Investigating the Roles of RNA Binding Protein Combinations in Neuronal Function and Organismal Behavior

The Norris lab recently identified two RNA binding proteins required for proper neuron-specific splicing. The lab conducted touch- response behavioral assays to assess the function of these proteins in touch-sensing neurons. After isolating C. elegans worms with specific phenotypes, the lab used automated computer tracking and video analysis to record the worms’ behavior. The behavior of mutant worms differed from that of wild-type worms. The Norris lab also discovered two possible RNA binding protein sites in SAD-1, a neuronal gene implicated in the neuronal development of C. elegans1. These two binding sites may control the splicing of SAD-1. The lab transferred mutated DNA into the genome of wild-type worms by injecting a mutated plasmid. The newly transformed worms fluoresced green, indicating that the two binding sites control SAD-1 splicing

Cenozoic Tectonic and Paleogeographic Evolution of the Horse Prairie Half-graben, Southwest Montana

The Horse Prairie basin (HPB) of southwestern Montana is a complex, east dipping half-graben that contains three angular unconformity-bounded sequences of Tertiary lacustrine, paludal, and fluvial sediments overlying middle Eocene volcanic rocks. The basin is near the eastern edge of the Cordilleran thrust belt, and represents the western half of a larger Paleogene rift basin. Geologic mapping within the Everson Creek and Bannock Pass 7.5 minute quadrangles indicates that five temporally and geometrically distinct episodes of extension characterize the late Mesozoic (?) to Cenozoic tectonic evolution of the upper HPB. The first episode of extension occurred prior to emplacement of middle Eocene volcanic rocks on an enigmatic, low-angle, southeast-dipping fault. Pre-volcanic extension (?) may reflect gravitational collapse of the Sevier thrust belt beginning in the lateMesozoic. The second episode of extension occurred in middle Eocene time on northwestdipping syn-volcanic normal faults. Syn-volcanic faults can be attributed to extension of the Challis volcanic arc, and typically accommodate less than I km of dip-slip separation. The third generation of normal faulting occurred on the low-angle, south-southwest- and west-dipping Lemhi Pass and Maiden Peak fault systems, respectively. Slip may have initiated during the waning phases of Challis volcanism, but these late to post-volcanic normal faults probably reflect continued gravitational collapse of the Sevier thrust belt, because they generally parallel contractional structures in the region. Late to post-volcanic normal faults accommodate the bulk of extensional strain in the study area, and are responsible for the deposition and preservation of the majority of basin-fill deposits in the HPB. Two episodes of middle Miocene and younger extension also occur within the study area; however, structural and basin analysis indicates the HPB experienced only minor extension in the last 17 m.y. Spatial and temporal relationships between magmatism and extension suggest that large magnitude extension in the HPB (episodes I and 3) was not associated with magmatism, and that extension in this portion of the Basin and Range province initiated due to gravitational instabilities imparted on the crust during the Sevier orogeny

Aryan Mundus and Sexual Inversion: Eliot's Edition of Nightwood

Despite its notorious sexual politics, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood gained considerable literary respectability when T. S. Eliot endorsed the first American edition with his Introduction. The presiding dean of Modernist letters at Faber and Faber in London, Eliot could distinguish even obscure writers with a single stroke of his editorial pen. Though his decision to publish Djuna Barnes's wildly subversive Nightwood suggests that an antic disposition lurked beneath his studied propriety, he expurgated several of the manuscript's most transgressive episodes, thus diminishing the redemptive role of sexual inversion in the novel. Eliot admits in his Introduction that “it took me, with this book, some time to come to an appreciation of its meaning as a whole”, but his editorial deletions indicate he overlooked the symbolic significance of inversion as the antithesis of Aryan essentialism in the manuscript. With uncanny prescience, Nightwood forecasts the nightmare of Nazi genocide and gendercide, creating a Parisian underground of expatriate inverts in exile from the deadly cultural “hygiene” of fascism. Analysis of the deleted manuscript passages restores the full force of Barnes's antifascist polemic in which inversion ultimately wins the day

Oeditorial Repression: The Case Histories of Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds

With the persistence of repetition compulsion, Modernists define their movement vis- à-vis the classic Freudian assumption that sexuality is the mainspring of virtually everything, including literary merit. The most libidinous of their aesthetic manifestos is Ezra Pound's characterization of creativity as a “phallus or spermatozoid charging, head-on, the female chaos … driving a new idea into the great passive vulva of London.” Though C. G. Jung is far less enamored of the phallus, he endows masculinity with the “creative and procreative” power of Logos, which, echoing Pound, he calls the “spermatic word.” As if to fend off “scribbling women,” Jung warns that “mental masculinization of the woman has unwelcome results,” most notably frigidity, homosexuality, and “a deadly boring kind of sophistry.” Gertrude Stein's iconoclasm notwithstanding, her paradoxical assertion that her genius is masculine simultaneously reifies and defies this theory that biology determines literary destiny. In the Modernist canon, the pen is a penis, even when a cigar is just a cigar. The most influential of the movement's manifestos, T. S. Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” codifies aesthetic essentialism, positing an Oedipal model of canonicity contingent on the authority of literary fathers. Even Virginia Woolf's rejection of gendered canonicity in A Room of One's Own assumes its tenacity, as if she were protesting too much against the inevitable

Metadata Challenges in Library Discovery Systems

With discovery systems such as Summon, EDS, and Primo Central, patrons can search nearly all of their libraries\u27 resources from a single platform. In order to create this experience, data from disparate sources must be normalized and unified into one index. In this session, we discussed some of the metadata challenges facing each of the parties involved in library discovery; the library, the publisher, and the discovery system provider. Libraries must normalize their bibliographic records to make them compatible with the discovery system’s schema. Publishers need to create mechanisms to regularly export records with meaningful metadata, and the discovery system provider must integrate metadata from these sources while ensuring the best possible user experience. We also touched on the recent guidelines of the NISO Open Discovery Initiative. The guidelines include goals such as “to streamline the process by which information providers, discovery service providers, and librarians work together to better serve libraries and their users.” The session will explore how these guidelines can be implemented along with some of the challenges and will include a discussion with the audience