Beyond antioxidants: the cellular and molecular interactions of flavonoids and how these underpin their actions on the brain

The consumption of flavonoid-rich foods and beverages has been suggested to limit the neurodegeneration associated with a variety of neurological disorders and to prevent or reverse normal or abnormal deteriorations in cognitive performance. Flavonoids mediate these effects via a number of routes, including a potential to protect neurons against injury induced by neurotoxins, an ability to suppress neuroinflammation and a potential to promote memory, learning and cognitive function. Originally, it was thought that such actions were mediated by the antioxidant capacity of flavonoids. However, their limited absorption and their low bioavailability in the brain suggest that this explanation is unlikely. Instead, this multiplicity of effects appears to be underpinned by three separate processes: first, through their interactions with important neuronal and glial signalling cascades in the brain, most notably the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase/Akt and mitogen-activated protein kinase pathways that regulate pro-survival transcription factors and gene expression; second, through an ability to improve peripheral and cerebral blood flow and to trigger angiogenesis and neurogenesis in the hippocampus; third, by their capacity to directly react with and scavenge neurotoxic species and pro-inflammatory agents produced in the brain as a result of both normal and abnormal brain ageing. The present review explores the potential inhibitory or stimulatory actions of flavonoids within these three systems and describes how such interactions are likely to underlie neurological effects.

Considering heteroglossia in language and development in Sub-Saharan Africa

Countries throughout the sub-Saharan (SSA) region have a complex linguistic heritage having their origins in opportunistic boundary changes effected by Western colonial powers at the Berlin Conference 1884-85. Postcolonial language-in-education policies valorizing ex-colonial languages have contributed at least in part to underachievement in education and thus the underdevelopment of human resources in SSA countries. This situation is not likely to improve whilst unresolved questions concerning the choice of language(s) that would best support social and economic development remain. Whilst policy attempts to develop local languages have been discussed within the framework of the African Union, and some countries have experimented with models of multilingual education during the past decade, the goalposts have already changed as a result of migration and trade. This paper argues that language policy makers need to be cognizant of changing language ecologies and their relationship with emerging linguistic and economic markets. The concept of language, within such a framework, has to be viewed in relation to the multiplicity of language markets within the shifting landscapes of people, culture, economics and the geo-politics of the 21st Century. Whilst, on the one hand, this refers to the hegemony of dominant powerful languages and the social relations of disempowerment, on the other hand, it also refers to existing and evolving social spaces and local language capabilities and choices. Within this framework the article argues that socially constructed dominant macro language markets need to be viewed also in relation to other, self-defined, community meso- and individual micro- language markets and their possibilities for social, economic and political development. It is through pursuing this argument that this article assesses the validity of Omoniyi’s argument in this volume, for the need to focus on the concept of language capital within multilingual contexts in the SSA region as compared to Bourdieu’s concept of linguistic capital.  

Innovation in construction: a sociology of technology approach

An alternative approach to understanding innovation is made using two intersecting ideas. The first is that successful innovation requires consideration of the social and organizational contexts in which it is located. The complex context of construction work is characterized by inter-organizational collaboration, a project-based approach and power distributed amongst collaborating organizations. The second is that innovations can be divided into two modes: ‘bounded’, where the implications of innovation are restricted within a single, coherent sphere of influence, and ‘unbounded’, where the effects of implementation spill over beyond this. Bounded innovations are adequately explained within the construction literature. However, less discussed are unbounded innovations, where many firms' collaboration is required for successful implementation, even though many innovations can be considered unbounded within construction's inter-organizational context. It is argued that unbounded innovations require an approach to understand and facilitate the interactions both within a range of actors and between the actors and technological artefacts. The insights from a sociology of technology approach can be applied to the multiplicity of negotiations and alignments that constitute the implementation of unbounded innovation. The utility of concepts from the sociology of technology, including ‘system building’ and ‘heterogeneous engineering’, is demonstrated by applying them to an empirical study of an unbounded innovation on a major construction project (the new terminal at Heathrow Airport, London, UK). This study suggests that ‘system building’ contains outcomes that are not only transformations of practices, processes and systems, but also the potential transformation of technologies themselves.

Alverata: Latin, Greek and Cyrillic typeface

Alverata: a typeface design for Europe This typeface is a response to the extraordinarily diverse forms of letters of the Latin alphabet in manuscripts and inscriptions in the Romanesque period (c. 1000–1200). While the Romanesque did provide inspiration for architectural lettering in the nineteenth century, these letterforms have not until now been systematically considered and redrawn as a working typeface. The defining characteristic of the Romanesque letterform is variety: within an individual inscription or written text, letters such as A, C, E and G might appear with different forms at each appearance. Some of these forms relate to earlier Roman inscriptional forms and are therefore familiar to us, but others are highly geometric and resemble insular and uncial forms. The research underlying the typeface involved the collection of a large number of references for lettering of this period, from library research and direct on-site ivestigation. This investigation traced the wide dispersal of the Romanesque lettering tradition across the whole of Europe. The variety of letter widths and weights encountered, as well as variant shapes for individual letters, offered both direct models and stylistic inspiration for the characters and for the widths and weight variants of the typeface. The ability of the OpenType format to handle multiple stylistic variants of any one character has been exploited to reflect the multiplicity of forms available to stonecutters and scribes of the period. To make a typeface that functions in a contemporary environment, a lower case has been added, and formal and informal variants supported. The pan-European nature of the Romanesque design tradition has inspired an pan-European approach to the character set of the typeface, allowing for text composition in all European languages, and the typeface has been extended into Greek and Cyrillic, so that the broadest representation of European languages can be achieved.

