2,421 research outputs found
The Rage of Well-fed Lions: The Economic Foundations of UK Welfare Claimant Demonisation in the Neoliberal Era
Ernest Mandel once said that Marxist writers too often echo Marx’s polemic without matching his nuance. The following paper is guilty of this. I have focused on empirical data, which I think will be of most interest to the reader. For reasons of space, this information is discussed within a bare-bones theoretical framework that is at times too simplistic to capture the full complexity of welfare-to-work policy. Nevertheless, I contend that they are solid bones, and were the analysis extended into more nuanced considerations, a significant amount of further empirical evidence could be presented to justify the thrust of the central thesis. Regarding the polemic tone of the paper, ‘workfare’ is no mere historical curiosity; it is a current, ongoing and expanding social policy affecting millions. It is my hope that this paper will encourage the reader to engage, react and feel moved to contribute to the debate surrounding this important economic phenomenon
The Anathattractive s/State: A Marxist-Semiotic Analysis of the Discourse, Ideology and Practice of Neoliberal Workfare
This paper explores the complex semiotic entanglement between discourse, ideology and practical application surrounding the neoliberal welfare policy known as workfare. It focuses particularly on the Flexible New Deal - the version of workfare trialled in the UK from 2009 to 2010 under New Labour. The Flexible New Deal was a privately administered, for-profit, payment-by-results scheme which made receipt of welfare benefits conditional upon reciprocal activity – in particular, attendance at workfare centres for “re-training”. This paper provides a Marxist-semiotic analysis of an actual Flexible New Deal centre, based on participant observation in 2010. This is framed within a wider analysis which proposes that an economic undercode dialectically interacts with class-racist ideology to semiotically sculpt the victims of structural unemployment into an apparent culture of pathological dysfunction – a theatrical illusion which nevertheless renders each unemployed person victim to a mendacious “rhyming up” with media folk-devils. In conclusion, this paper argues that via the term “underclass”, individual states of poverty are transformed into the perception of a socially-cancerous, welfare funded, expanding state (i.e. nation) within the State. This elision of personal and plural, and transubstantiation of the processes of poverty into people, is marked by the novel signifier “s/State”
Parametric Fokker-Planck equation
We derive the Fokker-Planck equation on the parametric space. It is the
Wasserstein gradient flow of relative entropy on the statistical manifold. We
pull back the PDE to a finite dimensional ODE on parameter space. Some
analytical example and numerical examples are presented
Who Watches the Watchmen? An Appraisal of Benchmarks for Multiple Sequence Alignment
Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is a fundamental and ubiquitous technique
in bioinformatics used to infer related residues among biological sequences.
Thus alignment accuracy is crucial to a vast range of analyses, often in ways
difficult to assess in those analyses. To compare the performance of different
aligners and help detect systematic errors in alignments, a number of
benchmarking strategies have been pursued. Here we present an overview of the
main strategies--based on simulation, consistency, protein structure, and
phylogeny--and discuss their different advantages and associated risks. We
outline a set of desirable characteristics for effective benchmarking, and
evaluate each strategy in light of them. We conclude that there is currently no
universally applicable means of benchmarking MSA, and that developers and users
of alignment tools should base their choice of benchmark depending on the
context of application--with a keen awareness of the assumptions underlying
each benchmarking strategy.Comment: Revie
Latent HIV in primary T lymphocytes is unresponsive to histone deacetylase inhibitors
Recently, there is considerable interest in the field of anti-HIV therapy to identify and develop chromatin-modifying histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors that can effectively reactivate latent HIV in patients. The hope is that this would help eliminate cells harboring latent HIV and achieve an eventual cure of the virus. However, how effectively these drugs can stimulate latent HIVs in quiescent primary CD4 T cells, despite their relevant potencies demonstrated in cell line models of HIV latency, is not clear. Here, we show that the HDAC inhibitors valproic acid (VPA) and trichostatin A (TSA) are unable to reactivate HIV in latently infected primary CD4 T cells generated in the H80 co-culture system. This raises a concern that the drugs inhibiting HDAC function alone might not be sufficient for stimulating latent HIV in resting CD4 T cells in patients and not achieve any anticipated reduction in the pool of latent reservoirs
HATS-17b: A Transiting Compact Warm Jupiter in a 16.3 Days Circular Orbit
We report the discovery of HATS-17b, the first transiting warm Jupiter of the
HATSouth network. HATS-17b transits its bright (V=12.4) G-type
(M=1.131 0.030 M,
R=1.091 R) metal-rich ([Fe/H]=+0.3 dex)
host star in a circular orbit with a period of P=16.2546 days. HATS-17b has a
very compact radius of 0.777 0.056 R given its Jupiter-like mass of
1.338 0.065 M. Up to 50% of the mass of HATS-17b may be composed of
heavy elements in order to explain its high density with current models of
planetary structure. HATS-17b is the longest period transiting planet
discovered to date by a ground-based photometric survey, and is one of the
brightest transiting warm Jupiter systems known. The brightness of HATS-17b
will allow detailed follow-up observations to characterize the orbital geometry
of the system and the atmosphere of the planet.Comment: 12 page, 8 figures, submitted to A
Significance of herpesvirus immediate early gene expression in cellular immunity to cytomegalovirus infection
