95 research outputs found

    'British Animation Women and the Myth of Meritocracy.' Society of Animation Studies. Animate Energies 2020. New Orleans

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    British Animation Women and the Myth of Meritocracy I produced and directed a documentary to celebrate women working in the animation industry for Sky Showcase Channel 192 on 13th October. The women interviewed in the documentary were from a range of backgrounds – animators, directors, commissioners and writers. These women all stated that there are less women in key creative roles than men, yet UK Screen Alliance, recently published a report that revealed that 51% of workers in animation were women – 89% in production, 55% in senior creative production and 49% in creative artist roles. At first these figures seem very exciting, but on further examination, the categories seem rather vague. Were these women in key creative roles or were these figures obscuring the reality of the kinds of roles women were actually engaged with. Out of the total number of animation series commissioned or co-produced in the UK between 1990 – 2018, only 6.5% were created by women (En.wikipedia.org.2018). The cultural and creative industries including animation, are usually seen as ‘cool, creative and egalitarian’ (Gill, 70-89, 2002). Yet when conducting my research by interviewing women across the industry, there appear to be clear paradoxes with inequalities in gender and race. In the animation industry, networking and word of mouth are key methods of gaining employment. ‘There is evidence that this may have different outcomes for men and women in the creative industries’ (Grugulis & Stoyanova, 2012.2) This appears to put women in animation at a disadvantage for a variety of reasons; women with children will find it hard to network, people from the same ilk tend to stick together and there is little transparency in recruitment. This paper asks the question, ‘Where are the key women in the UK animation industry?’ and attempts to create a possible framework to answer it. Bibliography Animated Women Breaking The Mold. (2019) https://www.britishanimationwomen.com/ Password to watch the documentary is crapston Animated Women UK. (2018). Animated Women UK Supporting Women in VFX & Animation. [online] Available at: http://www.animatedwomenuk.com/ [Accessed 12 Nov. 2018]. Gill, R., (2002), ‘Cool, creative and egalitarian? Exploring gender in project-based new media work in Europe’, Information, Communication & Society, 5 (1): 70–89. Grugulis,I.and Stoyanova,D.(2012),‘Socia lcapital and networks in film and TV:jobs for the boys?’ The British Sociological Association Annual Conference 2012: Sociology in an Age of Austerity. Wreyford, N. (2015). Birds of a Feather: Informal Recruitment Practices and Gendered Outcomes for Screenwriting Work in the UK Film Industry. The Sociological Review, 63(1_suppl), pp.84-96

    Decoupling of DNA methylation and activity of intergenic LINE-1 promoters in colorectal cancer

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    <p>Hypomethylation of LINE-1 repeats in cancer has been proposed as the main mechanism behind their activation; this assumption, however, was based on findings from early studies that were biased toward young and transpositionally active elements. Here, we investigate the relationship between methylation of 2 intergenic, transpositionally inactive LINE-1 elements and expression of the LINE-1 chimeric transcript (LCT) 13 and LCT14 driven by their antisense promoters (L1-ASP). Our data from DNA modification, expression, and 5′RACE analyses suggest that colorectal cancer methylation in the regions analyzed is not always associated with LCT repression. Consistent with this, in HCT116 colorectal cancer cells lacking DNA methyltransferases DNMT1 or DNMT3B, LCT13 expression decreases, while cells lacking both DNMTs or treated with the DNMT inhibitor 5-azacytidine (5-aza) show no change in LCT13 expression. Interestingly, levels of the H4K20me3 histone modification are inversely associated with LCT13 and LCT14 expression. Moreover, at these LINE-1s, H4K20me3 levels rather than DNA methylation seem to be good predictor of their sensitivity to 5-aza treatment. Therefore, by studying individual LINE-1 promoters we have shown that in some cases these promoters can be active without losing methylation; in addition, we provide evidence that other factors (e.g., H4K20me3 levels) play prominent roles in their regulation.</p

    ENVIRONMENTS and EOL : identification of Environment Ontology terms in text and the annotation of the Encyclopedia of Life

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    © The Author(s), 2015. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Bioinformatics 31 (2015): 1872-1874, doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btv045.The association of organisms to their environments is a key issue in exploring biodiversity patterns. This knowledge has traditionally been scattered, but textual descriptions of taxa and their habitats are now being consolidated in centralized resources. However, structured annotations are needed to facilitate large-scale analyses. Therefore, we developed ENVIRONMENTS, a fast dictionary-based tagger capable of identifying Environment Ontology (ENVO) terms in text. We evaluate the accuracy of the tagger on a new manually curated corpus of 600 Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) species pages. We use the tagger to associate taxa with environments by tagging EOL text content monthly, and integrate the results into the EOL to disseminate them to a broad audience of users.The Encyclopedia Of Life Rubenstein Fellows Program [CRDF EOL-33066-13/E33066], the LifeWatchGreece Research Infrastructure [384676-94/GSRT/ NSRF(C&E)] and the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research [NNF14CC0001]

    Co-design of an NHS primary care health check for autistic adults

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    Autistic people experience more health conditions and earlier mortality. This study investigated views about a primary care health check for autistic adults to inform its design. Fifty-one people participated in consultation groups and interviews, comprising autistic adults (some with co-occurring intellectual disabilities), adults with intellectual disabilities, supporters and health professionals. Participants wanted the health check to cover physical and mental health and social functioning. They emphasised the importance of sharing information about individual needs and associated adjustments before the health check. They highlighted the need to change the way healthcare services communicate with autistic people, such as reducing phone contact and booking appointments online. They wanted individual choice in how the health check was completed, with video call or email offered alongside face-to-face. Participants raised the need for further training of primary care staff on autism, to highlight the diversity of experiences of autistic people and ways in which difficulties, such as pain, may present differently. Clinicians raised questions about the capacity of mental health and social care services to meet the additional needs potentially identified through the health check. This study represents a key step in the development and co-design of a UK primary care health check for autistic people

    A Specialized Odor Memory Buffer in Primary Olfactory Cortex

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    The neural substrates of olfactory working memory are unknown. We addressed the questions of whether olfactory working memory involves a verbal representation of the odor, or a sensory image of the odor, or both, and the location of the neural substrates of these processes.We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure activity in the brains of subjects who were remembering either nameable or unnameable odorants. We found a double dissociation whereby remembering nameable odorants was reflected in sustained activity in prefrontal language areas, and remembering unnameable odorants was reflected in sustained activity in primary olfactory cortex.These findings suggest a novel dedicated mechanism in primary olfactory cortex, where odor information is maintained in temporary storage to subserve ongoing tasks
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