Breaking Ships in the World-System: An Analysis of Two Ship Breaking Capitals, Alang India and Chittagong, Bangladesh

Centrality in the world-system allows countries to externalize their hazards or environmental harms on others. Core countries, for instance, dump heavy metals and greenhouse gases into the global sinks, and some of the core’s hazardous products, production processes and wastes are displaced to the peripheral zones of the world-system. Since few peripheral countries have the ability to assess and manage the risks associated with such hazards, the transfer of core hazards to the periphery has adverse environmental and socio-economic consequences for many of these countries. Such export practices are therefore contributing to the globalization of health, safety, and environmental risks. Most discussions of the risk globalization problem have failed to situate the problem firmly in a world-system frame. This paper begins such a discussion by examining the specific problem of ship breaking in Alang, India and Chittagong, Bangladesh

TRPV1 agonist, capsaicin, induces axon outgrowth after injury via Ca2+/PKA signaling

AbstractPreconditioning nerve injuries activate a pro-regenerative program that enhances axon regeneration for most classes of sensory neurons. However, nociceptive sensory neurons and central nervous system neurons regenerate poorly. In hopes of identifying novel mechanisms that promote regeneration, we screened for drugs that mimicked the preconditioning response and identified a nociceptive ligand that activates a preconditioning-like response to promote axon outgrowth. We show that activating the ion channel TRPV1 with capsaicin induces axon outgrowth of cultured dorsal root ganglion (DRG) sensory neurons, and that this effect is blocked in TRPV1 knockout neurons. Regeneration occurs only in NF200-negative nociceptive neurons, consistent with a cell-autonomous mechanism. Moreover, we identify a signaling pathway in which TRPV1 activation leads to calcium influx and protein kinase A (PKA) activation to induce a preconditioning-like response. Finally, capsaicin administration to the mouse sciatic nerve activates a similar preconditioning-like response and induces enhanced axonal outgrowth, indicating that this pathway can be inducedin vivo. These findings highlight the use of local ligands to induce regeneration and suggest that it may be possible to target selective neuronal populations for repair, including cell types that often fail to regenerate.</jats:p

Diagnostics and training of affordance perception in healthy young adults - Implications for post-stroke neurorehabilitation

Affordance perception is critical to adaptive behavior. It comprises the ability to evaluate whether the environment and the actor's capabilities enable particular actions. It remains unclear how brain damage and its behavioral sequela impact this ability. Two affordance based judgment tasks were applied in healthy young adults that were adapted for prospective diagnostic purposes in patients. In addition to the commonly analyzed error-rate we included response times and accuracy measures based on a detection theory approach. Moreover, a manipulation was added intended to determine the effectiveness of feedback-based learning. We further applied control tasks that consider whether errors in affordance perception can be explained by errors in perception. Participants responded yes or no to decide prospectively if a given setting would afford a particular action. In study1, 27 participants judged whether their hand would fit through a given aperture (adapted from Ishak et al., 2008). In study2, 19 participants judged whether objects are reachable [adapted from Gabbard et al. (2005)]. For both studies two sessions were administered. In the first session all participants solved the judgment-task without executing the action. In the second session (feedback manipulation), half of the participants were allowed to first judge and then perform the task for each trial (reach forward and touch the object, or fitting the hand into the aperture). Judgments were slowest and errors most frequent for openings or distances close to the individual's actual physical limits. With more extreme settings accuracy increased and responses became faster. Importantly, we found an advantageous effect of feedback on performance in both tasks suggesting that affordance perception is rapidly trainable. Further, the aperture task demonstrated that feedback experienced with one hand can transfer to the other. This may have important implications for rehabilitation.publishe

Critical Commentary on Raising the Point with Director\u27s Reply

Raising the Point!, is an educational documentary which supports the South Bronx’s Hunts Point community’s efforts in improving the social, educational, environmental, and health injustices it encounters. Though the Hunts Point community faces many inequities, the film focuses on the issue of poor air quality

Digging Digitally: Creating a More Dynamic Archaeological Field Journal Archive

As the daily record of observations, the field journal always has been central to the archaeological process. Yet in recent decades, these important texts have been ignored in the rush to create digital artifact archives. This project, which builds upon software designed to manage the field books at the Ohio State University Excavations at Isthmia, will correct this oversight by enabling a community of scholars to use scans of the hand written texts to link electronically the disparate forms of evidence that make up the archaeological record. Also, this project will determine the best equipment and practices to allow archaeologists to utilize a digital notebook archive in their research. The result will be an inexpensive, multi-platform, and open source system that can be adapted by other scholars to simplify and enhance research in any field of humanities research that depends upon hand written documents as a primary source of evidence

Bibliotecas jurídicas e bibliotecários jurídicos ao redor do mundo: Estados Unidos da America

Breve relato sobre vários aspectos das bibliotecas jurídicas e dos bibliotecários nos Estados Unidos, enfocando: formação acadêmica, regulamentação profissional, mercado de trabalho, salários, instituições associativas, concursos de monografias, prêmios e tributos

Law libraries and law librarians around the world: United States of America

Short essay about several aspects of the law library profession in the United States of America: educational requirements, professional regulation, labor market, salaries, associations, labor union, events, monograph competitions, prizes and tributes

Exploring a search for long-duration transient gravitational waves associated with magnetar bursts

Soft gamma repeaters and anomalous X-ray pulsars are thought to be magnetars, neutron stars with strong magnetic fields of order $\mathord{\sim} 10^{13}$--$10^{15} \, \mathrm{gauss}$. These objects emit intermittent bursts of hard X-rays and soft gamma rays. Quasiperiodic oscillations in the X-ray tails of giant flares imply the existence of neutron star oscillation modes which could emit gravitational waves powered by the magnetar's magnetic energy reservoir. We describe a method to search for transient gravitational-wave signals associated with magnetar bursts with durations of 10s to 1000s of seconds. The sensitivity of this method is estimated by adding simulated waveforms to data from the sixth science run of Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). We find a search sensitivity in terms of the root sum square strain amplitude of $h_{\mathrm{rss}} = 1.3 \times 10^{-21} \, \mathrm{Hz}^{-1/2}$ for a half sine-Gaussian waveform with a central frequency $f_0 = 150 \, \mathrm{Hz}$ and a characteristic time $\tau = 400 \, \mathrm{s}$. This corresponds to a gravitational wave energy of $E_{\mathrm{GW}} = 4.3 \times 10^{46} \, \mathrm{erg}$, the same order of magnitude as the 2004 giant flare which had an estimated electromagnetic energy of $E_{\mathrm{EM}} = \mathord{\sim} 1.7 \times 10^{46} (d/ 8.7 \, \mathrm{kpc})^2 \, \mathrm{erg}$, where $d$ is the distance to SGR 1806-20. We present an extrapolation of these results to Advanced LIGO, estimating a sensitivity to a gravitational wave energy of $E_{\mathrm{GW}} = 3.2 \times 10^{43} \, \mathrm{erg}$ for a magnetar at a distance of $1.6 \, \mathrm{kpc}$. These results suggest this search method can probe significantly below the energy budgets for magnetar burst emission mechanisms such as crust cracking and hydrodynamic deformation