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Significance Animal NLRs form wheel-like structures called inflammasomes upon perception of pathogen-associated molecules. The induced proximity of the signaling domains at the center of the wheel is hypothesized to recruit caspases for the first step of immune signal transduction. We expressed a plant-animal NLR fusion to demonstrate that induced proximity of TIR signaling domains from plant NLRs is sufficient to activate plant immune signaling. This demonstrates that a signaling-competent inflammasome can be formed from known, minimal components. The intrinsic NADase activity of plant TIRs is necessary for immune signaling, but fusions to a bacterial or a mammalian TIR domain with NADase activity, which also lead to accumulation of NAD+ hydrolysis products (e.g. cyclic ADP-ribose), were unable to activate immune signaling., Plant and animal intracellular nucleotide-binding, leucine-rich repeat (NLR) immune receptors detect pathogen-derived molecules and activate defense. Plant NLRs can be divided into several classes based upon their N-terminal signaling domains, including TIR (Toll-like, Interleukin-1 receptor, Resistance protein)- and CC (coiled-coil)-NLRs. Upon ligand detection, mammalian NAIP and NLRC4 NLRs oligomerize, forming an inflammasome that induces proximity of its N-terminal signaling domains. Recently, a plant CC-NLR was revealed to form an inflammasome-like hetero-oligomer. To further investigate plant NLR signaling mechanisms, we fused the N-terminal TIR domain of several plant NLRs to the N terminus of NLRC4. Inflammasome-dependent induced proximity of the TIR domain in planta initiated defense signaling. Thus, induced proximity of a plant TIR domain imposed by oligomerization of a mammalian inflammasome is sufficient to activate authentic plant defense. Ligand detection and inflammasome formation is maintained when the known components of the NLRC4 inflammasome is transferred across kingdoms, indicating that NLRC4 complex can robustly function without any additional mammalian proteins. Additionally, we found NADase activity of a plant TIR domain is necessary for plant defense activation, but NADase activity of a mammalian or a bacterial TIR is not sufficient to activate defense in plants.

Background:MiaoMiao (MM) is a Bluetooth transmitter, which when paired with a smart phone/device, converts the Abbott FreeStyle Libre flash glucose monitoring system into a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) continuous glucose monitor (CGM). Families are increasingly adopting DIY CGM solutions, but little is known about parent and child experiences with these add-on technologies. We aimed to explore experiences of families using MM-CGM including challenges faced and their advice to others who may choose to use the technology.Methods:Between May and July 2019, we conducted 12 semistructured interviews (in person or via video conference) with parents of children (aged ≤16 years) with type 1 diabetes using MM-CGM. Interviews were audio recorded; professionally transcribed and key themes were identified through thematic analysis.Results:Overall, parents used MM-CGM to proactively manage their child’s blood glucose. In all participants, this led to a perceived decrease in frequency of hypoglycemia. Participants reported that the visibility and easy access to blood glucose readings, glucose trends, and customized alarms on parent’s phones decreased their disease burden and improved their sleep quality. Common barriers to using MM-CGM included difficulty of the setting up process, connectivity issues, and lack of support from medical teams.Conclusion:This study highlights the potential feasibility of using a DIY CGM system like MM-CGM, which could be an empowering and cost-effective tool for enabling remote monitoring of blood glucose in real time.

Philip Larkin's “Church Going” has been extensively anthologized since its first appearance in 1955. The author, with characteristic self-effacement, expressed his doubts about its merits,1 but the...

