Watch out for children : Charles Schulz’s Peanuts in the 1950s

When Peanuts debuted in American newspapers at the end of 1950, it entered a world of optimistic postwar consumerism that was moving out of the cities and into the suburbs. A comic about the baby boom that depicted the children of that boom without any parental supervision, it appeared to be set in an idyll, a small world of little folks, concerned only with small things. Even at this moment before melancholy and disappointment became its primary characteristics, however, the strip was fundamentally concerned with how its characters found their way in the world, which, at least in part, involved acting as if they were adults. For parents, such autonomy might have resonated with the emerging, and concerning, category of the teenager, had that vision not been covered over with a façade of cuteness. That mask, moreover, was one of the many factors that caused adults to imagine themselves as characters in the strip. By investigating the way that the children in the strip imagined themselves as adults, we can see that the little world of Charlie Brown animated the feeling, as the midcentury political philosopher Hannah Arendt might have said, of being between past and future, of being an actor in a world that does not understand individual agents and over which those agents have no control.American Studie

Correlated Dynamics of the O(P-3) + CHD3(v=0) Reaction : A Joint Crossed-Beam and Quasiclassical Trajectory Study

Crossed beam experiments and quasiclassical trajectory computations on an ab initio potential energy surface are performed for the O(P-3) + CHD3(v=0) --> OH(V'=0) + CD3(v(2)=0,2) and OD(v'=0,1) + CHD2(v=0) reactions. Both experiment and theory show that the excitation functions display a concave-up behavior and the angular distributions are backward scattered, indicating a direct rebound mechanism and a tight-bend transition state. The reaction produces mainly ground-state products showing the dominance of a vibrationally adiabatic reaction pathway. The Standard histogram binning cannot reproduce the observed vibrational adiabaticity, Whereas Gausgian binning give good agreement with experitnent

The Construction of Floating Nuclear Power Station in Pevek as Innovation in the Electricity market

The article considers efficiency issues of the innovative project construction of floating thermal nuclear power station (FNPS) as the instrument of increasing investment attractiveness of the region. The project is aimed to ensure energy supply in the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation. The necessity of building a FNPS is determined by the requirement to ensure the independence from transport infrastructure, logistics and pricing for the delivery of fuel. The long-term development of the district, aimed to attract prospective investors through the formation of the necessary infrastructure, enabling large companies to make the necessary investments in the cluster area.

Unemployment in Cohesion Regions of Italy

Import 06/11/2014Tato práce se zabývá nezaměstnanosti v regionech soudržnosti Itálie. První kapitola se věnuje teoretickému vymezení regionů, regionálním disparitám a nezaměstnanosti. Uvedeny jsou metody výpočtu míry nezaměstnanosti a dalších ukazatelů trhu práce. Druhá část práce obsahuje analýzu vývoje nezaměstnanosti v regionech NUTS 2. K řešení bylo použito metody analýzy časových řad a metody meziregionální komparace. Poslední část práce se věnuje porovnáním regionů v čase pomocí metody měření konvergence. Je zde také uvedena problematika politiky zaměstnanosti z pohledu Evropské unie a Itálie. Provedeným výzkumem jsme zjistili, že převládá nižší míra nezaměstnanosti v severních regionech.This work deal with development of unemployment in cohesion regions of Italy. The first chapter deals with the theoretical definition of regions, regional disparities and unemployment. The following are the methods for calculating the unemployment rate and other labor market indicators. The second part contains an analysis of unemployment in the NUTS 2 regions. To solving was used methods for the analysis of time series and cross-regional comparison. The last section is devoted to comparing regions over time using methods of measuring convergence. It also identified employment policy issues from the perspective of the European Union and Italy. Carried out the research, we found that dominates the lower unemployment rate in the northern regions.118 - Katedra regionální a environmentální ekonomikyvelmi dobř

Vibrio cholerae Infection of Drosophila melanogaster Mimics the Human Disease Cholera

Cholera, the pandemic diarrheal disease caused by the gram-negative bacterium Vibrio cholerae, continues to be a major public health challenge in the developing world. Cholera toxin, which is responsible for the voluminous stools of cholera, causes constitutive activation of adenylyl cyclase, resulting in the export of ions into the intestinal lumen. Environmental studies have demonstrated a close association between V. cholerae and many species of arthropods including insects. Here we report the susceptibility of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, to oral V. cholerae infection through a process that exhibits many of the hallmarks of human disease: (i) death of the fly is dependent on the presence of cholera toxin and is preceded by rapid weight loss; (ii) flies harboring mutant alleles of either adenylyl cyclase, Gsα, or the Gardos K(+) channel homolog SK are resistant to V. cholerae infection; and (iii) ingestion of a K(+) channel blocker along with V. cholerae protects wild-type flies against death. In mammals, ingestion of as little as 25 μg of cholera toxin results in massive diarrhea. In contrast, we found that ingestion of cholera toxin was not lethal to the fly. However, when cholera toxin was co-administered with a pathogenic strain of V. cholerae carrying a chromosomal deletion of the genes encoding cholera toxin, death of the fly ensued. These findings suggest that additional virulence factors are required for intoxication of the fly that may not be essential for intoxication of mammals. Furthermore, we demonstrate for the first time the mechanism of action of cholera toxin in a whole organism and the utility of D. melanogaster as an accurate, inexpensive model for elucidation of host susceptibility to cholera

The effects of antidepressants on the retention and metabolism of [3H]-norepinephrine in rat brain slices

Tricylic antidepressants acutely decrease the neuronal retention of [3H]-norepinehrine ([3H]-NE) by blocking neuronal membrane uptake and/or vesicular uptake and binding. To distinguish between effects upon the plasma membrane and upon the vesicular membrane, the retention, deamination, and O-methylation of [3H]-NE by rat brain slices were investigated in the presence of several antidepressant agents. The effects of antidepressants were compared to those of the prototype inhibitors, cocaine and reserpine, using slices of hypothalamus, brainstem. parietal cortex and caudate nucleus. Cocaine, which inhibits neuronal membrane uptake, decreased both the deamination and retention of [3H]-NE, while O-methylation was increased. Reserpine, which inhibits vesicular transport and binding, increased deamination, while it reduced retention without affecting the 0-methylation of [3H]-NE. The effects of desipramine, a prototype tricyclic antidepressant, were found to depend on the concentration. At low concentrations (10-9-10-8M), desipramine inhibited the retention and deamination of [3H]-NE in each brain region except the caudate. At higher concentrations (10-7-10w-4M), the retention of [3H]-NE was reduced further. However, deamination was increased in the caudate and, in the other three regions, deamination did not decrease further. Nortriptyline and protriptyline had actions similar to desipramine, whereas, iprindole did not affect [3H]-NE retention. These results suggest that tricyclic antidepressants are not specific selective inhibitors of neuronal membrane transport.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/24412/1/0000682.pd