99 research outputs found
As time flies by: Investigating cardiac aging in the short-lived Drosophila model.
Aging is associated with a decline in heart function across the tissue, cellular, and molecular levels. The risk of cardiovascular disease grows significantly over time, and as developed countries continue to see an increase in lifespan, the cost of cardiovascular healthcare for the elderly will undoubtedly rise. The molecular basis for cardiac function deterioration with age is multifaceted and not entirely clear, and there is a limit to what investigations can be performed on human subjects or mammalian models. Drosophila melanogaster has emerged as a useful model organism for studying aging in a short timeframe, benefitting from a suite of molecular and genetic tools and displaying highly conserved traits of cardiac senescence. Here, we discuss recent advances in our understanding of cardiac aging and how the fruit fly has aided in these developments
Charlie-is-so-âEnglishâ-like: Nationality and the branded-celebrity person in the age of YouTube
The YouTube celebrity is a novel social phenomenon. YouTube celebrities have implications for the social and cultural study of celebrity more generally but in order to illustrate the features of vlogging celebrity and its wider dimensions, this article focuses upon one case-study â Charlie McDonnell and his video âHow to be Englishâ. The premise of YouTube â âBroadcast Yourselfâ â begs the question âbut what self?â The article argues the YouTube celebrity is able to construct a celebrity persona by appealing to aspects of identity, such as nationality, and use them as a mask(s) to perform with. By situating Charlieâs âHow to be Englishâ in the context of establishing celebrity, the article argues that the processes of celebrification and âself-brandingâ utilise the power of identity myths to help assist the construction of a celebrity persona. Use of masks and myths allows for one to develop various aspects of their persona into personae. One such persona for Charlie is his âEnglishnessâ. As the social experience of âBroadcasting Yourselfâ necessarily asks one to turn ordinary aspects of their person into extra-ordinary qualities, Charlieâs use of Englishness allows âbeing Englishâ to become a mythological device to overcome the problem of âself-promotionâ
Simplicity in Visual Representation: A Semiotic Approach
Simplicity, as an ideal in the design of visual representations, has not received systematic attention. High-level guidelines are too general, and low-level guidelines too ad hoc, too numerous, and too often incompatible, to serve in a particular design situation. This paper reviews notions of visual simplicity in the literature within the analytical framework provided by Charles Morris' communication model, specifically, his trichotomy of communication levelsâthe syntactic, the semantic, and the pragmatic. Simplicity is ultimate ly shown to entail the adjudication of incompatibilities both within, and between, levels.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68281/2/10.1177_105065198700100103.pd
Creating the cultures of the future: cultural strategy, policy and institutions in Gramsci. Part one: Gramsci and cultural policy studies: some methodological reflections
Gramsciâs writings have rarely been discussed and used systematically by scholars in cultural policy studies, despite the fact that in cultural studies, from which the field emerged, Gramsci has been a major source of theoretical concepts. Cultural policy studies were, in fact, theorised as an anti-Gramscian project between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when a group of scholars based in Australia advocated a major political and theoretical reorientation of cultural studies away from hegemony theory and radical politicisation, and towards reformist-technocratic engagement with the policy concerns of contemporary government and business. Their criticism of the âGramscian traditionâ as inadequate for the study of cultural policy and institutions has remained largely unexamined in any detail for almost twenty years and seems to have had a significant role in the subsequent neglect of Gramsciâs contribution in this area of study. This essay, consisting of three parts, is an attempt to challenge such criticism and to provide an analysis of Gramsciâs writings, with the aim of proposing a more systematic contribution of his work to the theoretical development of cultural policy studies.
In Part One, I question the use of the notion of âGramscian traditionâ made by its critics and challenge the claim that it was inadequate for the study of cultural policy and institutions.
In parts Two and Three, I consider Gramsciâs specific writings on questions of cultural strategy, policy and institutions, which have so far been overlooked by scholars, arguing that they provide further analytical insights to those offered by his more general concepts. More specifically, in Part Two, I consider Gramsciâs pre-prison writings and political practice in relation to questions of cultural strategy and institutions. I argue that the analysis of these early texts, which were written in the years in which Gramsci was active in party organisation and leadership, is fundamental not only for understanding the nature of Gramsciâs early and continued involvement with questions of cultural strategy and institutions, but also as a key for deciphering and interpreting cultural policy themes that he later developed in the prison notebooks, and which originated in earlier debates.
