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This study aimed to understand the experiences of older women media professionals whose age and gender had prompted discriminatory behavior (gendered ageism) towards them by their line managers and/or employers. It draws on the testimonies provided by 24 women media professionals who self-identified as 'older' and who were interviewed for the work. All the participants had worked (and some still work) as journalists, presenters, producers or actors, and alongside diverse and routinised micro-aggressions, their experiences included having their contracts summarily terminated or not renewed, being manoeuvred out of front-of-camera roles, seen their career opportunities evaporate when they reached their 40s or even earlier, and been replaced by younger, 'fresher' women. However, some participants are fighting back by creating their own media and developing opportunities for other women to thrive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evolutionary studies often identify genes that have been exchanged between different organisms and the phrase Lateral or Horizontal Gene Transfer is often used in this context. However, they rarely provide any mechanistic information concerning how these gene transfers might have occurred. With the astonishing increase in the number of sequences in public databases over the past two or three decades, identical antibiotic resistance genes have been identified in many different sequence contexts. One explanation for this would be that genes are initially transmitted by transposons which have subsequently decayed and can no longer be detected. Here, we provide an overview of a protein, IEE (Insertion Sequence Excision Enhancer) observed to facilitate high‐frequency excision of IS629 from clinically important Escherichia coli O157:H7 and subsequently shown to affect a large class of bacterial insertion sequences which all transpose using the copy‐out‐paste‐in transposition mechanism. Excision depends on both IEE and transposase indicating association with the transposition process itself. We review genetic and biochemical data and propose that IEE immobilizes genes carried by compound transposons by removing the flanking insertion sequence (IS) copies. The biochemical activities of IEE as a primase with the capacity to recognize DNA microhomologies and the observation that its effect appears restricted to IS families which use copy‐out‐paste‐in transposition, suggests IS deletion occurs by abortive transposition involving strand switching (primer invasion) during the copy‐out step. This reinforces the proposal made for understanding the widespread phenomenon loss of ISApl1 flanking mcr‐1 in the compound transposon Tn6330 which we illustrate with a detailed model. This model also provides a convincing way to explain the high levels of IEE‐induced precise IS excision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore the concept of solidarity in the context of empirical social inquiry, a concept that is underdeveloped in the research methodology literature. We do so by drawing connections and contrasts to other more established methodological concepts such as reflexivity and positionality. We draw upon existing literature as well as reflection and analyses of our personal experiences and research endeavors to illustrate the nature of solidarity as a relationally grounded transformational practice. Through our exploration, we aim to articulate principles that can be utilized to understand solidarity as a methodological concept, based on our assertion that through such an understanding, we are better placed to engage in transformative and justice-oriented research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyzed large-scale post-translational modification (PTM) data to outline cell signaling pathways affected by tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) in ten lung cancer cell lines. Tyrosine phosphorylated, lysine ubiquitinated, and lysine acetylated proteins were concomitantly identified using sequential enrichment of post translational modification (SEPTM) proteomics. Machine learning was used to identify PTM clusters that represent functional modules that respond to TKIs. To model lung cancer signaling at the protein level, PTM clusters were used to create a co-cluster correlation network (CCCN) and select protein-protein interactions (PPIs) from a large network of curated PPIs to create a cluster-filtered network (CFN). Next, we constructed a Pathway Crosstalk Network (PCN) by connecting pathways from NCATS BioPlanet whose member proteins have PTMs that co-cluster. Interrogating the CCCN, CFN, and PCN individually and in combination yields insights into the response of lung cancer cells to TKIs. We highlight examples where cell signaling pathways involving EGFR and ALK exhibit crosstalk with BioPlanet pathways: Transmembrane transport of small molecules; and Glycolysis and gluconeogenesis. These data identify known and previously unappreciated connections between receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) signal transduction and oncogenic metabolic reprogramming in lung cancer. Comparison to a CFN generated from a previous multi-PTM analysis of lung cancer cell lines reveals a common core of PPIs involving heat shock/chaperone proteins, metabolic enzymes, cytoskeletal components, and RNA-binding proteins. Elucidation of points of crosstalk among signaling pathways employing different PTMs reveals new potential drug targets and candidates for synergistic attack through combination drug therapy. Author summary: Protein post-translational modifications (PTMs), such as phosphorylation, ubiquitination, and acetylation, are extensively employed by cell signaling pathways that regulate cell division, differentiation, migration, and cancer. We used machine learning to identify PTM clusters that represent functional modules in cell signaling pathways. These clusters were used to identify protein-protein interactions, and interactions between cell signaling pathways, that were active in lung cancer cells that were treated with anti-cancer drugs. We model these interactions as networks at three levels of granularity at the pathway, protein-protein interaction, and PTM levels. Interrogation of these networks yielded insights into molecular interactions between cell signaling pathways activated by oncogenes, transmembrane transport of small molecules, and glycolysis and gluconeogenesis. These analyses identify previously unappreciated mechanisms of crosstalk among signaling pathways between oncogenic tyrosine kinase signaling and proteins that regulate metabolic reprogramming in lung cancer, revealing new potential drug targets for combination therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Zealand's 2020 General Election campaign was unusual, though not unprecedented, in featuring women as both Prime Minister (Jacinda Ardern, Labour) and Leader of the Opposition (Judith Collins, National). To explore the extent to which gender, party and style intersected in their social media positioning, we analysed all posts made on the two Party Leaders' public Facebook pages. We found both quantitative (post frequency and composition, main topic and policy issues, audience reactions) and qualitative differences (tone, presentational style) but importantly, our research suggests that neither woman 'performed' gender in normatively stereotypical ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the recent history of sexuality education as a field of its own, there have not been many strong, positive rhetorical connections between comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) and Catholicism. While other Christian denominations see value in CSE, Catholic opponents of CSE see it as harmful despite the magisterial teachings that support the same core tenants. Current Catholic sexuality curricula fail to address many important components relevant to the sexual lives of the faithful. In this article we discuss the sufficient magisterial and theological support for robust and relevant Holistic Catholic Sexuality Education. We also offer guidelines for holistic sexuality education curricula rooted in Catholic moral theology, using the guiding principles of anthropological justice, moral justice, and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore the concept of validity as it applies to transformative experiences, asking how can we know when individuals are transformed as the result of some experience? What criteria or principles might be used to assess the validity of claims made about transformation? We suggest that validity in this context—what we call transformative validity— must transcend existing understandings that emphasize validity as a "thing" to be "achieved." Instead, we introduce a new conceptualization of validity to the qualitative inquiry community: We suggest that transformative validity is best conceptualized as a process that centers intersubjectivity, dialogue, and recognition and is always open and rooted in uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across our combined 15 years of experience as methodologists and research methodology instructors, we have found that the concept of 'failure' is only a small portion of methodological literature and is similarly missing from scholarship on teaching and learning social science research methodology. We define failure in terms of our inability as researchers to reach the onto-epistemological ideals to which we aspire in our empirical fieldwork with others, both in terms of relationships formed with our research participants and our inability to overcome broader (institutional or socio-political) constraints. This reflexive position paper is an attempt to provide several tools that instructors of research methodology courses may use to teach students techniques for better understanding the causes of failure; to provide students opportunities for workshopping and discussing fieldwork in the moment; and to model transparency and openness in reporting failures as part of their writing and research dissemination. We draw on our own teaching experiences to provide examples of how to build structures that will support students as they prepare to deal with the failures that often occur in empirical inquiry. We then offer examples of what teaching about failure might look like within the frameworks of existing research methodology courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) is a unique identifier most often associated with popular magazines, scholarly journals, and newspapers. The scope of ISSN, however, includes many types of grey literature. This article will discuss and provide examples of the types of grey literature in scope for ISSN and describe the bibliographic metadata about these resources created to support each ISSN assignment. Benefits to the originators of grey literature that result from ISSN assignments are highlighted, especially the valuable exposure that the resources gain from the bibliographic records that are created to document ISSN assignments and are included in multiple international databases. Benefits that accrue to the ISSN Network from the inclusion of grey literature will also be covered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media are increasingly entrenched in politicians' campaigning. Yet even as they become more ubiquitous, evidence suggests widely used platforms normalize rather than equalize the existing power dynamics of the political landscape. Our study of New Zealand's 2017 general election uses a mixed-method approach including analysis of five Party Leaders' (PLs) public Facebook wall posts, campaign coverage in four newspapers and interviews with Party workers and MPs. Our findings show PLs seldom interact with citizens and mostly use posts to promote campaign information. Citizens are more likely to 'like' a PL's post than share or comment and there are important divergences between Party and media agendas. These findings demonstrate not only the importance of social media for Parties' attempts to control messaging and disrupt journalistic interference, but also highlight that neither Parties nor citizens seem much invested in dialogue. However, understanding which posts excite citizen engagement may help all Parties more effectively promote participatory democracy globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on restorative justice in prison settings has focused largely on the relationship between restorative and criminal justice, or on the potential of such programs to reduce recidivism rates among participants. Little research focuses on possible other transformations that restorative justice can engender among incarcerated individuals. We address this gap by describing the outcomes of an evaluation of Mending Bridges, a restorative justice program implemented at three men's correctional institutions in New England. Our research points to the transformative potential of this program, not only among individuals but also in changing behaviors and relationships that have an impact on the prison community as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the concept of scaling up in relation to the work of peacebuilding and social justice initiatives. We propose a holistic conception of scaling up that emphasizes the need to look at the impact of peacebuilding and nonviolent movements along the processes that those actions involve. Our model proposes broadening scholars' understanding of the success of nonviolent movements not only by analyzing the size or territorial span of the movements but also by discussing societal changes that the very actions of social movement facilitate, regardless of whether the movement fails or succeeds in achieving its goals. In other words, we propose viewing scaling up as a holistic process where change is inevitable. In addition, our model shifts away from thinking about scaling up as a linear or chronological sequence of steps. Instead, the model views scaling up as impact‐oriented and as an iterative process of social learning, where actions are shaped by reactions (by the government and/or other actors) to previous moves. We suggest that this model can be used to better understand how grassroots peacebuilding and conflict transformation initiatives can broaden impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom holds that international education builds cross‐cultural capacity, and evaluations of peacebuilding interventions point to significant impacts. Yet, little scholarship links these fields or explores the significance of networks of participants in either area for mobilizing transnational peacebuilding capital. We address this by examining how peace and conflict‐oriented international education (PCIE) programs enable construction of lasting alumni networks, and how these can contribute to longer‐term conflict prevention and peacebuilding activities after participants return home. We draw upon an original dataset of 178 PCIE programs and a survey of program founders and staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[18F]MK‐6240 (6‐(fluoro)‐3‐(1H‐pyrrolo[2,3‐c]pyridin‐1‐yl)isoquinolin‐5‐amine) is a highly selective PET radiotracer for the in vivo imaging of neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs). [18F]MK‐6240 was synthesized in one step from its bis‐Boc protected precursor N‐[(tert‐butoxy)carbonyl]‐N‐(6‐nitro‐3‐[1H‐pyrrolo[2,3‐c]pyridin‐1‐yl]isoquinolin‐5‐yl) carbamate in DMSO using [18F] fluoride with TEA HCO3 with step‐wise heating up to 150°C, resulting in an isolated radiochemical yield of 9.8% ± 1.8% (n = 3) calculated from the end of bombardment (5.2% ± 1.0% calculated from the end of synthesis). This new synthetic approach eliminates the acidic deprotection of the bis‐Boc 18F‐labeled intermediate, which reduces the number of operations necessary for the synthesis as well as losses, which occur during deprotection and neutralization of the crude product mixture prior to the HPLC purification. The synthesis was performed automatically with a single‐use cassette on an IBA Synthera+ synthesis module. This synthesis method affords the radioligand with a reliable radiochemical yield, high radiochemical purity, and a high molar activity. [18F]MK‐6240 synthesized with this method has been regularly (n > 60) used in our ongoing human and animal PET imaging studies. [18F]MK‐6240, a highly selective positron emission tomography (PET) radiotracer for the in vivo imaging of neurofibrillary tangles, was prepared by a simple one‐step reaction and validated for use in humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we interrogate the concept of methodological 'failures' as they arise during fieldwork, in the process of collecting empirical data. We highlight how the techniques of validity horizon matrices and power analysis can be used as methodological tools to illustrate moments in the fieldwork process where these 'failures' occur and to illustrate what makes them 'failures' rather than just opportunities for learning. Drawing on examples from our own research, we use validity horizon matrices to suggest that 'failures' largely occur as a result of disagreements about backgrounded, implicit normative claims. We distinguish between 'failures' where communicative possibilities exist for negotiating norms and those where systemic constraints make critique impossible, though we acknowledge that in practice opportunities for negotiating power are limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of youth‐focused encounter initiatives have long focused on the potential of such endeavors to shift the attitudes of participants. In recent years, scholarship has begun t'o address whether encounters can shift behaviors, as well—particularly in terms of motivating continued engagement in peacebuilding and social change initiatives. Yet studies have not addressed the question of how this shift occurs, that is, what mechanisms lead from encounter participation to continued social change engagement. This article draws on long‐standing research with a veteran Israeli encounter organization, Sadaka Reut, to explore what is significant in making the participation–continued engagement link. Its analysis points to personalized learning and Sadaka Reut's binational framework as particularly salient, but also addresses the inherent tensions in an approach aiming to foster critical awareness among youth who are members of both the dominant and oppressed ethnonational groups in a long‐standing conflict context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon of sexual abuse by Catholic leaders has led to many responses by clergy, dioceses, and the global Catholic Church. One underexplored aspect of preventing sexual abuse by Catholic leaders is the educational practice of abuse prevention and the moral implications therein. Here we examine best practices for abuse prevention by turning to the interdisciplinary study of intimate partner violence and prevention education as tools for deeper theological exploration of safeguarding initiatives. Using these interdisciplinary insights, we offer theological grounding for power and relationship education in abuse prevention, identifying children's moral agency, right relationship, a theology of power literacy, and structures of vice as key components in the phenomenon of pervasive abuse. We explain the analysis of safeguarding materials conducted as part of Fordham University's Taking Responsibility grant initiative, and our concerns regarding the lack of best practices and theological gaps noted in our review--gaps related to social ethics, power, and the structural or communal effects of abuse. We conclude with recommendations for developing future safeguarding training, rooted in a relationship-based, systemic understanding of abuse, used to create our own safeguarding workshop for adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the twenty-teens, there are increasing numbers of women occupying executive positions in politics, business and the law but their words and actions rarely make the front page. In this article, we draw on data collected as part of the 2015 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) and focus on England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. Since the first GMMP in 1995, there has been a slow but steady rise in the proportion of women who feature, report or present the news (now at 24 per cent), but that increase is a mere 7 per cent over 20 years. Not only is there a problem with visibility but our data also suggest that when women are present, their contributions are often confined to the realm of the private as they speak as citizens rather than experts and in stories about health but not politics. Just over a third of the media professionals we coded were women and older women are almost entirely missing from the media scene. Citizens and democracy more generally are poorly served by a news media which privileges men's voices, actions and views over the other 51 per cent of the population: we surely deserve better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The asymmetric sampling in time hypothesis (AST) suggests that the left and right secondary auditory areas process auditory stimuli according to different sampling rates (Poeppel, 2003). We investigated whether asymmetries consistent with the AST are observable in children at age 7 and whether they become more pronounced at age 9. Data were collected from 50 children who attended a 2-day research program at age 7 and were followed up 2 years later. At both time points, children were presented with tone-pairs, each composed of two 50 ms, 1000 Hz, sinusoidal tones separated by inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs) of 25, 50, 100, or 200 ms. Stimuli were presented binaurally whilst the EEG was recorded. The Ta and Tb, which are components of the auditory event-related potential (ERP), were used as electrophysiological indices of auditory processing. There was no significant effect of age on Ta or Tb responses. Tb responses to the second tone of tone-pairs indicated a left-hemisphere preference for rapidly presented stimuli (50 ms ISI) and a right hemisphere preference for more slowly presented stimuli (100 and 200 ms ISI). The results provide evidence that auditory areas of the