Editorial : Launch of the European Journal of Taxonomy (EJT)

We are very pleased and proud to announce the launch of the European Journal of Taxonomy. The EJT is an international, online, fast-track, peer-reviewed, open access journal in descriptive taxonomy,covering subjects in zoology, entomology, botany, and palaeontology, owned and run by a Consortium of European Natural History Institutes. EJT is a collaborative project outcome of the EDIT network

The Unitary Executive during the Third Half-Century, 1889-1945

Recent Supreme Court decisions and the impeachment of President Clinton has reinvigorated the debate over Congress\u27s authority to employ devices such as special counsels and independent agencies to restrict the President\u27s control over the administration of the law. The initial debate focused on whether the Constitution rejected the executive by committee employed by the Articles of the Confederation in favor of a unitary executive, in which all administrative authority is centralized in the President. More recently, the debate has begun to turn towards historical practices. Some scholars have suggested that independent agencies and special counsels have become such established features of the constitutional landscape as to preempt arguments in favor of the unitary executive. Others, led by Bruce Ackerman, have suggested that the New Deal represented a constitutional moment that ratified major changes in the distribution of power within the federal government. To date, however, a complete assessment of the historical record has yet to appear. This Article is part of a larger project that offers a comprehensive chronicle that places the battles between the President and Congress over control of the administration of federal law in historical perspective. It reviews the period between 1889 and 1945, beginning with the Administration of Benjamin Harrison, ending with the Administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and paying particular attention to FDR\u27s failed attempt to reorganized the executive branch. The record reveals that these Presidents during this period consistently defended the unitariness of the executive branch to a degree sufficient to keep the issue from being foreclosed by history. In fact, the episodes discussed provide eloquent illustrations of the legal and normative arguments supporting the unitary executive

Type I Interferon regulates cytokine-delayed neutrophil apoptosis, reactive oxygen species production and chemokine expression via activation of p38 MAPK

ABSTRACT Interferons (IFNs) are key regulators of a number of inflammatory conditions in which neutrophils play an important role in pathology, such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), where Type I IFNs are implicated in disease pathology. However, IFNs are usually generated in vivo together with other cytokines that also have immunoregulatory functions but such interactions are poorly-defined experimentally. We measured the effects of Type-I IFN (IFN α ), elevated in both RA and SLE, on the functions of healthy neutrophils incubated in vitro in the absence and presence of pro-inflammatory cytokines typically elevated in inflammatory diseases (TNF α , GM-CSF). IFN α alone had no effect on neutrophil apoptosis, however it did abrogate the anti-apoptotic effect of GM-CSF (18h, p< 0.01). The enhanced stabilty of the anti-apoptotic protein Mcl-1 and delayed activation of caspase activation normally regulated by GM-CSF were blocked by IFN α this effect was mediated, in part, by activation of p38 MAPK, increased turnover of the anti-apoptotic protein Mcl-1 and cleavage of caspases. IFN α alone also primed ROS production alone and maintained the transient priming effect of TNF for up to 4h: it also down-regulated GM-CSF and TNF α -activated expression of CXCL1, CXCL2, CXCL3, CXCL8, CCL3 and CCL4, but in contrast increased the expression of CXCL10. These novel data identify complex regulatory signalling networks in which Type I IFNs profoundly alter the response of neutrophils to inflammatory cytokines. This is likely to have important consequences in vivo and may explain the complexity and heterogeneity of inflammatory diseases such as RA, in which multiple cytokine cascades have been activated

The Unitary Executive During the Third Half-Century, 1889-1945

Recent Supreme Court decisions and the impeachment of President Clinton has reinvigorated the debate over Congress\u27s authority to employ devices such as special counsels and independent agencies to restrict the President\u27s control over the administration of the law. The initial debate focused on whether the Constitution rejected the executive by committee employed by the Articles of the Confederation in favor of a unitary executive, in which all administrative authority is centralized in the President. More recently, the debate has begun to turn towards historical practices. Some scholars have suggested that independent agencies and special counsels have become such established features of the constitutional landscape as to preempt arguments in favor of the unitary executive. Others, led by Bruce Ackerman, have suggested that the New Deal represented a constitutional moment that ratified major changes in the distribution of power within the federal government. To date, however, a complete assessment of the historical record has yet to appear. This Article is part of a larger project that offers a comprehensive chronicle that places the battles between the President and Congress over control of the administration of federal law in historical perspective. It reviews the period between 1889 and 1945, beginning with the Administration of Benjamin Harrison, ending with the Administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and paying particular attention to FDR\u27s failed attempt to reorganized the executive branch. The record reveals that these Presidents during this period consistently defended the unitariness of the executive branch to a degree sufficient to keep the issue from being foreclosed by history. In fact, the episodes discussed provide eloquent illustrations of the legal and normative arguments supporting the unitary executive

Developing computational infrastructure for the CorCenCC corpus - the National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh

CorCenCC (Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes - National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh) is the first comprehensive corpus of Welsh designed to be reflective of language use across communication types, genres, speakers, language varieties (regional and social) and contexts. This article focuses on the computational infrastructure that we have designed to support data collection for CorCenCC, and the subsequent uses of the corpus which include lexicography, pedagogical research and corpus analysis. A grass-roots approach to design has been adopted, that has adapted and extended previous corpus-building and introduced new features as required for this specific context and language. The key pillars of the infrastructure include a framework that supports metadata collection, an innovative mobile application designed to collect spoken data (utilising a crowdsourcing approach), a backend database that stores curated data and a web-based interface that allows users to query the data online. A usability study was conducted to evaluate the user facing tools and to suggest directions for future improvements. Though the infrastructure was developed for Welsh language collection, its design can be re-used to support corpus development in other minority or major language contexts, broadening the potential utility and impact of this work