Creating Space by Spreading Atmospheres: Protest Movements From a Phenomenological Perspective

Wie konstituieren sich Räume über soziale Handlungen und wie konstituieren sie soziale Handlungen? Wir gehen dieser Fragestellung in unserem Beitrag nach und untersuchen, wie sich Protestierende Räume aneignen, indem sie Straßen und öffentliche Gebäude besetzen und bestimmte Atmosphären erzeugen und verbreiten. Das phänomenologische Konzept der Sinnprovinzen von Alfred SCHÜTZ nutzen wir als heuristisches Mittel, um die Vielfalt von Protestatmosphären mit ihren räumlichen, affektiven und epistemischen Dimensionen zu erfassen. Aus dieser Perspektive beschreiben wir Proteste in Südafrika und Senegal, wo "Straße" und Medien aufeinandertreffen. Unser Forschungsmaterial umfasst Dokumente, Tweets, online gesammeltes Videomaterial und ethnografische Interviews. In unserer Analyse geht es insbesondere darum aufzuzeigen, wie verkörperte Praktiken bestimmte Sinnprovinzen und Protestatmosphären produzieren und welche Rolle dabei Praktiken sozialer Medien in der Hervorbringung und in der räumlichen Konstituierung von Protesten spielen. Wir liefern mit unserem Beitrag damit nicht nur ein Beispiel dafür, wie sozialer Raum durch Protest geschaffen und refiguriert wird, sondern ermöglichen auch ein tiefergehendes Verständnis der situativen Entstehung von Protesten als kollektivem Handeln, durch das "Wir-Erfahrungen" erzeugt werden. Der phänomenologische Blick geht dabei über den weit verbreiteten Geist-Körper-Dualismus hinaus, der vielen Interpretationen sozialer Bewegungskulturen zugrunde liegt.How are spaces constituted through social action, and how do they constitute social action? We address these questions by studying how protesters appropriate spaces by occupying streets and public buildings and by spreading specific atmospheres. We apply Alfred SCHÜTZ's phenomenological take on the constitution of multiple realities in terms of "province of meaning" as a heuristic device to capture the diversity of protest atmospheres along with their spatial, affective, and epistemic dimensions—those embodied and situated as well as virtual. This perspective allows us to describe empirical examples of protest situations in South Africa and Senegal where "the streets" and the media meet. Our research material spans documents, tweets, video material collected online, and ethnographic interviews. In this article, we look at how embodied practices reproduce and manifest particular "provinces of meaning" and "protest atmospheres," and how these embodied practices are complemented by social media practices. Our proposed approach not only provides an example of how a social space is created and refigured through social protest, but also allows a further understanding of the situational emergence of protests as collective action that creates "we-experiences." The phenomenological perspective goes beyond the widespread mind/body dualism that underlies so many interpretations of social movement culture

Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives by looking at their translation: The translation-spotting technique

The various meanings of discourse connectives like while and however are difficult to identify and annotate, even for trained human annotators. This problem is all the more important that connectives are salient textual markers of cohesion and need to be correctly interpreted for many NLP applications. In this paper, we suggest an alternative route to reach a reliable annotation of connectives, by making use of the information provided by their translation in large parallel corpora. This method thus replaces the difficult explicit reasoning involved in traditional sense annotation by an empirical clustering of the senses emerging from the translations. We argue that this method has the advantage of providing more reliable reference data than traditional sense annotation. In addition, its simplicity allows for the rapid constitution of large annotated datasets

Controversies in hybrid banking: attitudes of Swiss public umbilical cord blood donors toward private and public banking

Purpose: Umbilical cord blood (UCB) stored in public inventories has become an alternative stem cell source for allogeneic stem cell transplantation. The potential use of autologous UCB from private banks is a matter of debate. In the face of the limited resources of public inventories, a discussion on "hybrid” public and private UCB banking has evolved. We aimed to explore the attitudes of the donating parents toward public and private UCB banking. Study design and methods: A standardized, anonymous questionnaire was sent to the most recent 621 public UCB donors including items regarding satisfaction with recruitment process, the need for a second consent before release of the UCB unit for stem cell transplantation, and the donors' views on public and private UCB banking. Furthermore, we asked about their views on UCB research. Results: Of the questionnaires, 48% were returned, and 16% were lost due to mail contact. Of our donors, 95% would donate to the public bank again. As much as 35% of them were convinced that public banking was useful. Whereas 27% had never heard about private UCB banking, 34% discussed both options. Nearly 70% of donors opted for public banking due to altruism and the high costs of private banking. Of our public UCB donors, 81% stated that they did not need a re-consent before UCB release for stem cell transplantation. In case of sample rejection, 53.5% wanted to know details about the particular research project. A total of 9% would not consent. Conclusions: Almost all donors would choose public banking again due to altruism and the high costs of private banking. Shortly after donation, mail contact with former UCB donors was difficult. This might be a relevant issue in any sequential hybrid bankin

Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives by looking at their translation: The translation-spotting technique

The various meanings of discourse connectives like while and however are difficult to identify and annotate, even for trained human annotators. This problem is all the more important that connectives are salient textual markers of cohesion and need to be correctly interpreted for many NLP applications. In this paper, we suggest an alternative route to reach a reliable annotation of connectives, by making use of the information provided by their translation in large parallel corpora. This method thus replaces the difficult explicit reasoning involved in traditional sense annotation by an empirical clustering of the senses emerging from the translations. We argue that this method has the advantage of providing more reliable reference data than traditional sense annotation. In addition, its simplicity allows for the rapid constitution of large annotated datasets

