Colonial Armidale: A Study of People, Place and Power in the Formation of a Country Town

This thesis examines the changes in colonial Armidale, New South Wales, from a small centrally located frontier village in the early 1850s to an eminently respectable cathedral city by 1891. The process of change was one of struggle for control of the district's resources and for the control of the social space of the town. That struggle is viewed using a concept of power with particular emphasis on the strategies people used in their communal encounters and conflicts. In the 1840s and early 1850s young, single, working class men dominated the town and the essence of status behaviour was prowess, centred on the male body. However, as Crown Lands were sold to private purchasers, a middling class of small farmers and urban entrepreneurs emerged. This class comprised young families, and, unlike the squatters and large investors of the middle class, was resident. This class struggled with the squatters for control of the arable lands, and with the large-scale investors to free their small businesses from debt. There was, as well, the continual struggle between workers and bosses for control of labour costs and working conditions. Family life was centred on the reality of an enormous power imbalance between husband and wife under the principles of the law of coverture, and women were engaged in struggle to define family roles in such a way as to ameliorate that power differential. This was part of a much wider gender struggle which saw the emergence of precepts of respectability which challenged the older ideology of masculinism. With the ascendancy of respectability every effort was made to control the public places and social infrastructure of the town and status behaviour based on property ownership and displays of wealth took over from the displays of prowess which characterised the earlier town. By the last decade of the nineteenth century sophisticated class and gender structures had emerged and these were reinforced by the patterns of wealth devolution evident as the pioneering generation of the middle and middling class passed away

The First Hyper-luminous Infrared Galaxy Discovered by WISE

We report the discovery by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) of the z = 2.452 source WISE J181417.29+341224.9, the first hyperluminous source found in the WISE survey. WISE 1814+3412 is also the prototype for an all-sky sample of ~1000 extremely luminous "W1W2-dropouts" (sources faint or undetected by WISE at 3.4 and 4.6 μm and well detected at 12 or 22 μm). The WISE data and a 350 μm detection give a minimum bolometric luminosity of 3.7 × 10^(13) L_☉, with ~10^(14) L_☉ plausible. Follow-up images reveal four nearby sources: a QSO and two Lyman break galaxies (LBGs) at z = 2.45, and an M dwarf star. The brighter LBG dominates the bolometric emission. Gravitational lensing is unlikely given the source locations and their different spectra and colors. The dominant LBG spectrum indicates a star formation rate ~300 M_☉ yr^(–1), accounting for ≲ 10% of the bolometric luminosity. Strong 22 μm emission relative to 350 μm implies that warm dust contributes significantly to the luminosity, while cooler dust normally associated with starbursts is constrained by an upper limit at 1.1 mm. Radio emission is ~10 times above the far-infrared/radio correlation, indicating an active galactic nucleus (AGN) is present. An obscured AGN combined with starburst and evolved stellar components can account for the observations. If the black hole mass follows the local M BH-bulge mass relation, the implied Eddington ratio is ≳ 4. WISE 1814+3412 may be a heavily obscured object where the peak AGN activity occurred prior to the peak era of star formation

LSST Science Book, Version 2.0

A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over 20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.Comment: 596 pages. Also available at full resolution at http://www.lsst.org/lsst/sciboo

Assessment of Metabolic Phenotypes in Patients with Non-ischemic Dilated Cardiomyopathy Undergoing Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy

Studies of myocardial metabolism have reported that contractile performance at a given myocardial oxygen consumption (MVO2) can be lower when the heart is oxidizing fatty acids rather than glucose or lactate. The objective of this study is to assess the prognostic value of myocardial metabolic phenotypes in identifying non-responders among non-ischemic dilated cardiomyopathy (NIDCM) patients undergoing cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT). Arterial and coronary sinus plasma concentrations of oxygen, glucose, lactate, pyruvate, free fatty acids (FFA), and 22 amino acids were obtained from 19 male and 2 female patients (mean age 56 ± 16) with NIDCM undergoing CRT. Metabolite fluxes/MVO2 and extraction fractions were calculated. Flux balance analysis (FBA) was performed with MetaFluxNet 1.8 on a metabolic network of the cardiac mitochondria (189 reactions, 230 metabolites) reconstructed from mitochondrial proteomic data (615 proteins) from human heart tissue. Non-responders based on left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) demonstrated a greater mean FFA extraction fraction (35% ± 17%) than responders [18 ± 10%, p = 0.0098, area under the estimated ROC curve (AUC) was 0.8238, S.E. 0.1115]. Calculated adenosine triphosphate (ATP)/MVO2 using FBA correlated with change in New York Heart Association (NYHA) class (rho = 0.63, p = 0.0298; AUC = 0.8381, S.E. 0.1316). Non-responders based on both LVEF and NYHA demonstrated a greater mean FFA uptake/MVO2 (0.115 ± 0.112) than responders (0.034 ± 0.030, p = 0.0171; AUC = 0.8593, S.E. 0.0965). Myocardial FFA flux and calculated maximal ATP synthesis flux using FBA may be helpful as biomarkers in identifying non-responders among NIDCM patients undergoing CRT

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics' resources: focus on curated databases

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (www.isb-sib.ch) provides world-class bioinformatics databases, software tools, services and training to the international life science community in academia and industry. These solutions allow life scientists to turn the exponentially growing amount of data into knowledge. Here, we provide an overview of SIB's resources and competence areas, with a strong focus on curated databases and SIB's most popular and widely used resources. In particular, SIB's Bioinformatics resource portal ExPASy features over 150 resources, including UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, ENZYME, PROSITE, neXtProt, STRING, UniCarbKB, SugarBindDB, SwissRegulon, EPD, arrayMap, Bgee, SWISS-MODEL Repository, OMA, OrthoDB and other databases, which are briefly described in this article