Performing weight change : a performative reading of reality-making through a relationship of meaning and doing : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in English at Massey University

Reading the reality-making processes that create bodies in weight change performances challenges us to understand the relationships between meanings and actions, or between discourses and materiality. This study uses a performative model to elaborate how discourses and materiality can be read in texts in such a way to bring transparency to the process of materiality-making, agency and causality. The texts used in this study are transcribed interviews of participants who identified themselves as undergoing weight change. Reading weight and body-making as a discursive-material relationship enriches a shared understanding in the interdisciplinary space of psychology and English. The performative model chosen for this study offers sufficient structure to read both the generic features of reality-making and individually-nuanced reality-making practices, presenting psychologists with a sophisticated understanding of change processes. To read reality-making with detailed transparency, we require tools of analysis that can directly read discourses and actions as shared spaces of relationship, through which material entities can emerge. For such tools of analysis, this study utilizes and extends the model of performativity offered by Dr Karen Barad (2007). In using this model to read text performatively, the unique features that are creating performances of weight change are accessed through a reading of boundary-making practices, through the relationship between meaning and doing that establishes what matters in accessing possibilities for meaning and possibilities for doing, and through the elaboration of subject-object relationships into a sequenced performance

Safety Engineering with COTS components

Safety-critical systems are becoming more widespread, complex and reliant on software. Increasingly they are engineered through Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) (Commercial Off The Shelf) components to alleviate the spiralling costs and development time, often in the context of complex supply chains. A parallel increased concern for safety has resulted in a variety of safety standards, with a growing consensus that a safety life cycle is needed which is fully integrated with the design and development life cycle, to ensure that safety has appropriate influence on the design decisions as system development progresses. In this article we explore the application of an integrated approach to safety engineering in which assurance drives the engineering process. The paper re- ports on the outcome of a case study on a live industrial project with a view to evaluate: its suitability for application in a real-world safety engineering setting; its benefits and limitations in counteracting some of the difficulties of safety en- gineering with COTS components across supply chains; and, its effectiveness in generating evidence which can contribute directly to the construction of safety cases

Biological Impact of Silicon Nitride for Orthopaedic Applications: Role of Particle Size, Surface Composition and Donor Variation

The adverse biological impact of orthopaedic wear debris currently limits the long-term safety of human joint replacement devices. We investigated the role of particle size, surface composition and donor variation in influencing the biological impact of silicon nitride as a bioceramic for orthopaedic applications. Silicon nitride particles were compared to the other commonly used orthopaedic biomaterials (e.g. cobalt-chromium and Ti-6Al-4V alloys). A novel biological evaluation platform was developed to simultaneously evaluate cytotoxicity, inflammatory cytokine release, oxidative stress, and genotoxicity potential of particles using peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMNCs) from individual human donors. Irrespective of the particle size, silicon nitride did not cause any adverse responses whereas cobalt-chromium wear particles caused donor-dependent cytotoxicity, TNF-α cytokine release, oxidative stress, and DNA damage in PBMNCs after 24 h. Despite being similar in size and morphology, silicon dioxide nanoparticles caused the release of significantly higher levels of TNF-α compared to silicon nitride nanoparticles, suggesting that surface composition influences the inflammatory response in PBMNCs. Ti-6Al-4V wear particles also released significantly elevated levels of TNF-α cytokine in one of the donors. This study demonstrated that silicon nitride is an attractive orthopaedic biomaterial due to its minimal biological impact on human PBMNCs

Non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms in the P2X receptor genes: Association with diseases, impact on receptor functions and potential use as diagnosis biomarkers

P2X receptors are Ca2+-permeable cationic channels in the cell membranes, where they play an important role in mediating a diversity of physiological and pathophysiological functions of extracellular ATP. Mammalian cells express seven P2X receptor genes. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are widespread in the P2RX genes encoding the human P2X receptors, particularly the human P2X7 receptor. This article will provide anoverview of the non-synonymous SNPs (NS-SNPs) that have been associated with or implicated in altering the susceptibility to pathologies or disease conditions, and discuss the consequences of the mutations resulting from such NS-SNPs on the receptor functions. Disease-associated NS-SNPs in the P2RXgenes have been valuable in understanding the disease etiology and the receptor function, and are promising as biomarkers to be used for the diagnosis and development of stratified therapeutics. © 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Blocked drains and open minds : multiple accountability relationships and improved service delivery performance in an Indian city

