20 research outputs found
Characterisation of galactinol synthase II (XvGolSII) from the resurrection plant Xerophyta viscosa (Baker)
No full textThe monocotyledonous Xerophyta viscosa belongs to a unique group of angiosperms known as resurrection plants. These plants possess a number of unique characteristics which allow them to survive and cope for extended periods with extreme abiotic stresses such as dehydration and cold stress. It is therefore of great interest to understand and elucidate the various molecular mechanisms which are specifically regulated in response to abiotic stress by identifying genes and proteins which may contribute to abiotic stress tolerance. These genes could potentially be utilized in the development of crops with improved tolerance to abiotic stresses. The aim of this study was to preliminarily characterize XvGolSII, a galactinol synthase, which had been isolated from a X. viscosa cold stress cDNA library. In this study, the XvGolSII cDNA was sequenced and both the nucleic and amino acid sequence analysed through in silico analysis. The XvGolSII cDNA sequence was shown to be 1434 bp in length, with an open reading frame (ORF) of 1018 bp. This ORF encodes a 339 amino acid protein with a molecular weight of 38.7 kDa, containing a characteristic hydrophobic carboxyterminal pentapeptide, APSAA. Recombinant XvGolSII protein was successfully expressed in E. coli BL21 cells using the pET29b expression vector. The recombinant XvGolSII protein showed in vitro galactinol synthase activity via an activity assay using HPAEC-PAD, where it produced galactinol from the substrates myo-inositol and UDPgalactose. Subcellular localisation examination, using an XvGolSII-YFP fusion protein, indicated localisation to the cell membrane of onion epidermal cells. Quantitative real time PCR analysis showed XvGolSII to be significantly down-regulated during dehydration stress while mildly up-regulated during the early stages of cold stress, though the latter increase was not significant. Western blot analyses did not detect XvGolSII in total protein extracted from X. viscosa leaf tissue during dehydration and rehydration treatments, using polyclonal antibodies generated from the XvGolSII recombinant protein. This study successfully characterized XvGolSII at the molecular level and provides a basis for further investigation of the role of XvGolSII in abiotic stress tolerance
Perennial Earth: Poetry by Wallace Stevens and Paintings by Alexis Serio
No full text Begun as a monthlong pandemic-reprieve project in the spring of 2020, Perennial Earth is a conversation between a painter and a poet that speaks to the ways in which artists contribute to their communities in challenging times as muses, expressive healers, and care providers, serving up aesthetic respite with more than a hint of joy. Some of Stevens's best known poems are paired with the vibrant work of contemporary artist Alexis Serio.
Contributors
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) has emerged as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. His lyrical and
often philosophical poems give voice to our vast and often
inarticulate inner lives. By profession, Stevens was a lawyer. He joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in 1916, specializing in surety bonds, and became a vice-president in 1934. He never retired, but his foremost love was poetry. An acute observer of nature, he was an ardent walker and would often compose poems while strolling through Elizabeth Park in Hartford or on his daily two-mile walk to and from the office. He would even jot down lines in the midst of dictating a legal document. In his later years, he garnered numerous awards, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems (1954).
Alexis Serio has an extensive exhibition record that
includes shows at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum
in Japan, the Martin Museum of Art at Baylor University,
and the Wichita Falls Museum of Art in Texas. Her work
has appeared alongside artists such as Andy Warhol and
Richard Diebenkorn in a show at the Delaware Center for
Contemporary Arts. She was an artist-in-residence at the
Gullkistan International Residency for Creative People in
Iceland and a finalist for the Hunting Art Prize. Numerous
galleries across the country have featured her paintings,
and many of her works are in public and private collections. Serio’s abstract landscapes are responses to the transience of light, especially as seen most dramatically at sunrise and sunset, in moving water, and in the light cast over grand vistas. Her fluid imagery functions metaphorically to express concepts and feelings about perception, time, memory, love, longing, spirituality—in other words, what it means to be human. Serio is professor of art at the University of Texas at Tyler and serves as art editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal. She received her B.F.A. in painting from Syracuse University and her M.F.A. in painting from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was awarded the Charles Addams Memorial Prize. She is currently represented by the Edgewater Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont. To see more of her artwork, visit alexisserioart.com.
