313 research outputs found
U.S. artists imagining Mexico, Central America and Cuba, 1875-1910
No full textThis dissertation investigates representations of Mexico, Central America and Cuba produced by U.S. artists from 1875 to 1910. As the United States strengthened its political and economic ties with its closest southern neighbors, a desire for visual knowledge of the people and places just south of the border grew. Paintings, photographs, films and illustrations by artists such as Eadweard Muybridge, Winslow Homer and William Henry Jackson introduced an unfamiliar U.S. public to the ―Other‖ America. While some of these artists constructed a vision of Mexico, Central America and Cuba as picturesque places mired in the past and ripe for U.S. expansionist efforts, others portrayed these lands as sites of mounting tension that suggest anxiety surrounding the increasingly intimate relationship between the North and South. A careful analysis of these images, the contemporary responses to them and the socio-historical context in which they were created reveals another veiled subject—the United States and its struggle to define its own identity at a watershed moment in its history. A study of the visual manifestation of the United States' relationship with Mexico, Central America and Cuba is at the forefront of recent scholarship that seeks to extend the scope of American art beyond geographic borders, embracing a more global, non-Euro-centrist perspective.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Diana Bramha
Tuning specific translation in cancer metastasis and synaptic memory: control at the MNK-eIF4E axis
No full textThe eukaryotic translation initiation factor (eIF) 4E, which binds to the 5'-cap of mRNA, undergoes phosphorylation on a single conserved serine, executed by the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK)-interacting kinases (MNKs). However, the functional consequences and physiological roles of MNK signalling have remained obscure. Now, new pharmacological and genetic tools have provided unprecedented insights into the function of MNKs and eIF4E phosphorylation. The studies suggest that MNKs control the translation of specific mRNAs in cancer metastasis and neuronal synaptic plasticity by a novel mechanism involving the regulation of the translational repressor, cytoplasmic fragile-X protein-interacting protein 1 (CYFIP1). These recent breakthroughs go a long way to resolving the longstanding enigma and controversy surrounding the function of the MNK-eIF4E axis in cancer cell biology and neurobiology.Clive R. Bramham, Kirk B. Jensen, Christopher G. Prou
Joining up policy discourses and fragmented practices: The precarious contribution of cultural projects to social inclusion?
No full textThis article outlines New Labour's policy discourse about social exclusion and the confusing challenge it poses to local cultural projects. Government now demands hard evidence to measure the impact of cultural projects on performance indicators such as education, employment, crime and health. However, community-based workers are hard pressed to collect valid and reliable data that evaluate projects against clear criteria for social inclusion. This article outlines possible criteria for social inclusion. Then, drawing on data collected from two 'Arts in Health' projects, we examine how contributions to social inclusion might have been effected. Considerable energy is required to form new alliances and health partnerships to resolve the dilemmas posed by a confused policy discourse and by fragile funding streams. © The Policy Press, 2006
Discovery of tephra in a Late-glacial and early Holocene organic sediment sequence in Schünsmoor (Niedersachsen, Germany)
No full textThe Changing Role of the Local State in UK Leisure Provision
No full textIn the UK the public sector has had a long history of both providing leisure opportunities and also regulating and encouraging activities of other agents through legislation, enforcement and subsidy. What we seek to do in this paper is to address some of the recent shifts in public sector operation so that readers can perform a comparative analysis with recent developments in their own nation state. Our basic argument is that the experience of the last two decades has been characterised by: i. a gradual fragmentation of the ‘leisure project’ ii. a growing instrumentalism in public policy which increasingly deploys leisure in order to secure wider social goals. iii. an invasive centralisation of policy and a reduction of the power of the local state. These processes are interrelated and are associated with a proliferation of more short term pragmatic policies. These in turn find expression in more centralised project funding and contracting arrangements. The shift away from traditional leisure policy and towards a contract culture was centrally driven in the UK by iconoclastic neoliberalist policies. They were the hallmark of Margaret Thatcher’s years of governance (1979-1990) .This policy direction has been continued, arguably refined and sharpened, by the three successive ‘New Labour’ governments of Tony Blair (1997-2006)
Count Me In: The Dimensions of social inclusion through Culture, Media & Sport (Executive Summary)