Novelist, poet, dramatist, and critic Stephen Gray was born in Cape Town and educated at the universities of Cape Town, Cambridge, and Iowa, where he was a member of the Iowa Writers Workshop. He edited Granta while at Cambridge and taught in France for some years before taking up a position at the Rand Afrikaans University (now the University of Johannesburg) in 1969, where he taught for some 20 years and became Professor of English. He took early retirement in 1991 and has since then worked as a freelance writer. The author of several works of poetry, drama, and fiction, Gray is also South Africa’s foremost anthologist and literary historiographer. Stephen Gray’s early novels are the satirical Local Colour (1975) and Invisible People (1977), and the historical Caltrop’s Desire (1980). His fascination with history is also reflected in John Ross: The True Story (1987), a fictionalized treatment of the life of Charles Maclean (‘John Ross’), a ship’s boy who survived a shipwreck off the Natal coast in 1825 and spent several years at the court of King Shaka. Later novels include Time of Our Darkness (1988), Born of Man (1989), and the semi-autobiographical War Child (1991). His autobiography, Accident of Birth, appeared in 1993.

A short-story writer, novelist, poet and journalist, Bosman was born in Kuils River near Cape Town, but spent most of his life in the Transvaal, and it is the Transvaal milieu that features in almost all of his writings. He became known in the 1940s for his ‘Oom Schalk Lourens’ stories, and his use of this simple-seeming but wily narrator has ensured his place in South African literature as one of the country’s most enduring and best-loved storywriters. Schalk Lourens features in the short-story collections Mafeking Road (1947) and Unto Dust (1963), while Bosman’s prison memoir, Cold Stone Jug (1949), set the trend for this important genre in South Africa. Bosman was educated at Jeppe Boys’ High School, the University of the Witwatersrand and Normal College, where he qualified as a teacher. In January 1926 he received a posting to the Groot Marico in the remote Western Transvaal, as it was known then. Despite its short duration, this stay later inspired almost all of his 150 short stories. In July 1926, on vacation at the family home in Johannesburg, he became embroiled in a family quarrel and shot and killed his step-brother David Russell. He was tried and sentenced to death—a sentence that was later commuted to imprisonment for ten years with hard labour. He eventually served four years of this sentence and was released on parole in August 1930.

Novelist, short-story and non-fiction writer Bessie Head was born in a Pietermaritzburg psychiatric institution, her white mother Bessie Amelia Emery (née Birch), who had had a long history of mental illness, having unexpectedly become pregnant (the identity of Head’s black father has never been discovered). Head grew up in foster care until the age of 13; thereafter the welfare authorities placed her in an Anglican mission orphanage in Durban. In 1961 she met and married fellow journalist Harold Head in Cape Town; their only child, Howard, was born in 1962. After the break-up of her marriage in 1964 she relinquished South African citizenship and took up a teaching post in Serowe, Botswana. Plagued by ill health and mental instability, she died in Serowe with six published works to her name and an international reputation as one of Africa’s foremost woman writers. Head’s first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), deals in predominantly realist fashion with the flight from South Africa of a young black political activist, his resettlement in Botswana and marriage to a Batswana woman. Her second novel, Maru (1971), which derives its name from its eponymous central character, is an altogether more complex work.

Transition of care (ToC) points, and in particular hospital admission and discharge, can be associated with an increased risk of adverse drug events (ADEs) and other drug-related problems (DRPs). The growing recognition of the pharmacist as an expert in medication management, patient education and communication makes them well placed to intervene. There is evidence to indicate that the inclusion of pharmacists in the health care team at ToC points reduces ADEs and DRPs and improves patient outcomes. The objectives of this paper are to outline the following using current literature: 1) the increased risk of medication-related problems at ToC points; 2) to highlight some strategies that have been successful in reducing these problems; and 3) to illustrate how the role of the pharmacist across all facets of care can contribute to the reduction of ADEs, particularly for patients at ToC points.

In reassessing A Question of Power, widely regarded as Bessie Head's major work, this article re-examines the biographical context in which the novel was written in order to establish its generative matrix. It then turns to key aspects of the novel and attempts to describe and analyse some of their most puzzling and inexplicable features. The article concludes with an assessment of the novel's value in the corpus of African fiction four decades after its first appearance.

