Roles and regulation of membrane-associated serine proteases

Pericellular proteolytic activity affects many aspects of cellular behaviour, via mechanisms involving processing of the extracellular matrix, growth factors and receptors. The serine proteases have exquisitely sensitive regulatory mechanisms in this setting, involving both receptor-bound and transmembrane proteases. Receptor-bound proteases are exemplified by the uPA (urokinase plasminogen activator)/uPAR (uPAR receptor) plasminogen activation system. The mechanisms initiating the activity of this proteolytic system on the cell surface, a critical regulatory point, are poorly understood. We have found that the expression of the TTSP (type II transmembrane serine protease) matriptase is highly regulated in leucocytes, and correlates with the presence of active uPA on their surface. Using siRNA (small interfering RNA), we have demonstrated that matriptase specifically activates uPAR-associated pro-uPA. The uPA/uPAR system has been implicated in the activation of the plasminogen-related growth factor HGF (hepatocyte growth factor). However, we find no evidence for this, but instead that HGF can be activated by both matriptase and the related TTSP hepsin in purified systems. Hepsin is of particular interest, as the proteolytic cleavage sequence of HGF is an ‘ideal substrate’ for hepsin and membrane-associated hepsin activates HGF with high efficiency. Both of these TTSPs can be activated autocatalytically at the cell surface, an unusual mechanism among the serine proteases. Therefore these TTSPs have the capacity to be true upstream initiators of proteolytic activity with subsequent downstream effects on cell behaviour

Funding and Secondary School Choice in Australia: A Historical Consideration

Since public funds first began to flow into non-government schools in the mid-1970s, successive Commonwealth and state governments have steadily increased the amount of funding they have provided to nongovernment schools (Bonnor & Caro, 2007; Macfarlane, 2003). The outcome of this funding decision has brought the cost of a ‘private school education’ within reach of many more Australian families in the 21st century (Rothman, 2003; Symes & Gulson, 2005). This paper explores the historical backdrop within which secondary schooling is provided in Western Australian today in order to better understand how it influences and/or predisposes the secondary school choices currently available to parents in Western Australia. The issue of funding is considered within an historical account of Australia’s dual system of school provision whereby government and non-government school sectors operate in parallel. Details of successive changes to state and Commonwealth school funding policies in Australia since the early 1970s provide a backdrop for consideration of the impact of funding on school choice

Review of G.H. Lewes: A Life

For a very long time, George Henry Lewes\u27s reputation has centred on the fact that, for the last 25 years of his life, he was George Eliot\u27s partner. Not a vast number of people have cared to know very much about him beyond an idea, perhaps, that he was a rather freewheeling journalist who produced a Life of Goethe, and that he was free-thinking and - at least until he took up with George Eliot - somewhat free-living. It is gratifying, therefore, that this highly intelligent, quick and versatile, immensely fair-minded man who loved science as much as he loved letters, should at last be presented in his own light. Rosemary Ashton is right to reclaim for him, and to reassess, both his actual achievements and his energetic (sometimes almost reckless) thrusts at achievement. Lewes was not a success as the novelist he tried to be, and he showed limited flair as the actor he wanted to be. But he was not entirely a failure as a playwright, and he was an influential, often dazzling theatre reviewer (a sort of model for Shaw) and literary critic. He was also a biographer, an extremely lucid philosophic expositor, an excellent mimic (and anecdotalist, apparently), and a popularising biologist. He died leaving the final two volumes of his five-volume Problems of Life and Mind - \u27a comprehensive study of the human organism, physiological and psychological\u27 , as Professor Ashton describes it - for George Eliot to complete. There was a haphazard, reeling element in the remarkable diversity of his prodigious output, though, and for this reason I think it will always remain the case that initial (though no longer, I hope, overwhelming) interest in him will continue to spring from his association with George Eliot: as he anchored her in life, so does she anchor him in history. And so the extent to which his enquiries and enthusiasms parallel hers before they came into each other\u27s lives is striking and enhancing: not only did they work independently on Spinoza, he on an essay, she on a translation - but they were both fervent admirers of George Sand, not for her sexual freedom, but for what they each felt was her spirit of truthfulness. Something of their future response to each other was inherent in their response to Sand\u27s work

Review of G.H. Lewes: A Life

For a very long time, George Henry Lewes\u27s reputation has centred on the fact that, for the last 25 years of his life, he was George Eliot\u27s partner. Not a vast number of people have cared to know very much about him beyond an idea, perhaps, that he was a rather freewheeling journalist who produced a Life of Goethe, and that he was free-thinking and - at least until he took up with George Eliot - somewhat free-living. It is gratifying, therefore, that this highly intelligent, quick and versatile, immensely fair-minded man who loved science as much as he loved letters, should at last be presented in his own light. Rosemary Ashton is right to reclaim for him, and to reassess, both his actual achievements and his energetic (sometimes almost reckless) thrusts at achievement. Lewes was not a success as the novelist he tried to be, and he showed limited flair as the actor he wanted to be. But he was not entirely a failure as a playwright, and he was an influential, often dazzling theatre reviewer (a sort of model for Shaw) and literary critic. He was also a biographer, an extremely lucid philosophic expositor, an excellent mimic (and anecdotalist, apparently), and a popularising biologist. He died leaving the final two volumes of his five-volume Problems of Life and Mind - \u27a comprehensive study of the human organism, physiological and psychological\u27 , as Professor Ashton describes it - for George Eliot to complete. There was a haphazard, reeling element in the remarkable diversity of his prodigious output, though, and for this reason I think it will always remain the case that initial (though no longer, I hope, overwhelming) interest in him will continue to spring from his association with George Eliot: as he anchored her in life, so does she anchor him in history. And so the extent to which his enquiries and enthusiasms parallel hers before they came into each other\u27s lives is striking and enhancing: not only did they work independently on Spinoza, he on an essay, she on a translation - but they were both fervent admirers of George Sand, not for her sexual freedom, but for what they each felt was her spirit of truthfulness. Something of their future response to each other was inherent in their response to Sand\u27s work

