Legislating to Control Online Hate Speech: a Corpus-assisted semantic Analysis of French Parliamentary Debates

This corpus analysis of linguistic and semantic features in French parliamentary debates concerning online hate speech regulation, highlights tensions between state powers and private rights. Two key themes are identified: first, the problem of definition: how such online content is defined in the debates, and second, the problem of regulation: how the debates negotiate the supra-jurisdictional and individual jurisdiction issues involved, in regulating both the global online content and the responsibilities of the owners of the platforms who manage the content. For this analysis, the authors created a corpus of French National Assembly Examination Committee discussions and public sessions between July 2019 to January 2020 discussing the Loi Avia (Avia Law). The corpus was analysed using quali-quantitative methods. Overall, the study combines a top-down (global) and a bottom-up (local) analysis of the data, applying corpus semantic approaches (Lecolle et al. in Langages 210(2):35–54, 2018; Rastier in The Routledge handbook of semantics, Routledge, pp 507–522, 2015) to contextualize the analysis of the meta-discourse (Hyland in Meta-discourse: exploring interaction in writing, 1st ed. Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350063617). The analysis highlights the linguistic features revealing the power dynamics inherent within the discourse and counter-discourse of the dominant and opposition political parties respectively

Dementia : through the eyes of women

Dementia disproportionately affects women but the experiences and voices of women are missing from the research and literature. This project provides a snapshot of the experiences, thoughts and opinions of women affected by dementia: women with a diagnosis of dementia, women who are caring for family or friends, and women working in one of the caring professions which support people with dementia. This report aims to inspire people to think differently about women and dementia by using stories and reflections from individual women to inform the debate in a unique and insightful way

Commercialising disadvantage: the neoliberal discourses of commercial bail bond websites

The commercial bail bond industry is one of the most profitable aspects of America’s highly marketized criminal justice system that is increasingly shaped by neoliberal structures and ideologies. Drawing on a specialised corpus of “Home” and “About Us” pages from bail bond websites, this paper is the first empirical linguistic examination of commercial bail bonds discourse grounded in its legal context. Using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, we examine how bail bond companies 1) discursively present and promote their services, 2) represent the legal system and its processes, and 3) construe arrest and detention to prospective service users. The findings show that bail bond companies position their services as an unobjectionably common part of legal and financial self-management by normalising, legitimising, and idealising their use whilst seeking to minimise the power-imbalance between themselves and their often financially and socially disempowered ‘clients’. By grounding our linguistic analysis in a legal context, we demonstrate that these discourses simultaneously serve whilst oppress those they purport to help, offering an example of a local form of structural violence that subtly perpetuates neoliberal agendas and a two-tier justice system

'Psy’ expert evidence in the family courts: The potential for corpus-assisted analysis

This article introduces corpus-assisted linguistic methods as an exploratory means of analysing expert psychologists’ reports used in public family law (child protection) cases. Analysis of this dataset is a new application for corpus linguistics (CL) and the primary purpose of this article is to explore viability and potential for its future research using CL as a core method. For this study we have created and analysed a 25 single-text-type specialised written corpus consisting of 25 expert psychologists’ reports (the Psychology Report Corpus “PRC-25”). The reports are a random sample selected from a population of all psychologists’ reports held in Cafcass files over a 10-year period, representing the first corpus of its kind in a currently under-researched area. Our study uses both an inductive (data-driven) approach to identify significant themes and topics in the reports, and a deductive (legal-intuitive) approach to explore psychologists’ use of legally significant terms, especially risk of and significant harm. We also explore the possibility for using this new methodological protocol to triangulate analysis of a larger and representative corpus of expert psychologists’ reports, and the possibilities for corpus-driven analysis of the genre of written expert evidence text types more generally

