THE DYNAMICS OF A DUO: PERCEPTIONS AND REFLECTIONS OF GENDER, NATIONALITY, AND IDENTITY IN YAMAMURA MISA

Writing throughout the 1970s and 80s, Japanese detective author Yamamura Misa represents an important transitional moment in the renaissance of female detective writers. Her works anticipate progressive ideas of gender and the critical power of detective fiction found in later authors such as Miyabe Miyuki and Kirino Natuso. Yamamura uses an American protagonist in her Katherine series to examine how the rhetoric of nihonjinron is consciously applied and unconsciously absorbed both within literature and by those who consume it. By examining how characters use social norms to manipulate one another, Yamamura encourages the reader to consider how nationalistic and sexists ideologies operate unseen in Japanese society, and she offers particular insight into shifting Japanese social norms during an era of increasing globalization and cultural influence. I discuss how Yamamura's depictions of an American girl in Japan encourage readers to justify and perhaps modify their own perceptions of gender and nationality on both sides of the Pacific, and demonstrate that Yamamura represents a generation of female detective authors that have the potential to expand our understanding of the development of Japanese detective fiction as a whole

Regioselective bromination of 1,4-dimethoxy-2,3-dimethylbenzene and conversion into sulfur-functionalised benzoquinones

The NBS bromination of 1,4-dimethoxy-2,3-dimethylbenzene has been examined under a variety of conditions in both 1,1,1-trichloroethane and benzotrifluoride. Four different bromination products have been isolated including the previously unknown 1-bromo-4-bromomethyl-2,5-dimethoxy-3-methylbenzene whose single crystal X-ray structure is presented. The synthetically useful 2,3-bis(bromomethyl)-1,4-dimethoxybenzene is readily prepared using either solvent and it has been converted into new sulfur-containing quinone derivativesPostprintPeer reviewe

Balancing the robustness and predictive performance of biomarkers.

Recent studies have highlighted the importance of assessing the robustness of putative biomarkers identified from experimental data. This has given rise to the concept of stable biomarkers, which are ones that are consistently identified regardless of small perturbations to the data. Since stability is not by itself a useful objective, we present a number of strategies that combine assessments of stability and predictive performance in order to identify biomarkers that are both robust and diagnostically useful. Moreover, by wrapping these strategies around logistic regression classifiers regularized by the elastic net penalty, we are able to assess the effects of correlations between biomarkers upon their perceived stability. We use a synthetic example to illustrate the properties of our proposed strategies. In this example, we find that: (i) assessments of stability can help to reduce the number of false-positive biomarkers, although potentially at the cost of missing some true positives; (ii) combining assessments of stability with assessments of predictive performance can improve the true positive rate; and (iii) correlations between biomarkers can have adverse effects on their stability and hence must be carefully taken into account when undertaking biomarker discovery. We then apply our strategies in a proteomics context to identify a number of robust candidate biomarkers for the human disease HTLV1-associated myelopathy/tropical spastic paraparesis (HAM/TSP)

A Gender-just Peace in Post-Conflict Sri Lanka: The Power of Intersectional Peacebuilding

This article examines the intersectional peace approach and assesses its effectiveness in acquiring a gender-just peace within a post-conflict society. This line of reasoning has been empirically exemplified through the gendered advocacy work of rural disabled Tamil women in post-conflict Sri Lanka. In recent times, the liberal peace model has become widely critiqued, resulting in a novel grounding of intersectionality into many contemporary peacebuilding initiatives. This has resulted in a more human-centred peace framework, uplifting the most marginalised voices within a conflict-affected community. Centrally, this article postulates that an intersectional peace approach is an effective method of attaining a gender-just peace, as it can act as a tool of empowerment, mobilising the most marginalised to transgress patriarchal norms and redefine the gender hierarchy upheld within a post-conflict society

APPLICATION OF SURFACE-OCEAN REMOTE-SENSING TO THE CHARACTERISATION OF BIOGEOGRAPHIC PATTERNS OF BENTHIC FAUNA IN A TEMPERATE SHELF SEA

