Caged birds and cloning machines: how student imagery 'speaks' to us about cultures of schooling and student participation

With the advent of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), there is an increasing requirement that schools ensure children and young people's views are voiced, listened to and taken seriously on matters of significance. Encouraging these shifts by law is one thing; changing the culture in schools is another. For a significant proportion of schools, actively engaging students' voices on how they experience education poses a significant challenge and crucial gaps may exist between the rhetoric espoused and a school's readiness for genuine student involvement. This ethnographic study illuminates tensions that persist between headteachers' espoused views of how students are valued and students' creative images of their actual post-primary schooling experience. If cultures of schooling are to nurture the true spirit of democratic pupil participation implied by changes in the law, there is a need to develop genuine processes of student engagement in which students and staff can collaborate towards greater shared understandings of a school's priorities.

Three-dimensional cultures of normal human osteoblasts: proliferation and differentiation potential in vitro and upon ectopic implantation in nude mice.

This paper is novel andreports on the in vitro establishment of 3-D cultures of human osteoblasts. These were evaluated for protein markers of bone cells. Sequentially alkaline phosphatase, calcium incorporation for matrix mineralisation and then finally osteocalcin expression were detected in cultures. The extracellular matrix was composed of type 1 collagen and as it mineralised, needle shaped crystals were often associated with matrix vesicles initiating mineralisation. In vivo implantation in nude mice showed progression of mineralisation from the inner region outward with peripheral cells in a non-mineralised matrix. Host vessels invaded the implanted cell area. The research has relevance to musculoskeletal tissue engineering.

Protest practice and (tree) cultures of conflict: understanding the spaces of ‘tree maiming’ in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England

Developing understandings of protest and cultures of resistance has been a central theme of the 'new' cultural geography of the 1990s and 2000s. But whilst geographers of the here and now have been highly sensitive to the importance of acts of protest which occur outside of the context of broader social movements, geographers concerned with past protests have tended to focus overwhelmingly upon either understanding the development of social movements or highly specific place-based studies. Through a focus upon the hitherto ignored practice of 'tree maiming', this paper demonstrates not only the value of examining specific protest practices in helping to better understand the complexity of conflict, but also how in periods of acute socio-economic change the evolving relationship between humans and the non-human – in this case trees – is a central discourse to the protest practices of the poor. Such attacks often involved complex cultural understandings about the ways in which trees should – and should not – be socially enrolled.

Physical and immunoaffinity extraction of paralytic shellfish poisoning toxins from cultures of the dinoflagellate Alexandrium tamarense

In the present study the extraction of paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) toxins from a toxic strain of the marine dinoflagellate Alexandrium tamarense CCMP-1493 using various mechanical and/or physical procedures was investigated. PBS buffer was investigated as the extraction solvent in order for these procedures to be used directly with immuno-magnetic Ferrospheres-N. The extraction was performed following the determination of when toxin content by the algae was at its highest during batch culture. The methods used for cell lysis and toxin extraction included freeze-thawing, freeze-boiling, steel ball bearing beating, glass bead beating, and sonication. The steel ball bearing beating was determined to release a similar amount of toxin when compared to a modified standard extraction method which was reported to release 100% of toxins from the algal cells and was therefore used in the next phase of the study. This next phase was to determine the feasibility of utilising an antibody coupled to novel magnetic microspheres (Ferrospheres-N) as a simple, rapid immune-capture procedure for PSP toxins extracted from the algae. The effects of increasing mass of Ferrospheres-N on the immuno-capture of the PSP toxins from the toxic algal strain extracts were investigated. Toxin recovery was found to increase when an increasing mass of Ferrospheres-N was used until 96.2% (+/- 1.3 SD) of the toxin extracted from the cells was captured and eluted. Toxin recovery was determined by comparison to an appropriate PSP toxin standard curve following analysis by the AOAC HPLC method. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Cultures of Rioting and Anti-Systemic Politics in Southern Europe

The article investigates why, despite similar background conditions, Greece has been the site of frequent, highly visible, fringe, anti-system politics and street riots, while similar phenomena are rare in Spain. Although the article's focal point is the eruption of the December 2008 riots in Athens, it sheds light on the two countries' diverse social reactions to the sovereign debt crisis. Deploying the tool of media framing, it argues that historical legacies and political cultures matter. In the Greek case, the transition to democracy shaped a political ‘culture of sympathy’ towards acts of resistance to the state, a culture that has been institutionalised since the mid-1970s.

The Cultures of Popular Culture

Special Issue of the 'Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Modern Languages Symposium', reflecting a selection of papers from the Belfast Conference (13th-14th December 2013)