How can public sector service providers deliver improved services to citizens within environments where inefficient and often corrupt service delivery is the norm? The following paper provides some answers to this question through examining the impact of a series of customer-focused service delivery reforms undertaken at the Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (Metro Water) in Hyderabad City, Andhra Pradesh state, Southern India at the end of the 1990s. The Metro Water case is interesting, as it shows how a semi-autonomous service provider can undertake organisational change and realise sustained improvements in service delivery performance. If this process is deepened over time there is a greater opportunity to attract, and provide security for, larger state or private sector investments that can impact water supply and sewerage service delivery over the long-term. This is the scenario that emerges in the following case. A key finding in this research is that multiple accountability relationships, operating between external actors and Metro Water staff, have collectively contributed to sustained organisational change and improved service delivery performance. The most critical of these relationships are those that triangulate between citizens, senior managers, and front-line workers. In the Metro Water case active citizen engagement through formal accountability mechanisms has been the key to the organisation s overall success in delivering improved services to citizens (both middle class and urban poor) throughout Hyderabad City

Private Universities and Building a World Class University in Africa

In the past decade the term world-class university WCU - also called globally competitive universities world-class elite or flagship universities- has become a catch phrase not simply for improving the quality of learning and research in higher education but also more important for developing the capacity to compete in the global higher education marketplace through the acquisition and creation of advanced knowledge This paper will provide a description of the attributes of world-class universities the steps in building and sustaining world-class universities in Africa and will propose methodologies by which private universities in Africa can attain world-class status sharing the experiences in Nigeria The paper will be concluded to offer a few tips to private Universities to guide their earnest quest to attain world-class statu

Corruption and Governance: A Bad Ginger for Development in Nigeria

Public service is a service where federal state or local government has an interest or where its presence is felt It is a very wide organ encompassing the civil service the school system the judicially the local government system the security agents government companies and public service is of great importance to any given state The role of the public service in achieving good governance cannot be underestimated The purpose of the state is to maximize the potentials of its citizens by providing basic rights liberty security and welfare which can be gathered from the central role in the formulation and implementation of policies designed for the development of the society Development is critical and essential to the sustenance and growth of any nation A country is classified as developed when can provide qualitative life for her citizenry Nigeria in the last fifty years has been battling with the problems of development despite huge human material and natural resources in her possession In Nigeria the roles of government has come under severe critiques within the framework of the gap that exists between the anticipated roles and the actual output in guiding the society along the course of development as a result of corruptio

'Everything Tutta Gloria'

A book review of Oblivion Banjo. The Poetry of Charles Wright, Charles Wright (hbck, 756pp, $50, Farrar Strauss & Giroux)in the form of a dialogue

Conformational changes during human P2X7 receptor activation examined by structural modelling and cysteine-based cross-linking studies

The P2X7 receptor (P2X7R) is important in mediating a range of physiological functions and pathologies associated with tissue damage and inflammation and represents an attractive therapeutic target. However, in terms of their structure-function relationships, the mammalian P2X7Rs remain poorly characterised compared to some of their other P2XR counterparts. In this study, combining cysteine-based cross-linking and whole-cell patch-clamp recording, we examined six pairs of residues (A44/I331, D48/I331, I58/F311, S60/L320, I75/P177 and K81/V304) located in different parts of the extracellular and transmembrane domains of the human P2X7R. These residues are predicted to undergo substantial movement during the transition of the receptor ion channel from the closed to the open state, predictions which are made based on structural homology models generated from the crystal structures of the zebrafish P2X4R. Our results provide evidence that among the six pairs of cysteine mutants, D48C/I133C and K81C/V304C formed disulphide bonds that impaired the channel gating to support the notion that such conformational changes, particularly those in the outer ends of the transmembrane domains, are critical for human P2X7R activation