30 research outputs found

    Black Content Creators' Responses and Resistance Strategies on TikTok

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    Social media wields a profound influence on social and economic dynamics worldwide, people on social media began to forge a livelihood through their online presence through creative labor. This surge in social media Content Creators significantly shaped the trends and cultural landscape of the internet. While many of the social media trends we observe today can be attributed to the creative contributions of Black Content Creators, digital platforms routinely marginalize and undermine these creators through algorithmic recommendation systems that produce systemic bias against Black and Brown people. To address this problem, we conducted a content analysis to assess how algorithms specifically illicit harassment, interact, and unfairly target Black Content Creators.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

    Disruptive lysosomal-metabolic signaling and neurodevelopmental deficits that precede Purkinje cell loss in a mouse model of Niemann-Pick Type-C disease.

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    Purkinje cell (PC) loss occurs at an early age in patients and animal models of Niemann-Pick Type C (NPC), a lysosomal storage disease caused by mutations in the Npc1 or Npc2 genes. Although degeneration of PCs occurs early in NPC, little is known about how NPC1 deficiency affects the postnatal development of PCs. Using the Npc1nmf164 mouse model, we found that NPC1 deficiency significantly affected the postnatal development of PC dendrites and synapses. The developing dendrites of Npc1nmf164 PCs were significantly deficient in mitochondria and lysosomes. Furthermore, anabolic (mTORC1) and catabolic (TFEB) signaling pathways were not only perturbed but simultaneously activated in NPC1-deficient PCs, suggesting a loss of metabolic balance. We also found that mice with conditional heterozygous deletion of the Phosphatase and Tensin Homolog Deleted on Chromosome 10 gene (Pten-cHet), an inhibitor of mTORC1, showed similar early dendritic alterations in PCs to those found in Npc1-deficient mice. However, in contrast to Npc1nmf164 mice, Pten-cHet mice exhibited the overactivation of the mTORC1 pathway but with a strong inhibition of TFEB signaling, along with no dendritic mitochondrial reductions by the end of their postnatal development. Our data suggest that disruption of the lysosomal-metabolic signaling in PCs causes dendritic and synaptic developmental deficits that precede and promote their early degeneration in NPC

    No dual-task practice effect in Alzheimer's disease

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    Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) requires evidence of progressive decline in cognitive function. However, many tests used to assess cognitive function suffer from considerable practice effects, reducing their reliability. Several studies have reported that the ability to do two things at once, or dual tasking, is impaired in AD, but unaffected by healthy ageing. The apparent specificity of this impairment suggests that this assessment may be particularly useful in the early diagnosis of AD, but the reliability of this assessment remains unknown. Therefore, this study investigated simultaneous performance of digit recall and tracking tasks across six testing sessions in eight people with AD, eight healthy older adults and eight healthy younger adults. The results found that dual-task performance was unaffected by healthy ageing, but significantly impaired in AD, with no effect of repeated exposure. The absence of any improvements in performance despite increased familiarity with the task’s demands suggests that not only is the dualtask assessment well suited for monitoring progression over time, but also that dual tasking involves a specific cognitive function which is impaired in the AD brain

    The rate of telomere loss is related to maximum lifespan in birds

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    Telomeres are highly conserved regions of DNA that protect the ends of linear chromosomes. The loss of telomeres can signal an irreversible change to a cell's state, including cellular senescence. Senescent cells no longer divide and can damage nearby healthy cells, thus potentially placing them at the crossroads of cancer and ageing. While the epidemiology, cellular and molecular biology of telomeres are well studied, a newer field exploring telomere biology in the context of ecology and evolution is just emerging. With work to date focusing on how telomere shortening relates to individual mortality, less is known about how telomeres relate to ageing rates across species. Here, we investigated telomere length in cross-sectional samples from 19 bird species to determine how rates of telomere loss relate to interspecific variation in maximum lifespan. We found that bird species with longer lifespans lose fewer telomeric repeats each year compared with species with shorter lifespans. In addition, phylogenetic analysis revealed that the rate of telomere loss is evolutionarily conserved within bird families. This suggests that the physiological causes of telomere shortening, or the ability to maintain telomeres, are features that may be responsible for, or co-evolved with, different lifespans observed across species.This article is part of the theme issue 'Understanding diversity in telomere dynamics'

    Mattie at work

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    How even the most deprived and traumatised children can be helped: Gianna Polacco Williams interview

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    Gianna Polacco Williams on her life's work as a child psychotherapist and the key theories and ideas she has developed - Double Deprivation and No Entry Defences are discussed here and the application of psychoanalytic work in non-clinical contexts. Gianna is a Consultant Child Psychotherapist and Psychoanalyst and is one of the most respected and incisive clinicians in child mental health today. Her paper ‘Doubly Deprived’ (Henry, 1974), written as Gianna Henry, broke new ground. It became an instant classic and is still one of the most quoted papers in child psychotherapy. The significance of this paper cannot be underestimated. It sparked research into psychotherapy with traumatised children, leading to publication of ‘Psychotherapy with severely deprived children’, edited by Mary Boston and Rolene Szur. Before it was published there was a widely held belief that severely deprived children could not be helped with psychotherapy. The concept of Double Deprivation suggests that the first deprivation is that which has been caused by a child’s external circumstances which cannot be changed. The second deprivation is due to a child’s internal defences which have developed in the avoidance of psychic pain and the nature of the child’s internal objects, which with treatment can be modified and so is changeable. In this interview she talks about Martin, the 14 years old patient who was the source of her ideas, and why the concepts she wrote about then are as relevant today. She also discusses in depth one of her other key theoretical ideas, the ‘No Entry’ defence, an illuminating concept in understanding the development of some eating disorders

    Enabling and inspiring: A tribute to Martha Harris

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    Martha Harris (1919-1987) was one of the most influential and also one of the most loved psychoanalysts of the generation that trained with Melanie Klein. She also worked with Wilfred Bion, and wrote many books and papers on psychoanalytic training and child development. Her colleague James Gammill cites Mrs Klein as saying: "She is one of the best people I have ever known for the psychoanalysis of children 
 and she has a mind of her own." Harris was responsible for the child psychotherapy training at the Tavistock Clinic from 1960 onwards, developing laterally the method founded on infant observation that had been put in place by Esther Bick. She established cross-clinic work discussion groups, a pioneering schools’ counselling course (in collaboration with her husband Roland Harris), and individual work with disturbed children in the school environment. Her belief that psychoanalytic ideas could and should “travel”, both geographically and across the professions, led to her seeding the “Tavi Model” in many other countries through regular teaching trips, in company with her later husband Donald Meltzer. Her influence was not as a theorist, but as a teacher with an extraordinary capacity to engage processes of introjective learning in both students and readers. This tribute by some of those who studied with her is not simply testimony to a remarkable teacher and clinician whose wisdom has been rarely equalled; it also offers inspiration to others who may be struggling to find ways of using psychoanalytic ideas imaginatively in a variety of contexts - clinical, social or scholarly - in what can at times appear to be an unreceptive world
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