Factor markets in England before the Black Death

Modern English factor markets originated during the two centuries of active commercialization that preceded the Black Death. An active labour market was established by the late twelfth century. Evolution of a land market followed the legal reforms of the 1170s and 1180s, which created legally secure and defensible property rights in land. These rights stimulated growth of a capital market, since land became a security against which credit could be obtained. Nevertheless, none of these nascent factor markets functioned unconstrained and each became embedded in legal, tenurial, and institutional complexities and rigidities which it took later generations centuries to reform.

Short interfering RNA-mediated gene silencing in Globodera pallida and Meloidogyne incognita infective stage juveniles

The analysis of gene function through RNA interference (RNAi)-based reverse genetics in plant parasitic nematodes (PPNs) remains inexplicably reliant on the use of long double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) silencing triggers; a practice inherently disadvantageous due to the introduction of superfluous dsRNA sequence. increasing chances of aberrant or off-target gene silencing through interactions between nascent short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) and non-cognate mRNA targets. Recently, we have shown that non-nematode, long dsRNAs have a propensity to elicit profound impacts on the phenotype and migrational abilities of both root knot and cyst nematodes. This study presents, to our knowledge for the first time, gene-specific knockdown of FMRFamide-like peptide (flp) transcripts, using discrete 21 bp siRNAs in potato cyst nematode Globodera pallida, and root knot nematode Meloidogyne incognita infective (J2) stage juveniles. Both knockdown at the transcript level through quantitative (q)PCR analysis and functional data derived from migration assay, indicate that siRNAs targeting certain areas of the FMRFamide-like peptide (FLP) transcripts are potent and specific in the silencing of gene function. In addition, we present a method of manipulating siRNA activity through the management of strand thermodynamics. Initial evaluation of strand thermodynamics as a determinant of RNA-induced Silencing Complex (RISC) strand selection (inferred from knockdown efficacy) in the siRNAs presented here suggested that the purported influence of 5' stand stability on guide incorporation may be somewhat promiscuous. However, we have found that on strategically incorporating base mismatches in the sense strand of a G. pallida-specific siRNA we could specifically increase or decrease the knockdown of its target (specific to the antisense strand), presumably through creating more favourable thermodynamic profiles for incorporation of either the sense (non-target-specific) or antisense (target-specific) strand into a cleavage-competent RISC. Whilst the efficacy of similar approaches to siRNA modification has been demonstrated in the context of Drosophila whole-cell lysate preparations and in mammalian cell cultures, it remained to be seen how these sense strand mismatches may impact on gene silencing in vivo, in relation to different targets and in different sequence contexts. This work presents the first application of such an approach in a whole organism; initial results show promise. (C) 2009 Australian Society for Parasitology Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Cotranscriptional role for Arabidopsis DICER-LIKE 4 in transcription termination.

Transcription termination is emerging as an important component of gene regulation necessary to partition the genome and minimize transcriptional interference. We have discovered a role for the Arabidopsis RNA silencing enzyme DICER-LIKE 4 (DCL4) in transcription termination of an endogenous Arabidopsis gene, FCA. DCL4 directly associates with FCA chromatin in the 3' region and promotes cleavage of the nascent transcript in a domain downstream of the canonical polyA site. In a dcl4 mutant, the resulting transcriptional read-through triggers an RNA interference–mediated gene silencing of a transgene containing the same 3' region. We conclude that DCL4 promotes transcription termination of the Arabidopsis FCA gene, reducing the amount of aberrant RNA produced from the locus.

“An Examination of the Key Factor of Influence In the Development Process of Credit Union Industries,”

The aim of this paper is to analyse credit union industries within a development framework. Explicit consideration is given to credit union industries in four countries – Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States. It is argued that in terms of a developmental typology the credit union industry in Great Britain is at a nascent stage of development, the industries in Ireland and New Zealand are at a transition stage while the US credit union industry is mature in nature. In progression between stages the analysis considers the influence of factors such as situational leadership, the complexion of trade associations, professionalisation, regulatory and legislative initiatives and technology. The analysis concluded that while there was a substantial commonality of experience, there were also significant differences in the impact of these factors. This consequently encouraged the recognition of the existence of ‘a variety of the species’ in respect of credit union development.

