Crisis and the Visual Arts in Ireland

The global economic crash of 2008 had a particularly severe impact in Ireland, including on the funding and the practice of the arts. This paper examines contemporary responses to crisis in Ireland as refracted through arts practice. It focuses on the work of two contemporary visual artists, Anthony Haughey and Deirdre O’Mahony, both of whom see ethics and politics as intrinsic to their work. It asks whether some of the underpinning rationales for artist engagement, particularly in the field of relational aesthetics, can empower artists to meet expectations that their work can, or should, be capable of decisive interventions at historical moments of crisis. A related objective is to ground a theoretical understanding of the nature of crisis in the evolution of an artist’s work, to gain some sense of its temporal manifestation in the life-long, everyday practice of making art.La crise économique mondiale de 2008 a eu un impact particulièrement sévère en Irlande, y compris dans le domaine des arts et de leur financement. Cet article analyse les réactions à cette crise en Irlande par le biais du prisme de la pratique artistique, se concentrant sur le travail de deux artistes visuels contemporains, Anthony Haughey et Deirdre O’Mahony. Tous deux considèrent les questions éthiques et politiques comme faisant partie intégrante de leur œuvre. L’article s'interroge quant à savoir si certains des principes qui sous-tendent l’engagement de l’artiste, notamment dans le domaine de l’esthétique relationnelle, peuvent donner aux artistes les moyens de répondre à l’attente de production d’œuvres qui pourraient ou devraient être des interventions décisives dans des moments de crise historiques. Un objectif complémentaire est d’ancrer une compréhension théorique de la nature même de la crise dans l’évolution de l’œuvre d’un artiste, de saisir sa temporalité dans la pratique quotidienne de celui qui fait œuvre artistique tout au long de sa vie

Corporate occupiers’ attitude to flex space in the post-Covid environment

Purpose This paper investigates how large UK corporate occupiers perceive the potential role of flexible office space in their office portfolios in a post-pandemic context. Design/methodology/approach The research methodology is qualitative and applied. For a longitudinal survey, convenience sampling was used to obtain co-operation from 11 corporate real estate managers with responsibility for managing large corporate real estate portfolios spread across a range of business sectors and countries. Semi-structured interviews were selected as the core research method to seek and to optimise the balance between discovery and generalisability. Findings Although the pandemic has led corporate occupiers to fundamentally re-appraise where and when different work tasks are performed, it is not yet clear whether this has major implications for the flex space sector. The flex space model, with its blending of various occupiers and activities, is perceived to be poorly aligned with an increasing emphasis on the office as a core corporate hub facilitating connection, collaboration, enculturation, learning and creativity. Since most flex space is concentrated in central locations, it is also not well positioned to benefit from any decentralisation of office functions. However, as the flex space sector evolves in response to structural shifts in employment and working practices and business change, its various products are likely to be a continuing requirement from corporate occupiers for short-term solutions to demand shocks, the need for rapid market entry, accommodation for short-term projects and access to desk space in multiple locations. Practical implications Understanding occupiers' drivers in their decision-making on selecting the method of occupation will assist investors in how they might adjust what they offer in the marketplace. Originality/value Whilst there has been a substantive number of surveys of corporate occupiers' perceptions and intentions regarding their office portfolio, this paper focusses on a specifically on the flex space sector. Whilst previous research has mainly been extensive, this research study is intensive

UniPep - a database for human N-linked glycosites: a resource for biomarker discovery

There has been considerable recent interest in proteomic analyses of plasma for the purpose of discovering biomarkers. Profiling N-linked glycopeptides is a particularly promising method because the population of N-linked glycosites represents the proteomes of plasma, the cell surface, and secreted proteins at very low redundancy and provides a compelling link between the tissue and plasma proteomes. Here, we describe UniPep - a database of human N-linked glycosites - as a resource for biomarker discovery

LSST Science Book, Version 2.0

A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over 20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.Comment: 596 pages. Also available at full resolution at http://www.lsst.org/lsst/sciboo

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead