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Reflections on disability, justice and abolition
Get PDFThis piece offers reflections on Liat Ben-Moshe’s recent book Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition and Linda Steele’s recent book Disability, Criminal Justice and Law: Reconsidering Court Diversion and their contributions to abolitionist work, disability justice and decarceration
A multimodal approach towards genomic identification of protein inhibitors of Uracil-DNA Glycosylase
Get PDFDNA-mimicking proteins encoded by viruses can modulate processes such as innate cellular immunity. An example is Ung-family uracil-DNA glycosylase inhibition, which prevents Ung-mediated degradation via the stoichiometric protein blockade of the Ung DNA-binding cleft. This is significant where uracil-DNA is a key determinant in the replication and distribution of virus genomes. Unrelated protein folds support a common physicochemical spatial strategy for Ung inhibition, characterised by pronounced sequence plasticity within the diverse fold families. That, and the fact that relatively few template sequences are biochemically verified to encode Ung inhibitor proteins, presents a barrier to the straightforward identification of Ung inhibitors in genomic sequences. In this study, distant homologs of known Ung inhibitors were characterised via structural biology and structure prediction methods. A recombinant cellular survival assay and in vitro biochemical assay were used to screen distant variants and mutants to further explore tolerated sequence plasticity in motifs supporting Ung inhibition. The resulting validated sequence repertoire defines an expanded set of heuristic sequence and biophysical signatures shared by known Ung inhibitor proteins. A computational search of genome database sequences and the results of recombinant tests of selected output sequences obtained are presented here
The UK government’s Northern Ireland policy after Brexit: a retreat to unilateralism and muscular unionism
Get PDFBrexit has significantly altered the trajectory of UK government policy towards Northern Ireland. The peace process was implicitly built on a presumption of continued joint EU membership by the UK and Ireland. The EU model of interdependence and cooperation was explicitly stated to be an inspiration by its key architect John Hume. However, the history of British–Irish cooperation over Northern Ireland is long and complex and cannot solely be understood through the lens of Europeanisation. Despite this, the aftermath of the 2016 referendum has seen a retreat by the UK government from a bilateral and consensual approach towards Northern Ireland to unilateralism and a ‘muscular’ unionist ideology. This has affected their governance there, hampering their relationship with local parties and undermining the agreed role of the Irish government. The impact of Brexit on UK government policy towards Northern Ireland has undoubtedly contributed to the destabilisation of the political settlement
Birkbeck 1823-2023 and the future of lifelong learning
Get PDFJoanna Bourke’s 'Birkbeck' charts the eventful progress of the London Mechanics' Institution from its foundation in 1823 through its incorporation as Birkbeck College with the University of London to its pre-eminent position as a provider of part-time University education today. The history of Birkbeck presents a window on higher education and lifelong learning within a wider social context. In particular that history rehearses debates – still hugely relevant today – regarding what should be taught, to whom and who should decide
The politics of the NPC meme: reactionary subcultural practice and vernacular theory
Get PDFThe acronym ‘NPC’ originates from videogame culture, where it refers to computer-controlled drones whose behaviour is dictated by their programming. By 2018 the term had gained traction within right-wing subcultural spaces as shorthand for individuals apparently incapable of thinking for themselves. By the autumn of 2018, these spaces were awash with NPC memes accusing liberals and leftists of uncritically accepting progressive doxa and parroting left-wing catchphrases. In mid-October, with midterm elections looming in the US, Twitter banned over 1000 NPC roleplay accounts created by supporters of Donald Trump, citing concerns over disinformation. This event was much discussed both within right-wing subcultural spaces and by mainstream media outlets, serving as an occasion to reassess the political effects of digital media in general and reactionary memes in particular. Here we use a combination of computational analysis and theoretically informed close reading to trace the NPC meme’s trajectory and explore its role in entrenching affectively charged political and (sub)cultural fault lines. We show how mainstream attention at once amplified the meme and attenuated its affective resonance in the subcultural spaces where it originated. We also contend that while the NPC meme has served as a vehicle for antidemocratic bigotry, it may yet harbour critical potential, providing a vocabulary for theorising the cultural and political impacts of communicative capitalism
A three-body problem: the effects of foreign language anxiety, enjoyment, and boredom on academic achievement
