Making Risk Visible. The role of images in the assessment of (cancer) genetic risk

Whilst analysis of 'risk' (in its many conceptual shapes) has loomed large in both medicine and social sciences over the past 25 years, detailed investigations as to how risk assessments are actually put together (in either lay or professional contexts) are few in number. The studies that are available usually focus on the use of words or everyday conversation in assembling risk. Talking about risk is, of course, important, but what tends to be ignored is the fact that risk can be and is often made visible. For example, it can be made visible through the use of tables, charts, diagrams and various kinds of sophisticated laboratory images. This paper concentrates on the role of such images in the context of a cancer genetics clinic and its associated laboratory. Precisely how these images are tied into the production of risk estimates, how professionals discuss and use such images in clinical work, and how professionals reference them to display facts about risk is the focus of the paper. The paper concludes by highlighting the significance of different kinds of visibility for an understanding of genetic abnormalities and how such differences might impact on the attempts of lay people to get to grips with risk.

The construction of images of people and place: Labelling Liverpool and stereotyping Scousers.

On 28th August 1207, King John created the Borough of Liverpool by granting its first charter. During the ensuing 800 years Liverpool has experienced a complex and changing social, economic and political history resulting in powerful images of the city and its people. This paper examines the labelling of Liverpool and stereotypes of Scousers. It explains how historical and contemporary events, and their coverage in various arms of the media, construct social and spatial imaginations of the city. This involves a more systematic contribution to the how and why dimensions of negative place imagery and social stereotypes, and enhances our understanding of the processes and issues affecting our interpretations of people and place. The analysis is both historical and contemporaneous in teasing out how previous and current events shape the perceptions of insiders and outsiders. This paper reveals that despite concerted efforts to re-brand Liverpool the city continues to face difficult challenges with ongoing bad publicity and negative place imagery.

The ‘Public Interest’ Agency of International Organizations? The case of the OECD Principles of Corporate Governance

This article seeks to outline and explore some of the conditions necessary for International Organizations (IOs) to perform in a public interest fashion through a case study of the Principles of corporate governance formulated by the OECD. Rather than the more commonly documented pathological and dysfunctional behavioural forms of IOs, the case of the Principles, both in their formulation by the OECD, and in their assessment by the World Bank through the ROSC process, represent an episode of IO agency protecting and promoting a wider public interest. In exercising their agency, IO staff, have made the Principles more agreeable to a wider range of interested parties, giving them a general interest orientation, in accordance with a proceduralist definition of public interest. This case should therefore encourage IPE scholars to consider carefully and systematically the sets of circumstances and conditions, which might be required for IO agency to take more socially useful forms. In the final section, three indicators are identified which might be evaluated in future research into the positive public interest agency of IOs across a range of cases.

The Fundamental Rights Agency of the EU A New Panopticism

The Fundamental Rights Agency of the European Union (FRA) is the EU’s newest, and only, human rights institution. The FRA represents a new way of speaking about rights in the EU, using ‘governance’ language. It was not conceived as a traditional human rights monitoring body and the monitoring mission was actively abandoned in favour of an advisory one. This article examines how the FRA’s governance-related role actually reveals a type of monitoring best understood as ‘surveillance’ in a critical, Foucauldian sense. In exercising surveillance tactics, the FRA represents a model of panopticism which allows it to carry out a new form of government. This is an interesting observation not only because of the implications it has for an EU that is striving to move away from government towards governance, but also because it challenges the assumption of the FRA as a ‘beacon on fundamental rights’ and a model of apolitical progress.

Computerised Diagnostic Decision Support System for the Classification of Pre-Invasive Cervical Squamous Lesions.

