Preparations of Duck Hepatitis B Virions Contain Multiple DNA Polymerase Activities

The hepadnaviral DNA genome is synthesized by a viral-encoded reverse transcriptase, but the nature of this protein(s) in vivo remains obscure. We have previously described studies in which activity gel assays identified multiple DNA polymerase (DNAp) activities associated with highly purified duck hepatitis B virus (DHBV) core particles. We now report that virions isolated from viremic sera are associated with DNA-dependent DNAp activities which are nearly identical to major DNAp activities detected with highly purified DHBV core particles. These results suggest that the virion-associated polymerases are the same as those which are detected with core particles and are likely to represent DHBV pol gene products involved in replication of the genome

Natural Populations of Woodchuck Hepatitis Virus Contain Variant Precore and Core Sequences Including a Premature Stop Codon in the Epsilon Motif

We have determined a consensus sequence and the type and the frequency of spontaneous sequence variations in the woodchuck hepatitis virus (WHV) precore gene and the 5' region of the core gene in 101 serum samples from 53 naturally WHV-infected woodchucks by polymerase chain reaction sequencing. Twenty of the 53 woodchucks were found to have variant sequences. Ten patterns of variant sequences were identified in these 20 animals. WHV sequences from 4 woodchucks had 1 nucleotide change, 3 had 2 nucleotide changes and 3 had 3 nucleotide changes. The nucleotide changes were not randomly distributed, but were limited to only 8 sites. Four sites were in the epsilon motif of the precore gene and four were in the 5' region of the core gene. Sixteen of the 53 (30%) woodchucks had precore sequence variants. All altered sites were analogous to previously described mutations in hepatitis B virus. There was a nucleotide change at nucleotide 2016 in codon 29 of the precore region that produced a stop codon in 4 animals. This site is analogous to a common hepatitis B virus e antigen mutation. The sequence from the initial blood samples from 3 of 4 animals with this stop codon producing variant appeared to be the consensus sequence; however, in later samples the variant occurred as a mixed infection with the consensus sequence. The mixed infections were chronic and the proportion of the variant sequence was maintained or increased in the course of infection. In the fourth animal only the variant was found and it persisted for over 14 months of infection. WHV appears to be a valuable model for the study of the structure and function of the hepadnavirus precore region

A decision support system for environmental management of agriculture.

The University of Hertfordshire, in collaboration with two UK agricultural establishments are developing a decision support system for environmental management in arable agriculture. The system aims to encourage and promote best practice. Significant environmental effects from arable agriculture arise from the use of fertilisers, pesticides and unsustainable soil management practices. The software's assessment routines determine eco-ratings and textual descriptions of performance by comparing actual practices with best practice. To provide a full farm assessment, other activities such as energy and water use, waste management and intensive livestock husbandry are also included. The system incorporates modules which allow 'what if scenarios to be explored and a hypertext information system which includes legislation, codes of best practice, a science library, glossary, index, contacts database and information on formal environmental management and farm auditing.Peer reviewe

Examining Student Identification With The Alumni Organization At A 4-Year Commuter Campus

Past research has identified several institutional and individual antecedents that lead to greater intent to support an organization. This paper takes an organizational identification approach in developing an Alumni Relationship Model (ARM) that can be used by universities to generate greater support for their Alumni services activities. This paper shows that by going beyond traditional organizational identification models and by introducing new variables, it is possible to broaden and enrich both practice and theory of organizational identification within a university setting

Forefronting Welsh through English: translating and translanguaging in Alys Conran's 'Pigeon'

Alys Conran’s first novel, Pigeon, (2016), relates the misadventure of a disaffected young Welsh boy, partly through the eyes of his friend and accomplice Iola, who, like Pigeon, comes from a broken family. Both are growing up in a bleak post industrial village in North Wales, never named, possibly Bethesda, the setting for one of the finest novels ever written in Welsh, Caradog Prichard’s Un nos ola leuad, which also charts the psychological undercurrents of a pre-adolescent boy trying to make sense of the world in which he finds himself, as he wanders innocently along a path of self-destruction. Prichard’s novel, written half a century ago, is in Welsh. Conran, a native speaker of Welsh, writes in English. In choosing to do so she offers insights into the way in which the two languages of Wales have been brought together through the media, through a bilingual educational system, and through changed attitudes towards both English and Welsh in the wake of devolution, more functional and less emotively charged. Pigeon and Iola are Welsh speakers, but they resort to English not just to interact with Pigeon’s monolingual step-sister, brought to the village by a violent Englishman who moves in with Pigeon’s mother, but also to play out their own fantasies, fuelled by the language of films and social media. In short, Pigeon, with its continual reference to the language use of its protagonists, can be seen as an exploration of ‘translanguaging’, a term which first appeared in Welsh as trawsieithu (Williams 1994) and has been defined by Canagarajah (2011) as ‘the ability of multilingual speakers to shuttle between languages, treating the diverse languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system’

Wales: (still) a problem of translation? Language choice in Wales at the end of the Anglo-Welsh era

