Reading the geographies of post-war British film culture through the reception of French film

This paper examines the ways in which British specialist film culture anticipated and received the resumed supply of French films at the end of the Second World War. It finds that in serious film journalism and within the rapidly expanding film society movement, new French cinema was the focus of at least as much British attention as Italian neo-realism – the European cinema more famously associated with the era. The paper posits that a number of factors, including anti-Americanism, combined to position the delayed wartime and immediate post-war French releases as a site of impossible expectations and subsequent interpretative difficulty for British cinephiles. In particular, through a case study of the local mediation of French cinema in the English city of Nottingham, this paper considers the role of published criticism for setting the local viewing frame within the provincial film society movement. By tracing the tensions surrounding the circulation of film prints, information, and opinion relating to these prestigious cultural imports, it becomes possible to gain greater insight into both the range of nationally specific meanings attributed to the imported films and the geographic and cultural inequalities at work within the film culture of the country of reception

The Reproducibility of Lists of Differentially Expressed Genes in Microarray Studies

Reproducibility is a fundamental requirement in scientific experiments and clinical contexts. Recent publications raise concerns about the reliability of microarray technology because of the apparent lack of agreement between lists of differentially expressed genes (DEGs). In this study we demonstrate that (1) such discordance may stem from ranking and selecting DEGs solely by statistical significance (P) derived from widely used simple t-tests; (2) when fold change (FC) is used as the ranking criterion, the lists become much more reproducible, especially when fewer genes are selected; and (3) the instability of short DEG lists based on P cutoffs is an expected mathematical consequence of the high variability of the t-values. We recommend the use of FC ranking plus a non-stringent P cutoff as a baseline practice in order to generate more reproducible DEG lists. The FC criterion enhances reproducibility while the P criterion balances sensitivity and specificity

Pain outcomes in patients with bone metastases from advanced cancer: assessment and management with bone-targeting agents

Bone metastases in advanced cancer frequently cause painful complications that impair patient physical activity and negatively affect quality of life. Pain is often underreported and poorly managed in these patients. The most commonly used pain assessment instruments are visual analogue scales, a single-item measure, and the Brief Pain Inventory Questionnaire-Short Form. The World Health Organization analgesic ladder and the Analgesic Quantification Algorithm are used to evaluate analgesic use. Bone-targeting agents, such as denosumab or bisphosphonates, prevent skeletal complications (i.e., radiation to bone, pathologic fractures, surgery to bone, and spinal cord compression) and can also improve pain outcomes in patients with metastatic bone disease. We have reviewed pain outcomes and analgesic use and reported pain data from an integrated analysis of randomized controlled studies of denosumab versus the bisphosphonate zoledronic acid (ZA) in patients with bone metastases from advanced solid tumors. Intravenous bisphosphonates improved pain outcomes in patients with bone metastases from solid tumors. Compared with ZA, denosumab further prevented pain worsening and delayed the need for treatment with strong opioids. In patients with no or mild pain at baseline, denosumab reduced the risk of increasing pain severity and delayed pain worsening along with the time to increased pain interference compared with ZA, suggesting that use of denosumab (with appropriate calcium and vitamin D supplementation) before patients develop bone pain may improve outcomes. These data also support the use of validated pain assessments to optimize treatment and reduce the burden of pain associated with metastatic bone disease

Influence of training status on high-intensity intermittent performance in response to β-alanine supplementation

Recent investigations have suggested that highly trained athletes may be less responsive to the ergogenic effects of β-alanine (BA) supplementation than recreationally active individuals due to their elevated muscle buffering capacity. We investigated whether training status influences the effect of BA on repeated Wingate performance. Forty young males were divided into two groups according to their training status (trained: T, and non-trained: NT cyclists) and were randomly allocated to BA and a dextrose-based placebo (PL) groups, providing four experimental conditions: NTPL, NTBA, TPL, TBA. BA (6.4 g day-1 ) or PL was ingested for 4 weeks, with participants completing four 30-s lower-body Wingate bouts, separated by 3 min, before and after supplementation. Total work done was significantly increased following supplementation in both NTBA (p = 0.03) and TBA (p = 0.002), and it was significantly reduced in NTPL (p = 0.03) with no difference for TPL (p = 0.73). BA supplementation increased mean power output (MPO) in bout 4 for the NTBA group (p = 0.0004) and in bouts 1, 2 and 4 for the TBA group (p ≤ 0.05). No differences were observed in MPO for NTPL and TPL. BA supplementation was effective at improving repeated high-intensity cycling performance in both trained and non-trained individuals, highlighting the efficacy of BA as an ergogenic aid for high-intensity exercise regardless of the training status of the individual

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

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

Jimmy Swaggart's Secular Confession

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The published version is available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02773940902766748 .Following the exposure of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart’s illicit rendezvous with a New Orleans prostitute, the Assemblies of God simultaneously orchestrated a massive attempt to silence those who would discuss the tryst and arranged the most widely publicized confession in American history theretofore. The coincidence of a “silence campaign” with the vast distribution of a public confession invites us to reconsider the nature of the public confession. For what place has a public confession, the discourse of disclosure par excellence, in a silence campaign? This question is best answered, I argue, if we understand public confession not as a stable a-historical form, but as a practice that is informed by multiple, competing traditions. I argue that by situating Swaggart’s performance in a philosophically modern and secular tradition of public confession we can understand both its complicity in a silence campaign and, more generally, the political logic of the modern public confession

'It's Just More Acceptable to Be White or Mixed Race and Gay Than Black and Gay': The Perceptions and Experiences of Homophobia in St. Lucia

Lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) individuals come from diverse cultural groups with differing ethnic and racial identities. However, most research on LGB people uses white western samples and studies of Afro-Caribbean diaspora often use Jamaican samples. Thus, the complexity of Afro-Caribbean LGB peoples’ experiences of homophobia is largely unknown. The authors’ analyses explore experiences of homophobia among LGB people in St. Lucia. Findings indicate issues of skin-shade orientated tolerance, regionalized disparities in levels of tolerance towards LGB people and regionalized passing (regionalized sexual identity shifting). Finally, the authors’ findings indicate that skin shade identities and regional location influence the psychological health outcomes of homophobia experienced by LGB people in St. Lucia

The rise and fall of the king : the correlation between FO Aquarii's low states and the White Dwarf's Spindown

The intermediate polar FO Aquarii experienced its first-reported low-accretion states in 2016, 2017, and 2018. We establish that these low states occurred shortly after the system's white dwarf (WD) began spinning down, after having spent a quarter-century spinning up. FO Aquarii is the only intermediate polar whose period derivative has undergone a sign change, and it has now done so twice. By combining our spin-pulse timings with previous data, we determine that the WD's spin period has varied quasi-sinusoidally since the system's discovery, and an extrapolation predicts that the white dwarf was spinning down during newly discovered low states in photographic plates from 1964, 1965, and 1974. Thus, FO Aquarii's low states appear to occur exclusively during epochs of spindown. Additionally, our time-series photometry of the 2016-18 low states reveals that the mode of accretion is extremely sensitive to the accretion rate; when the system is fainter than V~14.0, the accretion onto the WD is largely stream-fed, but when it is brighter, it is almost exclusively disk-fed. The system's grazing eclipse remained detectable throughout all observations, confirming the uninterrupted presence of a disk-like structure, regardless of the accretion state. Our observations are consistent with theoretical predictions that during the low states, the accretion disk dissipates into a ring of diamagnetic blobs. Finally, a new XMM-Newton observation from 2017 indicates that the system's anomalously soft X-ray spectrum and diminished X-ray luminosity in the wake of the 2016 low state appear to be long-lasting changes compared to pre-2016 observations.peer-reviewe