Previous studies have revealed considerable interobserver and intraobserver variation in the histological classification of preinvasive cervical squamous lesions. The aim of the present study was to develop a decision support system (DSS) for the histological interpretation of these lesions. Knowledge and uncertainty were represented in the form of a Bayesian belief network that permitted the storage of diagnostic knowledge and, for a given case, the collection of evidence in a cumulative manner that provided a final probability for the possible diagnostic outcomes. The network comprised 8 diagnostic histological features (evidence nodes) that were each independently linked to the diagnosis (decision node) by a conditional probability matrix. Diagnostic outcomes comprised normal; koilocytosis; and cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) 1, CIN II, and CIN M. For each evidence feature, a set of images was recorded that represented the full spectrum of change for that feature. The system was designed to be interactive in that the histopathologist was prompted to enter evidence into the network via a specifically designed graphical user interface (i-Path Diagnostics, Belfast, Northern Ireland). Membership functions were used to derive the relative likelihoods for the alternative feature outcomes, the likelihood vector was entered into the network, and the updated diagnostic belief was computed for the diagnostic outcomes and displayed. A cumulative probability graph was generated throughout the diagnostic process and presented on screen. The network was tested on 50 cervical colposcopic biopsy specimens, comprising 10 cases each of normal, koilocytosis, CIN 1, CIN H, and CIN III. These had been preselected by a consultant gynecological pathologist. Using conventional morphological assessment, the cases were classified on 2 separate occasions by 2 consultant and 2 junior pathologists. The cases were also then classified using the DSS on 2 occasions by the 4 pathologists and by 2 medical students with no experience in cervical histology. Interobserver and intraobserver agreement using morphology and using the DSS was calculated with K statistics. Intraobserver reproducibility using conventional unaided diagnosis was reasonably good (kappa range, 0.688 to 0.861), but interobserver agreement was poor (kappa range, 0.347 to 0.747). Using the DSS improved overall reproducibility between individuals. Using the DSS, however, did not enhance the diagnostic performance of junior pathologists when comparing their DSS-based diagnosis against an experienced consultant. However, the generation of a cumulative probability graph also allowed a comparison of individual performance, how individual features were assessed in the same case, and how this contributed to diagnostic disagreement between individuals. Diagnostic features such as nuclear pleomorphism were shown to be particularly problematic and poorly reproducible. DSSs such as this therefore not only have a role to play in enhancing decision making but also in the study of diagnostic protocol, education, self-assessment, and quality control. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The use of Raman microscopy to determine and localize vitamin E in biological samples

Alpha-tocopherol (aT), the predominant form of vitamin E in mammals, is thought to prevent oxidation of polyunsaturated fatty acids. In the lung, aT is perceived to be accumulated in alveolar type II cells and secreted together with surfactant into the epithelial lining fluid. Conventionally, determination of aT and related compounds requires extraction with organic solvents. This study describes a new method to determine and image the distribution of aT and related compounds within cells and tissue sections using the light-scattering technique of Raman microscopy to enable high spatial as well as spectral resolution. This study compared the nondestructive analysis by Raman microscopy of vitamin E, in particular aT, in biological samples with data obtained using conventional HPLC analysis. Raman spectra were acquired at spatial resolutions of 2-0.8 microm. Multivariate analysis techniques were used for analyses and construction of corresponding maps showing the distribution of aT, alpha-tocopherol quinone (aTQ), and other constituents (hemes, proteins, DNA, and surfactant lipids). A combination of images enabled identification of colocalized constituents (heme/aTQ and aT/surfactant lipids). Our data demonstrate the ability of Raman microscopy to discriminate between different tocopherols and oxidation products in biological specimens without sample destruction. By enabling the visualization of lipid-protein interactions, Raman microscopy offers a novel method of investigating biological characterization of lipid-soluble compounds, including those that may be embedded in biological membranes such as aT.

'What say you to [this] book? Is it yours?'::Oral and Collaborative Narrative Trajectories in the Mediated Writings of Anna Trapnel

This article argues that, when a printed page is initially orally generated and then transcribed, either at the time or on a subsequent occasion by a listener or an interlocutor, there are important critical implications for the “I” of the account. It takes as a case study Anna Trapnel's first published works. Appearing within a few weeks of each other in 1654, The Cry of a Stone and Strange and Wonderful News are both mediated texts, large parts of which depend on the agency of a relater. The article begins by examining the textual traces of the relater, arguing for the centrality of his role and other agencies in the shaping of the works which bear Trapnel's name. Situating itself in relation to a current orientation in feminist autobiographical theory that places emphasis on the external requirement to narrate one's life, rather than on the spontaneous production of autobiography by an inner self, the article emphasizes notions of coaxing, witnessing and intersubjectivity to point up an appreciation of women's life writing as a species of cultural production in which various historical actors—male and female—participate. This dialogic process, which persists into the afterlife of transcription, owes part of its genesis to the political vagaries of 1654 and precipitates two contrasting—but equally “authentic”—versions of Trapnel's life and self. Mapping this movement, discussion concentrates on the ways in which a critical confrontation with women's oral narrative is as much an activity of disentangling as it is of reconstructing, an activity which is revealing of the extent to which a spectrum of social and cultural networks participates in and facilitates the female writing act.