No full textThis study was set up to examine claims made for the ability of cultural projects to promote social inclusion (cultural projects are here taken to include those incorporating sport, the arts, media, heritage and outdoor adventure). This was to be achieved primarily by collecting evidence from a sample of 14 projects selected from some 200 that had volunteered their services. The report to the government’s Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) from the Policy Action Team (PAT10) (1999) noted the potential. In his foreword, Chris Smith (then Secretary of State for the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS)) wrote: “… art and sport can not only make a valuable contribution to delivering key outcomes of lower long term unemployment, less crime, better health and better qualifications, but can also help to develop the individual pride, community spirit and capacity for responsibility that enable communities to run regeneration programmes themselves”. Similar statements have followed from other politicians, particularly in the recent Commons debate on sport and social exclusion (22/11/01), and again in the public health debate (13/12/01). However, the PAT 10 report also came to the same conclusion as previous commentators (e.g. Glyptis, 19893; Allison & Coalter, 19964; Long & Sanderson, 1998) that there is little ‘hard’ evidence of the social benefits that accrue
Two-stage translational control of dentate gyrus LTP consolidation is mediated by sustained BDNF-TrkB signaling to MNK
No full textBDNF signaling contributes to protein-synthesis-dependent synaptic plasticity, but the dynamics of TrkB signaling and mechanisms of translation have not been defined. Here, we show that long-term potentiation (LTP) consolidation in the dentate gyrus of live rodents requires sustained (hours) BDNF-TrkB signaling. Surprisingly, this sustained activation maintains an otherwise labile signaling pathway from TrkB to MAP-kinase-interacting kinase (MNK). MNK activity promotes eIF4F translation initiation complex formation and protein synthesis in mechanistically distinct early and late stages. In early-stage translation, MNK triggers release of the CYFIP1/FMRP repressor complex from the 5′-mRNA cap. In late-stage translation, MNK regulates the canonical translational repressor 4E-BP2 in a synapse-compartment-specific manner. This late stage is coupled to MNK-dependent enhanced dendritic mRNA translation. We conclude that LTP consolidation in the dentate gyrus is mediated by sustained BDNF signaling to MNK and MNK-dependent regulation of translation in two functionally and mechanistically distinct stages
Breaking the mould? Whiteness, masculinity, Welshness, working-classness and rugby league in Wales
No full textTraditionally, rugby in Wales has meant rugby union, the once-amateur, fifteen-a-side code that has a long history of working-class, male involvement in the Valleys of South Wales (Williams, G., 1985). In recent years, however, rugby union has been joined in South Wales by the non-traditionally Welsh sport of rugby league. Once upon a time, rugby league was the sport that “bought” Welsh rugby players who went north (Collins, 2006). Rugby league has now expanded into Wales, developing its version of the rugby code. After a series of (historical) false starts, Welsh rugby league emerged in the 1990s as a sustainable participation sport. Two professional rugby league clubs have been established in Wales (Crusaders in Wrexham and the South Wales Scorpions), and a number of amateur rugby league clubs are now playing in the summer-based Rugby League Conference.
But why would anyone in Wales watch, and actively support, rugby league? What does it say about contemporary leisure choices, social identity and nationalism? In this paper, we explore the ways in which rugby league has penetrated the rugby union heartlands of Wales, and how the individuals who support Welsh rugby league (the players, the fans, the administrators) see their own Welshness in relation to their support of the ‘other’ rugby. We have interviewed Welsh rugby league enthusiasts at two periods in Welsh rugby league’s recent history: the high point of the Crusaders move to North Wales in the Super League, and the low point of the club’s resignation from the elite league and its resurrection in the lowest division of professional rugby league. For many rugby league fans the desire on the part of Welsh people to develop rugby league in Wales – supported by the Rugby Football League, the national governing body of rugby league in England, which works closely with the Wales Rugby League – is dismissed as an expensive nonsense by northern English fans on on-line forums and in the letters pages of rugby league newspapers. Yet those letters pages also show evidence of Welsh pride in their rugby league clubs, and Welsh pride in being part of rugby league’s ‘imaginary community’ (Spracklen, Timmins and Long, 2010):
I read with incredulity the letter by Phil Taylor in last week’s League Express. Mister Taylor stated that ‘the most important criterion for a Super league licence should be the proximity of the M62’ [to the club]… Perhaps Mister Taylor should venture a little further from his ‘shoe box in the middle of the M62’. I live in rural Carmarthenshire… A few friends and I decided to follow the Celtic Crusaders, which involved a 100 mile round trip for home matches down another motorway, the M4.”
