Using concepts in medieval history: perspectives on Britain and Ireland, 1100–1500. Edited by Jackson W. Armstrong, Peter Crooks & Andrea Ruddick. Pp 201. Cham: Springer. 2022. £22.99.

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Seeing the music – portrayals of authenticity in British period film music

Film music offers a diversity of variation in filmic portrayals. This thesis investigates the role film music plays in portrayals of authenticity in film. The material was chosen from British period films produced within the last 30 years, of which 13 films were analysed. The thesis also set out to test Kassabian’s Identification Tracking theoretical model (2001) that enables semiotic musical analysis by categorising commonalities according to respective codification practices, otherwise known as perceptions. Authenticity was found and discussed in themes of auteurism, production, historicity, realism, subject positions and identification. These authenticity portrayals occurred across different levels of film perception, not only at the point of text release. The thesis found that music in film can effectively be analysed using the semiotic analysis style. It also elucidated that authenticity carries meaning through codification practices of perceivers, and that this is established practice in the chosen focus of British period film. The thesis reiterates the need for more sensorial approaches to analysis of film that is otherwise limited by the sight-biased practice of the popular film discourse

Job quality in Europe

Promoting job quality and gender equality are objectives of the European Employment Strategy (EES) in spite of a downgrading of the attention given to both in the revised employment guidelines and the re-launch of the Lisbon Process. However, advances on both of these objectives may be important complements to the employment rate targets of the EES, as access to good quality jobs for both sexes is likely to help sustain higher employment rates. While the European Commission has a broad view of the concept of job quality in practice, it relies on a selection of labour market type indicators that say little about the quality of the actual jobs people do. Using data from the 2005 European Working Conditions survey, we analyse job quality along three dimensions: job content, autonomy and working conditions. We conclude that gender and occupational status, along with other job characteristics such as working time and sector, have more influence on an individual’s job quality than the country or ‘national model’ they are situated in. Our results also demonstrate the value of developing indicators of job quality that are both gender sensitive and derived at the level of the job rather than the labour market in order to advance EU policy and academic debate on this topic

Diffusion of Lexical Change in Social Media

Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user accounts). Using a latent vector autoregressive model to aggregate across thousands of words, we identify high-level patterns in diffusion of linguistic change over the United States. Our model is robust to unpredictable changes in Twitter's sampling rate, and provides a probabilistic characterization of the relationship of macro-scale linguistic influence to a set of demographic and geographic predictors. The results of this analysis offer support for prior arguments that focus on geographical proximity and population size. However, demographic similarity -- especially with regard to race -- plays an even more central role, as cities with similar racial demographics are far more likely to share linguistic influence. Rather than moving towards a single unified "netspeak" dialect, language evolution in computer-mediated communication reproduces existing fault lines in spoken American English.Comment: preprint of PLOS-ONE paper from November 2014; PLoS ONE 9(11) e11311

Protecting the Home Turf: National Bar Associations and the Foreign Lawyer

This note addresses the issues raised by domestic laws and bar associations limiting the practice of foreign lawyers. It looks at how the increase in globalization has led different countries to take different approaches toward dealing with these foreign lawyers. There are complex and varying reasons for how a country approaches foreign lawyers, as is demonstrated particularly through the actions of Brazil, India, and Japan. Also, it appears that emerging, but not as of yet established, global economic powers have decided it is in their interest to severely restrict the activity of foreign lawyers. The note suggests that these emerging powers should take the approach that Japan has taken and incrementally liberalize their rules regarding foreign lawyers and law firms. Despite the increased liberalization demonstrated by Japan and some states in the United States, there is little indication that emerging powers will lift their protectionist measures anytime soon