Glen MacLeod, Emeritus Professor of English at the
University of Connecticut, is the author of Wallace Stevens
and Company and Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From
the Armory Show to Abstract Expressionism, and editor of
Wallace Stevens in Context. He serves on the editorial board of The Wallace Stevens Journal and as vice president of the Wallace Stevens Society. The chief focus of his research has been the relations between Stevens’s poetry and the visual arts. In addition to his book on Stevens and modern art, he has curated the exhibition Painting in Poetry/Poetry in Painting: Wallace Stevens and Modern Art at Baruch College in New York, and published essays on the influence of Wallace Stevens on contemporary artists, Stevens’s relation to the long Western tradition of displaying plaster casts of famous statues, and Stevens’s relations to surrealism, abstract art, Picasso, and Matisse.
John N. Serio, former editor of The Wallace Stevens
Journal, has edited a number of books on Wallace Stevens, including Teaching Wallace Stevens: Practical Essays; The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens; Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems; and The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens: Corrected Edition. He has won several awards for his scholarly work, established an online concordance to Stevens’s poetry at www.wallacestevens.com, held Fulbright Fellowships in Greece and Belgium, and taught five times for Semester at Sea. He is Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Clarkson University.
Bill Vitek is editor of New Perennials Publishing, and
director of the New Perennials Project at Middlebury
College. Vitek taught philosophy for 32 years at Clarkson
University, always with the goal of helping students
experience the potential of the philosophical imagination
to do useful work in the world. For 35 years, he has
collaborated with Wes Jackson and The Land Institute.
Vitek and Jackson co-edited two books, Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place (1996) and The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (2008), with another one in the works. </p
Juvenile homicide : a criminological study on the possible causes of juvenile homicidal delinquency in Jamaica
No full textJamaica, the so-called land of wood and water, normally is the embodiment of a dream holiday destination with white sandy beaches, tropical palm trees, dazzling sunshine and the typical Caribbean flair. Generally, murder and manslaughter are not associated with Jamaica. However, international comparisons of crime rates reveal that Jamaica has persistently had one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Jamaica has been described as the murder capital of the world in 2006 by the BBC news after more than 1’600 people were killed in the year 2005; a tally of at least five people murdered a day. The majority of the homicides are caused by young men. Despite the dimension and severity of the homicidal problem in Jamaica, it is astonishing that literature on this phenomenon in Jamaica is very sparse and the literature that is available either doesn’t conform to the current homicide situation in Jamaica anymore or is inconsistent with other studies. The aim of the present research study was thus to close this gap and to help the process of comprehending the problem of fatal juvenile delinquency by engaging empirical research in serious efforts to describe and explain the epidemic. According to the author, understanding juvenile homicidal delinquents and their actions and thus ascertaining a plausible explanation for their high homicide rate can only be achieved by going back to those whose acts are to be explained: The juvenile homicidal delinquents themselves. The findings of the present study are therefore based upon the data gathered by means of 20 face-to-face, semi-standardised interviews with young men who have committed at least one homicide during the last five years prior to the interview and were aged between 12 and 25 years at the time of the respective homicide(s). The author acts on the assumption that homicides by juveniles can be understood as a reaction that emerges situationally and is based on a complex bundle of causes which leads to an increased susceptibility to homicides. The aim of the present study was to generate a plausible and scientifically substantiated hypothesis to explain the high proportion of male juveniles responsible for the homicide rate in Jamaica. Three groupings were examined: The individual personality characteristics of the homicide delinquents, the social context influencing the individual’s thoughts and actions and the triggering factors in the homicide context.
