Sparrows can't sing : East End kith and kinship in the 1960s

Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963) was the only feature film directed by the late and much lamented Joan Littlewood. Set and filmed in the East End, where she worked for many years, the film deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. Littlewood’s career spanned documentary (radio recordings made with Ewan MacColl in the North of England in the 1930s) to directing for the stage and the running of the Theatre Royal in London’s Stratford East, often selecting material which aroused memories in local audiences (Leach 2006: 142). Many of the actors trained in her Theatre Workshop subsequently became better known for their appearances on film and television. Littlewood herself directed hardly any material for the screen: Sparrows Can’t Sing and a 1964 series of television commercials for the British Egg Marketing Board, starring Theatre Workshop’s Avis Bunnage, were rare excursions into an area of practice which she found constraining and unamenable (Gable 1980: 32). The hybridity and singularity of Littlewood’s feature may answer, in some degree, for its subsequent neglect. However, Sparrows Can’t Sing makes a significant contribution to a group of films made in Britain in the 1960s which comment generally on changes in the urban and social fabric. It is especially worthy of consideration, I shall argue, for the use which Littlewood made of a particular community’s attitudes – sentimental and critical – to such changes and for its amalgamation of an attachment to documentary techniques (recording an aural landscape on location) with a preference for nonnaturalistic delivery in performance

Hurricane impacts on the Caribbean coastal/marine environment : using scientific assessment to plan for the future

The passage of Hurricane Hugo through the eastern Caribbean provided a unique opportunity for multidisciplinary study of (1) the effects of severe storms on tropical coastal and marine ecosystems, and (2) the physical and biological responses of those ecosystems to intense storm-induced changes. In addition to its direct value as basic science, this study can be used to facilitate development of improved coastal and marine resource management capabilities.Funding was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Coastal Research Center of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the NOAA National Sea Grant College Program Offce, Department of Commerce, under Grant No. NA86-AA-D-90

Hyperglycemia recognised in early pregnancy is phenotypically type 2 diabetes mellitus not gestational diabetes mellitus: a case control study

OBJECTIVE: Gestational diabetes mellitus is defined as "diabetes recognized in the second or third trimester that is not clearly overt diabetes". Evidence relating to women with hyperglycemia early in pregnancy is limited. We aimed to evaluate women diagnosed with hyperglycemia early in pregnancy (eGDM) and compared them to those with pregestational established type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and gestational diabetes diagnosed routinely at 24-28-week gestation (rtGDM) to determine if the length of exposure to hyperglycemia adversely affected outcomes. METHODS: Forty consecutive women with eGDM who attended a multidisciplinary antenatal clinic were reviewed. Two separate BMI-matched control groups were identified, recognized pregestational T2DM (n = 80) and rtGDM (n = 80). Baseline demographics and outcomes were compared. RESULTS: A higher proportion of women in the eGDM and T2DM group required insulin and the incidence of hypertensive disorders was similarly increased compared with the rtGDM group (88.6, 77.0 versus 8.1%, p < .001 and 42.5%, 37.5 versus 12.5% p < .001, respectively). The proportion of infants born small for gestational age varied (eGDM 11.1%, T2DM 13.0%, and rtGDM 2.5%, p=.049). Postpartum, 7.5% of eGDM women were diagnosed with T2DM versus 1.3% in the rtGDM group (p<.001). CONCLUSIONS: These novel data demonstrate that the length of exposure to glucose adversely affects materno-foetal outcomes independent of maternal adiposity

Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) Balloon Flight Data Handling Overview

The GLAST Balloon Flight Engineering Model (BFEM) represents one of 16 towers that constitute the Large Area Telescope (LAT), a high-energy (>20 MeV) gamma-ray pair-production telescope being built by an international partnership of astrophysicists and particle physicists for a satellite launch in 2006. The prototype tower consists of a Pb/Si pair-conversion tracker (TKR), a CsI hodoscopic calorimeter (CAL), an anti-coincidence detector (ACD) and an autonomous data acquisition system (DAQ). The self-triggering capabilities and performance of the detector elements have been previously characterized using positron, photon and hadron beams. External target scintillators were placed above the instrument to act as sources of hadronic showers. This paper provides a comprehensive description of the BFEM data-reduction process, from receipt of the flight data from telemetry through event reconstruction and background rejection cuts. The goals of the ground analysis presented here are to verify the functioning of the instrument and to validate the reconstruction software and the background-rejection scheme.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, to be published in IEEE Transacations on Nuclear Science, August 200

STRING v11: protein-protein association networks with increased coverage, supporting functional discovery in genome-wide experimental datasets

Proteins and their functional interactions form the backbone of the cellular machinery. Their connectivity network needs to be considered for the full understanding of biological phenomena, but the available information on protein-protein associations is incomplete and exhibits varying levels of annotation granularity and reliability. The STRING database aims to collect, score and integrate all publicly available sources of protein-protein interaction information, and to complement these with computational predictions. Its goal is to achieve a comprehensive and objective global network, including direct (physical) as well as indirect (functional) interactions. The latest version of STRING (11.0) more than doubles the number of organisms it covers, to 5090. The most important new feature is an option to upload entire, genome-wide datasets as input, allowing users to visualize subsets as interaction networks and to perform gene-set enrichment analysis on the entire input. For the enrichment analysis, STRING implements well-known classification systems such as Gene Ontology and KEGG, but also offers additional, new classification systems based on high-throughput text-mining as well as on a hierarchical clustering of the association network itself. The STRING resource is available online at https://string-db.org/