A ‘narrow world, strewn with prohibitions’: Chang Cheh’s The Assassin and the 1967 Hong Kong riots

Chang Cheh is one of the most influential directors in Hong Kong martial-arts cinema, and his film Da cike/The Assassin is a significant work produced at a key moment both in Chang’s early career and in the development of the increasingly violent 1960s swordplay (wuxia) genre that led ultimately to the appearance of the kungfu film in the 1970s. The Assassin was made during the Leftist Riots of 1967, a ‘watershed’ in Hong Kong’s modern history. In order to understand the changing fantasies of violence in Chang’s wuxia cinema during this period, this article makes a close reading of The Assassin in relation to the 1967 riots through Frantz Fanon’s account of the effects of violence on the colonial subject. It argues for a close relationship between Chang’s cinematic violence and the real-world political violence which was erupting at the moment of its production and first reception

ALTERNATIVE SPLICING REGULATES THE INNATE IMMUNE RESPONSE TO VIRAL INFECTION

Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV) is a mosquito-borne RNA virus that infects humans and livestock in sub-Saharan Africa and the Arabian peninsula, causing disease ranging from a mild flu-like illness to liver damage, blindness, hemorrhagic fever, death, and, especially in livestock animals, high rates of abortive pregnancies. There is no approved vaccine for RVFV, and as a disease with a high rate of spread that causes severe illness, it is listed as a Category A pathogen by the USA CDC. A better understanding of RVFV’s molecular virology will be instrumental to combating RVFV as climate change causes its mosquito host range to expand. RVFV infection causes global changes to host transcriptional activities, including host alternative splicing. Untangling these changes in transcription and alternative splicing will be key to a detailed understanding of viral infection and host responses to viral infection. Host cellular immunity, which is activated as soon as a viral incursion is detected, is multifaceted and complex, and many members of the innate immune response also encode alternatively spliced mRNA isoforms to regulate their activity. In this dissertation, RVFV’s wide-ranging effects on host transcription and splicing programs is described, and focus is placed on one particular alternative splicing event in the mRNA for host innate immune protein RIOK3. Chapter 1 reviews relevant aspects of cellular innate immunity and alternative splicing of innate immune genes, especially during RNA virus infection, and emphasizes recent evidence for RNA virus interference of host splicing mechanisms. Chapter 2 highlights our RNAseq work on RVFV-infected cells that shows the widespread changes in host transcription and splicing during infection, including in RIOK3. In Chapter 3, RIOK3’s antiviral role in the innate immune response to RVFV infection is demonstrated along with the observation that expression of the alternatively spliced isoform, RIOK3 X2, correlates with a diminished innate immune response, which indicates that this alternative splicing observed in RVFV infection may be important for regulation of innate immunity. Chapter 4 describes studies to more deeply characterize RIOK3’s alternatively spliced isoforms, and elucidates the importance of host splicing factor TRA2-b for the constitutive splicing of RIOK3. Of particular interest, we observed that in RVFV-infected cells TRA2-b mRNA is mostly alternatively spliced to diminish stability and translation, while conversely, TRA2-b overexpression and concomitant enhanced expression of constitutively spliced RIOK3 mRNA significantly limits RVFV replication. These data show that RVFV infection benefits from decreased RIOK3 via alternative splicing, and that RIOK3 is an essential member of the antiviral response. This work also contributes to an emerging story that mRNA splicing is vitally important for regulation of the innate immune response against viral infection

Interurban Bus: Time to Raise the Profile

A review of development of interurban bus services in Britain in recent years, including case studies showing the effects of major quality improvements and ridership growth, often filling gaps in the rail network. Policy recommendations

Fundamentals of Music Theory: Blending for Fluency and Interdisciplinary Learning

Music, as one wag put it, is the food of love. While the praises of music theory are sung less sumptuously (if sung at all), before the feast is the cookbook. In this workshop we will showcase a suite of on-line tools for blending an introductory music theory course, a course designed to teach non-musicians the basic ingredients and techniques that underpin musical preparations in the Western-European musical tradition. These tools were developed with the goals of helping students achieve mastery of basic skills more quickly in order to create more time in the course for understanding the historical and cultural contexts in which these tools operate. That is, tasks best learned through autodidactic practice and repetition were transferred outside of class time, making room for topics that lend themselves to critical argumentation and in-person discussion. Participants in this workshop will be treated to a microcosm of the class, divided into several courses: a mini-lesson on some musical skills precedes a live demo of the course’s site, then the session is turned over to practice, experiment, and discussion (participants will find it useful to have a laptop or tablet). For dessert, we present paired quantitative and qualitative approaches to assessing student learning and project success, and preview future developments we are planning based on the experience so far. Play on

The Administration of Rent Rationing and Price Control Legislation

Symposium: The Administration of Rent Rationing and Price Control Legislatio

The Effect of Root Exudate 7,4\u27-Dihydroxyflavone and Naringenin on Soil Bacterial Community Structure

Our goal was to investigate how root exudate flavonoids influence the soil bacterial community structure and to identify members of the community that change their relative abundance in response to flavonoid exudation. Using a model system that approximates flavonoid exudation of Medicago sativa roots, we treated a soil with 7,4′-dihydroxyflavone and naringenin in two separate experiments using three different rates: medium (equivalent to the exudation rate of 7,4′-dihydroxyflavone from M. sativa seedlings), high (10× the medium rate), and low (0.1× the medium rate). Controls received no flavonoid. Soil samples were subjected to ATP assays and 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. The flavonoid treatments caused no significant change in the soil ATP content. With the high 7,4′-dihydroxyflavone treatment rate, operational taxonomic units (OTUs) classified as Acidobacteria subdivision 4 increased in relative abundance compared with the control samples, whereas OTUs classified as Gaiellales, Nocardioidaceae, and Thermomonosporaceae were more prevalent in the control. The naringenin treatments did not cause significant changes in the soil bacterial community structure. Our results suggest that the root exudate flavonoid 7,4′-dihydroxyflavone can interact with a diverse range of soil bacteria and may have other functions in the rhizosphere in addition to nod gene induction in legume—rhizobia symbiosis