The study comes to the conclusion that the homicides of the respondents of the present study – additionally to the basic prerequisites of the occurrence of homicides in general such as a life in deprivation and the failure of the institutions of socialisation to sufficiently socialise their members – can be explained in high gear by the widely dispread culture of violence. Within this culture, violence constitutes a part of every-day behaviour and killing is perceived as a legitimate form of dispute resolution to which one has adapted because it utterly works. This is an instrumental understanding of violent behaviour. This apparent culture of violence of the underclass society with the deeply embedded willingness to apply violence to solve even seemingly minor disputes is intensified by a high gun prevalence and easy firearm accessibility as well as the wide distribution of and attachment to gangs. Firearms as well as delinquent gangs are two powerful factors that accord power, a feeling of strength and superiority to the individual. Status, power and respect rank high within the impecunious underclass society in Jamaica. Violence is perceived as a necessary instrument to sustain the own identity, status and respect. Thus, the fight for respect in the street culture of Jamaica’s urban inner-city youth depicts an act in self-defence for the parties involved. And such an act in self-defence legitimises to kill
Analysis of Plasmodium falciparum diversity in natural infections by deep sequencing.
No full textMalaria elimination strategies require surveillance of the parasite population for genetic changes that demand a public health response, such as new forms of drug resistance. Here we describe methods for the large-scale analysis of genetic variation in Plasmodium falciparum by deep sequencing of parasite DNA obtained from the blood of patients with malaria, either directly or after short-term culture. Analysis of 86,158 exonic single nucleotide polymorphisms that passed genotyping quality control in 227 samples from Africa, Asia and Oceania provides genome-wide estimates of allele frequency distribution, population structure and linkage disequilibrium. By comparing the genetic diversity of individual infections with that of the local parasite population, we derive a metric of within-host diversity that is related to the level of inbreeding in the population. An open-access web application has been established for the exploration of regional differences in allele frequency and of highly differentiated loci in the P. falciparum genome
Diversity in leadership: Australian women, past and present
No full textThis book provides a new understanding of the historical and contemporary aspects of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women’s leadership in a range of local, national and international contexts.
Overview
While leadership is an over-used term today, how it is defined for women and the contexts in which it emerges remains elusive. Moreover, women are exhorted to exercise leadership, but occupying leadership positions has its challenges. Issues of access, acceptable behaviour and the development of skills to be successful leaders are just some of them.
Diversity in Leadership: Australian women, past and present provides a new understanding of the historical and contemporary aspects of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women’s leadership in a range of local, national and international contexts. It brings interdisciplinary expertise to the topic from leading scholars in a range of fields and diverse backgrounds. The aims of the essays in the collection document the extent and diverse nature of women’s social and political leadership across various pursuits and endeavours within democratic political structures
Transnational Space and the Discourse of Multiculturalism: Contemporary Canadian Fiction
No full textThis thesis engages in a study of the construction of identity as “process” in four contemporary English-Canadian novels. The novels under discussion are: Cereus Blooms at Night, by Shani Mootoo; Life of Pi, by Yann Martell; Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels; and Childhood, by Andre Alexis. It offers a transnational model of analysis in relation to each of the novels, which enables the investigation of the “multiple” and “fluid” cultural identities in the four examples of contemporary Canadian fiction under scrutiny
Hackathons as Participatory Design
No full text© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Breastfeeding is not only a public health issue, but also a matter of economic and social justice. This paper presents an iteration of a participatory design process to create spaces for re-imagining products, services, systems, and policies that support breastfeeding in the United States. Our work contributes to a growing literature around making hackathons more inclusive and accessible, designing participatory processes that center marginalized voices, and incorporating systems- and relationship-based approaches to problem solving. By presenting an honest assessment of the successes and shortcomings of the first iteration of a hackathon, we explain how we re-structured the second Make the Breast Pump Not Suck hackathon in service of equity and systems design. Key to our re-imagining of conventional innovation structures is a focus on experience design, where joy and play serve as key strategies to help people and institutions build relationships across lines of difference. We conclude with a discussion of design principles applicable not only to designers of events, but to social movement researchers and HCI scholars trying to address oppression through the design of technologies and socio-technical systems
Wordsworth and death
No full textWordsworth is known as the poet of joy and hope, and to associate his name with death may seem at first strange. Yet, according to his own estimation, he was the poet not simply of joy but of “the very heart of man," of "human kind, and what we are”, of "men as they are men within themselves." Any vision of human nature which does not take into account the facts of mortality and bereavement is blinkered and inevitably inadequate and Wordsworth was committed to clarity of perception and the fullest insights of the Imagination. He did not shy away from the implications of “our mortal Nature”; throughout his career, he sought to portray in poetry the place of death in human life.