Manuscript Type Empirical Research Question/Issue This study investigates the impact of a responsible investment index on environmental management practices. Firms that were included in the FTSE4Good index but failed to meet enhanced requirements were subject to both engagement by FTSE and the threat of expulsion from the index. We examine the combined effect of these actions, estimate the contribution of both elements separately, and the influence of concentrated equity ownership, corporate governance, and the institutional environment. We also evaluate whether the effect is persistent or transitory. Research Findings/Insights For a sample of 1,029 firms from 21 countries, our findings demonstrate that engagement combined with the threat of expulsion from the FTSE4Good index doubles the probability that a firm failing to meet the environmental management criteria in 2002 would comply by 2005. The higher compliance rate for the firms receiving engagement persists until the end of our study in 2010. We also find that compliance is positively associated with low levels of concentrated ownership and with firms based in coordinated rather than liberal market economies. Theoretical/Academic Implications Our results contribute to the understanding of the complexities of governance, where decision makers are constrained or influenced by equity holders, the firm's governance system, institutional arrangements, and collective engagement by institutional equity holders. Our findings are consistent with both institutional and agency issues impacting on decision making. Practitioner/Policy Implications Our study suggests that engagement via a responsible investment index reinforced by the threat of public expulsion from the index provides an effective route for large-scale collaborative investor engagement on corporate social responsibility issues targeting large and internationally diverse firms. It also demonstrates why regulators may wish to encourage engagement of this type to achieve social benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(2010). CONCEPTUALIZING ‘POST-TRANSITIONAL’ SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH. English Studies in Africa: Vol. 53, 'Post-Transitional' South African Literature in English, pp. 1-10.

Boards of large UK companies are devoting more time to the governance of corporate social responsibility (CSR). This is in line with the Combined Code on Corporate Governance's requirement that boards set standards and values for companies and ensure they meet their social obligations. But is board activity in this area as effective as it could be at achieving corporate compliance with CSR standards? This paper draws on the economic literature to offer an analysis of the primary causes of breaches of corporate responsibility standards. Based on a small survey of the board CSR activities of 20 of Britain's largest companies, it assesses whether boards are addressing these causes effectively. The tentative conclusion is that board activity might usefully be reoriented to do more to address the fundamental incentives problems that often cause corporate responsibility failures, namely market failure and misaligned performance management systems.

The chance discovery of a letter written by HC Bosman to Roy Campbell in 1949 complaining about the poor state in which Mafeking Road had appeared in its first two editions prompted a re-editing of the text. In the process it became clear that Bosman played as significant a role in the introduction of errors into the text as later editors. This article examines the details of this rather odd turn of events and advances reasons for the aggregation of errors that dogged Mafeking Road for over fifty years.

This article looks back at the editing work that went into the fourteen-volume Anniversary Edition of Herman Charles Bosman (1998–2005) and pays particular attention to the editing of Bosman’s stories. It examines some of the problems that were encountered in arriving at ‘authoritative’ versions of the stories and argues that, ironically, it was Bosman himself who set in train the process that resulted in his classic Mafeking Road ending up with nearly 100 errors in it by the early 1990s. The article ends with a plea for greater rigour in the editing of South African literary works.

The deployment of oral forms in the written work of African writers is a more complex process than would perhaps appear at first sight. Frequently theorised about but seldom achieved, the effective transposition of the oral into the written involves successfully negotiating the ontological gap between oral and written modes. This entails a shift from the spoken to the written word, from live audience to absent reader, from reciprocity and interaction to a process of private interpretation removed (sometimes distantly) in time and place. This article examines attempts by four South African writers to deploy elements of orality in their written stories. It argues that the stories of Jordan and Matshoba are the most conspicuously oral-derived, and yet are the least satisfactory as (written) literary works. Ndebele thematises orality in his stories without, however, allowing this to become an integral part of the narrative style of his work, while Head is the most successful 'oral stylist' of the four in brid...

