'A Nihilist Kurort': Siberian Exile in the Victorian Imagination, c. 1830-1890

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from JSTOR via the DOI in this record.In the decades before the collapse of Tsarism in 1917, no issue did more to galvanize British support for the Russian revolutionary movement than the mistreatment of political exiles in Siberia. In popular literature, journalism and Polish and Russian émigré propaganda, Siberian exile was seen as synonymous with the iniquities of autocratic rule in Russia and was represented as a battleground upon which the forces of civilisation and barbarism contested Russia’s future as a European (or non-European) nation. As Siberia captured the popular imagination, the heroic figure of the revolutionary exile-martyr became not only symbolic of the anti-Tsarist struggle, but a projection of the Western self

Political Exile and the Image of Siberia in Anglo-Russian Contacts Prior to 1917

From the time of Ermak’s conquest in 1582, Siberia has both served and been envisaged as a carceral space, a land of exile and punishment. In the modern era, this image has proliferated and endured both within Russia itself and on the international stage. For many Russians and Westerners alike, Siberia has long provided fertile ground for mythmaking about Russia, and has become a byword for and synecdoche of political oppression and the evils of autocratic and totalitarian rule. In this thesis, I argue that representations of Siberian exile played a crucial role in transnationalising the Russian revolution during the decades prior to 1917. Throughout the nineteenth century, the image of Siberia as a vast prison camp – and, by extension, the birthplace of revolutionary heroes – was commonplace in the oral and literary traditions of Russia’s radical intelligentsia and amongst Anglo-American progressives alike. In both cases, Siberia represented an indictment of the Tsarist state and, to some extent, prefigured Russia’s post-autocratic future. From the 1880s onwards, a succession of Russian émigrés in Britain and the United States duly sought to capitalise on their hosts’ fascination with Siberia by publicising dramatic tales of political exiles’ mistreatment and heroism in captivity. Tracing the development of this discourse, I demonstrate that although it elevated several revolutionaries to international celebrity status and succeeded in securing considerable overseas support for their cause, it also exposed contradictions in how the revolution was understood inside and outside Russia. As Russian socialists used the rhetoric of punishment and protest to articulate their own ideological convictions, Britons and Americans romanticised and projected themselves upon the mythologised figure of the Siberian prisoner. In this sense, fin de siècle polemics over Siberian exile can be seen to anticipate Western anxieties over Russian oppositionists prevalent in our own time

Asynchronous In Situ Processing with Gromacs: Taking Advantage of GPUs

International audienceNumerical simulations using supercomputers are producing an ever growing amount of data. Efficient production and analysis of these data are the key to future discoveries. The in situ paradigm is emerging as a promising solution to avoid the I/O bottleneck encountered in the file system for both the simulation and the analytics by treating the data as soon as they are produced in memory. Various strategies and implementations have been proposed in the last years to support in situ treatments with a low impact on the simulation performance. Yet, little efforts have been made when it comes to perform in situ analytics with hybrid simulations supporting accelerators like GPUs. In this article, we propose a study of the in situ strategies with Gromacs, a molecular dynamic simulation code supporting multi-GPUs, as our application target. We specifically focus on the computational resources usage of the machine by the simulation and the in situ analytics. We finally extend the usual in situ placement strategies to the case of in situ analytics running on a GPU and study their impact on both Gromacs performance and the resource usage of the machine. We show in particular that running in situ analytics on the GPU can be a more efficient solution than on the CPU especially when the CPU is the bottleneck of the simulation

The UK register of HIV seroconverters: Methods and analytical issues

A Register of HIV-infected persons who have had a negative antibody test within 3 years of their first antibody positive test (seroconverters) is being set up in the UK to monitor the distribution of times from HIV seroconversion to AIDS (the incubation period) and to death. It will also provide a national resource for use by those designing studies in this group of individuals. Clinicians caring for HIV-positive persons in Genito-Urinary Medicine, Infectious Disease and other departments throughout the UK were asked to participate by providing information on eligible subjects. Most laboratories undertaking HIV antibody testing were also contacted and asked to provide the name of the attending clinician for all seroconverters identified through the HIV laboratory reporting systems of the PHLS Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre (CDSC) and the Scottish Centre for Infection and Environmental Health (SCIEH) and for any other seroconverters known to them but not identified by CDSC or SCIEH. Data items sought for the Register include: sex, ethnic group, probable route of HIV transmission, annual CD4 counts, details of therapy and prophylaxis prescribed, AIDS-defining events and vital status. Follow up information is collected annually. Wherever possible, all seroconverters known to a clinic have been identified, whether currently alive or dead, either from clinic records or laboratory reporting or both. The objective is to establish and update a complete register of seroconverters on a long-term basis to provide reliable estimates of the incubation period on which future projections of AIDS cases in the UK can be made

A circadian based inflammatory response – implications for respiratory disease and treatment

Circadian clocks regulate the daily timing of many of our physiological, metabolic and biochemical functions. The immune system also displays circadian oscillations in immune cell count, synthesis and cytokine release, clock gene expression in cells and organs of the immune system as well as clock-controlled genes that regulate immune function. Circadian disruption leads to dysregulation of immune responses and inflammation which can further disrupt circadian rhythms. The response of organisms to immune challenges, such as allergic reactions also vary depending on time of the day, which can lead to detrimental responses particularly during the rest and early active periods. This review evaluates what is currently known in terms of circadian biology of immune response and the cross-talk between circadian and immune system. We discuss the circadian pattern of three respiratory-related inflammatory diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, allergic rhinitis and asthma. Increasing our knowledge on circadian patterns of immune responses and developing chronotherapeutic studies in inflammatory diseases with strong circadian patterns will lead to preventive measures as well as improved therapies focussing on the circadian rhythms of symptoms and the daily variation of the patients’ responses to medication

