Hepatitis B Virus and the Cellular Response to Interferon.

Imperial Users onl

Culture and Religion

Matthew Arnold was a deeply religious man; his training as a child insured that, but in his essay, Culture and Anarchy, shallow reading might lead to the false assumption that he had little faith in religion. More intensive study, however, makes his underlying faith apparent . True, he found fault with religious organizations which were so self-satisfied because they preached the subduing of animalities that they lost sight of the goal of real religion, a way of life striving for the brotherhood of man

How Green

Eons ago when the government was donating an existence to me as payment for a few negligible risks, I lounged about and zig-zagged the Atlantic six or eight times aboard a tired old Liberty ship named in honor of Buffalo Bill Cody. Now Bill may have been a smooth-riding, fast-shooting pioneer-not so his namesake. She couldn\u27t push ten knots burning mattresses; nevertheless, she attracted the elite

‘I want my country back’: the resurgence of English nationalism

The three phases of Brexit – campaign, referendum, aftermath – have revealed three urgent problems, writes Russell Foster: the lack of public faith in establishment politics, the emotional deficit of the EU, and the return of English nationalism. All three stages have been characterised by contempt, anger and despair unseen in recent British politics and the referendum was thus fought on raw emotion. Once the genie of nationalism has been released from its bottle, it turns on those who released it and it cannot easily be put back

Tabulae imperii Europaei :mapping European empire

PhD ThesisThis thesis examines the unclear political nature of the European Union and current academic theories on how to understand and classify the EU. Placing the EU in the macrohistorical context from which it emerged, the project first critiques competing definitions of “empire” before examining the etymological and philosophical genealogy of imperium. It then uses textual analysis to trace how evolving interpretations of imperium and “empire” have influenced European historiography and political philosophy. This analysis demonstrates that “empire” is not a descriptive taxonomy but a normative discourse, expressing an imagination of power, legitimacy and sole sovereignty, used to validate the inherent inequality and manifest destiny of an imagined European community. This discourse must be publicly expressed in order to have validity, and it is most effectively conveyed in visual language. The study demonstrates that of the many forms of visual language, by far the most powerful is cartography. But while maps represent the world rather than reflect it, map-readers ascribe to maps an authority that is rarely questioned, accepting maps’ portrayals as truthful. Having established and justified a methodology based in semiotics and semantics, the project moves into an analytical focus by semiotically deconstructing the most publicly-accessible EU maps in print and virtual form and on Euro currency. These analyses demonstrate that EU maps intersect with EU iconography and inadvertently construct an imagined community defined by the discourse of empire. Such maps show the Union not as it is but as it should be – the sole sovereign of European civilisation, with supreme power, exclusive legitimacy, a manifest destiny to unite the Europeans, and inhabited by an imagined community whose imagined history partly masks an inherent, yet acknowledged, inequality. This dissertation concludes that the EU is not a sui generis construct but instead embodies a familiar historical discourse – the European Union as Empire. Unless specified, all images have been digitally photographed by the author from the cited books or copied from the cited websites, in accordance with the Copyright Licensing Act (2006) of UUK/SCOP Higher Education institutions. All websites referenced in the text were last accessed on the date of binding, 1st October 2013. Any errors of fact or interpretation remain the author’s own.The Economic and Social Research Council

Dynamics of Long-lived Foundation Species: The History of Quercus in Southern Scandinavia

(1) The long-term history of Quercus in southern Scandinavia has received little attention despite its important role in modern conservation. In this study the 4000-year dynamics of Quercus, its habitat and other important taxa were analysed with pollen data from 25 small hollows and 6 regional sites across southern Scandinavia. The aim was to provide a context for understanding the species’ current status and managing its future dynamics. (2) The results indicate that Quercus is much less abundant today than at any time during the previous 4000 years and corroborate the rapid decline reported in 18th- and 19th-century historical records. Modern pollen percentages are 45-60% of 17th-century values and only 20-35% of the maximum values reached in the 3rd century. (3) A strong positive correlation exists between the abundance of Quercus and the abundance of Tilia, Corylus and Alnus, which also experienced a steady decline across the region in the last two millennia. Climate change is the broad-scale driver of the observed dynamics, but human activity introduced considerable variation in the regional and temporal details of these changes. In the hemiboreal northern part of the study area the decline of Quercus appears to be controlled largely by competition with other tree species (especially Pinus and Picea), mediated by harvesting. In the temperate south part Quercus forests decreased through deforestation for agriculture. (4) Multivariate analyses indicate that although substantial phytogeographical variation has existed through past millennia the regional vegetation is more homogeneous today than in earlier periods. (5) Synthesis. The long-term decline and recent rapid reductions in Quercus populations throughout southern Scandinavia are striking and indisputable. From the perspective of both the populations of Quercus and its associated species of insects and epiphytes, the recent rate of decline is extremely rapid. Given the former abundance, longevity and capacity for persistence of Quercus, current populations of Quercus and its associated species appear to represent biological legacies in the midst of protracted decline. Based on these results, a reasonable conservation goal is to restore the abundance and distribution of Quercus to levels that preceded the drastic decline in the 18th and 19th centuries.Organismic and Evolutionary Biolog

Isolation of ribosomes from Neurospora and their analysis using a vertical rotor

Isolation of ribosomes from Neurospora and their analysis using a vertical roto

The Limits of EUropean Legitimacy : On Populism and Technocracy. Introduction to the Special Issue

This article introduces the special issue on populism and technocracy in the integration and governance of the European Union (EU), framing these opposing approaches in the context of polarised debate on the (il)legitimacy of the EU. The special issue was conceived as an interdisciplinary approach to questions of the EU’s legitimacy in the aftermath of structural crises (the eurozone, sovereign debt and the election and appointment of governing agents) and spontaneous crises (migration, external state and non-state security challenges, Brexit and Euroscepticism). Since the special issue’s conception the unanticipated Covid-19 pandemic, and responses from the EU and its member states (current and former) starkly illuminated debates on how the EU should operate, the limits of its power and the limits of its popular legitimacy. The era of passive consensus has been replaced by claims of legitimacy based on active expert-informed intervention, alongside populist claims of the EU’s inherent illegitimacy as an undemocratic technocracy. As such the special issue’s objective is to critically analyse manifold ways in which the populist-technocratic divide is narrated and performed in different regions, disciplines, and social and political systems in an era of growing internal and external challenges to the Union. We observe that the EU’s institutions remain highly adaptable in responding to challenges, but that member-states have continued and accelerated a tendency to nationalise success and Europeanise failure, with the EU acting as a perennial scapegoat largely due to the ease with which it can be narrated as a site of projection for mistrust, resentment, and social grievances. We argue that the relationship between populism and technocracy is rapidly evolving from an imagined binary into a much more fluid, overlapping, and reversible set of political narratives. We conclude that despite the changing nature of populist-technocratic debates and the resilience and adaptability of the EU, it faces accelerating challenges to its legitimacy in the new era of ‘politics of necessity’