New Rural Arts Seminar Report

July 25th 2014–In Cumbria, England, a four hour train-ride north of London, a group of 30-some-odd organizers, largely from rural UK, gathered by the Merz Barn on the Cylinders Estate for a one-day event entitled The New Rural Arts Seminar. Organized by community arts leaders Ian Hunter and Celia Larner, the Seminar was initiated primarily in response to an Arts Council England’s (ACE) Position Report issued the month prior, but it also seized upon a confluence of international visitors to connect artists and leaders redefining contemporary rural practice in the UK and beyond

The Polyopticon: A Diagram for Urban Artificial Intelligences

Smart city discourses often invoke the Panopticon, a disciplinary architecture designed by Jeremy Bentham and popularly theorized by Michel Foucault, as a model for understanding the social impact of AI technologies. This framing focuses attention almost exclusively on the negative ramifications of Urban AI, correlating ubiquitous surveillance, centralization, and data consolidation with AI development, and positioning technologies themselves as the driving factor shaping privacy, sociality, equity, access, and autonomy in the city. This paper describes an alternative diagram for Urban AI—the Polyopticon: a distributed, polyvalent, multi-modal network of synthetic intelligences. It posits that fourth industrial revolution technologies change the political, social, and psychodynamic relationships of sentience and witness in the city, shifting the effects of watching and watched beyond the exclusive domain of top-down surveillance and discipline. The Polyopticon poses a more expansive and ambivalent spectrum of possibilities for Urban AI scenarios, one that undermines the totalizing, singular, and cerebral notion of intelligence that so often characterizes Urban AI and smart city critiques

Associations between sleep and memory in aging

The goal of this dissertation was to understand how changes in sleep influence memory performance in healthy older adults. Previous research suggests that older individuals experience parallel declines in sleep and episodic memory. These age-related changes appear to be linked such that sleep disruptions contribute to deficits in memory performance. We examined the components of episodic memory that changed following sleep loss and correlated with aspects of sleep physiology. Healthy older adults completed two overnight sessions: an in-lab sleep recording session and a 24-hour sleep deprivation session. The morning after each sleep manipulation, participants completed both episodic memory and sustained attention tasks. We applied computational models, specifically drift-diffusion models, to the episodic memory tasks to examine whether sleep loss affected memory indirectly through lapses in sustained attention (vigilance hypothesis) or specifically through declines in the strategic processes associated with memory (neuropsychological hypothesis). Our results showed that memory functions that depend on processes associated with the prefrontal cortex were impaired following sleep deprivation. In addition, sleep loss caused a small but robust impairment in sustained attention. Since multiple cognitive processes were impaired by sleep loss in older adults, these findings do not provide unequivocal support for either the neuropsychological hypothesis or the vigilance hypothesis. In addition, we explored which aspects of sleep physiology (recorded during the sleep session) optimized components of memory performance. Our results illustrated that more slow wave power during sleep was correlated with higher next-day source memory strength. Additionally, individuals who spent more time in slow wave sleep had better memory retention. These results support further efforts to investigate sleep as a general indicator of cognitive function across the lifespan and highlight the importance of reinforcing healthy sleep behaviors as a method to preserve cognitive functioning in older adults.Psycholog

Role of MrgA in Peroxide and Light Stress in the Cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803.

In the unicellular cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803, the mrgA gene is part of the PerR regulon that is upregulated during peroxide stress. We determined that an ΔmrgA mutant was highly sensitive to low peroxide levels and that the mutant upregulated a gene cluster (sll1722-26) that encoded enzymes involved with exopolymeric substance (EPS) production. We made mutants in this EPS cluster in both a wild type and ΔmrgA background and studied the responses to oxidative stress by measuring cell damage with LIVE/DEAD stain. We show that Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 becomes highly sensitive to oxidative stress when either mrgA or the sll1722-26 EPS components are deleted. The results suggest that the deletion of the EPS cluster makes a cell highly susceptible to cell damage, under moderate oxidative stress conditions. Mutations in either mrgA or the EPS cluster also result in cells that are more light and peroxide sensitive, and produce significantly less EPS material than in wild type. In this study, we show that in the absence of MrgA, which is known to be involved in the storage or mobilization of iron, cells can be more easily damaged by exogenous oxidative and light stress