Get PDFThis study is part of a growing wave of interest in foreign language learners’ emotions, their sources, and their effects. Previous studies have confirmed that there is a clear relationship between the emotions of Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE), Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (FLCA), Foreign Language Boredom (FLB), and FL performance. However, the relative importance of each emotion as a predictor of FL performance has yet to be examined, and as different teaching and learning strategies can elicit different emotions, it is difficult to determine whether FL teachers and learners should prioritize a specific emotion in course design and study. We, therefore, utilized structural equation modeling and latent dominance analysis on a sample of 502 Moroccan EFL learners in order to examine the relative importance of each emotion in predicting FL performance. We argue that it is crucial to use sophisticated statistical analyses and to collect samples from outside Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) countries. The latent dominance analysis revealed that FLCA had the strongest (negative) effect on English test scores. FLB had a significant -but slightly weaker- negative effect and FLE had a significant -but weaker still- positive effect. As such, it is vital that FL teachers and learners not underestimate the impact of anxiety on language learning
Humane orientation, work–family conflict, and positive spillover across cultures
No full textAlthough cross-national work–family research has made great strides in recent decades, knowledge accumulation on the impact of culture on the work–family interface has been hampered by a limited geographical and cultural scope that has excluded countries where cultural expectations regarding work, family, and support may differ. We advance this literature by investigating work–family relationships in a broad range of cultures, including understudied regions of the world (i.e., Sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Asia). We focus on humane orientation (HO), an overlooked cultural dimension that is however central to the study of social support and higher in those regions. We explore its moderating effect on relationships between work and family social support, work–family conflict, and work–family positive spillover. Building on the congruence and compensation perspectives of fit theory, we test alternative hypotheses on a sample of 10,307 participants from 30 countries/territories. We find HO has mostly a compensatory role in the relationships between workplace support and work-to-family conflict. Specifically, supervisor and coworker supports were most strongly and negatively related to conflict in cultures in which support is most needed (i.e., lower HO cultures). Regarding positive spillover, HO has mostly an amplifying role. Coworker (but not supervisor) support was most strongly and positively related to work-to-family positive spillover in higher HO cultures, where providing social support at work is consistent with the societal practice of providing support to one another. Likewise, instrumental (but not emotional) family support was most strongly and positively related to family-to-work positive spillover in higher HO cultures
Should there be a global space agency?
Get PDFIf every country had its own space agency there would be almost 200 independent national space agencies, all asserting their perceived national interests in the transnational domain of space. There is a danger that these national interests may conflict. Perhaps it is time to lay the foundations for a truly global space agency, able to act on behalf of humanity as a whole
Understanding ‘islandness’
Get PDF‘Islandness’ is a contested concept, not just between disciplines but also cultures, entangled with what islands, island studies, and island identity are understood to be. The purpose of this paper is to explore some of these different meanings, without necessarily unifying or reconciling them, but with the aim of keeping multiple understandings of ‘islandness’ in creative tension. We begin by considering ‘islandness’ as smallness, recognising that though many entry points into island studies relate to size in some way, what constitutes ‘small’ is both context- and worldview-dependent. Next, we consider ‘islandness’ as culture, and the concept of island ‘identity’, which is expressed in varied forms. Lastly, we consider framings of islands as ‘others’, and the extent to which contemporary narratives 'linked' to islands are really inherent to islands or not. Ultimately, we conclude that while there is much to be gained from appreciating differing understandings of ‘islandness’, these multiple meanings make it critical to reflect on context wherever the term is used, and exercise care in assigning attributes and outcomes to ‘islandness’
A right kind of wrong: European equity market forecasting with custom feature engineering and loss functions
Get PDFThis study makes time-series-based predictions on future returns of the STOXX Europe 600 and the German DAX by adopting (in addition to a lagged and transformed version of the target series) a diversified set of predictors. Feature engineering expands further — from the initial raw group of variables, to extract knowledge of market conditions and demand for hedging. A penalisation factor is introduced with loss functions to learn a model from neural networks, in order to adapt a traditional machine learning regression framework to solve the equity forecasting problems in question. Architectures based on convolutional neural network are proposed, treating the obtained feature map similarly to an image. Experiments over different time periods demonstrate that trading strategies derived from the forecasts are more profitable than models based on efficient market assumptions. The temporal, non-stationary structure of financial data has a significant impact on the out of sample success of any model. It thus can be seen that different architectures exhibit different resilience to changing market conditions
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