Short- and long-term evolution in our arms race with cancer: Why the war on cancer is winnable.

Human society is engaged in an arms race against cancer, which pits one evolutionary process-human cultural evolution as we develop novel cancer therapies-against another evolutionary process-the ability of oncogenic selection operating among cancer cells to select for lineages that are resistant to our therapies. Cancer cells have a powerful ability to evolve resistance over the short term, leading to patient relapse following an initial period of apparent treatment efficacy. However, we are the beneficiaries of a fundamental asymmetry in our arms race against cancer: Whereas our cultural evolution is a long-term and continuous process, resistance evolution in cancer cells operates only over the short term and is discontinuous - all resistance adaptations are lost each time a cancer patient dies. Thus, our cultural adaptations are permanent, whereas cancer's genetic adaptations are ephemeral. Consequently, over the long term, there is good reason to expect that we will emerge as the winners in our war against cancer

Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra: Constructing Humanity

Neo-Marxist theory suggests that capitalist structures are dehumanizing and that alternative structures should be constructed to re-humanize the people. Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) constructs settlements of small, self-governing family farms as an alternative to the large agricultural estates that dominate Brazil. The settlements have transformed the way workers see themselves. They have successfully developed a humanizing alternative; MST members see themselves as subjects. It is important for Social Justice movements to understand how MST has achieved such powerful differences from Capitalist societies in order to replicate humanizing social structures. My study sought to understand how MST’s agricultural system cultivates humanity, human dignity, and subjectivity in its community. Assentamento Palmares, a MST settlement in Ceará, generously allowed me to pursue my research in their community. I interviewed 5 members of the settlement. I also participated in and recorded information about a regional MST meeting, a day of farm work, and a meeting of the settlement’s women’s group. In MST’s farming system, workers have direct control over food production, which humanizes the communities in many ways. They can secure their health and human dignity by farming nutritious food without pesticides and they own the products of their labor, so they are not alienated from it. Life at the settlement requires sharing and fighting together for everyone’s right to human dignity, so members to work together and help each other out, a collective consciousness that equalizes and humanizes. MST’s leadership draws from the farming-class/working-class members of the settlements; this alternative to Capitalist divisions of labor encourages its members to voice their political opinions and creative expressions. The community promotes the knowledge that workers have valuable thoughts and feelings; they are human beings. However, my time with the women’s group showed me that they are still fighting sexism in the settlement. Full humanization would require equal respect for women’s work, bodies, and voices

Nothing More Real Than Nothing: The Unnamable as Self-Annihilating Fiction

Nature abhors nothing; it is the mind which cannot bear to live in a state of suspension, in absence, in a vacuum. The very existence of fiction testifies to man\u27s need for intricate models through which he may fashion and explore his life. In the last eighty years, a great deal of research has been devoted to discovering the ways in which fictions are structured; the ways, that is, in which literature replaces chaos not with content, but with form; with elaborate verbal webs that hold in abeyance the hollow of life without language. Russian formalism, mythcriticism like Northrop Frye\u27s, structuralism, poststructuralism and phenomenological analysis have clearly demonstrated the fact that literature is shaped by unconscious conventions on the levels of genre, plot and character, and in the deployment of multiple pairs of binary oppositions which create a kind of symbolic code within the work. Perhaps most significantly, theorists like Roland Barthes and Jonathan Culler have begun to make explicit the interpretive conventions which readers bring to a work and the ways in which these conventions influence their reading. Unlike most fictions, however, The Unnamable radically subverts many of these conventions, consequently invalidating the implicit narrative contracts signed between reader and author. Since its publication in 1953, The Unnamable has provoked hundreds of pages of comment; yet few English-speaking critics have thought closely about the specific ways in which the novel undermines narrative and linguistic conventions. Instead, The Unnamable has traditionally been treated either as Beckett\u27s bleak vision of the human condition, or as a reflection of his philosophic thought

The Cryptographic Imagination

Originally published in 1996. In The Cryptographic Imagination, Shawn Rosenheim uses the writings of Edgar Allan Poe to pose a set of questions pertaining to literary genre, cultural modernity, and technology. Rosenheim argues that Poe's cryptographic writing—his essays on cryptography and the short stories that grew out of them—requires that we rethink the relation of poststructural criticism to Poe's texts and, more generally, reconsider the relation of literature to communication. Cryptography serves not only as a template for the language, character, and themes of much of Poe's late fiction (including his creation, the detective story) but also as a "secret history" of literary modernity itself. "Both postwar fiction and literary criticism," the author writes, "are deeply indebted to the rise of cryptography in World War II." Still more surprising, in Rosenheim's view, Poe is not merely a source for such literary instances of cryptography as the codes in Conan Doyle's "The Dancing-Men" or in Jules Verne, but, through his effect on real cryptographers, Poe's writing influenced the outcome of World War II and the development of the Cold War. However unlikely such ideas sound, The Cryptographic Imagination offers compelling evidence that Poe's cryptographic writing clarifies one important avenue by which the twentieth century called itself into being. "The strength of Rosenheim's work extends to a revisionistic understanding of the entirety of literary history (as a repression of cryptography) and then, in a breathtaking shift of register, interlinks Poe's exercises in cryptography with the hyperreality of the CIA, the Cold War, and the Internet. What enables this extensive range of applications is the stipulated tension Rosenheim discerns in the relationship between the forms of the literary imagination and the condition of its mode of production. Cryptography, in this account, names the technology of literary production—the diacritical relationship between decoding and encoding—that the literary imagination dissimulates as hieroglyphics—the hermeneutic relationship between a sign and its content."—Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth Colleg