Microglial Signaling in the Spinal Cord after Peripheral Nerve Injury

Injuries to the peripheral nervous system rank among the most common causes of chronic neuropathic pain. Afflicting millions of people for months or even years, symptoms of this condition have proven difficult to treat clinically. A thorough understanding of the pathophysiological changes induced by such nerve lesions is essential to the development of more efficient therapeutic options. Peripheral nerve injury induces a robust and tightly regulated innate immune response in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord. The precise molecular mechanisms regulating the spatiotemporal dynamics and functional impact of the response remain incompletely understood. Preclinical evidence suggests mitigating this immune response can have a significant therapeutic benefit in the treatment of neuropathic pain, however these findings have yet to be clinically validated. To elucidate the mechanisms regulating the spinal immune response, we used a mouse model of partial sciatic nerve injury exclusively in male adult (2-3-month-old) mice. The spared nerve injury (SNI) model employed throughout our studies induces robust, persistent neuropathic pain-like behavior. We established a time course for the spinal immune response to SNI and used mRNA extracted from the ipsilateral dorsal horn of lumbar spinal cord segments L4 and L5 to analyze changes in the transcriptome at the peak of the immune reaction 7 days after nerve lesion. We discovered upregulation of multiple elements of the triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (Trem2) pathway. Trem2 is considered a regulator of toll-like receptor signaling in innate immune cells. It also promotes microglia-mediated phagocytosis in the central nervous system. Recent work from our lab has established neuronal apoptosis in the ipsilateral dorsal horn after SNI as an essential mechanism leading to the development of chronic neuropathic pain-like behavior. We used TUNEL staining of L4 spinal cord sections to compare the clearance of apoptotic cell profiles in Trem2-/- mice to wild-type littermates and discovered a key role for Trem2 in the clearance of apoptotic cells after SNI. We further used genetic deletion of Trem2 as well as administration of a Trem2 agonist in C57Bl/6 mice to assess the impact of Trem2 signaling on both the spinal immune response and neuropathic pain-like behavior after SNI. Neither removal nor augmentation of Trem2 signaling significantly affected the development of neuropathic pain-like behavior. Utilizing flow cytometry, we also evaluated the cellular composition of the spinal immune response. We found no evidence that monocytes from the peripheral circulation invade the spinal cord after SNI, as has been previously suggested. These findings were corroborated by immunohistochemical analysis of spinal cord sections from transgenic mice that express distinct fluorescent proteins in their monocyte and microglia cell populations. To better understand the different mechanisms modulating the spinal immune response, we further examined several transcriptionally regulated signaling pathways. We achieved the greatest reduction of mechanical allodynia in nerve-lesioned mice treated with a P2x4r antagonist. Surprisingly, the removal of fractalkine (Cx3cl1) signaling, another prominent chemokine signaling pathway in microglia, had no significant impact on either the spinal immune response or mechanical allodynia after SNI. Reducing the number of spinal microglia by blocking Csf1r activation did not prevent the development of mechanical allodynia after SNI either. Our findings reveal a more nuanced concept of microglial activation after nerve injury. The impact on neuropathic pain-like behavior and phagocytosis appear to be regulated by pathways that differ from those controlling immune cell recruitment and global activation. These findings provide a greater understanding of the complex mechanisms governing microglial function and offer new insight into molecular targets essential to the development of more efficient treatment options for neuropathic pain

America\u27s Tax System and How to Fix It

Abraham Lincoln signed into law the first national income tax on August 5, 1861. Since 1913, the content of the Internal Revenue Code has increased from the 27-page tax law of that year to over 5000 pages today. As time has passed and the length of this document has increased, so has the expense and complexity of abiding by its statutes. The inefficiencies of the current system indicate that something must be done about the United States tax system, but no one has agreed on what to do. Many proposals to correct the problem have been brought forward over the years, and those proposals need to be studied and analyzed to find the one that is best for America and its people. The results of the analysis indicate that the FairTax would best suit the needs of the United States government and its people

Graph Oracle Models, Lower Bounds, and Gaps for Parallel Stochastic Optimization

We suggest a general oracle-based framework that captures different parallel stochastic optimization settings described by a dependency graph, and derive generic lower bounds in terms of this graph. We then use the framework and derive lower bounds for several specific parallel optimization settings, including delayed updates and parallel processing with intermittent communication. We highlight gaps between lower and upper bounds on the oracle complexity, and cases where the "natural" algorithms are not known to be optimal