Increased HIV Incidence in Men Who Have Sex with Men Despite High Levels of ART-Induced Viral Suppression: Analysis of an Extensively Documented Epidemic

Background: There is interest in expanding ART to prevent HIV transmission, but in the group with the highest levels of ART use, men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM), numbers of new infections diagnosed each year have not decreased as ART coverage has increased for reasons which remain unclear. Methods: We analysed data on the HIV-epidemic in MSM in the UK from a range of sources using an individual-based simulation model. Model runs using parameter sets found to result in good model fit were used to infer changes in HIV-incidence and risk behaviour. Results: HIV-incidence has increased (estimated mean incidence 0.30/100 person-years 1990–1997, 0.45/100 py 1998–2010), associated with a modest (26%) rise in condomless sex. We also explored counter-factual scenarios: had ART not been introduced, but the rise in condomless sex had still occurred, then incidence 2006–2010 was 68% higher; a policy of ART initiation in all diagnosed with HIV from 2001 resulted in 32% lower incidence; had levels of HIV testing been higher (68% tested/year instead of 25%) incidence was 25% lower; a combination of higher testing and ART at diagnosis resulted in 62% lower incidence; cessation of all condom use in 2000 resulted in a 424% increase in incidence. In 2010, we estimate that undiagnosed men, the majority in primary infection, accounted for 82% of new infections. Conclusion: A rise in HIV-incidence has occurred in MSM in the UK despite an only modest increase in levels of condomless sex and high coverage of ART. ART has almost certainly exerted a limiting effect on incidence. Much higher rates of HIV testing combined with initiation of ART at diagnosis would be likely to lead to substantial reductions in HIV incidence. Increased condom use should be promoted to avoid the erosion of the benefits of ART and to prevent other serious sexually transmitted infections

Exhaled volatile organic compounds in patients with non-small cell lung cancer: cross sectional and nested short-term follow-up study

BACKGROUND: Non-invasive diagnostic strategies aimed at identifying biomarkers of lung cancer are of great interest for early cancer detection. The aim of this study was to set up a new method for identifying and quantifying volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in exhaled air of patients with non-small cells lung cancer (NSCLC), by comparing the levels with those obtained from healthy smokers and non-smokers, and patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The VOC collection and analyses were repeated three weeks after the NSCLC patients underwent lung surgery. METHODS: The subjects' breath was collected in a Teflon(® )bulb that traps the last portion of single slow vital capacity. The 13 VOCs selected for this study were concentrated using a solid phase microextraction technique and subsequently analysed by means of gas cromatography/mass spectrometry. RESULTS: The levels of the selected VOCs ranged from 10(-12 )M for styrene to 10(-9 )M for isoprene. None of VOCs alone discriminated the study groups, and so it was not possible to identify one single chemical compound as a specific lung cancer biomarker. However, multinomial logistic regression analysis showed that VOC profile can correctly classify about 80 % of cases. Only isoprene and decane levels significantly decreased after surgery. CONCLUSION: As the combination of the 13 VOCs allowed the correct classification of the cases into groups, together with conventional diagnostic approaches, VOC analysis could be used as a complementary test for the early diagnosis of lung cancer. Its possible use in the follow-up of operated patients cannot be recommended on the basis of the results of our short-term nested study

Questions on causality and responsibility arising from an outbreak of Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections in Norway

In 2002, Norway experienced a large outbreak of Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections in hospitals with 231 confirmed cases. This fuelled intense public and professional debates on what were the causes and who were responsible. In epidemiology, other sciences, in philosophy and in law there is a long tradition of discussing the concept of causality. We use this outbreak as a case; apply various theories of causality from different disciplines to discuss the roles and responsibilities of some of the parties involved. Mackie's concept of INUS conditions, Hill's nine viewpoints to study association for claiming causation, deterministic and probabilistic ways of reasoning, all shed light on the issues of causality in this outbreak. Moreover, applying legal theories of causation (counterfactual reasoning and the "but-for" test and the NESS test) proved especially useful, but the case also illustrated the weaknesses of the various theories of causation

Single Gene Deletions of Orexin, Leptin, Neuropeptide Y, and Ghrelin Do Not Appreciably Alter Food Anticipatory Activity in Mice

Timing activity to match resource availability is a widely conserved ability in nature. Scheduled feeding of a limited amount of food induces increased activity prior to feeding time in animals as diverse as fish and rodents. Typically, food anticipatory activity (FAA) involves temporally restricting unlimited food access (RF) to several hours in the middle of the light cycle, which is a time of day when rodents are not normally active. We compared this model to calorie restriction (CR), giving the mice 60% of their normal daily calorie intake at the same time each day. Measurement of body temperature and home cage behaviors suggests that the RF and CR models are very similar but CR has the advantage of a clearly defined food intake and more stable mean body temperature. Using the CR model, we then attempted to verify the published result that orexin deletion diminishes food anticipatory activity (FAA) but observed little to no diminution in the response to CR and, surprisingly, that orexin KO mice are refractory to body weight loss on a CR diet. Next we tested the orexigenic neuropeptide Y (NPY) and ghrelin and the anorexigenic hormone, leptin, using mouse mutants. NPY deletion did not alter the behavior or physiological response to CR. Leptin deletion impaired FAA in terms of some activity measures, such as walking and rearing, but did not substantially diminish hanging behavior preceding feeding time, suggesting that leptin knockout mice do anticipate daily meal time but do not manifest the full spectrum of activities that typify FAA. Ghrelin knockout mice do not have impaired FAA on a CR diet. Collectively, these results suggest that the individual hormones and neuropepetides tested do not regulate FAA by acting individually but this does not rule out the possibility of their concerted action in mediating FAA