left hemisphere preferentially respond to fast temporal rates, and those of the right hemisphere preferentially respond to slow temporal rates in children at age 7 and 9. In 7-year-old children, leftward lateralisation of responses to rapidly presented tones predicted better phonemic decoding ability 2 years later, which suggests that hemispheric specialisation may be a precursor for subsequent phonemic decoding skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I argue for the importance of conducting comparative studies of educational interventions implemented within the same sociopolitical environment. Taking into account both arguments for comparative research in education and recent calls for context-rich vertical case studies, I suggest that horizontal comparisons in a single environment provide a nuanced view of divergent programmatic approaches and outcomes and allow us to better understand the agency of actors in the educational realm. I draw on the concept of multilevel opportunity structure to explore the work of two encounter organizations in Israel bringing together Jewish and Palestinian youth--Peace Child Israel and Sadaka Reut--and explain why the responses of each organization to shifting political environments in the Israeli context over the past 30 years, especially post-2000, led to different outcomes in terms of organizational survival. My analysis demonstrates how methodological choices affect the potential for theory building in comparative education and points to the importance of examining educational initiatives at an organizational level in order to better understand the relationship between educational initiatives and the broader sociopolitical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a rapid increase of scientific literature on this deadly disease. Extracting knowledge from biomedical literature and integrating it with relevant information from curated biological databases is essential to gain insight into COVID-19 etiology, diagnosis and treatment. We used Semantic Web technology RDF to integrate COVID-19 knowledge mined from literature by iTextMine, PubTator and SemRep with relevant biological databases and formalized the knowledge in a standardized and computable COVID-19 Knowledge Graph (KG). We published the COVID-19 KG via a SPARQL endpoint to support federated queries on the Semantic Web and developed a knowledge portal with browsing and searching interfaces. We also developed a RESTful API to support programmatic access and provided RDF dumps for download. Availability and implementation The COVID-19 Knowledge Graph is publicly available under CC-BY 4.0 license at https://research.bioinformatics.udel.edu/covid19kg/. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mucosal epithelial cells express an autonomous innate immune response that controls the overgrowth of invaded bacteria, mitigates the harmful effects of the bacteria carried within, and does not rely on other external arms of the immune response. Epithelial cell autonomous innate immunity “respects” the social biology of invading bacteria to achieve symbiosis, and is the primary protective mechanism against pathogens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: MicroRNAs are increasingly being appreciated as critical players in human diseases, and questions concerning the role of microRNAs arise in many areas of biomedical research. There are several manually curated databases of microRNA-disease associations gathered from the biomedical literature; however, it is difficult for curators of these databases to keep up with the explosion of publications in the microRNA-disease field. Moreover, automated literature mining tools that assist manual curation of microRNA-disease associations currently capture only one microRNA property (expression) in the context of one disease (cancer). Thus, there is a clear need to develop more sophisticated automated literature mining tools that capture a variety of microRNA properties and relations in the context of multiple diseases to provide researchers with fast access to the most recent published information and to streamline and accelerate manual curation. Methods: We have developed miRiaD (microRNAs in association with Disease), a text-mining tool that automatically extracts associations between microRNAs and diseases from the literature. These associations are often not directly linked, and the intermediate relations are often highly informative for the biomedical researcher. Thus, miRiaD extracts the miR-disease pairs together with an explanation for their association. We also developed a procedure that assigns scores to sentences, marking their informativeness, based on the microRNA-disease relation observed within the sentence. Results: miRiaD was applied to the entire Medline corpus, identifying 8301 PMIDs with miR-disease associations. These abstracts and the miR-disease associations are available for browsing at http://biotm.cis.udel.edu/miRiaD. We evaluated the recall and precision of miRiaD with respect to information of high interest to public microRNAdisease database curators (expression and target gene associations), obtaining a recall of 88.46-90.78. When we expanded the evaluation to include sentences with a wide range of microRNA-disease information that may be of interest to biomedical researchers, miRiaD also performed very well with a F-score of 89.4. The informativeness ranking of sentences was evaluated in terms of nDCG (0.977) and correlation metrics (0.678-0.727) when compared to an annotator's ranked list. Conclusions: miRiaD, a high performance system that can capture a wide variety of microRNA-disease related information, extends beyond the scope of existing microRNA-disease resources. It can be incorporated into manual curation pipelines and serve as a resource for biomedical researchers interested in the role of microRNAs in disease. In our ongoing work we are developing an improved miRiaD web interface that will facilitate complex queries about microRNA-disease relationships, such as "In what diseases does microRNA regulation of apoptosis play a role?" or "Is there overlap in the sets of genes targeted by microRNAs in different types of dementia?".". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activating phosphorylation of cyclin-dependent protein kinases (CDKs) is necessary for their kinase activity and cell cycle progression. This phosphorylation is carried out by the Cdk-activating kinase (CAK); in contrast, little is known about the corresponding protein phosphatase. We show that type 2C protein phosphatases (PP2Cs) are responsible for this dephosphorylation of Cdc28p, the major budding yeast CDK. Two yeast PP2Cs, Ptc2p and Ptc3p, display Cdc28p phosphatase activity in vitro and in vivo, and account for ~90% of Cdc28p phosphatase activity in yeast extracts. Overexpression of PTC2 or PTC3 results in synthetic lethality in strains temperature-sensitive for yeast CAK1, and disruptions of PTC2 and PTC3 suppress the growth defect of a cak1 mutant. Furthermore, PP2C-like enzymes are the predominant phosphatases toward human Cdk2 in HeLa cell extracts, indicating that the substrate specificity of PP2Cs toward CDKs is evolutionarily conserved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we address the phenomenon of clients who present their concerns in the medicalised discourse of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Fifth Edition (DSM-5). We contextualise this