Luciano Floridi and contemporary art practice

This article examines how the thinking of Luciano Floridi, especially his emphasis on information, could affect the way we approach art practice. It aims to situate art practice in relation to contemporary informational theories and suggests that the way we view contemporary art practice needs to move beyond existing theories. Key components to Floridi’s philosophy are introduced with relevance to art practice, followed by an analysis of these concepts with examples from the history of art. It is hoped that, by clarifying some of the more complex terms and concepts, readers will form a better understanding of the connections and potential synergy between art practice and the sciences of information, through the philosophy of Floridi

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

Art and Technology : The End and the Future

Danto has identified the sense of crisis in art at the end of the Twentieth Century. I have suggested that his account of that crisis is unduly pessimistic. I have not however attempted to predict what art will be like in the next century. For not only is art in its very nature unpredictable, but speculations about the future on such a scale are liable to be quaint, like science fiction drawings, which carry with them features of their own times, so close as to be unnoticed, and which construct a vision of the future on the unreliable basis of the fears and enthusiasms of the present. As Danto himself puts this point, nothing so much belongs to its own times as an age's glimpses into the future. What I have attempted to do in this essay however is to identify some features of the present condition of art which I think are important in our present thought about the future of art. The first is that the domination of a peculiarly Western concept of art, with its defensive separations of art, design and craft, may be breaking down, and that the aesthetic ideas and practices from cultures which have not traditionaly made such rigid distinctions may influence the course of art, with beneficent effects on our sensibilities towards our personal and social environment. Secondly, and perhaps more fundamentally, I have pointed to ways in which the Western concept of art has been a means whereby complex and competeting views about reality, nature and human nature have been visualised and contended. In any self reflective culture I believe that art, in whatever form, will continue to play this role. And the last and most particular point is that the separation of art from other more moral, political or spiritual concerns in the Modernist period of Western art may now be over. Ideas of both social organisation and spiritual value, and processes of moral deliberation require imagination. Artistic representions are one of the ways in which the imagination is constructed and made reflective. Thus if any new technologies of representation are to be technologies of art, they must be able to be used in ways which enable us to reflect upon the relations between the content and themes of the work and the manner or style in which that content is revealed. Plato asked about the knowledge or expertise which artists have about that which they speak or show. His question is still relevant to those who seek to use mechanical or electronic technologies to make new forms of art. For the knowledge of an artist lies in knowing how a technology or a medium might be used not merely to represent the world, but as a means of seeing the world and its human concerns, and thus reflecting upon it

a companion to art theory

edited by Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde.xix, 529 p. : ill. ; 26 cm

A companion to art theory

xix, 529 hal. : il.; 25 c

Motivational and cognitive effects of learning in a natural history museum with differently structured tasks

Wilde M, Urhahne D. Motivational and cognitive effects of learning in a natural history museum with differently structured tasks. In: Hammann M, Reiss M, Boulter C, Tunnicliffe SD, eds. Biology in context: learning and teaching for the twenty-first century: a selection of papers presented at the 6th Conference of European Researchers in Didactics of Biology (ERIDOB). Institute of Education Publications; 2008: 259-270

Cancer-stromal cell interactions in breast cancer brain metastases induce glycocalyx-mediated resistance to HER2-targeting therapies.

Brain metastatic breast cancer is particularly lethal largely due to therapeutic resistance. Almost half of the patients with metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer develop brain metastases, representing a major clinical challenge. We previously described that cancer-associated fibroblasts are an important source of resistance in primary tumors. Here, we report that breast cancer brain metastasis stromal cell interactions in 3D cocultures induce therapeutic resistance to HER2-targeting agents, particularly to the small molecule inhibitor of HER2/EGFR neratinib. We investigated the underlying mechanisms using a synthetic Notch reporter system enabling the sorting of cancer cells that directly interact with stromal cells. We identified mucins and bulky glycoprotein synthesis as top-up-regulated genes and pathways by comparing the gene expression and chromatin profiles of stroma-contact and no-contact cancer cells before and after neratinib treatment. Glycoprotein gene signatures were also enriched in human brain metastases compared to primary tumors. We confirmed increased glycocalyx surrounding cocultures by immunofluorescence and showed that mucinase treatment increased sensitivity to neratinib by enabling a more efficient inhibition of EGFR/HER2 signaling in cancer cells. Overexpression of truncated MUC1 lacking the intracellular domain as a model of increased glycocalyx-induced resistance to neratinib both in cell culture and in experimental brain metastases in immunodeficient mice. Our results highlight the importance of glycoproteins as a resistance mechanism to HER2-targeting therapies in breast cancer brain metastases