633 research outputs found
Assessing the George W. Bush Presidency: A Tale of Two Terms
No full textIn one of the first volumes assessing the full two terms of the George W. Bush presidency, Wroe and Herbert have gathered the work of leading American and European scholars. In fifteen succinct and incisive chapters, authorities such as Jim Pfiffner, John Maltese, Graham Wilson and Alan Gitelson offer assessments of the Bush administration's successes and failures. Extensive attention is paid to Bush's foreign policy, including 'The War on Terror' but the focus is broadened to absorb not only the Bush Doctrine and its repercussions, but also his trade and homeland security policies. The president's domestic leadership in economics and social policy is investigated, as are his dealings as president with the other institutions of the U.S. political system. The result is a comprehensive guide to the Bush presidency and its legacy
Barinya wangala Wroe 1999
No full text† Barinya SPECIES SCORED: † Barinya wangala (type species). GEOLOGICAL PROVENANCE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Neville’s Garden, Bite’s Antennary and Upper sites (Riversleigh Faunal Zone B), and Henk’s Hollow and Jim’s Jaw sites (Riversleigh Faunal Zone C), Riversleigh World Heritage Area, Queensland, Australia. AGE OF SCORED SPECIMENS: Based on biostratigraphy, Riversleigh Faunal Zone B is interpreted to be early Miocene (Archer et al., 1989, 1994, 1995, 1997, 2006; Creaser, 1997; Travouillon et al., 2006; Black et al., 2012b, 2013; Woodhead et al., 2014; Arena et al., 2015), and Faunal Zone C is interpreted to be middle Miocene (see † Nimbacinus above). Radiometric dates from Woodhead et al. (2014) are 17.72–18.53 Mya for Neville’s Garden Site and 16.84–17.38 Mya for Bite’s Antennary Site, but the other sites lack dates, so we have conservatively assumed the entire span of the early to middle Miocene (Aquitanian to Serravallian; Cohen et al., 2013 [updated]) for this taxon. ASSIGNED AGE RANGE: 23.030 –11.630 Mya. REMARKS: Wroe (1999) described † Barinya wangala as the oldest known dasyurid based on two relatively complete skulls (QM F31408 and F314089) plus additional dental specimens. Wroe (1999) identified a number of putative dasyurid apomorphies in the auditory region, but Murray and Megirian (2006a) subsequently argued that at least some of these features may have been secondarily lost in thylacinids. Among dasyuromorphians, † B. wangala is dentally autapomorphic in exhibiting a very large bulbous P3, somewhat reminiscent of the enlarged P3 seen in males of some Recent peramelemorphians (see Aplin et al., 2010: 26–31). A second species, † B. kutjamarpensis, was described by Binfield et al. (2016), based on a single partial right dentary (SAM P53348) from the the?early-middle Miocene Leaf Locality of the Kutjamarpu Local Fauna in the Wipajiri Formation, Lake Ngapakaldi, Tirari Desert, Lake Eyre Basin, South Australia (Woodburne et al., 1994; Archer et al., 1997; Travouillon et al., 2006; Megirian et al., 2010; Black et al., 2012b, 2013, 2014a; Gurovich et al., 2014); however, † B. kutjamarpensis has not been used for scoring purposes here. † Barinya was recovered as a dasyurid in the phylogenetic analyses of Wroe et al. (2000), Wroe and Musser (2001), and Murray and Megirian (2006a), but not in those of Archer et al. (2016) or Kealy and Beck (2017), and in only some of those by Rovinsky et al. (2019); we therefore follow Kealy and Beck (2017) in considering this taxon Daysuromorphia incertae sedis.Published as part of Beck, Robin M. D., Voss, Robert S. & Jansa, Sharon A., 2022, Craniodental Morphology And Phylogeny Of Marsupials, pp. 1-353 in Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2022 (457) on page 324, DOI: 10.1206/0003-0090.457.1.1, http://zenodo.org/record/697135
Social working without borders: challenging privatisation and complicity with the hostile environment
No full textSocial Workers Without Borders is a UK social work charity established in early 2016 to provide direct support to migrant children and families, and to scaffold this through the development of social work education and activism reflecting the principles of human rights and social justice. Reflecting on Social Workers Without Borders’ model of practice, Lauren Wroe, co-founder and trustee of Social Workers Without Borders, discusses the charity’s recent campaign against Capita and the implications of privatisation for asylum-seeking and migrant families, as well as for the ethical value base of the profession. Positioning Social Workers Without Borders as a voluntary network that ‘fills the gap’ in state services, the author discusses campaign strategies to defend the profession, and the families it supports, from the rolling back of state welfare and the rolling out of state hostility through the deregulated outsourcing of social care services
Automating Experiments Using Semantic Data on a Bioinformatics Grid
No full textmyGrid assists bioinformaticians in designing and executing in silico experiments using the Grid’s resources. In myGrid, much of this experimental design has been encoded as workflows. Workflows must be represented at tiered levels of detail to ensure that they can respond to changes in service availability, be customized to services in different locations, and be shared with others to varying degrees. The authors have developed workflow templates in which classes of services are composed, and a resolution mechanism by which these classes are instantiated. The specification of service classes and their resolution depends on seven kinds of service metadata. Functionally equivalent services vary widely in implementation. The authors describe workflow harmonization in which the workflow is modified to accommodate variations between substituted services. Finally, they examine the role of scientist and automated process in resolution and harmonization and discuss scope for further automation
Normal zone propagation studies on a single pancake coil of multifilamentry BSCCO-2223 tape operating at 65K
No full textSemantic Description, Publication and Discovery of Workflows in myGrid
No full textThe bioinformatics scientific process relies on in silico experiments, which are experiments executed in full in a computational environment. Scientists wish to encode the designs of these experiments as workflows because they provide minimal, declarative descriptions of the designs, overcoming many barriers to the sharing and re-use of these designs between scientists and enable the use of the most appropriate services available at any one time. We anticipate that the number of workflows will increase quickly as more scientists begin to make use of existing workflow construction tools to express their experiment designs. Discovery then becomes an increasingly hard problem, as it becomes more difficult for a scientist to identify the workflows relevant to their particular research goals amongst all those on offer. While many approaches exist for the publishing and discovery of services, there have been few attempts to address where and how authors of experimental designs should advertise the availability of their work or how relevant workflows can be discovered with minimal effort from the user. As the users designing and adapting experiments will not necessarily have a computer science background, we also have to consider how publishing and discovery can be achieved in such a way that they are not required to have detailed technical knowledge of workflow scripting languages. Furthermore, we believe they should be able to make use of others' expert knowledge (the semantics) of the given scientific domain. In this paper, we define the issues related to the semantic description, publishing and discovery of workflows, and demonstrate how the architecture created by the myGrid project aids scientists in this process. We give a walk-through of how users can construct, publish, annotate, discover and enact workflows via the user interfaces of the myGrid architecture; we then describe novel middleware protocols, making use of the Semantic Web technologies RDF and OWL to support workflow publishing and discovery
Looking for the archaeological signature in Australian Megafaunal extinctions
No full textThe decline and disappearance of a range of giant marsupials, reptiles and birds from the Australian landscape during the last Glacial cycle continues to capture the imagination of both researchers and the general public. The events hinted at in the Australian fossil sequences appear to be mirrored on other continents through similar time periods, though the exact cause or sequence of extinctions remains largely unresolved. In recent years debate over megafaunal extinctions in Australia has been dominated by reports that humans were the primary drivers, leading some to assert that it is no longer a question of whether humans drove these extinctions, only how. Following the review of Wroe and Field, new reports have been published that claim support for a human-driven extinction (HDE). On closer scrutiny however, the key sites and samples lack firm contextual data and/or clear provenance. These studies fail to prove a key tenet of the HDE – that all, or even most now-extinct species were present at the time of human colonization of the continent. As compared with the easy assertion 5 years ago that this had been established, there are now more faunal species (c. 69% of total known to have become extinct) that cannot be placed within 50–100 ka of human arrival. There are