(Nic Day, letter to League Express, 2765, 27 June 2011, p. 35)
The following section is a literature review on Welshness, community, masculinity and rugby union. After that, we briefly discuss our methods and then introduce some important history and policy context around rugby league in the north of England and Wales. The rest of the chapter is built around the issues raised by our respondents and our critical analysis and discussion. We will show that the adoption of rugby league is associated with two separate trends: an awareness of and identification with its northern, working-class roots, its anti-London rhetoric and its ideology of toughness and resistance; and a rationalisation that league is just another form of rugby, in which traditional Welsh maleness can be protected. Both of these trends allow the whiteness of Welsh rugby union and of Welshness itself (like the whiteness of northern English rugby league and traditional northern identity – see Spracklen, Long and Timmins, 2010) to go un-noticed and unchallenged
Evolutionary conservation and diversification of complex synaptic function in human proteome
No full textThe evolution of synapses from early proto-synaptic protein complexes in unicellular
eukaryotes to sophisticated machines comprising thousands of proteins parallels the
emergence of finely tuned synaptic plasticity, a molecular correlate for memory and
learning.
Phenotypic change in organisms is ultimately the result of evolution of their genotype
at the molecular level. Selection pressure is a measure of how changes in genome
sequence that arise though naturally occurring processes in populations are fixed or
eliminated in subsequent generations. Inferring phylogenetic information about proteins
such as the variation of selection pressure across coding sequences can provide
valuable information not only about the origin of proteins, but also the contribution
of specific sites within proteins to their current roles within an organism. Recent
evolutionary studies of synaptic proteins have generated attractive hypotheses about
the emergence of finely-tuned regulatory mechanisms in the post-synaptic proteome
related to learning, however, these analyses are relatively superficial.
In this thesis, I establish a scalable molecular phylogenetic modelling framework
based on three new inference methodologies to investigate temporal and spatial aspects
of selection pressure changes for the whole human proteome using protein
orthologs from up to 68 taxa.
Temporal modelling of evolutionary selection pressure reveals informative features
and patterns for the entire human proteome and identifies groups of proteins that
share distinct diversification timelines. Multi-ontology enrichment analysis of these
gene cohorts was used to aid biological interpretation, but these approaches are statistically
under powered and do not capture a clear picture of the emergence of synaptic
plasticity. Subsequent pathway-centric analysis of key synaptic pathways extends the
interpretation of temporal data and allows for revision of previous hypotheses about
the evolution of complex synaptic function. I proceed to integrate inferred selection
pressure timeline information in the context of static protein-protein interaction data.
A network analysis of the full human proteome reveals systematic patterns linking
the temporal profile of proteins’ evolution and their topological role in the interaction
graph. These graphs were used to test a mechanistic hypothesis that proposed a
propagating diversification signal between interactors using the temporal modelling
data and network analysis tools.
Finally, I analyse the data of amino-acid level spatial modelling of selection pressure
events in Arc, one of the master regulators of synaptic plasticity, and its interactors
for which detailed experimental data is available. I use the Arc interactome as
an example to discuss episodic and localised diversifying selection pressure events in
tightly coupled complexes of protein and showcase potential for a similar systematic
analysis of larger complexes of proteins using a pathway-centric approach.
Through my work I revised our understanding of temporal evolutionary patterns
that shaped contemporary synaptic function through profiling of emergence and refinement
of proteins in multiple pathways of the nervous system. I also uncovered
systematic effects linking dependencies between proteins with their active diversification,
and hypothesised about their extension to domain level selection pressure
events
Soluble tau species, not neurofibrillary aggregates, disrupt neural system integration in a tau transgenic model
No full textNeurofibrillary tangles are a feature of Alzheimer disease and other tauopathies, and although they are generally believed to be markers of neuronal pathology, there is little evidence evaluating whether tangles directly impact neuronal function. To investigate the response of cells in hippocampal circuits to complex behavioral stimuli, we used an environmental enrichment paradigm to induce expression of an immediate-early gene, Arc, in the rTg4510 mouse model of tauopathy. These mice reversibly overexpress P301L tau and exhibit substantial neurofibrillary tangle deposition, neuronal loss, and memory deficits. Using fluorescent in situ hybridization to detect Arc messenger RNA, we found that rTg4510 mice have impaired hippocampal Arc expression both without stimulation and in response to environmental enrichment; this likely reflects the combination of functional impairments of existing neurons and loss of neurons. However, tangle-bearing cells were at least as likely as non-tangle-bearing neurons to exhibit Arc expression in response to enrichment. Transgene suppression with doxycycline for 6 weeks resulted in increased percentages of Arc-positive cells in rTg4510 brains compared with untreated transgenics, restoring enrichment-induced Arc messenger RNA levels to that of wild-type controls despite the continued presence of neurofibrillary pathology. We interpret these data to indicate that soluble tau contributes to impairment of hippocampal function, although tangles do not preclude neurons from responding in a functional circuit
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