Ecosystem scale, adaptive management of the marine environment, emphasised by the Convention on Biological Diversity, requires a clear understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamics of the system in question. Classical species-based biogeography alone is not sufficient to describe those dynamics at the appropriate scale for whole ecosystem management. A novel, multidisciplinary, complex systems approach has been developed for characterising the biogeographic distribution of benthic fauna in a temperate shelf sea system through application of remote sensing to the principles of benthic-pelagic coupling. A six year time series of satellite remote sensing data (AVHRR SST and SeaWiFS Chl-α, LwN(555, 670)) was analysed using multivariate statistical techniques to identify the emergent patterns (temporal and spatial) of water column physical structure and associated patterns of productivity in North-West European Shelf waters. Three persistent biogeographic regions were identified from horizontal patterns in .sea surface properties. Comparison with the results of an epibenthic field survey, have shown gradients of epibenthic megafaunal distribution to correspond closely to the biogeographic regions identified by remote sensing. The application of this technique to marine monitoring programmes and ecosystem management is discussed.Plymouth Marine Laborator

Monte Carlo Simulation of Hard Radiation in Decays in Beyond the Standard Model Physics in Herwig++

We use the POWHEG formalism in the Herwig++ event generator to match QCD real-emission matrix elements with the parton shower for a range of decays relevant to Beyond the Standard Model physics searches. Applying this correction affects the shapes of experimental observables and so changes the number of events passing selection criteria. To validate this approach, we study the impact of the correction on Standard Model top quark decays. We then illustrate the effect of the correction on Beyond the Standard Model scenarios by considering the invariant-mass distribution of dijets produced in the decay of the lightest Randall–Sundrum graviton and transverse momentum distributions for decays in Supersymmetry. We consider only the effect of the POWHEG correction on the simulation of the hardest emission in the shower and ignore the normalisation factor required to correct the total widths and branching ratios to next-to-leading order accuracy

Economic immorality and social reformation in English popular preaching, 1585-1625

Popular preachers, often drawing crowds of hundreds, frequently attempted to reform the relationship between rich and poor in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Rather than accepting economic oppression as part of the divinely-ordained social order, many tried to convince their audiences that the extortions of merchants, landlords and creditors were crimes which should be punished severely by England’s earthly authorities. This paper demonstrates how the language of popular homiletics opened up a space for plebeian action with concrete socioeconomic consequences. By analysing the connotative idiom of social complaint found in homilies and other widely-heard sermons, the important but historiographically neglected role of ‘godliness’ in the early modern ‘moral economy’ is revealed

MTN-001: Randomized Pharmacokinetic Cross-Over Study Comparing Tenofovir Vaginal Gel and Oral Tablets in Vaginal Tissue and Other Compartments

Background: Oral and vaginal preparations of tenofovir as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection have demonstrated variable efficacy in men and women prompting assessment of variation in drug concentration as an explanation. Knowledge of tenofovir concentration and its active form, tenofovir diphosphate, at the putative vaginal and rectal site of action and its relationship to concentrations at multiple other anatomic locations may provide key information for both interpreting PrEP study outcomes and planning future PrEP drug development. Objective: MTN-001 was designed to directly compare oral to vaginal steady-state tenofovir pharmacokinetics in blood, vaginal tissue, and vaginal and rectal fluid in a paired cross-over design. Methods and Findings: We enrolled 144 HIV-uninfected women at 4 US and 3 African clinical research sites in an open label, 3-period crossover study of three different daily tenofovir regimens, each for 6 weeks (oral 300 mg tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, vaginal 1% tenofovir gel [40 mg], or both). Serum concentrations after vaginal dosing were 56-fold lower than after oral dosing (p<0.001). Vaginal tissue tenofovir diphosphate was quantifiable in ≥90% of women with vaginal dosing and only 19% of women with oral dosing. Vaginal tissue tenofovir diphosphate was ≥130-fold higher with vaginal compared to oral dosing (p<0.001). Rectal fluid tenofovir concentrations in vaginal dosing periods were higher than concentrations measured in the oral only dosing period (p<0.03). Conclusions: Compared to oral dosing, vaginal dosing achieved much lower serum concentrations and much higher vaginal tissue concentrations. Even allowing for 100-fold concentration differences due to poor adherence or less frequent prescribed dosing, vaginal dosing of tenofovir should provide higher active site concentrations and theoretically greater PrEP efficacy than oral dosing; randomized topical dosing PrEP trials to the contrary indicates that factors beyond tenofovir's antiviral effect substantially influence PrEP efficacy. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00592124

A protocol for a pragmatic randomized controlled trial using the Health Teams Advancing Patient Experience: Strengthening Quality (Health TAPESTRY) platform approach to promote person-focused primary healthcare for older adults

Detailed description of the intervention [57, 84–89]. (DOC 63 kb