1,721,119 research outputs found
The Anadyomene Movement: metamorphics of figure-ground
No full text‘Figure-ground’ is about the production of meaning based on the perception of contrasts or binary oppositions and segregations. Viewers of my paintings, and of the kind of paintings that interest me, have the impression that the ‘figure’ subsides or slips or fades into ‘ground’, or that the ‘ground’ is more powerful or dominant than the ‘figure’, or that the ‘figure’ is insecurely attached, suggesting it is incapable, unwilling, too acquiescent or complicit to fully differentiate itself from the ‘ground’. I address flux, mutation, indistinctness and complementarity within the visual field of painting. I develop and extend the heuristic context for the interpretation of my studio practice and for work of a similar kind, and then feedback this new context into my practice in order to generate new works, also in the process shedding a new light on my interpretative models. Beyond this, I also make a more general argument for the re alignment of the relationship between art theory and practice - one that can better incorporate a sense of in between-ness, indistinctness or liminality. My approach is comparative: I look at East Asian art and ideas and, in particular, deploy the writings of the French Sinologist and philosopher François Jullien, in whose work there is the attempt to expand Western epistemology, ontology, semantics and aesthetics via a discussion of Chinese thought and aesthetics. Jullien proposes a paradigm that draws the ‘in-out’ respiratory rhythm or pulse within the perceptual field towards the centre of a theory of representation, a theory that seeks to account for consciousness from the ‘inside’ rather than the ‘outside’. The consequence of this relocation of agency is an interpretative framework that is firmly grounded in a nondualistic and holistic approach, foregrounding affect and empathetic relationships between artist and work, viewer and work, and self and the world. Traditional East Asian thought begins with similar premises to poststructuralism in the West: the ‘self’ is an illusion and the possibility of knowledge of reality independent of thought is dismissed as untenable because there is no objective reality accessible to us. Everything depends on the bias of the mind, rather than on anything we can identify as an innate attribute of reality itself, thus there is no escape from our lived experience, and we are profoundly limited by the interpretive knowledge of our mind; we are trapped within the ‘prison house of language’. But within the different recursive orientations that characterize ‘East’ and ‘West’ the interpretation and consequences of these insights are understood in quite different ways. I explore why this should be the case and what some of the consequences are, both theoretically through the written text and performatively through my studio work
Kinky binding and SECsy insertions
No full textHere Budiman et al. (2009) demonstrate that the selective translation of selenocysteine-containing proteins can be regulated by the mutually exclusive binding of eIF4a3 and SECIS binding protein 2 (SBP2) to a cis-acting element in the 3' untranslated region (3'UTR) of the target mRNA
Signaling pathways open the GAITway to translational control
No full textIn activated monocytes, Interferon-gamma modulates assembly of a heterotetrameric inhibitor of translation. This is responsive to signaling cascades promoting the induction and activation of death associated protein kinase (DAPK) and consequently zipper-interacting protein kinase (ZIPK). Now Mukhopadhyay et al., in a recent issue of Molecular Cell, show that the kinases themselves are regulated by the same translational silencing they promote thereby providing a negative feedback loop to limit late inflammatory gene expression
Disturbance, dispersal and marine assemblage structure: A case study from the nearshore Southern Ocean
Get PDFDisturbance is a key factor in most natural environments and, globally, disturbance regimes are changing, driven by increased anthropogenic influences, including climate change. There is, however, still a lack of understanding about how disturbance interacts with species dispersal capacity to shape marine assemblage structure. We examined the impact of ice scour disturbance history (2009–2016) on the nearshore seafloor in a highly disturbed region of the Western Antarctic Peninsula by contrasting the response of two groups with different dispersal capacities: one consisting of high-dispersal species (mobile with pelagic larvae) and one of low-dispersal species (sessile with benthic larvae). Piecewise Structural Equation Models were constructed to test multi-factorial predictions of the underlying mechanisms, based on hypothesised responses to disturbance for the two groups. At least two or three disturbance factors, acting at different spatial scales, drove assemblage composition. A comparison between both high- and low-dispersal models demonstrated that these mechanisms are dispersal dependent. Disturbance should not be treated as a single metric, but should incorporate remote and direct disturbance events with consideration of taxa-dispersal and disturbance legacy. These modelling approaches can provide insights into how disturbance shapes assemblages in other disturbance regimes, such as fire-prone forests and trawl fisheries
