'Vigilant Hospitality': The Online Imperative and Teaching Cultural Studies

Information technology (IT) sees information as a fluid, to be stored, regulated and exchanged. This is a profoundly economic model, whose dreams are those of the marketplace – and now, university managers. But no teacher, of course, holds that teaching can be reduced to the movement of information from one point to another. Teaching is never quite absorbed into the models of IT. Where they meet, we do not have the utopia of the virtual classroom, at last freed from the strictures of timetables and the face-to-face; we have, rather, the grinding of two radically irreducible models. This has nothing to do with Luddism; on the contrary, it is the value and necessity of IT for us at present, as teachers. At a time when the tertiary sector’s massive investment in IT is motivated in part by its own dream of the teacherless classroom, one of the pressing tasks for us may be simply to argue as rigorously as we can the structural necessity of our own position as teachers, without nostalgia or humanist sentimentality.

Milk thistle and indinavir: a randomized controlled pharmacokinetics study and meta-analysis

Objectives: To determine whether ingestion of milk thistle affects the pharmacokinetics of indinavir. Methods: We conducted a three-period, randomized controlled trial with 16 healthy participants. We randomized participants to milk thistle or control. All participants received initial dosing of indinavir, and baseline indinavir levels were obtained (AUC(0-8)) (phase I). The active group were then given 450 mg milk-thistle extract capsules to be taken t.i.d. from day 2 to day 30. The control group received no plant extract. On day 29 and day 30, indinavir dosing and sampling was repeated in both groups as before (phase II). After a wash-out period of 7 days, indinavir dosing and sampling were repeated as before (phase III). Results: All participants completed the trial, but two were excluded from analysis due to protocol violation. There were no significant between-group differences. Active group mean AUC(0-8) indinavir decreased by 4.4% (90% CI, -27.5% to -26%, P=0.78) from phase I to phase II in the active group, and by 17.3% (90% CI, -37.3% to +9%, P=0.25) in phase III. Control group mean AUC(0-8) decreased by 21.5% (90% CI, -43% to +8%, P=0.2) from phase I to phase II and by 38.5% (90% CI, -55.3% to -15.3%, P=0.01) of baseline at phase III. To place our findings in context, milk thistle-oindinavir trials were identified through systematic searches of the literature. A meta-analysis of three milk thistle-indinavir trials revealed a non-significant pooled mean difference of 1% in AUC(0-8) (95% CI, -53% to 55%, P=0.97). Conclusions: Indinavir levels were not reduced significantly in the presence of milk thistle.

Effect of nutrition level and diets on creatinine excretion by sheep

In this experiment, creatinine (C) excretion by sheep was measured when they were fed different diets at different levels of intake. Creatinine excretion was not affected by the level of feed intake or the addition of salt to lucerne-based diets. However, differences between individual animals were significant. Creatinine excretion was significantly affected by diets, which were formulated by combining different amounts of lucerne chaff, oaten chaff and sorghum. It was also found that there were significant diurnal changes in the ratios of purine derivatives to creatinine (PD:C) in 3 hourly urine samples when the animals were fed either once or twice daily, but the average value for the PD:C ratio of any two urine samples taken 12 h apart was close to the daily mean. The results of this experiment suggest that if separate determination of the creatinine excretion by individual animals is made and the average value of the ratio of PD:C in two spot urine samples taken 12 h apart is used to predict PD excretion by spot urine sampling, microbial nitrogen flow can be estimated more accurately than when a fixed value of creatinine excretion is used for all animals and only a single urine sample is taken. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

I-Spi: innovative shared practical ideas: a support guide for literacy and numeracy in the early years of schooling, for home tutor/supervisors in distance education

Innovative Shared Practical Ideas (I-Spi) is a guide to help you and your children learn together. It is designed to affirm, support and strengthen your role as home tutor/supervisors in your daily learning sessions with your children. In this guide particular emphasis is given to the value of talk, formal and informal early literacy and numeracy practices (including ideas from distance school lessons, from home tutor/supervisors, research, and beyond), assessment of these practices together with informal assessment ideas for gauging your children’s literacy and numeracy progress, and stepping in and building on strategies