The Potential for mHealth Interventions to Support Women with Breast Cancer after Active Treatment

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among women worldwide. Chances of living one-year after diagnosis are high (~98%), and health self-management is essential to reduce risks of recurrence. Mobile health (mHealth) has emerged as a wide-reaching and cost-effective way of providing health information and support. Therefore, we conducted a narrative review of the currently available mHealth literature and synthesised the literature according to the impacts of mHealth interventions on patient outcomes, the potential mechanism for behaviour change and innovative approaches to developing future mHealth interventions. Results found a small amount of evidence for the value of mHealth interventions (text message programs, smartphone applications and activity trackers) for supporting women after breast cancer treatment. However, accessibility, cost and gender inequities may pose barriers to implementation. Developing consumer-led mHealth interventions based on lived-experiences will be essential to improving user outcomes. In conclusion, mHealth interventions are widely available and have the potential to support women after breast cancer treatment and further robust research will determine effectiveness in specific subgroups and populations

Women with a Reduced Ovarian Complement May Have an Increased Risk for a Child with Down Syndrome

Advanced maternal age is the only well-established risk factor for trisomy 21 Down syndrome (DS), but the basis of the maternal-age effect is not known. In a population-based, case-control study of DS, women who reported surgical removal of all or part of an ovary or congenital absence of one ovary were significantly more likely to have delivered a child with DS than were women who did not report a reduced ovarian complement (odds ratio 9.61; 95% confidence interval 1.18–446.3). Because others have observed that women who have had an ovary removed exhibit elevated levels of FSH and similar hallmarks of advanced maternal age, our finding suggests that the physiological status of the ovary is key to the maternal-age effect. In addition, it suggests that women with a reduced ovarian complement should be offered prenatal diagnosis

Charismatic and Affective Rhetoric in a Presidential Campaign

Although prior research demonstrates that charisma and rhetoric are two determinants of voting behavior, few studies have examined the effects of charismatic rhetoric and affect as they pertain to the outcomes of presidential elections. Using DICTION software for content analysis, 432 pre-convention speeches from the 2008 presidential election were analyzed to explore the effects that charismatic rhetoric and affect have on presidential candidates’ success. Results indicate that there were more similarities than differences in the charismatic and affect-laden rhetoric of successful and unsuccessful presidential candidates in both the Republican and Democratic parties. Overall, the results demonstrate that both successful and unsuccessful presidential candidates used charismatic rhetoric and emotional language to motivate their followers in the 2008 presidential election

Widespread genetic heterogeneity of human ribosomal RNA genes

Polymorphism drives survival under stress and provides adaptability. Genetic polymorphism of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes derives from internal repeat variation of this multicopy gene, and from interindividual variation. A considerable amount of rRNA sequence heterogeneity has been proposed but has been challenging to estimate given the scarcity of accurate reference sequences. We identified four rDNA copies on chromosome 21 (GRCh38) with 99% similarity to recently introduced reference sequence KY962518.1. We customized a GATK bioinformatics pipeline using the four rDNA loci, spanning a total 145 kb, for variant calling and used high-coverage whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data from the 1000 Genomes Project to analyze variants in 2504 individuals from 26 populations. We identified a total of 3791 variant positions. The variants positioned nonrandomly on the rRNA gene. Invariant regions included the promoter, early 5 ' ETS, most of 18S, 5.8S, ITS1, and large areas of the intragenic spacer. A total of 470 variant positions were observed on 28S rRNA. The majority of the 28S rRNA variants were located on highly flexible human-expanded rRNA helical folds ES7L and ES27L, suggesting that these represent positions of diversity and are potentially under continuous evolution. Several variants were validated based on RNA-seq analyses. Population analyses showed remarkable ancestry-linked genetic variance and the presence of both high penetrance and frequent variants in the 5 ' ETS, ITS2, and 28S regions segregating according to the continental populations. These findings provide a genetic view of rRNA gene array heterogeneity and raise the need to functionally assess how the 28S rRNA variants affect ribosome functions.Peer reviewe