Measuring party organization: The vertical dimension of the multilevel organization of statewide parties in Spain and the UK

Over the past few years, attention to the role of state-wide political parties in multi-level polities has increased in recognition of their linkage function between levels of government, as these parties compete in both state-wide and regional elections across their countries. This article presents a coding scheme designed to describe the relationship between central and regional levels of state-wide parties. It evaluates the involvement of the regional branches in central decision-making and their degree of autonomy in the management of regional party affairs. This coding scheme is applied to state-wide parties in Spain (the socialist PSOE and the conservative Partido Popular) and in the UK (Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats). It is an additional tool with which to analyse party organization and it facilitates the comparison of parties across regions and in different countries.

What counts and what is being counted – The social organization of knowledge on the front lines of emergency medical services.

Paramedics are trained to use specialized medical knowledge and a variety of medical procedures and pharmaceutical interventions to “save patients and prevent further damage” in emergency situations, both as members of “health-care teams” in hospital emergency departments (Swanson, 2005: 96) and on the streets – unstandardized contexts “rife with chaotic, dangerous, and often uncontrollable elements” (Campeau, 2008: 3). The paramedic’s unique skill-set and ability to function in diverse situations have resulted in the occupation becoming ever more important to health care systems (Alberta Health and Wellness, 2008: 12).
Today, prehospital emergency services, while varying, exist in every major city and many rural areas throughout North America (Paramedics Association of Canada, 2008) and other countries around the world (Roudsari et al., 2007). Services in North America, for instance, treat and/or transport 2 million Canadians (over 250,000 in Alberta alone ) and between 25 and 30 million Americans annually (Emergency Medical Services Chiefs of Canada, 2006; National EMS Research Agenda, 2001). In Canada, paramedics make up one of the largest groups of health care professionals, with numbers exceeding 20,000 (Pike and Gibbons, 2008; Paramedics Association of Canada, 2008). However, there is little known about the work practices of paramedics, especially in light of recent changes to how their work is organized, making the profession “rich with unexplored opportunities for research on the full range of paramedic work” (Campeau, 2008: 2).

This presentation reports on findings from an institutional ethnography that explored the work of paramedics and different technologies of knowledge and governance that intersect with and organize their work practices. More specifically, my tentative focus of this presentation is on discussing some of the ruling discourses central to many of the technologies used on the front lines of EMS in Alberta and the consequences of such governance practices for both the front line workers and their patients. In doing so, I will demonstrate how IE can be used to answer Rankin and Campbell’s (2006) call for additional research into “the social organization of information in health care and attention to the (often unintended) ways ‘such textual products may accomplish…ruling purposes but otherwise fail people and, moreover, obscure that failure’ (p. 182)” (cited in McCoy, 2008: 709).

The structural organization of aurein precursor cDNAs from the skin secretion of the Australian green and golden bell frog, Litoria aurea.

Aureins are a family of peptides (13-25 residues), some of which possess potent antimicrobial and anti-cancer properties, which have been classified into 5 subgroups based upon primary structural similarities. They were originally isolated from the defensive skin secretions of the closely related Australian bell frogs, Litoria aurea and Litoria raniformis, and of the 23 aurein peptides identified, 10 are common to both species. Using a recently developed technique, we have constructed a cDNA library from the defensive secretion of the green and golden bell frog, L. aurea, and successfully cloned a range of aurein precursor transcripts containing entire open-reading frames. All open-reading frames consisted of a putative signal peptide and an acidic pro-region followed by a single copy of aurein. The deduced precursor structures for the most active aureins (2.2 and 3.1) confirmed the presence of a C-terminal amidation motif whereas that of aurein 5.3 did not. Processed peptides corresponding in molecular mass to aureins 2.2, 2.3, 2.5, 3.1 and 5.3 were identified in the same secretion sample using LC/MS. The application of this technique thus permits parallel peptidomic and transcriptomic analyses on the same lyophilized skin secretion sample circumventing sacrifice of specimens of endangered herpetofauna.

Organization of the musculature of schistosome cercariae

Phalloidin-fluorescein isothiocyanate staining of filamentous actin was used to identify muscle systems within the cercariae of Schistosoma mansoni. Examination of labeled cercariae by confocal scanning laser microscopy revealed distinct organizational levels of myofiber arrangements within the body wall, anterior cone, acetabulum, and esophagus. The body wall throughout showed a typical latticelike arrangement of outer circular and inner longitudinal myofibers, with an additional innermost layer of diagonal fibers in the anterior portion of the body. Circular and longitudinal fibers were also evident in the anterior organ and esophagus and. to some extent, the ventral acetabulum. Most striking was the striation of the cercarial tail musculature.

The Synergistic Organization of Muscle Recruitment Constrains Visuomotor Adaptation

Reaching to visual targets engages the nervous system in a series of transformations between sensory information and motor commands. That which remains to be determined is the extent to which the processes that mediate sensorimotor adaptation to novel environments engage neural circuits that represent the required movement in joint-based or muscle-based coordinate systems. We sought to establish the contribution of these alternative representations to the process of visuomotor adaptation. To do so we applied a visuomotor rotation during a center-out isometric torque production task that involved flexion/extension and supination/pronation at the elbow-joint complex. In separate sessions, distinct half-quadrant rotations (i.e., 45°) were applied such that adaptation could be achieved either by only rescaling the individual joint torques (i.e., the visual target and torque target remained in the same quadrant) or by additionally requiring torque reversal at a contributing joint (i.e., the visual target and torque target were in different quadrants). Analysis of the time course of directional errors revealed that the degree of adaptation was lower (by ~20%) when reversals in the direction of joint torques were required. It has been established previously that in this task space, a transition between supination and pronation requires the engagement of a different set of muscle synergists, whereas in a transition between flexion and extension no such change is required. The additional observation that the initial level of adaptation was lower and the subsequent aftereffects were smaller, for trials that involved a pronation–supination transition than for those that involved a flexion–extension transition, supports the conclusion that the process of adaptation engaged, at least in part, neural circuits that represent the required motor output in a muscle-based coordinate system.

Molecular cloning and deduced organization of the pHpG/CNP precursor from the venom of the African forest viper, Atheris squamigera

The discovery that the hypotensive sequela of envenomation by the South American viper, Bothrops jararaca, was mediated by peptides, represented a milestone in drug discovery research that led to the introduction of ACE inhibitors. These bradykinin-potentiating peptides (BPPs) have been found in the venoms of many species of viper and molecular cloning of biosynthetic precursors has revealed that each encodes several different BPPs in tandem with a single copy of a C-type natriuretic peptide (CNP) located at the C-terminus. Venoms of the African forest vipers (Atheris) have been poorly studied possibly because they do not represent a major danger to humans. However, initial studies have indicated that they contain some of the “classical” protein toxins of viper venoms and a novel class of peptide, the polyglycine/polyhistidine (pGpH) peptides. These peptides occur in several molecular forms with different numbers of repetitive glycine and histidine repeats. We have cloned the biosynthetic precursor of A. squamigera pGpH peptides from a venom-derived cDNA library and have confirmed that a single copy of CNP is located at the C-terminus and additionally that, like BPPs in other vipers, pGpH peptides are encoded in tandem within this single precursor. Solid phase peptide synthesis of pGpH peptides has proven to be extremely difficult but is progressing and acquisition of synthetic replicates of each peptide is a necessary prerequisite for systematic pharmacological characterisation as establishment of a biological function for these peptides remains elusive. pGpH peptides may prove to play a role as fundamental as that of the BPPs.