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Anthropocene aesthetics in D. H. Lawrence's later fiction
No full textBook synopsis: How do the works of D. H. Lawrence speak to readers in the age of the Anthropocene? In this volume, sixteen scholars from six countries explore different answers to this question, considering Lawrence’s novels, short fiction, poetry, paintings and his often-provocative polemical essays. This comprehensive survey of Lawrence’s writings and artworks reveals that his familiar enquiries into human nature were always situated within the energies, large and local, of what he calls ‘the cosmos’ which is our shared home. Lawrence challenges his readers by his movements between cynicism and idealism, dissolution and creativity, critique and regeneration – the very tensions that confront us today in the face of industrial capitalism and environmental deterioration. This revelation of Lawrence’s passionate ‘environmentalism’ not only fills what has been described as ‘a gaping hole in Lawrence studies’. It also drills down into the heart of the problems holding back an adequate response to the climate crisis by offering fundamental values for recovery
The embodied reader in D. H. Lawrence's criticism and fiction: reading, feeling and modernist form
No full textThis book puts D. H. Lawrence’s criticism and fiction in dialogue with a recent, multifaceted turn in literary studies towards readers’ affective and embodied responses to texts. It argues that Lawrence’s critical writing registers, in its turbulent forms as well as its explicit statements, the felt dimension of literary response, and explores how his affectively charged critical practice is rooted in a distinct early-twentieth-century culture of autodidactic reading. Rather than view Lawrence's major critical works as expressing a supposed authorial 'philosophy' or 'metaphysic' of embodiment, the book explores these texts’ volatile, culturally situated responses to the ways in which their subject texts themselves represent and evoke embodied life. The book analyses Lawrence's readings of Thomas Hardy's novels and nineteenth-century American literature in the light of 'postcritical', ethical and broadly materialist approaches to the text-reader relation, showing how his critical discourse of embodied response raises new questions for these perspectives, especially regarding the relation between readers’ felt responses and the sociocultural contexts of reading. The book demonstrates, further, how attending to Lawrence's critical aesthetics in these texts sheds new light on the means by which his own modernist fiction elicits embodied responses in the reader, and the ethical potential of such effects
Brexit and the cost of living: a tale of two phases
Get PDFWe employ Synthetic Control Method techniques to estimate the causal effect of Brexit on the consumer price index (CPI) in the United Kingdom. We construct a counterfactual CPI index from a weighted pool of comparable economies and find that the price level of the United Kingdom rose approximately 7 percentage points more than its synthetic counterpart, between 2016Q2 and 2024Q4. This accounts for over a quarter of total inflation
during the period. We attribute about 2 percentage points of this increase to the depreciation of the British pound after the Referendum and the remaining 5 percentage points to the change in trading relationships that ensued the 2021 Trade and Cooperation Agreement
Assessing and improving syntactic adversarial robustness of pre-trained models for code translation
No full textContext:
Pre-trained models (PTMs) have demonstrated significant potential in automatic code translation. However, the vulnerability of these models in translation tasks, particularly in terms of syntax, has not been extensively investigated.
Objective:
To fill this gap, our study aims to propose a novel approach CoTR to assess and improve the syntactic adversarial robustness of PTMs in code translation.
Methods:
CoTR consists of two components: CoTR-A and CoTR-D. CoTR-A generates adversarial examples by transforming programs, while CoTR-D proposes a semantic distance-based sampling data augmentation method and adversarial training method to improve the model’s robustness and generalization capabilities. The Pass@1 metric is used by CoTR to assess the performance of PTMs, which is more suitable for code translation tasks and offers a more precise evaluation in real-world scenarios.
Results:
The effectiveness of CoTR is evaluated through experiments on real-world Java
Python datasets. The results demonstrate that CoTR-A can significantly reduce the performance of existing PTMs, while CoTR-D effectively improves the robustness of PTMs.