In 1996 the poet R. S. Thomas, addressing an audience at Kings College London, claimed that ‘my country, Cymru, to be understood presents a problem of translation, and if it is to maintain a separate and valuable identity, it must continue to do so.’ Thomas, a native speaker of English, and a self-taught user of Welsh, seemed to be questioning the value of English to reflect the reality of Wales, and with it his own status as an ‘Anglo-Welsh’ poet. Thomas had spent a lifetime campaigning for the Welsh language, while writing some of the most important poetry in English to emerge in Britain during the latter half of the last century. This inner conflict mirrored the language situation in Wales, and the choices facing writers who grew up in the principality; or rather, the lack of choice, since native Welsh speakers carried the psychological onus of remaining faithful to the hen iaith, the ‘old language’, while numbers of Welsh speakers declined all around them, and non-Welsh speakers had no choice but to use English. But the last two decades have seen considerable social, political, and linguistic change in Wales. An extensive bilingual education policy, the emergence of a Welsh language television channel, and the establishment of the Welsh assembly in 19998, seem to have halted the decline in the number of Welsh speakers, and come some way to bridging the gap between the two linguistic communities. Today writers in Welsh and in English share the same national platform (Llenyddiaeth Cymru - Literature Wales) and an increasing number of bilingual writers choose to use both languages, often translating their own work. In this paper I look back over a century of Anglo Welsh writing, and suggest that entrenched language attitudes in Wales, and the attendant ‘impossibility of translation’, have given way to a vibrant bilingual literary scene as Welsh writers look beyond the hills and valleys of an Anglo-Welsh tradition to the world at large, and to how their country relates to the all-engulfing forces of globalisation

Rethinking English Language Certification

The premise for this volume is that the time has come to rethink English language certification to reflect the needs and profiles of users of English as a lingua franca, in which the dynamics of interaction are rather different from that of communication with native speakers. After an analysis of existing certifications, their scope and limitations, we describe an experiment in co-certification in which an international examining board and a higher education institution joined forces to produce a local version of an international exam, within a framework of English as a lingua franca

Towards a (Painful?) Paradigm Shift: Language Teachers and the Notion of 'Error'

This paper examines the relationship between language teachers and the errors made by their students. Traditionally, errors reflect a deviation from a norm, which is a described or imagined standard form of linguistic behavior, and teachers are the repositories of that standard. Errors provide insights into processes of language acquisition, and offer teachers convenient strategies for classroom intervention. More than this, student errors – grammatical, phonological, lexical, pragmatic – continue to offer teachers a source of reflection, amusement, and even endearment, as professional teaching publications and Internet forums show. The appearance of contrastive analysis in the 1960s, the brief ascendancy of error analysis, and the ensuing development of inter-language studies, kept the focus firmly on the learner’s distance (ultimately unbridgeable) from native speaker competences, with the underlying message for the language teaching profession that the teacher’s role was to bring students as far as possible towards a native-speaker like competence – a default model of competence which was built into the rating scales of major testing organisations. This comfortable status quo was called into question by the can do approach adopted in the Common European Framework of Reference (2000), in which the focus shifted from learner error to learner competence, posing new challenges for curriculum designers and language testers. Nonetheless, a standard form of the language (usually ‘British English’ in Europe) continued to provide the target in coursebooks produced by the major publishers, and an ostensibly communicative approach continued to be the vehicle for a grammatical syllabus written in stone. But over the last decade further challenges have been posed by the explosion on the scene of English Lingua Franca (ELF) and the awareness that most interactions in English today are between non native speakers. ELF research increasingly shows that success in NNS interaction does not come from approximating native speaker norms, but rather from a range of collaborative strategies, linguistic, paralinguistic, and pragmatic. In this context, teachers and testers will increasingly have to redefine the notion of ‘error’ in the language classroom, an operation which for many teachers rooted in native speaker norms (most of them, according to recent surveys in both secondary and higher education) is likely to signify a painful paradigm shift

“Co-certification”: a close encounter with ELF for an international examining board

Over the last decade ELF has become a reality in European universities, but this is not reflected in the major international language tests designed for access to higher education and for university students. In this paper I describe an experiment in ‘co-certification’, a test of English set at level C1 of the CEFR, jointly developed by Trinity College London and the University of Ca’ Foscari Venice, in which an international version of the test was adapted locally to include locally-relevant components and enhance validity and task authenticity. One feature of the co-certification was the introduction of an independent listening task which took the form of understanding an extract from a lecture given in English by a non native speaker. Possible problems we had anticipated ranged from the kind of discourse features they should include, and whether or not there was a fairness issue related to accent recognition. In fact the overall results showed no significant difference from the previous (‘non ELF’) version of the exam, while the listening part had a higher pass rate than the overall oral test which involved interaction with a native speaker. As far as we know, the co-certification is the first example of an internationally recognized board engaging systematically with ELF features , notably non-native phonology and intonation patterns, in a test of listening. The findings so far suggest that, for the test takers at least, this can be unproblematic and uncontroversial