SEEING THE UNSEEN: DELIVERING INTEGRATED UNDERGROUND UTILITY DATA IN THE UK

In earlier work we proposed a framework to integrate heterogeneous geospatial utility data in the UK. This paper provides an update on the techniques used to resolve semantic and schematic heterogeneities in the UK utility domain. Approaches for data delivery are discussed, including descriptions of three pilot projects and domain specific visualization issues are considered. A number of practical considerations are discussed that will impact on how any implementation architecture is derived from the integration framework. Considerations of stability, security, currency, operational impact and response time can reveal a number of conflicting constraints. The impacts of these constraints are discussed in respect of either a virtual or materialised delivery system. 1

Reimagining Restitution: New Approaches to Support Youth and Communities

Courts began ordering youth restitution in the 1960s as a less restrictive sanction than probation or incarceration for mostly white youth. Since then, restitution has been linked to higher recidivism rates and heightened racial and economic disparities in the juvenile justice system. This report provides an overview of the historical and current landscape of restitution imposed on youth, the impact of restitution on youth, victims and communities, and provides recommendations for how jurisdictions can reimagine restitution

Connectivity-based parcellation of the thalamus explains specific cognitive and behavioural symptoms in patients with bilateral thalamic infarct

A novel approach based on diffusion tractography was used here to characterise the cortico-thalamic connectivity in two patients, both presenting with an isolated bilateral infarct in the thalamus, but exhibiting partially different cognitive and behavioural profiles. Both patients (G.P. and R.F.) had a pervasive deficit in episodic memory, but only one of them (R.F.) suffered also from a dysexecutive syndrome. Both patients had an MRI scan at 3T, including a T1-weighted volume. Their lesions were manually segmented. T1-volumes were normalised to standard space, and the same transformations were applied to the lesion masks. Nineteen healthy controls underwent a diffusion-tensor imaging (DTI) scan. Their DTI data were normalised to standard space and averaged. An atlas of Brodmann areas was used to parcellate the prefrontal cortex. Probabilistic tractography was used to assess the probability of connection between each voxel of the thalamus and a set of prefrontal areas. The resulting map of corticothalamic connections was superimposed onto the patients' lesion masks, to assess whether the location of the thalamic lesions in R.F. (but not in G. P.) implied connections with prefrontal areas involved in dysexecutive syndromes. In G.P., the lesion fell within areas of the thalamus poorly connected with prefrontal areas, showing only a modest probability of connection with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Conversely, R.F.'s lesion fell within thalamic areas extensively connected with the ACC bilaterally, with the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and with the left supplementary motor area. Despite a similar, bilateral involvement of the thalamus, the use of connectivity-based segmentation clarified that R.F.'s lesions only were located within nuclei highly connected with the prefrontal cortical areas, thus explaining the patient's frontal syndrome. This study confirms that DTI tractography is a useful tool to examine in vivo the effect of focal lesions on interconnectivity brain patterns

Preclinical Pharmacokinetic Evaluation to Facilitate Repurposing of Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitors Nilotinib and Imatinib as Antiviral Agents

Background Several tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) developed as anti-cancer drugs, also have anti-viral activity due to their ability to disrupt productive replication and dissemination in infected cells. Consequently, such drugs are attractive candidates for “repurposing” as anti-viral agents. However, clinical evaluation of therapeutics against infectious agents associated with high mortality, but low or infrequent incidence, is often unfeasible. The United States Food and Drug Administration formulated the “Animal Rule” to facilitate use of validated animal models for conducting anti-viral efficacy studies. Methods To enable such efficacy studies of two clinically approved TKIs, nilotinib, and imatinib, we first conducted comprehensive pharmacokinetic (PK) studies in relevant rodent and non-rodent animal models. PK of these agents following intravenous and oral dosing were evaluated in C57BL/6 mice, prairie dogs, guinea pigs and Cynomolgus monkeys. Plasma samples were analyzed using an LC-MS/MS method. Secondarily, we evaluated the utility of allometry-based inter-species scaling derived from previously published data to predict the PK parameters, systemic clearance (CL) and the steady state volume of distribution (Vss) of these two drugs in prairie dogs, an animal model not tested thus far. Results Marked inter-species variability in PK parameters and resulting oral bioavailability was observed. In general, elimination half-lives of these agents in mice and guinea pigs were much shorter (1–3 h) relative to those in larger species such as prairie dogs and monkeys. The longer nilotinib elimination half-life in prairie dogs (i.v., 6.5 h and oral, 7.5 h), facilitated multiple dosing PK and safety assessment. The allometry-based predicted values of the Vss and CL were within 2.0 and 2.5-fold, respectively, of the observed values. Conclusions Our results suggest that prairie dogs and monkeys may be suitable rodent and non-rodent species to perform further efficacy testing of these TKIs against orthopoxvirus infections. The use of rodent models such as C57BL/6 mice and guinea pigs for assessing pre-clinical anti-viral efficacy of these two TKIs may be limited due to short elimination and/or low oral bioavailability. Allometry-based correlations, derived from existing literature data, may provide initial estimates, which may serve as a useful guide for pre-clinical PK studies in untested animal models