phenomenon, highlighting how a 'diagnose-and-treat' logic increasingly pervades everyday understandings and informs people's efforts to make sense of their concerns. We relate these cultural ways of sense-making to discursive counselling practice, noting possibilities for circumventing 'discursive capture' through reflective and generative dialogues. We then turn to two common ways in which clients present their concerns in counselling: (1) arriving self-diagnosed or diagnosed by another professional and (2) as a family in which parents present a child as having a mental disorder. We suggest ways of moving beyond medicalised discourse via resourceful and critically reflective conversations with clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the wealth of bioinformatics resources and the growing complexity of biological information, it is valuable to integrate data from disparate sources to gain insight into the role of genes/proteins in health and disease. We have developed a bioinformatics framework that combines literature mining with information from biomedical ontologies and curated databases to create knowledge “maps” of genes/proteins of interest. We applied this approach to the study of beta-catenin, a cell adhesion molecule and transcriptional regulator implicated in cancer. The knowledge map includes post-translational modifications (PTMs), protein-protein interactions, disease-associated mutations, and transcription factors co-activated by beta-catenin and their targets and captures the major processes in which beta-catenin is known to participate. Using the map, we generated testable hypotheses about beta-catenin biology in normal and cancer cells. By focusing on proteins participating in multiple relation types, we identified proteins that may participate in feedback loops regulating beta-catenin transcriptional activity. By combining multiple network relations with PTM proteoform-specific functional information, we proposed a mechanism to explain the observation that the cyclin dependent kinase CDK5 positively regulates beta-catenin co-activator activity. Finally, by overlaying cancer-associated mutation data with sequence features, we observed mutation patterns in several beta-catenin PTM sites and PTM enzyme binding sites that varied by tissue type, suggesting multiple mechanisms by which beta-catenin mutations can contribute to cancer. The approach described, which captures rich information for molecular species from genes and proteins to PTM proteoforms, is extensible to other proteins and their involvement in disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) regulate a wide range of cellular and developmental processes through gene expression suppression or mRNA degradation. Experimentally validated miRNA gene targets are often reported in the literature. In this paper, we describe miRTex, a text mining system that extracts miRNA-target relations, as well as miRNA-gene and gene-miRNA regulation relations. The system achieves good precision and recall when evaluated on a literature corpus of 150 abstracts with F-scores close to 0.90 on the three different types of relations. We conducted full-scale text mining using miRTex to process all the Medline abstracts and all the full-length articles in the PubMed Central Open Access Subset. The results for all the Medline abstracts are stored in a database for interactive query and file download via the website at . Using miRTex, we identified genes potentially regulated by miRNAs in Triple Negative Breast Cancer, as well as miRNA-gene relations that, in conjunction with kinase-substrate relations, regulate the response to abiotic stress in Arabidopsis thaliana. These two use cases demonstrate the usefulness of miRTex text mining in the analysis of miRNA-regulated biological processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this manuscript, I interrogate the concept of ‘quality’ encounter programs for youth in conflict zones. I focus on two Israeli organizations implementing encounters for Jewish and Palestinian citizens, and draw upon narratives of former participants as articulated during life history narratives to illustrate divergent emphases in each organization’s goals and implementation strategies. Through my comparison of the organizations and their work, I highlight the importance in encounter programs of providing opportunities not only for legitimizing the collective narrative of the ‘other’ side, but also for critical reflection upon in-group narratives and policies, and suggest that ‘quality’ peace education programs are those that provide these opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1923, Thomas Barbour of Harvard announced the creation of a national lay organization, the Society of Friends of Medical Progress (FMP), to defend animal research in the United States against a resurgent antivivisection movement. After decades of successful behind-the-scenes lobbying and avoiding the public spotlight, medical scientists significantly altered their tactics and sought public engagement, at least by proxy. Although the authority of scientific medicine was rising, women's suffrage, the advent of the ballot initiative, and a growing alliance of antivivisectionists and other groups in opposition to allopathic medicine so altered the political landscape that medical scientists reconsidered formerly rejected ideas such partnering with laymen. Medical scientists, Walter B. Cannon and Simon Flexner chief among them, hoped that the FMP would relieve the scientists of a time-consuming burden and defend against government regulation of medical institutions without the charge of material self-interest. However, financial problems and the frequent conflicts that arose between the lay leadership and Flexner eventually undermined the FMP's value as a defender of animal experimentation and reveal the distrust of reformers like Flexner who did not believe that laymen could speak for scientific medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is rare to hear about the gendered risks of field work. My experiences with sexual violence with key informants forced me to assume a variety of defensive behaviors, which ran counter to the ways that scholarly discussions of methods tend to emphasize the importance of reducing distance and shifting power away from the researcher in a cross-cultural context. By considering gendered risks, I question the extent to which an idealized male researcher is still viewed as the archetype from which methods are conceptualized and practiced, and the implications are then discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although serial killings are relatively rare, they can be the cause of a great deal of anxiety while the killer remains at-large. Despite the fact that the motivations for serial killings are typically quite complex, the psychological analysis of a serial killer can provide valuable insight into how and why certain individuals become serial killers. Such knowledge may be instrumental in preventing future serial killings or in solving ongoing cases. In certain serial killings, the various incidents have a variety of similar features. Identification of similarities between separate homicidal incidents is necessary to recognize that a serial killer may be actively killing. In this report, the authors present a group of serial killings involving three prostitutes who were shot to death over a 3-month period. Scene and autopsy