A cunning stunt: an alternative mechanism of eukaryotic translation initiation
No full textCell stress activates signaling pathways, allowing cells to choose between survival and apoptosis. Translation plays a critical role in balancing this choice by allowing for rapid and physiologically responsive changes in de novo gene expression. The steady-state abundance of cellular inhibitor of apoptosis 2 (cIAP2) is increased in response to various cell stresses. This modular protein contains baculoviral IAP repeat (BIR) motifs and ubiquitin protein ligase (E3) activity, which allows it to bind directly to caspases and to modulate activation of the transcription factor, nuclear factor kappaB (NF-kappaB). The messenger RNA (mRNA) encoding cIAP2 is a large 5.5-kb transcript, with a highly structured 5' untranslated region (5'UTR) also containing 64 upstream initiation codons ahead of the true start codon. cIAP2 employs an unusual cap-dependent mechanism of ribosome shunting to bypass the majority of the inhibitory elements in the 5'UTR, a mechanism first described for plant pararetroviruses. Furthermore, in mammalian cells, this poorly understood mechanism of translation for cIAP2 is enhanced during mild stress in the absence of pararetrovirus-encoded proteins known to be essential for this process in plant cells. Here, we discuss how cIAP2 might utilize the stress-mediated shunt process in the absence of viral proteins, which suggests a more widespread role for canonical initiation factors, internal ribosome entry sequence-specific trans-acting factors, and mRNA structure in translational control during stress
The proteasome inhibitor, MG132, promotes the reprogramming of translation in C2C12 myoblasts and facilitates the association of hsp25 with the eIF4F complex
No full textThe eukaryotic translation initiation factor (eIF) 4E, is regulated by modulating both its phosphorylation and its availability to interact with the scaffold protein, eIF4G, to form the mature eIF4F complex. Here we show that treatment of C2C12 myoblasts with the proteasomal inhibitor, MG132 (N-carbobenzoxyl-Leu-Leu-leucinal), resulted in an early decrease in protein synthesis rates followed by a partial recovery, reflecting the reprogramming of translation. The early inhibition of protein synthesis was preceded by a transient increase in eIF2alpha phosphorylation, followed by a sustained increase in eIF4E phosphorylation. Inhibition of eIF4E phosphorylation with CGP57380 failed to prevent translational reprogramming or the moderate decrease in eIF4F complexes at later times. Prolonged incubation with MG132 resulted in the increased expression of heat shock protein (hsp)25, alphaB-crystallin and hsp70, with a population of hsp25 associating with the eIF4F complex in a p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase-dependent manner. Under these conditions, eIF4GI, and to a lesser extent eIF4E, re-localized from a predominantly cytoplasmic distribution to a more perinuclear and granular staining. Although MG132 had little effect on the colocalization of eIF4E and eIF4GI, it promoted the SB203580-sensitive association of eIF4GI and hsp25, an effect not observed with alphaB-crystallin. Addition of recombinant hsp25 to an in vitro translation assay resulted in stimulation of on-going translation and a moderate decrease in de novo translation, indicating that this modified eIF4F complex containing hsp25 has a role to play in recovery of mRNA translation following cellular stress
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Latitudinal trends in shell production cost from the tropics to the poles
Get PDFThe proportion of body mass devoted to skeleton in marine invertebrates decreases along latitudinal gradients from large proportions in the tropics to small proportions in polar regions. A historical hypothesis—that latitudinal differences in shell production costs explain these trends—remains untested. Using field-collected specimens spanning a 79°N to 68°S latitudinal gradient (16,300 km), we conducted a taxonomically controlled evaluation of energetic costs of shell production as a proportion of the total energy budget in mollusks. Shell production cost was fairly low across latitudes at <10% of the energy budget and predominately <5% in gastropods and <4% in bivalves. Throughout life, shell cost tended to be lower in tropical species and increased slightly toward the poles. However, shell cost also varied with life stage, with the greatest costs found in young tropical gastropods. Low shell production costs on the energy budget suggest that shell cost may play only a small role in influencing proportional skeleton size gradients across latitudes relative to other ecological factors, such as predation in present-day oceans. However, any increase in the cost of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) deposition, including from ocean acidification, may lead to a projected ~50 to 70% increase in the proportion of the total energy budget required for shell production for a doubling of the CaCO3 deposition cost. Changes in energy budget allocation to shell cost would likely alter ecological trade-offs between calcification and other drivers, such as predation, in marine ecosystems
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