TNF suppresses acute intestinal inflammation by inducing local glucocorticoid synthesis

Although tumor necrosis factor (α) (TNF) exerts proinflammatory activities in a variety of diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease, there is increasing evidence for antiinflammatory actions of TNF. In contrast, glucocorticoids (GCs) are steroid hormones that suppress inflammation, at least in part by regulating the expression and action of TNF. We report that TNF induces extraadrenal production of immunoregulatory GCs in the intestinal mucosa during acute intestinal inflammation. The absence of TNF results in a lack of colonic GC synthesis and exacerbation of dextran sodium sulfate–induced colitis. TNF seems to promote local steroidogenesis by directly inducing steroidogenic enzymes in intestinal epithelial cells. Therapeutic administration of TNF induces GC synthesis in oxazolone-induced colitis and ameliorates intestinal inflammation, whereas inhibition of intestinal GC synthesis abrogates the therapeutic effect of TNF. These data show that TNF suppresses the pathogenesis of acute intestinal inflammation by promoting local steroidogenesis

Clinical quantification of the integrin αvβ6 by [18F]FB-A20FMDV2 positron emission tomography in healthy and fibrotic human lung (PETAL Study)

© 2019, The Author(s). Purpose: The RGD-integrin, αvβ6, plays a role in the pathogenesis of pulmonary fibrosis through activation of transforming growth factor beta (TGFβ). This study sought to quantify expression of αvβ6 in the lungs of healthy humans and subjects with pulmonary fibrosis using the αvβ6-selective [18F]FB-A20FMDV2 PET ligand. Methods: [18F]FB-A20FMDV2 PET/CT scans were performed in healthy subjects and those with fibrotic lung disease. Standard uptake values (SUV) and volume of distribution (VT) were used to quantify αvβ6 expression. In subjects with fibrotic lung disease, qualitative assessment of the relationship between αvβ6 expression and the distribution of fibrosis on high resolution computed tomography was conducted. Results: A total of 15 participants (6 healthy, 7 with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and 2 with connective tissue disease (CTD) associated PF) were enrolled. VT and SUV of [18F]FB-A20FMDV2 were increased in the lungs of subjects with pulmonary fibrosis (PF) compared with healthy subjects. Geometric mean VT (95% CI) was 0.88 (0.60, 1.29) mL/cm3 for healthy subjects, and 1.40 (1.22, 1.61) mL/cm3 for subjects with IPF; and SUV was 0.54 (0.36, 0.81) g/mL for healthy subjects and 1.03 (0.86, 1.22) g/mL for subjects with IPF. The IPF/healthy VT ratio (geometric mean, (95% CI of ratio)) was 1.59 (1.09, 2.32) (probability ratio > 1 = 0.988)) and the SUV ratio was 1.91 (1.27, 2.87) (probability ratio > 1 = 0.996). Increased uptake of [18F]FB-A20FMDV2 in PF was predominantly confined to fibrotic areas. [18F]FB-A20FMDV2 measurements were reproducible at an interval of 2 weeks. [18F]FB-A20FMDV2 was safe and well tolerated. Conclusions: Lung uptake of [18F]FB-A20FMDV2, a measure of expression of the integrin αvβ6, was markedly increased in subjects with PF compared with healthy subjects