247 research outputs found
Retinoic Acid-Binding Protein in Human Breast Cancer and Dysplasia
Seventy-five specimens of human breast tissue were checked for the presence of cellular retinoic acid-binding protein (cRABP). Fifty-two percent of the primary carcinomas and 43% of the dysplastic breast lesions (stage MIl) contained detectable amounts of cRABP, whereas no cRABP was found in normal tissue. Sucrose gradient centrifugation and electrophoresis on agarose were used for analysis of the presence of cRABP. The cRABP of human origin (normal uterus and neoplastic mammary tissue) differed in its mobility in agarose electrophoresis from that of rat testis cRA
The ethical challenge of Touraine's 'living together'
In Can We Live Together? Alain Touraine combines a consummate analysis of crucial social tensions in contemporary societies with a strong normative appeal for a new emancipatory 'Subject' capable of overcoming the twin threats of atomisation or authoritarianism. He calls for a move from 'politics to ethics' and then from ethics back to politics to enable the new Subject to make a reality out of the goals of democracy and solidarity. However, he has little to say about the nature of such an ethics. This article argues that this lacuna could usefully be filled by adopting a form of radical humanism found in the work of Erich Fromm. It defies convention in the social sciences by operating from an explicit view of the 'is' and the 'ought' of common human nature, specifying reason, love and productive work as the qualities to be realised if we are to move closer to human solidarity. Although there remain significant philosophical and political differences between the two positions, particularly on the role to be played by 'the nation', their juxtaposition opens new lines of inquiry in the field of cosmopolitan ethics
Space Warps II. New Gravitational Lens Candidates from the CFHTLS Discovered through Citizen Science
We report the discovery of 29 promising (and 59 total) new lens candidates
from the CFHT Legacy Survey (CFHTLS) based on about 11 million classifications
performed by citizen scientists as part of the first Space Warps lens search.
The goal of the blind lens search was to identify lens candidates missed by
robots (the RingFinder on galaxy scales and ArcFinder on group/cluster scales)
which had been previously used to mine the CFHTLS for lenses. We compare some
properties of the samples detected by these algorithms to the Space Warps
sample and find them to be broadly similar. The image separation distribution
calculated from the Space Warps sample shows that previous constraints on the
average density profile of lens galaxies are robust. SpaceWarps recovers about
65% of known lenses, while the new candidates show a richer variety compared to
those found by the two robots. This detection rate could be increased to 80% by
only using classifications performed by expert volunteers (albeit at the cost
of a lower purity), indicating that the training and performance calibration of
the citizen scientists is very important for the success of Space Warps. In
this work we present the SIMCT pipeline, used for generating in situ a sample
of realistic simulated lensed images. This training sample, along with the
false positives identified during the search, has a legacy value for testing
future lens finding algorithms. We make the pipeline and the training set
publicly available.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, MNRAS accepted, minor to moderate changes in
this versio
Epitaxial rhenium microwave resonators
International audienceWe have fabricated rhenium microwave resonators from epitaxial films. We have used thin films of different structural quality depending on their growth conditions. The resonators were coupled to a microwave transmission line which allows the measurement of their resonance frequencies and internal quality factors. From the resonance frequency at low temperature , the effective penetration depth and the London penetration depth of the rhenium film are extracted
Space Warps: I. Crowd-sourcing the Discovery of Gravitational Lenses
We describe Space Warps, a novel gravitational lens discovery service that
yields samples of high purity and completeness through crowd-sourced visual
inspection. Carefully produced colour composite images are displayed to
volunteers via a web- based classification interface, which records their
estimates of the positions of candidate lensed features. Images of simulated
lenses, as well as real images which lack lenses, are inserted into the image
stream at random intervals; this training set is used to give the volunteers
instantaneous feedback on their performance, as well as to calibrate a model of
the system that provides dynamical updates to the probability that a classified
image contains a lens. Low probability systems are retired from the site
periodically, concentrating the sample towards a set of lens candidates. Having
divided 160 square degrees of Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey
(CFHTLS) imaging into some 430,000 overlapping 82 by 82 arcsecond tiles and
displaying them on the site, we were joined by around 37,000 volunteers who
contributed 11 million image classifications over the course of 8 months. This
Stage 1 search reduced the sample to 3381 images containing candidates; these
were then refined in Stage 2 to yield a sample that we expect to be over 90%
complete and 30% pure, based on our analysis of the volunteers performance on
training images. We comment on the scalability of the SpaceWarps system to the
wide field survey era, based on our projection that searches of 10 images
could be performed by a crowd of 10 volunteers in 6 days.Comment: 21 pages, 13 figures, MNRAS accepted, minor to moderate changes in
this versio
Influence of a Random Telegraph Process on the Transport through a Point Contact
We describe the transport properties of a point contact under the influence
of a classical two-level fluctuator. We employ a transfer matrix formalism
allowing us to calculate arbitrary correlation functions of the stochastic
process by mapping them on matrix products. The result is used to obtain the
generating function of the full counting statistics of a classical point
contact subject to a classical fluctuator, including extensions to a pair of
two-level fluctuators as well as to a quantum point contact. We show that the
noise in the quantum point contact is a sum of the (quantum) partitioning noise
and the (classical) noise due to the two-level fluctuator. As a side result, we
obtain the full counting statistics of a quantum point contact with
time-dependent transmission probabilities.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure; a new section about experiments and a figure
showing the crossover from sub- to superpoissonian noise have been adde
The concept of solidarity: emerging from the theoretical shadows?
The concept of solidarity has been relatively neglected by social scientists since Durkheim's pioneering work in the late 19th century. The discipline of politics has been guilty of overlooking this 'subjective' element of community life, but recent works by Stjernø and Brunkhorst reflect a growing awareness of the theoretical significance of the concept. Whereas early liberal attempts to theorise solidarity took the nation state to be the appropriate community for its realisation, the emergence of globalisation raises the possibility of human solidarity developing in the global community. Traditional forms of solidarity have been dissipated by the social changes accompanying globalisation, but they were often locked into the defence of particular interests. New forms may be emerging to rekindle the broader vision of human solidarity. Recent work by writers such as Habermas, Honneth, Rorty and Touraine focuses on widening and deepening democratic participation and/or the articulation of our ethical obligations in various ways. It is argued here that these perspectives need to be supplemented by a radical humanist approach grounded in a normative theory of human self-realisation
Global citizenship as the completion of cosmopolitanism
A conception of global citizenship should not be viewed as separate from, or synonymous with, the cosmopolitan moral orientation, but as a primary component of it. Global citizenship is fundamentally concerned with individual
moral requirements in the global frame. Such requirements, framed here as belonging to the category of individual cosmopolitanism, offer guidelines on right action in the context of global human community. They are complementary
to the principles of moral cosmopolitanism – those to be used in assessing the justice of global institutions and practices – that have been emphasised by cosmopolitan political theorists. Considering principles of individual and moral cosmopolitanism together can help to provide greater clarity concerning individual duties in the absence of fully global institutions, as well as clarity on individual obligations of justice in relation to emerging and still-developing trans-state institutions
- …