect of DMF on any secondary outcome

Dimethyl fumarate in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 (RECOVERY): a randomised, controlled, open-label, platform trial

Dimethyl fumarate (DMF) inhibits inflammasome-mediated inflammation and has been proposed as a treatment for patients hospitalised with COVID-19. This randomised, controlled, open-label platform trial (Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy [RECOVERY]), is assessing multiple treatments in patients hospitalised for COVID-19 (NCT04381936, ISRCTN50189673). In this assessment of DMF performed at 27 UK hospitals, adults were randomly allocated (1:1) to either usual standard of care alone or usual standard of care plus DMF. The primary outcome was clinical status on day 5 measured on a seven-point ordinal scale. Secondary outcomes were time to sustained improvement in clinical status, time to discharge, day 5 peripheral blood oxygenation, day 5 C-reactive protein, and improvement in day 10 clinical status. Between 2 March 2021 and 18 November 2021, 713 patients were enroled in the DMF evaluation, of whom 356 were randomly allocated to receive usual care plus DMF, and 357 to usual care alone. 95% of patients received corticosteroids as part of routine care. There was no evidence of a beneficial effect of DMF on clinical status at day 5 (common odds ratio of unfavourable outcome 1.12; 95% CI 0.86-1.47; p = 0.40). There was no significant effect of DMF on any secondary outcome