still only two sites that demonstrate a coexistence of humans with some species of megafauna – Nombe Rockshelter in the PNG highlands and Cuddie Springs in the semi-arid southeast of Australia. If there is so little empirical evidence for coexistence or association of megafauna with humans, then support for an HDE through overhunting and ecosystem disruption is seriously compromised. Furthermore, the popularly cited “extinction window”, proposed as c. 51–39 ka when the HDE is argued to occur, is still only a theoretical construct. There is no clear evidence indicating that this period was particularly significant in terms of faunal loss. At present, the great majority of ‘Pleistocene’ sites remain poorly dated and the understanding of faunal turnover through this epoch is almost non-existent. Small datasets, poorly constructed hypotheses and assertive rhetoric are the prominent features of current discussions on a human role in megafaunal extinctions. Importantly, it is yet to be established whether the extinctions are an archaeological problem. The sparse fossil record known from Australia hampers a clear resolution as to how and when the megafauna disappeared, a situation likely to continue into the near future
Immune response to clostridium difficile infection and an investigation of the mechanisms of moxifloxacin resistance in clinical C. difficile isolates
No full textClostridium difficile is an increasingly common cause of nosocomial infection. C.
difficile infection (CDI) presents as a spectrum ranging from asymptomatic carriage to
mild diarrhoea, pseudomembranous colitis, toxic megacolon and intestinal perforation. It
is not yet fully understood why this spectrum is seen, however, it is believed that the
immune response mounted by an individual plays an important role in determining the
outcome of infection.
This thesis comprises three studies. Firstly, a comparative study of immune cell
populations within the lamina propria of colonic tissue not exhibiting pathological
changes and taken from individuals with symptomatic CDI (cases); asymptomatic
carriers; and non-colonised controls. Effector T cells, B cells, plasma cells and
macrophages were enumerated by means of immunohistochemical staining of tissue
sections. Secondly, a study to establish the prevalence within these three study groups
of specific host single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the TLR2, TLR5 and IL-8
genes by PCR genotyping and to determine whether an association existed between
these genotypes and susceptibility to CDI. Thirdly, an examination of the mechanisms of
moxifloxacin resistance in a collection of clinical isolates. This study also sought to
determine whether the competitive advantage conferred by resistance to moxifloxacin
influenced the fitness of C. difficile isolates, in particular growth and the expression of
the virulence factors toxins A and B.
Carriers were found to have fewer of all four immune cell types quantified than both
cases and controls. However, in only one instance, that of plasma cells, was this difference statistically significant. Cases had fewer of all cell types than controls but
these differences were not significant. These findings suggest that individuals who
become infected, both symptomatically and asymptomatically, with C. difficile display
altered mucosal immune cell populations when compared with those of uninfected
individuals.
The data regarding host polymorphisms are suggestive of an association between the
presence of SNPs and increased susceptibility to CDI. The variant IL-8 and TLR2
genotypes were carried by cases and carriers while the variant TLR5 genotype was
carried by cases only. No variant genotypes were present in control subjects.
All moxifloxacin resistant isolates characterised in this study, with the exception of an
isolate with intermediate resistance and a third-generation mutant with reduced
susceptibility, carried the common gyrA mutation ACT→ATT (Thr82→Ile). Efflux
pumps are known to play a role in multi-drug resistance in many bacterial species. Semiquantitative
PCR analysis of expression of the putative efflux pumps cme and cdeA
found no correlation between overexpression and moxifloxacin resistance, suggesting
that these genes do not play a role. Three novel mutations in the putative promoter
region of CD3197, a MerR family transcriptional regulator found immediately upstream
of cme, were identified. No association between the presence of these mutations and
overexpression of cme or resistance or sensitivity to moxifloxacin was found. The
competitive advantage conferred by resistance to moxifloxacin does not influence the
fitness of C. difficile isolates, as measured in terms of growth and toxin production
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