Queering religious texts: An exploration of British non-heterosexual Christians’ and Muslims’ strategy of constructing sexuality-affirming hermeneutics.

Religious authority figures often use religious texts as the primary basis for censuring homosexuality. In recent years, however, non-heterosexual Christians and Muslims have begun to contest the discursively produced boundary of sexual morality.Drawing upon two research projects on non-heterosexual Christians and Muslims, this article explores the three approaches embedded in this strategy.While acknowledging that homosexuality is indeed portrayed negatively in some parts of religious texts, the participants critique traditional hermeneutics by highlighting its inaccuracy and socio-cultural specificity, and arguing for a contextualized and culturally relevant interpretation. They also critique the credibility of institutional interpretive authority by highlighting its inadequacy and ideology, and relocating authentic interpretive authority to personal experience. Finally, they recast religious texts to construct resources for their spiritual nourishment.This strategy generally reflects the contemporary western religious landscape that prioritizes the authority of the self over that of religious institution.

ArrayMining: a modular web-application for microarray analysis combining ensemble and consensus methods with cross-study normalization

Background: Statistical analysis of DNA microarray data provides a valuable diagnostic tool for the investigation of genetic components of diseases. To take advantage of the multitude of available data sets and analysis methods, it is desirable to combine both different algorithms and data from different studies. Applying ensemble learning, consensus clustering and cross-study normalization methods for this purpose in an almost fully automated process and linking different analysis modules together under a single interface would simplify many microarray analysis tasks. Results: We present ArrayMining.net, a web-application for microarray analysis that provides easy access to a wide choice of feature selection, clustering, prediction, gene set analysis and cross-study normalization methods. In contrast to other microarray-related web-tools, multiple algorithms and data sets for an analysis task can be combined using ensemble feature selection, ensemble prediction, consensus clustering and cross-platform data integration. By interlinking different analysis tools in a modular fashion, new exploratory routes become available, e.g. ensemble sample classification using features obtained from a gene set analysis and data from multiple studies. The analysis is further simplified by automatic parameter selection mechanisms and linkage to web tools and databases for functional annotation and literature mining. Conclusion: ArrayMining.net is a free web-application for microarray analysis combining a broad choice of algorithms based on ensemble and consensus methods, using automatic parameter selection and integration with annotation databases.

Compounds, creativity and complexity in climate change communication: the case of ‘carbon indulgences’

This article deals with climate change from a linguistic perspective. Climate change is an extremely complex issue that has exercised the minds of experts and policy makers with renewed urgency in recent years. It has prompted an explosion of writing in the media, on the internet and in the domain of popular science and literature, as well as a proliferation of new compounds around the word ‘carbon’ as a hub, such as ‘carbon indulgence’, a new compound that will be studied in this article. Through a linguistic analysis of lexical and discourse formations around such ‘carbon compounds’ we aim to contribute to a broader understanding of the meaning of climate change. Lexical carbon compounds are used here as indicators for observing how human symbolic cultures change and adapt in response to environmental threats and how symbolic innovation and transmission occurs.