Export of O-specific lipopolysaccharide

The O antigen is the most surface-exposed component of the lipopolysaccharide (LPS) molecule and its biogenesis involves several complex mechanisms not completely well understood. All of these mechanisms involve biochemical reactions that occur on the cytoplasmic side of the plasma membrane as well as several different translocation pathways that deliver the nascent O antigens in a glycolipid form to the periplasmic side of the plasma membrane. This article discusses our current understanding of the mechanisms operating in the biogenesis of the O-specific LPS.

Translocation of lipid-linked oligosaccharides across the ER membrane requires Rft1 protein

N-linked glycosylation of proteins in eukaryotic cells follows a highly conserved pathway. The tetradecasaccharide substrate (Glc3Man9GlcNAc2) is first assembled at the membrane of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) as a dolichylpyrophosphate (Dol-PP)-linked intermediate, and then transferred to nascent polypeptide chains in the lumen of the ER. The assembly of the oligosaccharide starts on the cytoplasmic side of the ER membrane with the synthesis of a Man5GlcNAc2-PP-Dol intermediate. This lipid-linked intermediate is then translocated across the membrane so that the oligosaccharides face the lumen of the ER, where the biosynthesis of Glc3Man9GlcNAc2-PP-Dol continues to completion. The fully assembled oligosaccharide is transferred to selected asparagine residues of target proteins. The transmembrane movement of lipid-linked Man5GlcNAc2 oligosaccharide is of fundamental importance in this biosynthetic pathway, and similar processes involving phospholipids and glycolipids are essential in all types of cells. The process is predicted to be catalysed by proteins, termed flippases, which to date have remained elusive. Here we provide evidence that yeast RFT1 encodes an evolutionarily conserved protein required for the translocation of Man5GlcNAc2-PP-Dol from the cytoplasmic to the lumenal leaflet of the ER membrane.

Explaining Prolonged Silences in Transitional Justice: The Disappeared in Cyprus and Spain

The article examines why some postconflict societies defer the recovery of those who forcibly disappeared as a result of political violence, even after a fully fledged democratic regime is consolidated. The prolonged silences in Cyprus and Spain contradict the experience of other countries such as Bosnia, Guatemala, and South Africa, where truth recovery for disappeared or missing persons was a central element of the transition to peace and democracy. Exhumations of mass graves containing the victims from the two periods of violence in Cyprus (1963–1974) and the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) was delayed up until the early 2000s. Cyprus and Spain are well suited to explain both prolonged silences in transitional justice and the puzzling decision to become belated truth seekers. The article shows that in negotiated transitions, a subtle elite agreement links the non-instrumental use of the past with the imminent needs for political stability and nascent democratization. As time passes, selective silence becomes an entrenched feature of the political discourse and democratic institutions, acquiring a hegemonic status and prolonging the silencing of violence.

Quality Management and Managerialism in Healthcare:: A Critical Historical Survey

Quality Management and Managerialism in Healthcare creates a comprehensive and systematic international survey of various perspectives on healthcare quality management together with some of their most pertinent critiques. Chapter one starts with a general discussion of the factors that drove the introduction of management paradigms into public sector and health management contexts in the mid to late 1980s. Chapter two explores the rise of risk awareness in medicine; which, prior to the 1980s, stood largely in isolation to the implementation of managerial performance targets. Chapter three investigates the widespread adoption of performance management and clinical governance frameworks during the 1980s and 1990s. This is followed by Chapters four and five which examine systems based models of patient safety and the evidence-based medicine movement as exemplars of managerial perspectives on healthcare quality. Chapter six discusses potential future avenues for the development of alternative perspectives on quality of care which emphasise workforce involvement. The book concludes by reviewing the factors which have underpinned the managerialist trajectory of healthcare management over the past decades and explores the potential impact of nascent technologies such as 'connected health' and 'telehealth' on future developments.

Knowledge translation in men’s health research: development and delivery of content for use online

Background: Men can be hard to reach with face-to-face health-related information, while increasingly, research shows that they are seeking health information from online sources. Recognizing this trend, there is merit in developing innovative online knowledge translation (KT) strategies capable of translating research on men’s health into engaging health promotion materials. While the concept of KT has become a new mantra for researchers wishing to bridge the gap between research evidence and improved health outcomes, little is written about the process, necessary skills, and best practices by which researchers can develop online knowledge translation.
Objective: Our aim was to illustrate some of the processes and challenges involved in, and potential value of, developing research knowledge online to promote men’s health.

Methods: We present experiences of KT across two case studies of men’s health. First, we describe a study that uses interactive Web apps to translate knowledge relating to Canadian men’s depression. Through a range of mechanisms, study findings were repackaged with the explicit aim of raising awareness and reducing the stigma associated with men’s depression and/or help-seeking. Second, we describe an educational resource for teenage men about unintended pregnancy, developed for delivery in the formal Relationship and Sexuality Education school curricula of Ireland, Northern Ireland (United Kingdom), and South Australia. The intervention is based around a Web-based interactive film drama entitled “If I Were Jack”.

Results: For each case study, we describe the KT process and strategies that aided development of credible and well-received online content focused on men’s health promotion. In both case studies, the original research generated the inspiration for the interactive online content and the core development strategy was working with a multidisciplinary team to develop this material through arts-based approaches. In both cases also, there is an acknowledgment of the need for gender and culturally sensitive information. Both aimed to engage men by disrupting stereotypes about men, while simultaneously addressing men through authentic voices and faces. Finally, in both case studies we draw attention to the need to think beyond placement of content online to delivery to target audiences from the outset.

Conclusions: The case studies highlight some of the new skills required by academics in the emerging paradigm of translational research and contribute to the nascent literature on KT. Our approach to online KT was to go beyond dissemination and diffusion to actively repackage research knowledge through arts-based approaches (videos and film scripts) as health promotion tools, with optimal appeal, to target male audiences. Our findings highlight the importance of developing a multidisciplinary team to inform the design of content, the importance of adaptation to context, both in terms of the national implementation context and consideration of gender-specific needs, and an integrated implementation and evaluation framework in all KT work.

The Routledge Handbook of Irish Criminology

The Routledge Handbook of Irish Criminology is the first edited collection of its kind to bring together the work of leading Irish criminologists in a single volume. While Irish criminology can be characterised as a nascent but dynamic discipline, it has much to offer the Irish and international reader due to the unique historical, cultural, political, social and economic arrangements that exist on the island of Ireland.

Death and Consumer Culture

Among the most veiled and emotionally charged of life’s experiences are those related to death. Given that poetry has long been recognized as an unparalleled means of expressing and understanding the most complex and emotional aspects of life (Sherry and Schouten, 2002), it is of little surprise that few poets regarded as the finest of all wordsmiths have not, since time immemorial, grappled with death.

Recently, within marketing and consumer research, poetry has slowly but progressively come to be recognized as a means by which to understand, express, celebrate, and/or confront that which defies scientific or other more “scholarly” explanation (Canniford, 2012; Wijland, 2011; Sherry and Schouten, 2002). This “poetic turn” has manifest itself most notably within the nascent realm of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT); mainly in poetry reading sessions held—with published chapbooks in hand—in concurrence with the annual CCT symposium. Death-related poetry penned by marketing and consumer researchers has there entered—albeit randomly—the CCT circuit (see, for example: Arnould, 2014; Steinfield, 2014; Gabel, 2013, 2010; Downey, 2011, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c).

This chapter represents the first formal, organized attempt to better understand death-related consumption experience and meaning via the creation and dissemination of original works of poetry. The chapter’s title reflects the broad, eclectic perspective of death and consumption herein pursued. We consider funerary and other—good, service, and ideological—product consumption activities and experiences transpiring in the context of death. We also embrace the notion that death often brutally consumes those dealing with it; a sort of “consumption of consumers by death.” In turn, as vividly expressed in several of the poems in this chapter, consumption acts or experiences and/or memories thereof may be instrumental in coping with “being consumed by death.”

Dublin 1916: theatre of revolt

At Easter 1916, Dublin city centre was one of a series of sites throughout Ireland where a rebellion was staged against British rule. It was a strategic failure, swiftly crushed by superior British forces. The event, however, subsequently took a central role in the mythology of modern Ireland.

The first visual representations were of the conflict’s aftermath: photographic journeys through landscapes of ruin. From the distance of the camera, we see none of the pockmarks of shell bursts, nor the etchings of machine guns. Instead, traces of life in the city seem to have been swept aside by an unseen hand: the passing of millennia or a violent action of nature. Architecture alone has witnessed and recorded its presence. Amongst the fragments, the shell of the General Post Office (G.P.O.) in Sackville Street is one of the few buildings still wholly recognizable. The remnants of its classical form, portico and pediment, columns and entablature seem to transcend its prosaic modern functions and allude to something more ancient. The bewilderment of city’s inhabitants is also recorded. Dubliners have become inquisitive tourists in streets which hitherto were the locus of everyday life. They wander around aimlessly in a landscape as alien and picturesque as Pompeii. This shift in perception was captured by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats who hinted that Dublin, purged of modern commercialism had transcended its petty inadequacies to revive a slumbering heroic past.

‘I have met them at the close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses [.]’
All is changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.’

His comments were prescient. Initially unpopular, the republican leaders, executed by the British, slowly became recast as heroic martyrs. Similarly, the spaces where their heroism was forged became venerated. The G.P.O. and Sackville Street, however, already had a republican history. It was originally conceived in the eighteenth century as part of a series of magnificent urban spaces to provide an arena of spectacle and self-celebration for the colonial Anglo-Irish and their vision of a Protestant republic. O’Connell/Sackville Street became the temporal, geographical and mythical hinge upon which two different versions of Irish republicanism waxed and waned. Its recasting after independence as a space of Catholic Nationalism bore testimony to its consistency in providing a backdrop for the production of ritual and myth. In the 1920s and 30s, as the nascent country, beset with economic stagnation and political tensions, turned to spectacle as a salve for it social problems, O’Connell Street and the G.P.O. provided its most sacred sites. Within the introduction of new myths, however, individual as well as national identities were created and consolidated. The emerging identity of modern Ireland became inextricably linked with that of one ambitious politician. His uses of the G.P.O. in particular revealed a perceptive understanding of the political uses of classical architecture and urban space.

Stratified analysis reveals chemokine-like factor (CKLF) as a potential prognostic marker in the MSI-immune consensus molecular subtype CMS1 of colorectal cancer

The Colorectal Cancer (CRC) Subtyping Consortium (CRCSC) recently published four consensus molecular subtypes (CMS’s) representing the underlying biology in CRC. The Microsatellite Instable (MSI) immune group, CMS1, has a favorable prognosis in early stage disease, but paradoxically has the worst prognosis following relapse, suggesting the presence of factors enabling neoplastic cells to circumvent this immune response. To identify the genes influencing subsequent poor prognosis in CMS1, we analyzed this subtype, centered on risk of relapse.
In a cohort of early stage colon cancer (n=460), we examined, in silico, changes in gene expression within the CMS1 subtype and demonstrated for the first time the favorable prognostic value of chemokine-like factor (CKLF) gene expression in the adjuvant disease setting [HR=0.18, CI=0.04-0.89]. In addition, using transcription profiles originating from cell sorted CRC tumors, we delineated the source of CKLF transcription within the colorectal tumor microenvironment to the leukocyte component of these tumors. Further to this, we confirmed that CKLF gene expression is confined to distinct immune subsets in whole blood samples and primary cell lines, highlighting CKLF as a potential immune cell-derived factor promoting tumor immune-surveillance of nascent neoplastic cells, particularly in CMS1 tumors. Building on the recently reported CRCSC data, we provide compelling evidence that leukocyte-infiltrate derived CKLF expression is a candidate biomarker of favorable prognosis, specifically in MSI-immune stage II/III disease.

Early warning systems for cyber defence

Cybercriminals ramp up their efforts with sophisticated techniques while defenders gradually update their typical security measures. Attackers often have a long-term interest in their targets. Due to a number of factors such as scale, architecture and nonproductive traffic however it makes difficult to detect them using typical intrusion detection techniques. Cyber early warning systems (CEWS) aim at alerting such attempts in their nascent stages using preliminary indicators. Design and implementation of such systems involves numerous research challenges such as generic set of indicators, intelligence gathering, uncertainty reasoning and information fusion. This paper discusses such challenges and presents the reader with compelling motivation. A carefully deployed empirical analysis using a real world attack scenario and a real network traffic capture is also presented.