findings, including the unusual finding of postmortem enucleation of the eyes, led investigators to recognize the serial nature of the homicides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media have an increasingly important place in the lives of citizens, and their potential to expand the reach of communication messages beyond individual networks is attractive to those looking to maximise message efficiency. The influence of Facebook in Obama’s 2008 campaign success galvanised many politicians into taking it seriously as a campaign tool. Our study explored the Facebook wall posts (1148 in total) of New Zealand Members of Parliament (MPs) leading up to the 2011 general election to determine posting behaviours and differences. Among other things, we found that women posted more frequently than men and that Labour MPs posted more than their National counterparts. Additionally, most politicians do not invite dialogue with readers of their posts, rarely get involved in comment threads and mostly take a monologic approach, using Facebook as a way of broadcasting information rather than as a medium enabling two-way flow. In other words, same old, same old. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

According to the asymmetric sampling in time hypothesis, the left auditory cortex processes stimuli using a short temporal integration window (~25–50 ms), whereas the right auditory cortex processes stimuli using a long temporal integration window (~200 ms). We examined N1 and T-complex responses to the second tone of tone-pairs presented with inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs) of 50 and 200 ms. Twenty-seven undergraduate students were presented with stimuli binaurally whilst the EEG was recorded. N1 and Ta responses were symmetric between hemispheres, with responses elicited by the second tone of the 50 ms ISI tone-pairs. Tb responses to the second tones were significantly attenuated over the right hemisphere when compared to the left hemisphere for the 50 ms ISI tone-pairs, but returned to similar amplitudes in the 200 ms condition. Our results suggest that temporal integration windows of the left and right primary auditory areas are symmetric whereas those of the left and right secondary auditory areas are asymmetric. These findings are consistent with the asymmetric sampling in time hypothesis and provide justification for further investigation of the involvement of temporal integration in higher order auditory processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protein phosphorylation is a reversible post-translational modification where a protein kinase adds a phosphate group to a protein, potentially regulating its function, localization and/or activity. Phosphorylation can affect protein-protein interactions (PPIs), abolishing interaction with previous binding partners or enabling new interactions. Extracting phosphorylation information coupled with PPI information from the scientific literature will facilitate the creation of phosphorylation interaction networks of kinases, substrates and interacting partners, toward knowledge discovery of functional outcomes of protein phosphorylation. Increasingly, PPI databases are interested in capturing the phosphorylation state of interacting partners. We have previously developed the eFIP (Extracting Functional Impact of Phosphorylation) text mining system, which identifies phosphorylated proteins and phosphorylation-dependent PPIs. In this work, we present several enhancements for the eFIP system: (i) text mining for full-length articles from the PubMed Central open-access collection; (ii) the integration of the RLIMS-P 2.0 system for the extraction of phosphorylation events with kinase, substrate and site information; (iii) the extension of the PPI module with new trigger words/phrases describing interactions and (iv) the addition of the iSimp tool for sentence simplification to aid in the matching of syntactic patterns. We enhance the website functionality to: (i) support searches based on protein roles (kinases, substrates, interacting partners) or using keywords; (ii) link protein entities to their corresponding UniProt identifiers if mapped and (iii) support visual exploration of phosphorylation interaction networks using Cytoscape. The evaluation of eFIP on full-length articles achieved 92.4% precision, 76.5% recall and 83.7% F-measure on 100 article sections. To demonstrate eFIP for knowledge extraction and discovery, we constructed phosphorylation-dependent interaction networks involving 14-3-3 proteins identified from cancer-related versus diabetes-related articles. Comparison of the phosphorylation interaction network of kinases, phosphoproteins and interactants obtained from eFIP searches, along with enrichment analysis of the protein set, revealed several shared interactions, highlighting common pathways discussed in the context of both diseases. Database URL: http://proteininformationresource.org/efip [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is undoubtedly true that social media such as Facebook and Twitter are influencing the ways in which politicians engage the public, no longer hostage to the gatekeeping proclivities of traditional media, but now able to broadcast their messages to anyone who wants to hear them. On the public’s side, we can now follow politicians who are on Twitter or have a Facebook fan page, comment on their tweets and posts, and send them messages directly. So far, so democratic. But how many of us actually do more than just read posts and tweets and how many politicians do more than just inform us about their activities? Crucially, do politicians use social media in ways that enhance opportunities for dialogue between them and us? To explore these questions further in relation to politicians’ Facebook behaviours, we interviewed New Zealand Members of Parliament about their motivations for using social media and their attitudes on such media’s effectiveness as a political communication tool in the context of a general election campaign. Our findings suggest that despite their talk of citizen engagement, most politicians use social media as means of distributing information (one-way flow) and to make themselves both visible and ‘hip’ to the public. While cautiously optimistic about the role of social media in the lives of citizens, Members of Parliament also suggest that social media must be complementary to, and thus incorporated in, a broad-based communications strategy, rather than be seen as a replacement for traditional campaign activities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the study on the role of women in decision-making in large media organisations in Europe and the types of policies focused on gender equality in those organisations. It details how the study was conducted which a survey of 99 organisations from European Union countries and Croatia. The results reportedly revealed a low number of women in senior decision-making positions. It notes that there are only few organisations with robust gender equality policies.

The article discusses aspects of the liberation theology impacting the lives of the oppressed and poor. It states the possibility of model of sister-parish relationships in acting liberation theology from within the margins and maintaining the integrity of the daily experiences. It also mentions the essential of building mutual respect among theologians to sustain the relationship with other people.