This article examines the choices some South African authors have recently made as regards the setting and style of their writing, and the implications of these choices. It looks in some detail at Johan Vlok Louw’s Karoo Dusk (2014), and concludes with a brief look at Steven Boykey Sidley’s latest novel, Free Association (2017). The article was written with the current calls for decolonising the university curriculum in mind. It speculates about what a decolonised South African literature would be like and whether or not this is even possible. It argues that the global marketplace and increasingly borderless nature of modern culture are likely to be forces that the decolonisers will be unable to resist.Keywords: Johan Vlok Louw, Karoo Dusk, Steven Boykey Sidley, Free Association, Lauren Beukes, Zakes Mda, decolonisation, language and literature, Karoo

Just after midnight on Sunday, 18 July 1926, merely hours before he was due to return to the Marico after a mid-year break, Herman Charles Bosman killed his stepbrother David Russell at the family home at 19 Isipingo Street, Bellevue East, Johannesburg. Using a hunting rifle that he had brought back from the bushveld, he shot the 23-year-old Russell in the bedroom shared by the two men. The consequence of this act for the young schoolteacher was what he later called "a somewhat lengthy sojourn in prison" (Bosman 1949, unnumbered dedication page). He escaped the gallows, had his sentence commuted to 10 years with hard labour, and emerged on parole on 14 September 1930, having served just over four years of this sentence (Gray 2005, 131).

Recent studies have highlighted two apparent `contradictions' in the behaviour of ethical investors: it is not unusual for people to waive the interest on their ethical investments but say they would invest more if the interest rate was raised and it is common for people to invest both in ethical and standard funds. Lewis and Mackenzie have proposed that these contradictions can be resolved using the ideas of framing and mental accounts. The current paper uses an experimental approach to explore these issues. Participants took part in a role-play of a consultation with a `virtual' financial advisor. This was setup on the World Wide Web. Participants used the Netscape browser to provide financial and other information to the financial advisor. They were then presented with a variety of investment choices. The study revealed that ethical investors were generally committed to ethical investment, and kept such investments even if they performed badly or were ethically ineffective.

In the past, UK pension funds have resisted the suggestion that they should take account of ethical and environmental issues in investment. One reason for this is that the model proposed for doing so involved the exclusion, on ethical grounds, of a significant proportion of the investment universe. This was widely considered to be legally unsafe. Following the introduction of a new Pensions Act disclosure regulation on this subject, attitudes have changed, largely because new models have emerged for taking account of ethical issues in investment. This paper describes the most popular of these models and explains the rationale for their widespread adoption.

This paper reports on a questionnaire survey of 1146 ethical investors in the UK. Ethical investing usually means that certain companies are excluded from one's portfolio on non-economic grounds, e.g. because they manufacture armaments, test chemicals on live animals, or have poor pollution records. Is this an example where moral commitment rather than economics is driving economic decision making? Ethical investors were found to be neither cranks nor saints holding both ethical and not so ethical investments at the same time. A case is made that people are prepared to put their money where their morals are although there is no straightforward trade-off between principles and money. A broader analysis than that based on rational economic man is recommended: an economic psychology.

An important goal of ethical investment is to influence companies to improve their ethical and environmental performance. The principal means that many ethical funds employ is passive market signalling, which may not, on its own, have a significant effect. A much more promising approach may be active engagement. This paper reports on a questionnaire study of a sample of 1146 ethical investors in order to assess whether U.K. ethical investors would support more activist ethical investment and whether they would be prepared to invest in companies which are failing ethically in order to do so. The results show general support for the current practice of passive signalling accompanied by "soft" engagement in the form of lobbying and the development of dialogue in order to improve corporate practice. The "harder" options of investing in companies that err in order to change them is, however, favoured by consistent minorities.

This paper is a report of an empirical psychological study of the relationship between the ethical and financial beliefs and desires of ethical investors. Semi-structured interviews of 20 ethical investors have been carried out by the project 10 of which have been analysed using qualitative data analysis software. All of our participants faced the problem that, while they had ethical concerns, they were not prepared to sacrifice their essential financial requirements to address them. We found four common ways of dealing with this problem: they divided up their money into core and surplus accounts; they decided that it was enough to only be a partial ethical investor; they avoided detailed consideration of the costs of ethical investment; and they avoided rigorous ethical thinking. One equilibrium position arising from these responses is a portfolio approach to ethics, which allows people to assuage their consciences by investing only a small proportion of their investments ethically, while leaving the rest in non-ethical investment vehicles.

