Academic lives lived outside

What does it mean to be an academic? What is the perception of who or what an academic is? These are questions pondered by those who live their lives outside the academy but view themselves as academics. They are underlined by harmful attitudes which seek to situate an academic within and only within the academy. Can you be an academic if you work outside of an academic institution? Do those academic institutions treat all academics the same? (DIPF/Orig.

Reconfiguring Systemic Power Relations: A Collaborative Practice-Based Exploration of Inequality with Young People and Adults in Dublin

This collaborative art practice-based thesis mobilises the concept of power as an analytical lens to examine a decade-long collaboration (2007-16) between its author/artist and a Dublin-based youth organisation, Rialto Youth Project. In opposition to the depoliticisation of inequality and associated insidious ethics of social inclusion, a collaborative methodological framework is foregrounded, producing dialogical encounters in which multiple power relations are visualised, challenged and reconfigured and where freedom is recognised as a lived contingent practice. Working across disciplines and in response to lived experiences of systemic inequalities, a series of transgenerational projects were developed to critically examine and respond to power relations at a personal, community and societal level, contributing new transdisciplinary knowledge across the fields of socially engaged art practice, youth work and education. The thesis comprises an introduction, two chapters and a conclusion. By considering the historical ontology of the practice and the formation of subject positions of those working in collaboration, chapter one outlines the construction and conceptualisation of power over time among a diverse group exercising political imagination. In articulating lived experiences of complex and interconnected systemic power relations, the second chapter examines the complex relationship of voice and listening in the public manifestations of the collaborative practice, in which truth speaks to power and politics is staged publicly through dialogical and transformative actions

Cuisine and conquest: interdisciplinary perspectives on food, continuity and change in 11th-century England and beyond

Multiple strands of evidence are combined to determine the impact of the Norman Con-quest on food culture. Diet is reconstructed from the analysis of zooarchaeological, archaeobotanical and ceramic evidence, as well as through an analysis of the 12th-century text Urbanus magnus. This text is then examined alongside the study of artefacts to reconstruct practices surrounding cooking and dining. The chapter concludes that the Norman Conquest did not have a clear and consistent impact on food culture. Whilst some changes, particularly to elite cuisine, can be related to Norman influences, others, such as an increase in fish consumption, are in fact indicative of longer-term trends. It is considered that the continuities and changes observed caused different experiences of the Conquest to be mediated through food, for some allowing new forms of elite, Norman, identity to emerge, whilst for others the consumption of familiar foods provided stability in a changing world

Coinfinder: Detecting significant associations and dissociations in pangenomes

© 2020 The Authors. The accessory genes of prokaryote and eukaryote pangenomes accumulate by horizontal gene transfer, differential gene loss, and the effects of selection and drift. We have developed Coinfinder, a software program that assesses whether sets of homolo-gous genes (gene families) in pangenomes associate or dissociate with each other (i.e. are ‘coincident’) more often than would be expected by chance. Coinfinder employs a user-supplied phylogenetic tree in order to assess the lineage-dependence (i.e. the phylogenetic distribution) of each accessory gene, allowing Coinfinder to focus on coincident gene pairs whose joint presence is not simply because they happened to appear in the same clade, but rather that they tend to appear together more often than expected across the phylogeny. Coinfinder is implemented in C++, Python3 and R and is freely available under the GNU license from https://​github.​com/​fwhelan/​coinfinder

The Use of Meteorlogical Data to Improve Contrail Detection in Thermal Imagery over Ireland.

Aircraft induced contrails have been found to have a net warming influence on the climate system, with strong regional dependence. Persistent linear contrails are detectable in 1 Km thermal imagery and, using an automated Contrail Detection Algorithm (CDA), can be identified on the basis of their different properties at the 11 and 12 m w av.el enTgthshe algorithm s ability to distinguish contrails from other linear features depends on the sensitivity of its tuning parameters. In order to keep the number of false identifications low, the algorithm imposes strict limits on contrail size, linearity and intensity. This paper investigates whether including additional information (i.e. meteorological data) within the CDA may allow for these criteria to be less rigorous, thus increasing the contrail-detection rate, without increasing the false alarm rate

Contact Endoscopy as a Novel Technique in the Detection and Diagnosis of Mucosal Lesions in the Head and Neck: A Brief Review

Background. There are a variety of described noninvasive optical detection techniques for evaluation of head and neck mucosal lesions. Contact endoscopy is a promising method of in vivo microscopic examination whereby a rigid telescope is placed on a previously dye-stained mucosa allowing evaluation of the superficial cell layers of the epithelium. This technique produces real-time, magnified images of cellular architecture of surface mucosa comparable to histology without the need for biopsy. In this review, we will briefly summarize the efficacy of CE in the detection of precancerous and cancerous mucosal lesions and its potential as a novel technique in early diagnosis, monitoring, and preoperative assessment of mucosal lesions of the head and neck. Methods. PUBMED, MEDLINE, and COCHRANE search revealed five prospective articles on contact endoscopy for the diagnosis of mucosal lesions in the head and neck. Results. The literature search yielded five prospective studies examining contact endoscopy for the diagnosis of benign versus malignant head and neck mucosal lesions. These reported a sensitivity and specificity of 77–100%, specificity of 66–100% and an accuracy of 72–92%. Conclusion. Contact endoscopy is a promising optical technology that may be a useful adjunct in the evaluation and diagnosis of benign and malignant head and neck mucosal lesions. Future prospective randomized double-blind studies of this detection method are required

Structural basis for DNA strand separation by a hexameric replicative helicase

Hexameric helicases are processive DNA unwinding machines but how they engage with a replication fork during unwinding is unknown. Using electron microscopy and single particle analysis we determined structures of the intact hexameric helicase E1 from papillomavirus and two complexes of E1 bound to a DNA replication fork end-labelled with protein tags. By labelling a DNA replication fork with streptavidin (dsDNA end) and Fab (5′ ssDNA) we located the positions of these labels on the helicase surface, showing that at least 10 bp of dsDNA enter the E1 helicase via a side tunnel. In the currently accepted ‘steric exclusion’ model for dsDNA unwinding, the active 3′ ssDNA strand is pulled through a central tunnel of the helicase motor domain as the dsDNA strands are wedged apart outside the protein assembly. Our structural observations together with nuclease footprinting assays indicate otherwise: strand separation is taking place inside E1 in a chamber above the helicase domain and the 5′ passive ssDNA strands exits the assembly through a separate tunnel opposite to the dsDNA entry point. Our data therefore suggest an alternative to the current general model for DNA unwinding by hexameric helicases