A Locked City: The Japanese Company Nitchitsu’s Building of Hŭngnam

Hŭngnam City has received scholarly attention as a symbolic space in which urbanization followed industrialization during the Japanese colonial era in Korea. The Japanese company Nihon Chisso Hiryō Kabushiki Kaisha (Nitchitsu) took this secluded region and built it into a city with world-class production and urban facilities, transforming it into an enterprise city dubbed “the kingdom of Nitchitsu.” However, there is a dearth of analyses which focus on Nitchitsu’s “planning,” “constructing,” and “ruling” of Hŭngnam rather than the aspects of its brilliant “modernization.” In this regard, this article focuses on the city structure of colonial Hŭngnam and how this structure molded a “Japanese settler community.” In particular, this article examines how the families of lower-class laborers from Nitchitsu’s main Japanese factory in Minamata, through the process of moving into Hŭngnam, were formed into a “Japanese settler community” in which they were discriminated against in the colonial city. Furthermore, the article reviews Nitchitsu’s strategy for operating the city through an analysis of detailed records of the company’s donations. The Japanese approach relative to Nitchitsu and Hŭngnam, in order to stabilize the “Japanese settler community” and maximize profits and operations, sought to plan and operate the city as a space only for themselves. Hŭngnam was built in a manner that concentrated all capacity towards the “Japanese settler community” and Nitchitsu, and blocked any “urban integration” which disrupted the company’s pursuit of profit, turning Hŭngnam into a locked “fortress city” built just for Nitchitsu. In sum, this article, by offering a narrative analysis of the closed-minded manner in which Hŭngnam was made into a “fortress” closed to the rest of Korea to maximize profit margins, and shows the flawed historical development of this urban industrial complex that prefigured the Nitchitsu corporation’s role in the tragic emergence of “Minamata disease” in the region after World War II

Rewriting the Economic Growth History of Korea in the 1970s: Focusing on the Pollution Imports and the Shadow People of Economic Growth

During the period of rapid economic growth since the 1970s, Korea imported many polluting industrial facilities from Japan, resulting in the generation of huge amounts of hazardous waste. While the problems of environmental degradation such as these were an integral part of Korea’s development process, they have received only scant attention in the official history of the country’s economic development, often being dismissed as peripheral issues. This paper aims to go beyond this tendency by rewriting the history of economic growth that underlay the disputes caused by the importation of polluting industries from Japan in the 1970s. Its features can be summarized as follows. First, Japan was the most damaging pollution exporter to Korea in the 1970s, and it was also the direct channel to import the knowledge of pollution, and alternative logic against the pollution issues. Second, discussions over industrial pollution in the 1970s occurred in the antagonistic relationship between four groups: the government, media, opposition party, and scholars. Third, a group of experts played various roles, including bureaucrats, researchers, and policy makers, leading the discussion of pollution in Korean society in the 1970s. It has been well over 50 years since 1970. Nevertheless, Korean society still does not hesitate to create areas and people that become shadows in the wake of development. This explains why we should focus on the “sick body” rather than the “numbers” in this age of science and technology

Re-reading Film about a woman who...: a study of filmic identification in the context of Roland Barthes's notions

Film About a Woman Who…, is the second feature length film made from 1972 to 1974 by Yvonne Rainer. Rainer juxtaposes images, texts, narrative and music and intermingles them in her filmic space, which confuses and frustrates the viewer who is accustomed to the linear narratives of most films. Most critics generally categorize the film within the avant-garde feminist film movement due to its experimental film form and social metaphors. But rather than addressing mainstream gender-specific discourses, this paper places the film in the context of Roland Barthes’s notion of pleasure/bliss, the neutre, and readerly/writerly reading to explain viewers’ free and individual identification. Furthermore, it explores and analyzes the meaning of both cliché and anticliché, and of the temporal dialectics in re-presenting autographical diaries

Rewiring of PDZ Domain-Ligand Interaction Network Contributed to Eukaryotic Evolution

PDZ domain-mediated interactions have greatly expanded during metazoan evolution, becoming important for controlling signal flow via the assembly of multiple signaling components. The evolutionary history of PDZ domain-mediated interactions has never been explored at the molecular level. It is of great interest to understand how PDZ domain-ligand interactions emerged and how they become rewired during evolution. Here, we constructed the first human PDZ domain-ligand interaction network (PDZNet) together with binding motif sequences and interaction strengths of ligands. PDZNet includes 1,213 interactions between 97 human PDZ proteins and 591 ligands that connect most PDZ protein-mediated interactions (98%) in a large single network via shared ligands. We examined the rewiring of PDZ domain-ligand interactions throughout eukaryotic evolution by tracing changes in the C-terminal binding motif sequences of the PDZ ligands. We found that interaction rewiring by sequence mutation frequently occurred throughout evolution, largely contributing to the growth of PDZNet. The rewiring of PDZ domain-ligand interactions provided an effective means of functional innovations in nervous system development. Our findings provide empirical evidence for a network evolution model that highlights the rewiring of interactions as a mechanism for the development of new protein functions. PDZNet will be a valuable resource to further characterize the organization of the PDZ domain-mediated signaling proteome