With the lobby growing for social and ethical reporting, companies will need to quantify the relationship between ethics and business success to convince shareholders focused on the bottom line of the value of adopting an ethical approach to business. A convergence between the emerging practices of social auditing and brand valuation is a good place to start.

How do ethical investment funds choose their ethical criteria? How intelligent is this process from an ethical point of view? This paper reports on his field work carried out as part of the Bath University ‘Morals and Money’ Project. After completing this research, Dr. Craig Mackenzie left academia to become ethics development officer at Friends Provident. He can be contacted at 15 Old Bailey, London, EC4M 7AP; c.mackenzie@stewardship.co.uk

The focus of this article is Ernest Glanville's collection of stories Tales from the Veld (1897) and its place in the South African oral‐style story tradition. Glanville's tales are set on the Eastern Cape Frontier in the last part of the nineteenth century and employ a narrator, the loquacious but wily backwoodsman ‘Uncle Abe Pike’. This style of story reached its apogee with the ‘Oom Schalk Lourens’ tales of Herman Charles Bosman. Little, however, is known about earlier users of the oral‐style story and the contribution they made to the form. It will be argued that, like Bosman's Oom Schalk, Glanville's Uncle Abe is a complex figure who speaks in several voices. The ideology he articulates is complex and ambiguous: he is simultaneously racist and humane, condescending to the ‘Kaffir’ and sympathetic to Xhosa culture, loyal to the Queen and contemptuous of the colonial administration. For all of these reasons, Glanville's ‘Abe Pike’ tales are worthy of more attention than they have been accorded.

Richard Thaler has made a number of claims about the peculiar motives people have for their economic behaviour. This paper is sympathetic to Thaler's project, but argues that there is a problem with the evidence he uses to support his claims. The problem is that Thaler's main claims are about the motivation for economic action, but his main evidence is not about motivation but about behaviour. In failing to provide evidence about motives. Thaler's claims are vulnerable. To illustrate this problem the paper focuses on an example of the apparently anomalous behaviour of wine owners which Thaler uses. Employing some evidence about the motivations of wine owners, the paper challenges Thaler's claims that the behaviour of wine owners is explained by the ‘endowment effect’ and ‘loss aversion.’

Stakeholders—clients, beneficiaries, trade unions, non-governmental organisations—have actively encouraged investors to take a more activist approach to their investments. The motivations include both the potential financial benefits and the desire to address the specific concerns or values of the organisation or the individual concerned. Shareholder activism occurs when shareholders use their unique power as the owners of companies to facilitate change. The starting point in many discussions around shareholder activism has been the importance of using the formal rights associated with owning shares, in particular the right to vote on resolutions at annual general meetings. In situations where investors decide to intervene with companies, there is a range of strategies that can be used. The specific strategies depend on factors such as the specific issue in question, the relationship between the investor and the company, the support from other investors and the relationship between the issue and financial performance.

This paper provides results consistent with the proposition that engagement by and threat of deletion from a responsible investment index motivated persistent improvements to corporate environmental management practices, especially for firms where the threat of exclusion from the index was likely to be costly. We use the natural experiment provided by the FTSE4Good upgrade of their environmental management criteria in 2002 when they engaged with index member firms that would not meet the new requirements but did not engage with non-member firms that would similarly fail. By 2005 49% of the 388 large and internationally diverse firms that had received engagement and been threatened with exclusion from the FTSE4Good index had complied, as opposed to 23% of the 658 firms which were not subject to engagement or potential exclusion. This result is statistically significant even after controlling for environmental risk, industry, country, governance and financial performance. Further results indicate that the effect of FTSE engagement produces a difference in compliance which persists for at least five years.