Knowledge representation of the role of phosphorylation is essential for the meaningful understanding of many biological processes. However, such a representation is challenging because proteins can exist in numerous phosphorylated forms with each one having its own characteristic protein-protein interactions (PPIs), functions and subcellular localization. In this article, we evaluate the current state of phosphorylation event curation and then present a bioinformatics framework for the annotation and representation of phosphorylated proteins and construction of phosphorylation networks that addresses some of the gaps in current curation efforts. The integrated approach involves (i) text mining guided by RLIMS-P, a tool that identifies phosphorylation-related information in scientific literature; (ii) data mining from curated PPI databases; (iii) protein form and complex representation using the Protein Ontology (PRO); (iv) functional annotation using the Gene Ontology (GO); and (v) network visualization and analysis with Cytoscape. We use this framework to study the spindle checkpoint, the process that monitors the assembly of the mitotic spindle and blocks cell cycle progression at metaphase until all chromosomes have made bipolar spindle attachments. The phosphorylation networks we construct, centered on the human checkpoint kinase BUB1B (BubR1) and its yeast counterpart MAD3, offer a unique view of the spindle checkpoint that emphasizes biologically relevant phosphorylated forms, phosphorylation-state-specific PPIs and kinase-substrate relationships. Our approach for constructing protein phosphorylation networks can be applied to any biological process that is affected by phosphorylation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the months leading up to the 2010 British General Election, pundits were claiming that women would be specifically targeted by all political parties. However, this focus never materialized and it was just more business as usual but with the added novelty of televised leaders’ debates, which meant that coverage was more male ordered than ever. The study on which this article is based monitored articles published in the four weeks leading up to election day across twelve newspapers, comprising a mix of dailies and weekend editions, broadsheets and midmarket, and tabloid titles. The study concentrated on articles that had the election as the main story and which mentioned or sourced one or more candidates, both MPs seeking reelection, and Parliamentary Candidates. We were interested in exploring (any) differences in the news coverage of women and men candidates, looking at both frequency and content. Our findings suggest that women were much less likely to feature in news stories than men, even when controlling for Party Leader coverage. Women were much more likely to be mentioned or quoted in feature articles focused explicitly on gender issues, made interesting because of their sex and couture rather than their political abilities and experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article emerges from struggles we, two American–Israeli women, have encountered while conducting research in Israel on issues related to Jewish-Arab dynamics. Since beginning our research we have faced a single question in nearly every interview: “Where are you from?” Embedded in this question are a whole host of other queries: “Are you American? Israeli? Jewish? Arab?” “What is your native language?” This article engages in the methodological consequences of our responses to these questions and broader identity-negotiations during qualitative interviews. What happens when we, as researchers, foreground or background, particular identities? Furthermore, how does the fluidity of our identities inform the specific information we gather? We analyze two case studies in which the fluidity of our identities unfolds during an interview to highlight the coconstruction of interviews and the active process involved in presenting facets of ourselves, a process that conditions subsequent data collection and knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Question Woody plants have increased in density in many ecosystems, but the factors promoting encroachment are often debated. Since European colonization, C allitris glaucophylla has recruited abundantly in many E ucalyptus- C allitris woodlands in eastern Australia following changes to disturbance regimes analogous to changes in many other ecosystems globally. We used a dynamic stand model to disentangle effects of disturbances on Callitris encroachment and asked, to what extent was C allitris encroachment enhanced by historical removal of pre-settlement trees and subsequent thinning of regrowth? Location Woodlands dominated by E ucalyptus sp. and C . glaucophylla, which originally occupied ca. 100 000 km2 in eastern Australia. Methods We used a process-driven stand simulation model to simulate tree demography, with growth, survival and recruitment mediated by annual rainfall, competition and disturbance. Following parameter calibration and model testing, we orthogonally manipulated historical removal of pre-settlement trees and thinning of regrowth to identify how both processes may have influenced structural changes over 120 yr of European settlement. Results Removal of pre-settlement trees had little effect on modelled encroachment, as trees increased to comparable densities whether pre-settlement trees were retained or removed. In unthinned scenarios, C allitris regeneration formed 'locked' stands of high density but low basal area. Thinning promoted growth of retained C allitris, increased total stand basal area, and together with direct removal of large pre-settlement E ucalyptus and thinning of E ucalyptus regrowth, transformed stands from E ucalyptus to C allitris dominance. Conclusions Removal of pre-settlement trees does not appear to have been a necessary precursor to modelled encroachment in E ucalyptus- C allitris woodlands in eastern Australia, perhaps because initial tree cover was low and C allitris can regenerate beneath isolated trees. Manual thinning was required to effect major structural change because C allitris self-thins extremely slowly; thinning will be less important in other ecosystems that self-thin more rapidly. The impact of historical tree removal on encroachment is likely to vary according to initial tree cover, with greatest impacts in dense ecosystems with high tree cover. These results highlight the value of simulation models for disentangling the effects of multiple disturbances on tree encroachment and other ecosystem dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Cognitive control refers to the ability to selectively attend and respond to task-relevant events while resisting interference from distracting stimuli or prepotent automatic responses. The current study aimed to determine whether interference suppression and response inhibition are separable component processes of cognitive control. Methodology/Principal Findings: Fourteen young adults completed a hybrid Go/Nogo flanker task and continuous EEG data were recorded concurrently. The incongruous flanker condition (that required interference suppression) elicited a more centrally distributed topography with a later N2 peak than the Nogo condition (that required response inhibition). Conclusions/Significance: These results provide evidence for the dissociability of interference suppression and response inhibition, indicating that taxonomy of inhibition is warranted with the integration of research evidence from neuroscience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist news researchers have long argued that in the macho culture of most newsrooms, journalists’ daily decisions about what is newsworthy remain firmly based on masculine news values. As such, issues and topics traditionally seen to be particularly relevant to women tend to be pushed to the margins of the news where the implicit assumption is that they are less important than those which interest men. In so doing, men’s views and voices are privileged over women’s, thereby