Redreaming ways of seeing: Ben Okri’s intuitive creativity

Drawing on A Way of Being Free (1997) and A Time for New Dreams (2011) among other Okrian texts, this article is a discussion of the notion of redreaming ways of seeing through intuitive creativity. The argument is divided into three parts: the role of intuitive creativity; redreaming ways of seeing in The Landscapes Within (1981); and intuition or “the landscapes within”. The deployment of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and Roland Barthes’s Image, Music, Text posits an Afro-Western worldview in which the title of Okri’s second novel effectively becomes a simulacrum for the lead character’s psyche that supplants character per se, so that the “landscapes within”—the psyche—becomes the eponymous hero of the tale. The contention is that the complex inner workings of the mind of the artist-protagonist, Omovo, is both the signifier and the signified. This is supported by analyses of an Okri poem and extracts from the novel. I argue that, in contrast to its inter-art variants, René Magritte’s 1935 Le faux miroir and La clef des songes, the novel invokes a neo-Platonic/Coleridgean concept of the “enlightening” eye as a correlative of Okri’s notion of the inward visionary quest of the dreaming “soul” “opening towards infinity”. The article concludes by briefly justifying the article’s claim that, in this novel, art deals with inner reality, with “the landscapes within

Ben Okri’s Aphorisms: “Music on the Wings of a Soaring Bird”

The title of this presentation is derived from Ben Okri’s latest publication, The Magic Lamp (2017), itself an intersectional text featuring a selection of Rosemary Clunie’s art and Okri’s accompanying ontopoietic/ heightened consciousness prose. This trans-disciplinary paper traces the trajectory and suggests the import of Okri’s blueprints for regaining our true state of being: his aphorisms in Birds of Heaven (1996), A Time for New Dreams (2011) and those in Johns Hopkins’s journal, Callaloo (2015, 38(5): 1042-1043). Reviving a wisdom corpus from antiquity, this Booker Prizewinning Nigerian novelist provides a guiding paremiological exemplum in A Time for New Dreams to counter postmodernity’s obsession with the pleasure principle or fast living and hyper-connectivity: “And out of the wilderness/ The songbird sings/ ‘Nothing is what it seems./ This is a time for new dreams’” (2011: 147). Based on Italian Renaissance’s Desiderius Erasmus’s ([1540] 1982) view on the luminous benefits of concise thought, the argument is that the quintessence of aphorisms or proverbs has been and is their pithy wisdom. A basic premise is that the Imaginatio Creatix communicating in poetic prose aphorisms provides fertile ground for new connections, new depths, and new transversals as well as epiphanies or what Okri terms the alchemy of ‘serendipity’. A fragment in Birds of Heaven (1996: 40) highlights the moral purpose of Okri’s aphorisms: “It is precisely in a broken age that we need mystery and a re-awakened sense of wonder: need them in order to be whole again.

Mythic conjunction in transit : Ontopoiesis in Ben Okri's An African Elergy and Mental Fight and Wole Soyinka's A Shuttle in the Crypt

Drawing on Ben Okri’s A Time for New Dreams (2011) and Wole Soyinka’s Myth, Literature and the African World ([1976]1995), this article adopts a literary aesthetics approach, explaining that mythic conjunctions are inherent in ontopoiesis or the selfinduced develop-ment of consciousness (Tymeniecka 1992). Okri (2011: 27) argues that self-creativity or innovation “come from being able first to see what is there, and not there; to hear what is said, and not said …. And … the art of intuition”, whereas for Soyinka ([1976]1995: 3) “man’s attempt to externalise and communicate his inner intuitions” gives rise to cultural mythology. “In Asian and European antiquity ... man did, like the African, exist within a cosmic totality, did possess a consciousness in which his own earth being, his gravity-bound apprehension of self, was inseparable from the entire cosmic pheno-menon,” he asserts (p. 3.). The poems selected reveal that mythic conjunctions are inherent in such non-dualistic insights. In Okri’s poetry (1992 & 1999), a higher state of consciousness or “illumination” is the basis for life’s transitions wrought largely through spirit awakenings via a retrieval of traditional geocosmic horizons; in Soyinka’s (1972), such transitions accrue from a conscious reconstruction of the human self, affected by the trauma of solitary confinement.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjls20hb2016Englis

The creative imagination in Ben Okri's The Landscapes Within (1981)

This paper begins with an initial justification of the chosen title and argues for the idea of The Landscapes Within effectively becoming the eponymous hero of a tale, the trajectory of which is the inner workings of the mind of the artist-protagonist, Omovo. Then, drawing on Ben Okri‟s own sense of the incompleteness of this, his second novel, which he was later to rewrite as Dangerous Love, it invokes Milan Kundera‟s discussion of the significance of an „unfinished‟ story in the sense of what has not been achieved. The critique of this novel focuses on the „unachieved‟ in terms of its relation between Omovo‟s stolen and confiscated and unfinished paintings and Kundera‟s three new categories of art: the art of radical divestment, the art of novelistic counterpoint and the art of the specifically novelistic essay. It concludes by briefly justifying the paper‟s claim that, in this novel art, like philosophy, deals with inner reality, with „the landscapes within‟. „Philosophy,‟ says Okri consciously articulating the artistic process, „is most powerful when it revolves into story. But story is amplified in power by the presence of philosophy.‟The National Research Foundation, South Africahttp://www.tandfonline.com/loi/racr20hb2016Englis