From Tarde to Deleuze and Foucault: The Infinitesimal Revolution (Review)

From Tarde to Deleuze and Foucault: The Infinitesimal Revolution ,Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2018; 154 pp.: ISBN 9783319551487 Sergio Tonkonoff

Rebels without regret: Documentary artivism in the digital age

This article takes up the implications of the blurring of art and politics in two documentary contexts: Ai Weiwei’s art activism in China, as documented in Alison Klayman’s award-winning film Never Sorry, and the Gezi protests in Turkey, documented and disseminated virally through the Internet. Drawing parallels between the self-proclaimed hooliganism of Ai Weiwei and the Turkish protesters, who co-opted the hooligan label that the government used to incriminate them and turned it into a tool for resistance, the article argues that hooliganism is just another incarnation of unruly documentary artivism, which has become prevalent in an era of digitally mediated, global social justice movements. As an interpretive framework for understanding how documentary hooliganism operates, the article proposes Tony D. Sampson’s theory of virality and its application of Dawkins’s neo-Darwinian memetic thought contagion model to the way ideas and political gestures spread in the twenty-first century. Hooliganism, like viruses or memetic thoughts, has a self-spreading tendency; its anarchic affect is contagious and creates volatile yet powerful social encounters. Therefore, the article claims that the foregrounding of hooliganism, which is itself a phenomenon that describes ‘affective contagious encounters’ among anonymous crowds, in the artivist practices of Ai Weiwei and Turkish protesters point to the potential of unruly forms of documentation to influence and inspire selforganized mobilization

Transitions in Human Computer Interaction: From Data Embodiment to Experience Capitalism

This article develops a critical theory of human–computer interaction (critical HCI) intended to test some of the assumptions and omissions made in the field as it transitions from a cognitive theoretical frame to a phenomenological understanding of user experience described by Harrison et al. (the three paradigms of HCI. Paper presented at the Conference on human factors in computing systems. https://people.cs.vt.edu/~srh/Downloads/TheThreeParadigmsofHCI.pdf, 2007) as a third research paradigm and similarly Bødker (when second wave HCI meets third-wave challenges. In: NordiCHI ‘06 Proceedings of the 4th Nordic conference on human–computer interaction: changing roles, 1–8. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1182476; 2006, Interactions 22(5):24–31; Bødker, Interactions 22(5)):24–31, 2015) as third-wave HCI. Although this particular focus on experience has provided some novel avenues of academic enquiry, this article draws attention to a distinct bridge between the conventional HCI disciplinary concerns with predominantly task-based digital work and use context and a growing business interest in consumer experiences in digital environments. Critical HCI addresses the problem of experience in two interrelated ways. On one hand, it explores the role market logic plays in putting user experiences to work. On the other hand, it engages with ontological understandings of experience hitherto realized in HCI by way of a phenomenological matrix (Harrison et al. The three paradigms of HCI. Paper presented at the Conference on human factors in computing systems. https://people.cs.vt.edu/~srh/Downloads/TheThreeParadigmsofHCI.pdf, 2007). The article concludes by bringing in an old thinker (A. N. Whitehead) to consider experience in novel ways that relate ontological concerns to a broader political concept of experience capitalism

A Fragment of the LG3 Peptide of Endorepellin Is Present in the Urine of Physically Active Mining Workers: A Potential Marker of Physical Activity

Biomarker analysis has been implemented in sports research in an attempt to monitor the effects of exertion and fatigue in athletes. This study proposed that while such biomarkers may be useful for monitoring injury risk in workers, proteomic approaches might also be utilised to identify novel exertion or injury markers. We found that urinary urea and cortisol levels were significantly elevated in mining workers following a 12 hour overnight shift. These levels failed to return to baseline over 24 h in the more active maintenance crew compared to truck drivers (operators) suggesting a lack of recovery between shifts. Use of a SELDI-TOF MS approach to detect novel exertion or injury markers revealed a spectral feature which was associated with workers in both work categories who were engaged in higher levels of physical activity. This feature was identified as the LG3 peptide, a C-terminal fragment of the anti-angiogenic/anti-tumourigenic protein endorepellin. This finding suggests that urinary LG3 peptide may be a biomarker of physical activity. It is also possible that the activity mediated release of LG3/endorepellin into the circulation may represent a biological mechanism for the known inverse association between physical activity and cancer risk/survival

WHO World Mental Health Surveys International College Student Project: Prevalence and Distribution of Mental Disorders

Increasingly, colleges across the world are contending with rising rates of mental disorders, and in many cases, the demand for services on campus far exceeds the available resources. The present study reports initial results from the first stage of the WHO World Mental Health International College Student project, in which a series of surveys in 19 colleges across 8 countries (Australia, Belgium, Germany, Mexico, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Spain, United States) were carried out with the aim of estimating prevalence and basic sociodemographic correlates of common mental disorders among first-year college students. Web-based self-report questionnaires administered to incoming first-year students (45.5% pooled response rate) screened for six common lifetime and 12-month DSM-IV mental disorders: major depression, mania/hypomania, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, alcohol use disorder, and substance use disorder. We focus on the 13,984 respondents who were full-time students: 35% of whom screened positive for at least one of the common lifetime disorders assessed and 31% screened positive for at least one 12-month disorder. Syndromes typically had onsets in early to middle adolescence and persisted into the year of the survey. Although relatively modest, the strongest correlates of screening positive were older age, female sex, unmarried-deceased parents, no religious affiliation, nonheterosexual identification and behavior, low secondary school ranking, and extrinsic motivation for college enrollment. The weakness of these associations means that the syndromes considered are widely distributed with respect to these variables in the student population. Although the extent to which cost-effective treatment would reduce these risks is unclear, the high level of need for mental health services implied by these results represents a major challenge to institutions of higher education and governments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).status: publishe

Abdominal aortic aneurysm is associated with a variant in low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 1

Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a common cause of morbidity and mortality and has a significant heritability. We carried out a genome-wide association discovery study of 1866 patients with AAA and 5435 controls and replication of promising signals (lead SNP with a p value < 1 × 10-5) in 2871 additional cases and 32,687 controls and performed further follow-up in 1491 AAA and 11,060 controls. In the discovery study, nine loci demonstrated association with AAA (p < 1 × 10-5). In the replication sample, the lead SNP at one of these loci, rs1466535, located within intron 1 of low-density-lipoprotein receptor-related protein 1 (LRP1) demonstrated significant association (p = 0.0042). We confirmed the association of rs1466535 and AAA in our follow-up study (p = 0.035). In a combined analysis (6228 AAA and 49182 controls), rs1466535 had a consistent effect size and direction in all sample sets (combined p = 4.52 × 10-10, odds ratio 1.15 [1.10-1.21]). No associations were seen for either rs1466535 or the 12q13.3 locus in independent association studies of coronary artery disease, blood pressure, diabetes, or hyperlipidaemia, suggesting that this locus is specific to AAA. Gene-expression studies demonstrated a trend toward increased LRP1 expression for the rs1466535 CC genotype in arterial tissues; there was a significant (p = 0.029) 1.19-fold (1.04-1.36) increase in LRP1 expression in CC homozygotes compared to TT homozygotes in aortic adventitia. Functional studies demonstrated that rs1466535 might alter a SREBP-1 binding site and influence enhancer activity at the locus. In conclusion, this study has identified a biologically plausible genetic variant associated specifically with AAA, and we suggest that this variant has a possible functional role in LRP1 expression

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe