Adipocyte-specific protein tyrosine phosphatase 1B deletion increases lipogenesis, adipocyte cell size and is a minor regulator of glucose homeostasis

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Posthumanist Education

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Tatar nation building since 1991: Ethnic mobilisation in historical perspective’

This study analyses the process of ethnic mobilization in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras and assesses the way in which history, memory and the treatment of the Volga Tatars by the Soviet state, especially under Lenin and Stalin, affected their long term desire for greater independence from Moscow. The central argument of this study is that Volga Tatar’s nation building was influenced by changes introduced under Gorbachev and by the weaknesses of the post-Sovietstate particularly during the Yeltsin era of the 1990s. The article assesses the strategies the President of Tatarstan and his advisors utilized during this period,especially after 1985, to successfully negotiate a bilateral treaty with Moscow in February 1994 granting Tatarstan greater autonomy and independence. Within this framework, the article then provides a detailed analysis of the approach taken in Tatarstan to achieve this goal and to renew the treaty in October 2005, despite Putin’s recentralization policies from 2000-2008

From a restricted to full linguistic space: an ‘affirmative action’ strategy for the Udmurt language

This study analyzes the long-term reasons why Udmurt occupies a restricted linguistic space in the post-Soviet state – the low status of Udmurt, due to Soviet language and other policies; urbanization; population shifts; myths and stereotypes about Udmurts; making Russian compulsory after 1938 – and the consequences of this for the fate of the Udmurt language today (relatively few native speakers). The central argument is that Udmurts have not overcome the Stalinist legacy, which led to the reversal of Lenin’s ‘affirmative action’ policy on non-Russian languages. This stems from the failure of the elites in the Udmurt Republic to pursue an ethnic mobilization strategy to promote the Udmurt language in contemporary Russia. Drawing upon language planning and ethnic policy elsewhere in Russia (Tatarstan) and in the UK (Wales), this article outlines ways to raise the status of Udmurt without generating inter-ethnic conflict, thereby creating a ‘space for all’

Riding a Spiral Wave: Numerical Simulation of Spiral Waves in a Co-Moving Frame of Reference

We describe an approach to numerical simulation of spiral waves dynamics of large spatial extent, using small computational grids.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures, as accepted by Phys Rev E 2010/03/2

Impossible protest: noborders in Calais

Since the closure of the Red Cross refugee reception centre in Sangatte, undocumented migrants in Calais hoping to cross the border to Britain have been forced to take refuge in a number of squatted migrant camps, locally known by all as ‘the jungles.’ Unauthorised shanty-like residences built by the migrants themselves, living conditions in the camps are very poor. In June 2009, European ‘noborder’ activists set up a week-long protest camp in the area with the intention of confronting the authorities over their treatment of undocumented migrants. In this article, we analyse the June 2009 noborder camp as an instance of ‘immigrant protest.’ Drawing on ethnographic materials and Jacques Rancière's work on politics and aesthetics, we construct a typology of forms of border control through which to analyse the different ways in which the politics of the noborder camp were staged, performed and policed. Developing a critique of policing practices which threatened to make immigrant protest ‘impossible’, we highlight moments of protest which, through the affirmation of an ‘axiomatic’ equality, disrupted and disarticulated the borders between citizens and non-citizens, the political and non-political

Location Advantages, Governance Quality, Stock Market Development and Firm Characteristics as Antecedents of African M&As

This study explores firm- and country-specific antecedents of African M&As. We use one of the largest datasets to-date consisting of 1,490 unique African firms (11,183 firm-year observations) from 1996 to 2012. Our results suggest that improvements in time-varying country-level factors, including location advantages (market size, human capital and efficiency opportunities), national governance quality, and stock market development are associated with an increase in the volume of M&A activity. Consistent with the resource-curse paradox, high resource endowments are not associated with increased levels of M&A. In support of the management inefficiency but contrary to the traditional firm size hypotheses, African targets are generally characterised by declining stock returns and accounting profitability but are more likely to be larger firms; suggesting the presence of information asymmetry concerns in their selection. Notwithstanding, we find evidence of heterogeneity across countries with inconsistent support for established target prediction hypotheses. A model which combines firm- and country- specific factors better explains observed variations in African M&A activity

Gender Differences in Russian Colour Naming

In the present study we explored Russian colour naming in a web-based psycholinguistic experiment (http://www.colournaming.com). Colour singletons representing the Munsell Color Solid (N=600 in total) were presented on a computer monitor and named using an unconstrained colour-naming method. Respondents were Russian speakers (N=713). For gender-split equal-size samples (NF=333, NM=333) we estimated and compared (i) location of centroids of 12 Russian basic colour terms (BCTs); (ii) the number of words in colour descriptors; (iii) occurrences of BCTs most frequent non-BCTs. We found a close correspondence between females’ and males’ BCT centroids. Among individual BCTs, the highest inter-gender agreement was for seryj ‘grey’ and goluboj ‘light blue’, while the lowest was for sinij ‘dark blue’ and krasnyj ‘red’. Females revealed a significantly richer repertory of distinct colour descriptors, with great variety of monolexemic non-BCTs and “fancy” colour names; in comparison, males offered relatively more BCTs or their compounds. Along with these measures, we gauged denotata of most frequent CTs, reflected by linguistic segmentation of colour space, by employing a synthetic observer trained by gender-specific responses. This psycholinguistic representation revealed females’ more refined linguistic segmentation, compared to males, with higher linguistic density predominantly along the redgreen axis of colour space

Board composition, monitoring and credit risk: evidence from the UK banking industry

This paper examines the effects of board composition and monitoring on the credit risk in the UK banking sector. The study finds CEO duality, pay and board independence to have a positive and significant effect on credit risk of the UK banks. However, board size and women on board have a negative and significant influence on credit risk. Further analysis using sub-samples divided into pre-financial crisis, during the financial crisis and post crisis reinforce the robustness of our findings. Overall, the paper sheds light on the effectiveness of the within-firm monitoring arrangement, particularly, the effects of CEO power and board independence on credit risk decisions thereby contributing to the agency theory

Season of birth and chess expertise

The origin of talent and expertise is currently the subject of intense debate, with explanations ranging from purely biological to purely environmental. This report shows that the population of expert chess players in the north hemisphere shows a seasonal pattern, with an excess of births in late winter and early spring. This effect remains when taking into account the distribution of births in the population at large, using statistics from the European Union member countries. A similar pattern has been found with schizophrenia, and the possible link between these two phenomena is discussed