The Evolutionarily Conserved LIM Homeodomain Protein LIM-4/LHX6 Specifies the Terminal Identity of a Cholinergic and Peptidergic C. elegans Sensory/Inter/Motor Neuron-Type

The expression of specific transcription factors determines the differentiated features of postmitotic neurons. However, the mechanism by which specific molecules determine neuronal cell fate and the extent to which the functions of transcription factors are conserved in evolution are not fully understood. In C. elegans, the cholinergic and peptidergic SMB sensory/inter/motor neurons innervate muscle quadrants in the head and control the amplitude of sinusoidal movement. Here we show that the LIM homeobox protein LIM-4 determines neuronal characteristics of the SMB neurons. In lim-4 mutant animals, expression of terminal differentiation genes, such as the cholinergic gene battery and the flp-12 neuropeptide gene, is completely abolished and thus the function of the SMB neurons is compromised. LIM-4 activity promotes SMB identity by directly regulating the expression of the SMB marker genes via a distinct cis-regulatory motif. Two human LIM-4 orthologs, LHX6 and LHX8, functionally substitute for LIM-4 in C. elegans. Furthermore, C. elegans LIM-4 or human LHX6 can induce cholinergic and peptidergic characteristics in the human neuronal cell lines. Our results indicate that the evolutionarily conserved LIM-4/LHX6 homeodomain proteins function in generation of precise neuronal subtypes

The Howl - Fall 2016

The Howl is a magazine that is planned, researched, written, photographed and designed by Otterbein University\u27s ESL and international students. The magazine serves to give them a safe space in which to use their voice to share their cultures, experiences and lives. If you are interested in submitting to The Howl, please email your writing or photography to [email protected]://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/the_howl/1001/thumbnail.jp

Genetically Determined Plasma Lipid Levels and Risk of Diabetic Retinopathy: A Mendelian Randomization Study.

Results from observational studies examining dyslipidemia as a risk factor for diabetic retinopathy (DR) have been inconsistent. We evaluated the causal relationship between plasma lipids and DR using a Mendelian randomization approach. We pooled genome-wide association studies summary statistics from 18 studies for two DR phenotypes: any DR (N = 2,969 case and 4,096 control subjects) and severe DR (N = 1,277 case and 3,980 control subjects). Previously identified lipid-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms served as instrumental variables. Meta-analysis to combine the Mendelian randomization estimates from different cohorts was conducted. There was no statistically significant change in odds ratios of having any DR or severe DR for any of the lipid fractions in the primary analysis that used single nucleotide polymorphisms that did not have a pleiotropic effect on another lipid fraction. Similarly, there was no significant association in the Caucasian and Chinese subgroup analyses. This study did not show evidence of a causal role of the four lipid fractions on DR. However, the study had limited power to detect odds ratios less than 1.23 per SD in genetically induced increase in plasma lipid levels, thus we cannot exclude that causal relationships with more modest effect sizes exist

Identifying and Mitigating the Security Risks of Generative AI

Every major technical invention resurfaces the dual-use dilemma -- the new technology has the potential to be used for good as well as for harm. Generative AI (GenAI) techniques, such as large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models, have shown remarkable capabilities (e.g., in-context learning, code-completion, and text-to-image generation and editing). However, GenAI can be used just as well by attackers to generate new attacks and increase the velocity and efficacy of existing attacks. This paper reports the findings of a workshop held at Google (co-organized by Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison) on the dual-use dilemma posed by GenAI. This paper is not meant to be comprehensive, but is rather an attempt to synthesize some of the interesting findings from the workshop. We discuss short-term and long-term goals for the community on this topic. We hope this paper provides both a launching point for a discussion on this important topic as well as interesting problems that the research community can work to address

Lysine acetyltransferase Tip60 is required for hematopoietic stem cell maintenance.

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) have the potential to replenish the blood system for the lifetime of the organism. Their 2 defining properties, self-renewal and differentiation, are tightly regulated by the epigenetic machineries. Using conditional gene-knockout models, we demonstrated a critical requirement of lysine acetyltransferase 5 (Kat5, also known as Tip60) for murine HSC maintenance in both the embryonic and adult stages, which depends on its acetyltransferase activity. Genome-wide chromatin and transcriptome profiling in murine hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells revealed that Tip60 colocalizes with c-Myc and that Tip60 deletion suppress the expression of Myc target genes, which are associated with critical biological processes for HSC maintenance, cell cycling, and DNA repair. Notably, acetylated H2A.Z (acH2A.Z) was enriched at the Tip60-bound active chromatin, and Tip60 deletion induced a robust reduction in the acH2A.Z/H2A.Z ratio. These results uncover a critical epigenetic regulatory layer for HSC maintenance, at least in part through Tip60-dependent H2A.Z acetylation to activate Myc target genes.Cancer Research UK, Wellcome Trust, National Institutes of Health, Singapore state fundin