0012: Cardiac effects of a treatment with prolyl-hydroxylase inhibitors (PHI), used to improve exercise performance, in sedentary and trained rats

Stabilization of the Hypoxia Inducible Factor (HIF) using prolyl-hydroxylase inhibitors (PHI) leads to an EPO synthesis which is suspected to be used as a doping practice. Such a treatment is suspected to improve endurance performance by increasing oxygen transport. However the effects of a PHI treatment on heart morphology and function has never been investigated. Therefore the aim of this study was to evaluate whether potential effects of PHI on cardiac function could contribute to explain its beneficial effect on aerobic performance.We tested the effects of a 1 week treatment with a PHI (DMOG, 150mg.kg–1, I.P.) or a placebo (NaCl) on both sedentary (Sed) and trained rats (Ex; trained during 5 weeks before treatment started; 40min at 25m.min–1 per day; 5days/week). Our first result was that PHI increased running performance (+12%, p<0,05) in both Sed and Ex groups. This increased performance was associated with a major increase in total hemoglobin in PHI-treated animals (+13% p<0,05). However, regarding cardiac function and cardiac remodeling no beneficial effect of PHI was observed. Indeed, in hearts of sedentary as well as exercised rats no significal change in any morphological parameters (LVEDs, LVEDd, AWTd, PWTd and RWT) was found. Moreover, no change in systolic function likely to explain enhanced exercise performance was observed in PHI-treated hearts, when evaluated by intraventricular pressure probe (Millar®). Finally it is interesting to note that in sedentary rat hearts an impairment of diastolic function characterized by an altered E/A and dp/dtmin ratios was found when they were challenged with isoproterenol (0,5mg.kg-1). These last results obtained in sedentary hearts could suggest that a more prolonged treatment with such PHI could have deleterious consequences on heart health and point out the danger of such a doping strategy; however, this point remains to be more precisely investigated

Discourse-level Annotation over Europarl for Machine Translation: Connectives and Pronouns

This paper describes methods and results for the annotation of two discourse-level phenomena, connectives and pronouns, over a multilingual parallel corpus. Excerpts from Europarl in English and French have been annotated with disambiguation information for connectives and pronouns, for about 3600 tokens. This data is then used in several ways: for cross-linguistic studies, for training automatic disambiguation software, and ultimately for training and testing discourse-aware statistical machine translation systems. The paper presents the annotation procedures and their results in detail, and overviews the first systems trained on the annotated resources and their use for machine translation

Haploinsufficiency of Dmxl2, Encoding a Synaptic Protein, Causes Infertility Associated with a Loss of GnRH Neurons in Mouse

International audienceCharacterization of the genetic defects causing gonadotropic deficiency has made a major contribution to elucidation of the fundamental role of Kisspeptins and Neurokinin B in puberty onset and reproduction. The absence of puberty may also reveal neurodevelopmental disorders caused by molecular defects in various cellular pathways. Investigations of these neurodevelopmental disorders may provide information about the neuronal processes controlling puberty onset and reproductive capacity. We describe here a new syndrome observed in three brothers, which involves gonadotropic axis deficiency, central hypothyroidism, peripheral demyelinating sensorimotor polyneuropathy, mental retardation, and profound hypoglycemia, progressing to nonautoimmune insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. High-throughput sequencing revealed a homozygous in-frame deletion of 15 nucleotides in DMXL2 in all three affected patients. This homozygous deletion was associated with lower DMXL2 mRNA levels in the blood lymphocytes of the patients. DMXL2 encodes the synaptic protein rabconnectin-3a, which has been identified as a putative scaffold protein for Rab3-GAP and Rab3-GEP, two regulators of the GTPase Rab3a. We found that rabconnectin-3a was expressed in exocytosis vesicles in gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) axonal extremities in the median eminence of the hypothalamus. It was also specifically expressed in cells expressing luteinizing hormone (LH) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) within the pituitary. The conditional heterozygous deletion of Dmxl2 from mouse neurons delayed puberty and resulted in very low fertility. This reproductive phenotype was associated with a lower number of GnRH neurons in the hypothalamus of adult mice. Finally, Dmxl2 knockdown in an insulin-secreting cell line showed that rabconnectin-3a controlled the constitutive and glucose-induced secretion of insulin. In conclusion, this study shows that low levels of DMXL2 expression cause a complex neurological phenotype, with abnormal glucose metabolism and gonadotropic axis deficiency due to a loss of GnRH neurons. Our findings identify rabconectin-3a as a key controller of neuronal and endocrine homeostatic processes

Aplastic anemia and concomitant autoimmune diseases

The association of aplastic anemia (AA) with other autoimmune diseases (AID) has been described but so far not systematically evaluated. We assessed the incidence and the outcome of concomitant AID in a retrospective, single-center study of 243 patients with severe AA treated between 1974 and 2006 with either immunosuppression (186) or hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (57) and a median follow-up time of 9.3years (0-33). Clinically manifest AID were observed in 24 out of 243 (10 ± 3.7%) patients. Age at diagnosis of AA was significantly younger in patients without AID compared to patients with AID (median, 20 versus 52years; P < 0.001). In 12 patients where the diagnosis of AID was done before AA therapy, response to antithymocyte globulin was good for AA (ten out of 12) but not for AID (2 out of 12). In 13 patients in which AID occurred after first-line therapy, the median time to the AID was 7years (range 3months-27.5years