Interstitial pneumonia linked with reactivation of latent human cytomegalovirus due to iatrogenic immunosuppression can be a serious complication of bone marrow transplantation therapy of aplastic anaemia and acute leukaemia1. Cellular immunity plays a critical role in the immune surveillance of inapparent cytomegalovirus infections in man and the mouse1−7. The molecular basis of latency, however, and the interaction between latently or recurrently infected cells and the immune system of the host are poorfy understood. We have detected a so far unknown antigen in the mouse model. This antigen is found in infected cells in association with the expression of the herpesvirus 'immediate early' genes and is recognized by cytolytic T lymphocytes (CTL)8. We now demonstrate that an unexpectedly high proportion of the CTL precursors generated in vivo during acute murine cytomegalovirus infection are specific for cells that selectively synthesize immediate early proteins, indicating an immunodominant role of viral non-structural proteins
The effect of age on emotion processing in individuals with mood disorders and in healthy individuals
Copyright \ua9 2024 Gray, Moot, Frampton, Douglas, Gallagher, Jordan, Carter, Inder, Crowe, McIntosh and Porter. Introduction: Emotion processing is an essential part of interpersonal relationships and social interactions. Changes in emotion processing have been found in both mood disorders and in aging, however, the interaction between such factors has yet to be examined in detail. This is of interest due to the contrary nature of the changes observed in existing research - a negativity bias in mood disorders versus a positivity effect with aging. It is also unclear how changes in non-emotional cognitive function with aging and in mood disorders, interact with these biases. Methods and results: In individuals with mood disorders and in healthy control participants, we examined emotional processing and its relationship to age in detail. Data sets from two studies examining facial expression recognition were pooled. In one study, 98 currently depressed individuals (either unipolar or bipolar) were compared with 61 healthy control participants, and in the other, 100 people with bipolar disorder (in various mood states) were tested on the same facial expression recognition task. Repeated measures analysis of variance was used to examine the effects of age and mood disorder diagnosis alongside interactions between individual emotion, age, and mood disorder diagnosis. A positivity effect was associated with increasing age which was evident irrespective of the presence of mood disorder or current mood episode. Discussion: Results suggest a positivity effect occurring at a relatively early age but with no evidence of a bias toward negative emotions in mood disorder or specifically, in depressed episodes. The positivity effect in emotional processing in aging appears to occur even within people with mood disorders. Further research is needed to understand how this fits with negative biases seen in previous studies in mood disorders
Population Selection and Sequencing of Caenorhabditis elegans Wild Isolates Identifies a Region on Chromosome III Affecting Starvation Resistance
To understand the genetic basis of complex traits, it is important to be able to efficiently
phenotype many genetically distinct individuals. In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, individuals have
been isolated from diverse populations around the globe and whole-genome sequenced. As a result,
hundreds of wild strains with known genome sequences can be used for genome-wide association studies
(GWAS). However, phenotypic analysis of these strains can be laborious, particularly for quantitative traits
requiring multiple measurements per strain. Starvation resistance is likely a fitness-proximal trait for nematodes, and it is related to metabolic disease risk in humans. However, natural variation in C. elegans
starvation resistance has not been systematically characterized, and precise measurement of the trait is
time-intensive. Here, we developed a population-selection-and-sequencing-based approach to phenotype
starvation resistance in a pool of 96 wild strains. We used restriction site-associated DNA sequencing
(RAD-seq) to infer the frequency of each strain among survivors in a mixed culture over time during
starvation. We used manual starvation survival assays to validate the trait data, confirming that strains that
increased in frequency over time are starvation-resistant relative to strains that decreased in frequency.
Further, we found that variation in starvation resistance is significantly associated with variation at a region
on chromosome III. Using a near-isogenic line (NIL), we showed the importance of this genomic interval for
starvation resistance. This study demonstrates the feasibility of using population selection and sequencing
in an animal model for phenotypic analysis of quantitative traits, documents natural variation of starvation
resistance in C. elegans, and identifies a genomic region that contributes to such variation
Decoherence induced deformation of the ground state in adiabatic quantum computation
Despite more than a decade of research on adiabatic quantum computation
(AQC), its decoherence properties are still poorly understood. Many theoretical
works have suggested that AQC is more robust against decoherence, but a
quantitative relation between its performance and the qubits' coherence
properties, such as decoherence time, is still lacking. While the thermal
excitations are known to be important sources of errors, they are predominantly
dependent on temperature but rather insensitive to the qubits' coherence. Less
understood is the role of virtual excitations, which can also reduce the ground
state probability even at zero temperature. Here, we introduce normalized
ground state fidelity as a measure of the decoherence-induced deformation of
the ground state due to virtual transitions. We calculate the normalized
fidelity perturbatively at finite temperatures and discuss its relation to the
qubits' relaxation and dephasing times, as well as its projected scaling
properties.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure
- …