Direct measurement of riverine particulate organic carbon age structure

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2012. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 39 (2012): L19703, doi:10.1029/2012GL052883.Carbon cycling studies focusing on transport and transformation of terrigenous carbon sources toward marine sedimentary sinks necessitate separation of particulate organic carbon (OC) derived from many different sources and integrated by river systems. Much progress has been made on isolating and characterizing young biologically-formed OC that is still chemically intact, however quantification and characterization of old, refractory rock-bound OC has remained troublesome. Quantification of both endmembers of riverine OC is important to constrain exchanges linking biologic and geologic carbon cycles and regulating atmospheric CO2 and O2. Here, we constrain petrogenic OC proportions in suspended sediment from the headwaters of the Ganges River in Nepal through direct measurement using ramped pyrolysis radiocarbon analysis. The unique results apportion the biospheric and petrogenic fractions of bulk particulate OC and characterize biospheric OC residence time. Compared to the same treatment of POC from the lower Mississippi-Atchafalaya River system, contrast in age spectra of the Ganges tributary samples illustrates the difference between small mountainous river systems and large integrative ones in terms of the global carbon cycle.This work was partially supported by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Cooperative Agreement OCE-228996 to NOSAMS and NSF grants OCE-0851015 & OCE-0928582 to VG.2013-04-0

Accelerator mass spectrometry 14C determination in CO2 produced from laser decomposition of aragonite

Author Posting. © John Wiley & Sons, 2008. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of John Wiley & Sons for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry 22 (2008): 3443-3449, doi:10.1002/rcm.3745.Determination of 14C in aragonite (CaCO3) decomposed thermally to CO2 using an yttrium‐aluminum‐garnet doped neodymium laser is reported. Laser decomposition accelerator mass spectrometer (LD‐AMS) measurements reproduce AMS determinations of 14C from conventional reaction of aragonite with concentrated phosphoric acid. The lack of significant differences between these sets of measurements indicate that LD‐AMS radiocarbon dating can overcome the significant fractionation that has been observed during stable isotope (C and O) laser decomposition analysis of different carbonate minerals. The laser regularly converted nearly 30% of material removed to CO2 despite being optimized for ablation, where laser energy breaks material apart rather than chemically altering it. These results illustrate promise for using laser decomposition on the front‐end of AMS systems that directly measure CO2 gas. The feasibility of such measurements depends on 1. the improvement of material removal and/or CO2 generation efficiency of the laser decomposition system and 2. the ionization efficiency of AMS systems measuring continuously flowing CO2.This work was funded on a competitive basis by the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Technology Innovation Award of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Die Reaktion von Schwefelwasserstoff auf Cyanamido-dithiocarbonate

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Ladislav Cabada, Šárka Waisová a kol.: Bezpečnostní, zahraniční a evropská politika Visegrádské skupiny

Visegrádská skupina se po rozpadu sovětského bloku stala nejvýraznějším regionálním uskupením v prostoru střední Evropy. Historicky se jedná o region s mimořádnou geopolitickou senzitivitou, přičemž po pádu železné opony se státy v něm ležící jednoznačně vyslovily pro definitivní začlenění do západních integračních struktur. Nehledě na úspěch tohoto snažení a členství v EU a NATO vnímají i v současnosti státy střední Evropy svou periferní pozici a snaží se společně čelit hrozbám a výzvám pro svou bezpečnost. Naše kniha analyzuje, jaké strategie a přístupy Visegrádská čtyřka a její členské státy v oblasti bezpečnostní a zahraniční politiky preferují, jaká rizika vnímají jako nejvýraznější a jaké návrhy opatření a řešení společně či jednostranně prosazují

Building Better Collections Through Relationships: Sharing Expertise During Collection Downsizing

Boise State University’s Albertsons Library undertook a substantial collection downsizing project in 2017. A survey tool was developed to investigate whether this project would strengthen working relationships between technical services staff and librarians. The survey would allow us to assess the process and its outcomes and gain insight into the emotions of those participating in the project. Survey results showed librarians and staff members had different experiences during the project. Librarians experienced more anxiety during the process than staff. More staff than librarians felt that there was a barrier to sharing their expertise due to their job role. Perceptions of technical services and librarians were not significantly changed throughout the process, although survey comments indicated an increased collegiality among staff and librarians as a result of the project. The comments of the survey respondents revealed that a high-level strategy for weeding and a shared understanding of objectives and best practices would have given the project more cohesion, supported buy-in, and increased participation. Using a survey such as this prior to undertaking a large-scale weeding process would help identify communication preferences, areas where training is needed, and best practices to use for the project. A similar survey after the project would evaluate the success of implantation from the perspective of library employees