Two basic ways of understanding mortality are considered in this thesis: the first is death as disjunction, extinction, the end; the second is death as part of a larger continuity, a threshold, a stage. The conflict between these two visions was fundamental to Wordsworth's thought, and writing. Isolation and despair were the corollaries of the first vision, while the capacity for love and hope which was essential to the life of the human spirit was nurtured and made possible by the second. Wordsworth wrestled in his writings with the effects of these different visions of death on the complexities of human nature.
The thesis has been divided into three main parts. Section I - Death in Wordsworth's Time - seeks to place the poet into a historical context. Section II - Death in Wordsworth' Life - is concerned with Wordsworth's personal experiences of loss and feelings about his own mortality, And in Section III - Death in Wordsworth's Poetry - what he had to say about death is considered in relation to some of the other major themes in his poetry
Transmission dynamics and baseline epidemiological parameter estimates of Coronavirus disease 2019 pre-vaccination: Davao City, Philippines
No full textThe Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has exposed many systemic vulnerabilities in many countries' health system, disaster preparedness, and adequate response capabilities. With the early lack of data and information about the virus and the many differing local-specific factors contributing to its transmission, managing its spread had been challenging. The current work presents a modified Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered compartmental model incorporating intervention protocols during different community quarantine periods. The COVID-19 reported cases before the vaccine rollout in Davao City, Philippines, are utilized to obtain baseline values for key epidemiologic model parameters. The probable secondary infections (i.e., time-varying reproduction number) among other epidemiological indicators were computed. Results show that the cases in Davao City were driven by the transmission rates, positivity proportion, latency period, and the number of severely symptomatic patients. This paper provides qualitative insights into the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 along with the government's implemented intervention protocols. Furthermore, this modeling framework could be used for decision support, policy making, and system development for the current and future pandemics. Copyright: © 2023 Añonuevo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.11Nsciescopu
Red, white and blue highways: British travel writing and the American road trip in the late twentieth century
No full textThis study locates late-twentieth-century roadlogues (nonfiction, prose accounts of American road trips) by British writers within the tradition of the postwar American highway narrative in travel writing, novels, and film. It exposes the discursive structures and textual constraints underlying seven case studies published in the 1990s by comparing them to texts from various genres in diachronic and synchronic contexts. It contributes to scholarship on the American highway narrative, which largely overlooks British texts. It complements research on British travel writing, which tends to be biased towards pre-twentieth-century texts by travellers whose culture is in a dominant relation to that of travellees. It adds to postcolonial studies through analysis of representations of the other where otherness is reduced and complicated by a history of cultural exchange.
The methodology combines several approaches including discourse theory, discourse analysis, narrative theory, feminist criticism, and theories of tourism. Three main areas are considered: identity, in relation to nationality and gender; the road writer's gaze, with regard to vehicles and roads; and intertextuality, on the margins (in maps) and inside roadlogues (in direct and indirect allusions).
The study concludes that contemporary British roadlogues are in what is almost a subordinate relation to American highway narratives, evidenced by extensive influence of American texts. However, this subordination is qualified by joint ownership of western and New World myths, vestiges of imperial superiority, and selective deference by British writers. The latter is demonstrated through a consumer approach to American culture afforded by the episodic structure of the road trip and encouraged by the niche-oriented nature of the current market for travel writing. While American writers regard roadscapes with imperial eyes and experience the road trip as a rite of passage, contemporary Britons generally engage in superficial role play and remain untransformed by American highways