Finally, in Part Three, I carry out a detailed analysis of Gramsciâs prison notes on questions of cultural strategy, policy and institutions, which enrich the theoretical underpinnings for critical frameworks of analysis as well as for radical practices of cultural strategy, cultural policy-making and cultural organisation. I then answer the question of whether Gramsciâs insights amount to a theory of cultural policy
Popularity markers on YouTubeâs attention economy: the case of Bubzbeauty
This article focuses on issues of attention and popularity development in YouTubeâs beauty community. I conceptualise the role of views and subscriptions as popularity markers, based on a broader ethnographic examination of 22Â months of immersed fieldwork on the platform. I consider the case of Bubz, a British-Chinese beauty guru, through a purposeful sample of 80 videos. A content typology is introduced, presenting four distinctive video categories: content-oriented, market-oriented, motivational, and relational. Drawing from the concepts of âattention economyâ and âmetrics of popularityâ, I explore content characteristics and affordances for the creation and maintenance of viewersâ attention. I argue that the guruâs uploads lead to two types of audiencesâcasual viewers and loyal subscribers. Vlogs renew attention and help maintain the interest first generated by tutorials, leading to treasured subscribersâan essential commodity within YouTubeâs highly competitive environment
Nucleosomes in gene regulation: theoretical approaches
This work reviews current theoretical approaches of biophysics and
bioinformatics for the description of nucleosome arrangements in chromatin and
transcription factor binding to nucleosomal organized DNA. The role of
nucleosomes in gene regulation is discussed from molecular-mechanistic and
biological point of view. In addition to classical problems of this field,
actual questions of epigenetic regulation are discussed. The authors selected
for discussion what seem to be the most interesting concepts and hypotheses.
Mathematical approaches are described in a simplified language to attract
attention to the most important directions of this field
Search for a W ' boson decaying to a muon and a neutrino in pp collisions at âs =7 TeV
This is the Pre-Print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 ElsevierA new heavy gauge boson, W', decaying to a muon and a neutrino, is searched for in pp collisions at a centre-of-mass of 7 TeV. The data, collected with the CMS detector at the LHC, correspond to an integrated luminosity of 36 inverse picobarns. No significant excess of events above the standard model expectation is found in the transverse mass distribution of the muon-neutrino system. Masses below 1.40 TeV are excluded at the 95% confidence level for a sequential standard-model-like W'. The W' mass lower limit increases to 1.58 TeV when the present analysis is combined with the CMS result for the electron channel.This work is supported by the FMSR (Austria); FNRS and FWO (Belgium); CNPq, CAPES, FAPERJ, and FAPESP (Brazil); MES (Bulgaria); CERN; CAS, MoST, and NSFC (China); COLCIENCIAS (Colombia); MSES (Croatia); RPF (Cyprus); Academy of Sciences
and NICPB (Estonia); Academy of Finland, ME, and HIP (Finland); CEA and CNRS/IN2P3
(France); BMBF, DFG, and HGF (Germany); GSRT (Greece); OTKA and NKTH (Hungary); DAE and DST (India); IPM (Iran); SFI (Ireland); INFN (Italy); NRF and WCU (Korea); LAS (Lithuania); CINVESTAV, CONACYT, SEP, and UASLP-FAI (Mexico); PAEC (Pakistan); SCSR
(Poland); FCT (Portugal); JINR (Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan); MST and MAE (Russia); MSTD (Serbia); MICINN and CPAN (Spain); Swiss Funding Agencies (Switzerland); NSC (Taipei); TUBITAK and TAEK (Turkey); STFC (United Kingdom); DOE and NSF (USA)
First measurement of hadronic event shapes in pp collisions at âs = 7 TeV
This is the Pre-Print version of the Article - Copyright @ 2011 ElsevierHadronic event shapes have been measured in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV, with a data sample collected with the CMS detector at the LHC. The sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 3.2 inverse picobarns. Event-shape distributions, corrected for detector response, are compared with five models of QCD multijet production
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