contributing to the ongoing secondary status of women’s participation as citizens. In this article, we draw upon data we collected from the UK and the Republic of Ireland as part of the larger, 108-country study, which comprised the 2010 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP). We argue that while there have been some positive improvements in women’s representation as news actors, sources and journalists in the British and Irish news media since the first GMMP day of monitoring in 1995, women’s voices, experiences and expertise continue to be regarded by news industries as less important than those of men. Such a situation undermines and under-reports women’s contribution to social, economic and cultural life and in so doing, diminishes democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Substrate imbalance is a well-recognized feature of diabetic cardiomyopathy. Insulin resistance effectively limits carbohydrate oxidation, resulting in abnormal cardiac glycogen accumulation. Aims of the present study were to 1) characterize the role of glycogen-associated proteins involved in excessive glycogen accumulation in type 2 diabetic hearts and 2) determine if exercise training can attenuate abnormal cardiac glycogen accumulation. Control (db+) and genetically diabetic (db/db) C57BL/KsJ-leprdb/leprdb mice were subjected to sedentary or treadmill exercise regimens. Exercise training consisted of high-intensity/short-duration (10 days) and low-intensity/long-duration (6 wk) protocols. Glycogen levels were elevated by 35-50% in db/db hearts. Exercise training further increased (2- to 3-fold) glycogen levels in db/db hearts. Analysis of soluble and insoluble glycogen pools revealed no differential accumulation of one glycogen subspecies. Phosphorylation (Ser640) of glycogen synthase, an indicator of enzymatic fractional activity, was greater in db/db mice subjected to sedentary and exercise regimens. Elevated glycogen levels were accompanied by decreased phosphorylation (Thr172) of 5′-AMP-activated kinase and phosphorylation (Ser79) of its downstream substrate acetyl-CoA carboxylase. Glycogen concentration was not associated with increases in other glycogen-associated proteins, including malin and laforin. Novel observations show that exercise training does not correct diabetes-induced elevations in cardiac glycogen but, rather, precipitates further accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses the little understood relationship between educational attainment and public attitudes towards war in four predominantly Muslim countries contemplating war: Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Turkey. The multivariate analysis using public opinion data suggests that the educational attainment of respondents has no statistically significant association with believing that war is necessary for obtaining justice. In a separate analysis, there is no statistically significant association between educational attainment and believing that UN approval is necessary before using military force to deal with an international threat. This study suggests that there is some validity to concerns raised by the UK's Department for International Development and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) that education may not be contributing to peaceful conflict resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to explore the ways politicians characterize and think about the relationships they sustain with journalists, using a case study approach that focuses on the views and attitudes of New Zealand MPs towards members of the Press Gallery and, to a lesser extent, their local and regional news media. Undertaken over a twentyfour-month period, with two fieldwork phases, 62 of 121 MPs were interviewed. The broad findings suggest that MPs are relatively sanguine about their media relationships, recognizing their symbiotic nature, but clear differences emerged in terms of the complexity and friendliness of these relationships. Those differences can be accounted for primarily by way of personal style and preferences, on one hand, and party status and position, on the other: factors such as gender (either of the politician or the journalist) were not significant as determinants of difference, although women were more likely to characterize their relationships as "friendly" compared with men, who tended to use more neutral language such as "collegial." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

White cypress pine Callitris glaucophylla is an important native tree widespread in heavily cleared savanna woodlands of the south-east Australian wheat-sheep belt. C. glaucophylla woodlands have been the focus of vigorous debate regarding their structure and dynamics during Aboriginal times and following European settlement, and the causes of structural changes are poorly understood. Management of contemporary woodland remnants is therefore controversial, and has so far lacked a predictive, process-based approach. We sought to determine whether a simple process model with recruitment, growth and survival mediated by rainfall and competition, could accurately simulate medium-term dynamics of C. glaucophylla woodlands in which fire has typically been excluded. Model parameters were optimised using reference data from 6- to 36-year silvicultural trials in central-western New South Wales (NSW). Predictions of the calibrated model compared favourably to actual growth, survival and recruitment of C. glaucophylla in the reference data, as well as in an independent dataset not used in optimisation. We tested whether remaining differences between predictions and actual data were related to variation in site productivity (a function of moisture availability as influenced by soil and landscape factors not modelled). Growth was overestimated in low-productivity sites and underestimated in high-productivity sites. Growth predictions were improved by using site-specific expected maximum heights to reflect site productivity. We also tested whether the model and parameter set produce dynamics consistent with those observed over the last half century. Modelled growth, survival, recruitment and competition processes were consistent with data and observations in previous studies on historical dynamics and stand behaviour of C. glaucophylla. The model has a wide range of potential applications for understanding past and predicting future stand dynamics. To illustrate an application of the model to thinning, a strategy currently being implemented to manage tree densities in inland NSW, we compared predicted stand structures in simulations of different thinning treatments. The simulations showed that without careful manipulation of existing canopy cover, stands can re-fill to pre-thinning densities within relatively short periods of time. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Some degree of physical activity is always preferable to a sedentary lifestyle. For home bound elderly, with limited mobility and strength, physical activity should be focused on "functional fitness" such as performing activities of daily living, transfers, and mobility. Progressive resistance training and flexion exercises are critical for maintaining muscle mass and subsequent Independence In activities of dally living Physicians and other health (are providers must disseminate the message promoting physical activity among all of their patients, especially frail older adults. The goals of physical activity counseling am to provide concrete Information, clear and consistent recommendations, and to recognize barriers that older adults face in initiating and maintaining a program. Tailoring the message based on a patient's health and functional status is paramount, and counselling should be ongoing and Included at every visit. We examine the benefits of exercise for frail home bound elderly, potential barriers to exercise, and ways to initiate a physical activity program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces articles and research papers of the March 2005 issue of the journal "Feminist Media Studies."