Conclusion:
Our study identifies the limitations of current PTMs, including large language models, in code translation tasks. It highlights the potential of CoTR as an effective solution to enhance the robustness of PTMs for code translation tasks
Comparative and phylogenomic plastome analysis of the Physalideae tribe (Solanaceae)
No full textThe tribe Physalideae comprises two monophyletic subtribes, Iochrominae and Physalidinae, along with the polyphyletic Withaninae. However, consensus regarding phylogenetic relationships within and between subtribes remains elusive. To contribute to a better understanding of the evolutionary history and relationships among Physalideae species, we sequenced, assembled, and annotated the chloroplast genome of 15 species, reannotated 40 plastomes of Physalideae species available from GenBank, and conducted a comprehensive comparative phylogenomic analysis of the plastomes. The analyzed complete plastomes exhibit a quadripartite structure, with Iochrominae having a larger average size, followed by intermediate sizes in Physalidinae, and the smallest in Withaninae. The number of functional genes ranged from 112 to 114 per species, with Physalidinae consistently having 114. Plastome identity was generally high, with variation more pronounced in the Large Single Copy (LSC) and Small Single Copy (SSC) regions than in the Inverted Repeat (IR) and in non-coding regions compared to coding regions. We identify nine genes under positive selection, and their differential expression could optimize processes related to photosynthesis and ribosome self-replication. Phylogenomic analyses confirm that Iochrominae and Physalidinae are monophyletic. Withaninae may be monophyletic if the genera Cuatresia and Tubocapsicum are excluded from this subtribe. Within the tribe Physalideae, we observe no relation between plastome size, number of functional genes, or identity of positively selected genes with geographic distribution or life history traits. This decoupling suggests that distinct evolutionary forces are occurring within each species or groups of species
Capture, mutual inhibition and release mechanism for aPKC-Par6 and its multi-site polarity substrate Lgl
Get PDFThe mutually antagonistic relationship between the aPKC-Par6 kinase and the substrate Lgl is essential for regulating polarity across many cell types. Although aPKC-Par6 phosphorylates Lgl at three serine sites to exclude it from the apical domain, paradoxically, aPKC-Par6 and Lgl forms a stable kinase substrate complex, with conflicting roles proposed for Par6. We report the structure of human aPKCι-Par6α bound to full-length Llgl1, captured through an aPKCi docking site and a Par6PDZ contact. This
complex traps a phospho-S663 Llgl1 intermediate bridging between aPKC and Par6, impeding phosphorylation progression. Thus, aPKCι is effectively inhibited by Llgl1pS663 whilst Llgl1 is captured by aPKCι-Par6. Mutational disruption of Lgl-aPKC interaction impedes complex assembly and Lgl phosphorylation, whereas disrupting the Lgl-Par6PDZ contact promotes complex dissociation and Lgl phosphorylation. We demonstrate a Par6PDZ-regulated substrate capture-and-release model requiring binding by Cdc42-GTP and the apical partner Crumbs to drive complex disassembly. Our results suggest a mechanism for mutual regulation and spatial control of aPKC-Par6 and Lgl activities.
Christopher P. Earl1,*, Mathias Cobbaut1,2,*, André Barros-Carvalho3,4, Marina E. Ivanova1,5, David C. Briggs1, Eurico Morais-de-Sá3,4, Peter J. Parker2,6 & Neil Q. McDonald1,
A systematic review and critique of publicly available guidance for mental health practitioners called to a coroner’s inquest
Get PDFMental health practitioners may be called to an inquest after the unexpected death of a patient. Our review aimed to synthesise publicly available guidance written for practitioners working in mental health who are called to give evidence at a coroner’s inquest. We conducted both a systematic database and web search. We conducted a quality appraisal and data synthesis using the Framework Method. We found limited guidance specifically for
those working in mental health. Guidance gave advice on preparing effectively including how to give oral evidence and write witness statements. Support was often assumed to be given by the employing Trust. Only a minority of guidance suggested means of
psychological support. We identified a set of practically applicable principles for healthcare practitioners attending inquests. Many recommendations were not backed by evidence and lacked stakeholder inpu
Inversion produces opposite size illusions for faces and food
Get PDFFaces are important communicative signals in humans and face perception is believed to involve specialised mechanisms in the visual system. Several other categories of stimuli are also thought to involve specialised processes, including bodies, letters, places, and food. A recently described face size illusion shows that upright faces appear physically smaller than identical inverted faces. This illusion appears to be highly face-specific, not occurring for other stimulus categories, such as bodies, letters, and hands. In this study, we investigated whether an analogous size inversion illusion occurs for items of food, a category which has recently been found to also involve specialised processes in the visual system. The results provided a clear replication of the face size illusion, with upright faces seen as smaller than inverted faces. In contrast, items of food and everyday objects showed an effect in the opposite direction, appearing larger when upright than when inverted. These results provide further evidence for the highly face-selective nature of the face size illusion. They also provide evidence for a different size illusion which affects visual perception of food
What role for the right to housing in mortgage law? Homeownership and systemic considerations in private law beyond the state
No full textThis contribution brings into focus the interaction between the right to housing and mortgage law. While the law of residential mortgages is pivotal in guaranteeing access to housing in a political economy of private homeownership, its relationship with the right to housing in the transnational legal framework remains less clear. By analysing international, transnational and EU developments, this paper questions the extent to which broader housing concerns inspire the law of residential mortgages. Even though the objectives of mortgage law are manifold – ranging from addressing creditor risk and enabling homeownership to supporting financial stability and the ‘green’ transition of the economy – it seems that economic considerations rather than broader housing concerns drive legal developments. This raises doubts as to whether the fundamental right to housing has more than a limited, indirect impact within transnational mortgage law
An approach to implementing ESPRESSO’s decentralized private search on Dataswyft: feasibility and high-level design
Get PDFThis article presents a high-level design of an approach to privacy-preserving search in the Dataswyft decentralized data cooperative, where data is subject to differential access control. The ESPRESSO experimental search framework is the first approach to query processing in decentralized, federated or Linked Data systems that takes differential access control into account. The ESPRESSO approach has already demonstrated its efficacy for search in Solid, an open-source protocol for decentralized private data cooperatives. Dataswyft is a proprietary platform with an approach to data governance that is diametrically opposed to that of Solid. In this article, we describe how the differences in these approaches to data governance have impacted design decisions at the earliest stages of prototyping. The high-level design which we present in this article, and which we will implement over the coming months, will advance the ESPRESSO approach towards greater interoperability
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