The Fraternity of Metaphors: Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme

Since the 'completion' of Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-1998), Jean-Luc Godard's work has become increasingly mosaic-like in its forms and configurations, and markedly elegiac in its ruminations on history, cinema, art, and thought. While his associative aesthetic and citational method –including his choice of ‘actors’, and the fragmentariness of his ‘soundtracks’ – can combine to create a distinctive cinematic event, the films themselves refuse to cohere around a unifying concern, or yield to a thematic schema. Not surprisingly, Film Socialisme does not offer us the illusion of narrative or structural integrity anymore than it contributes to the quotidian rhetoric of political and moral argument. It is, however, a political film in the sense that it alters something more fundamental than opinions and points of view. It transforms a way of seeing and understanding reality and history, fiction and documentary, images, and images of images. If anything, it belongs to that dissident or ‘dissensual’ category of artwork capable of ‘emancipating the spectator’ by disturbing what Jacques Rancière terms ‘the distribution of the sensible’ in that it generates gaps, openings, and spaces, poses questions, invites associations without positing a fixed position, imposing an interpretation, or allowing itself to invest in the illusion of expressive objectivity and the stability of meaning. The myriad citations and fragments that comprise the film are never intended to culminate into anything cohesive, never mind conclusive. In one sense, they have no source and no context beyond their moment in the film itself, and what we make of that moment. This article studies the degree to which Godard allows these images and sounds to combine and collide, associate and dissolve in this film, arguing that Film Socialisme is both an important intervention in the history of contemporary cinema, and necessary point of reference in any serious discussion of the relations between that cinema and political reality.

A virtual surgery in general practice: evaluation of a novel undergraduate virtual patient learning package

Background: A suite of 10 online virtual patients developed using the IVIMEDS ‘Riverside’ authoring tool has been introduced into our undergraduate general practice clerkship. These cases provide a multimedia-rich experience to students. Their interactive nature promotes the development of clinical reasoning skills such as discriminating key clinical features, integrating information from a variety of sources and forming diagnoses and management plans.

Aims: To evaluate the usefulness and usability of a set of online virtual patients in an undergraduate general practice clerkship.
Method: Online questionnaire completed by students after their general practice placement incorporating the System Usability Scale questionnaire.

Results: There was a 57% response rate. Ninety-five per cent of students agreed that the online package was a useful learning tool and ranked virtual patients third out of six learning modalities. Questions and answers and the use of images and videos were all rated highly by students as useful learning methods. The package was perceived to have a high level of usability among respondents.

Conclusion: Feedback from students suggest that this implementation of virtual patients, set in primary care, is user friendly and rated as a valuable adjunct to their learning. The cost of production of such learning resources demands close attention to design.

Study of beam aberrations in a germanium XXIII XUV laser amplifier

A beam of amplified spontaneous emission at 23.2/23.6 nm from a GeXXIII XUV laser has been injected into a separate amplifier plasma and the astigmatic aberrations introduced by plasma density gradients in the amplifier have been estimated from analysis of images of the amplified beam.

Plus ça change: (Post)Colonial Timor-Leste as a Return to (Pre)Colonial Realities in the Novels of Luis Cardoso

This article examines the novels of the East Timorese writer Luís Cardoso, and argues that their representations of a colonial past should not be simply interpreted as memorializations of Timor-Leste’s suffering at the hands of foreign aggressors. It proposes that underlying their revisiting of the past is a call for acknowledgement of the agency of East Timorese in the history of violent conflict that has troubled the nation, and that only this can guarantee true reconciliation, justice and national independence.

Automatic detection and classification of football players

Color segmentation of images usually requires a manual selection and classification of samples to train the system. This paper presents an automatic system that performs these tasks without the need of a long training, providing a useful tool to detect and identify figures. In real situations, it is necessary to repeat the training process if light conditions change, or if, in the same scenario, the colors of the figures and the background may have changed, being useful a fast training method. A direct application of this method is the detection and identification of football players.