The margin of appreciation, domestic irregularity and domestic court rulings in ECHR environmental jurisprudence: Global legal pluralism in action

Global legal pluralism is concerned, inter alia, with the growing multiplicity of normative legal orders and the ways in which these different orders intersect and are accommodated with one another. The different means used for accommodation will have a critical bearing on how individuals fare within them. This article examines the recent environmental jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights to explore some of the means of reaching an accommodation between national legal orders and the European Convention. Certain types of accommodation – such as the margin of appreciation given to states by the Court – are well known. In essence, such mechanisms of legal pluralism raise a presumptive barrier which generally works for the state and against the individual rights-bearer. However, the principal focus of the current article is on a less well-known, recent set of pluralistic devices employed by the Court, which typically operate presumptively in the other direction, in favour of the individual. First, the Court looks to instances of breaches of domestic environmental law (albeit not in isolation); and second, it places an emphasis on whether domestic courts have ruled against the relevant activity. Where domestic standards have been breached or national courts have ruled against the state, then, presumptive weight is typically shifted towards the individual.

Storytelling in song: television music, narrative and allusion in 'The O.C.'

Television’s long-form storytelling has the potential to allow the rippling of music across episodes and seasons in interesting ways. In the integration of narrative, music and meaning found in The O.C. (Fox, FOX 2003-7), popular song’s allusive and referential qualities are drawn upon to particularly televisual ends. At times embracing its ‘disruptive’ presence, at others suturing popular music into narrative, at times doing both at once. With television studies largely lacking theories of music, this chapter draws on film music theory and close textual analysis to analyse some of the programme's music moments in detail. In particular it considers the series-spanning use of Jeff Buckley’s cover of ‘Hallelujah’ (and its subsequent oppressive presence across multiple televisual texts), the end of episode musical montage and the use of recurring song fragments as theme within single episodes. In doing so it highlights music's role in the fragmentation and flow of the television aesthetic and popular song’s structural presence in television narrative. Illustrating the multiplicity of popular song’s use in television, these moments demonstrate song’s ability to provide narrative commentary, yet also make particular use of what Ian Garwood describes as the ability of ‘a non-diegetic song to exceed the emotional range displayed by diegetic characters’ (2003:115), to ‘speak’ for characters or to their feelings, contributing to both teen TV’s melodramatic affect and narrative expression.

Spectral asymmetry of the massless Dirac operator on a 3-torus

Consider the massless Dirac operator on a 3-torus equipped with Euclidean metric and standard spin structure. It is known that the eigenvalues can be calculated explicitly: the spectrum is symmetric about zero and zero itself is a double eigenvalue. The aim of the paper is to develop a perturbation theory for the eigenvalue with smallest modulus with respect to perturbations of the metric. Here the application of perturbation techniques is hindered by the fact that eigenvalues of the massless Dirac operator have even multiplicity, which is a consequence of this operator commuting with the antilinear operator of charge conjugation (a peculiar feature of dimension 3). We derive an asymptotic formula for the eigenvalue with smallest modulus for arbitrary perturbations of the metric and present two particular families of Riemannian metrics for which the eigenvalue with smallest modulus can be evaluated explicitly. We also establish a relation between our asymptotic formula and the eta invariant.

Scoping customer relationship management strategy in HEI - Understanding steps towards alignment of customer and management needs

Higher Education Institutions (HEI) are complex organisations, offering a wide range of services, which involve a multiplicity of customers, stakeholders and service providers; both in terms of type and number. Satisfying a diverse set of customer groups is complex, and requires development of strategic Customer Relationship Management (CRM). This paper contributes to the HEI area, by proposing an approach that scopes CRM strategy, allowing us a better understanding CRM implementation in Higher Education Institutions; maximising alignment of customer and management desires, expectation and needs.

The multidimensional character of accounting numbers

This paper takes as its motivation debates surrounding the multiplicity of functions of accounting information. We are in particular interested in the existential function of accounting numbers and argue that numerical signs having discursive possibilities may acquire new meanings through reframing. Drawing on Goffman’s (1974) frame analysis and Vollmer’s (2007) work on three-dimensional character of numerical signs, we explore the ways in which numbers can go through instantaneous transformations and tell a new kind of story. In our analysis, we look at the main historical developments and current controversies surrounding accounting practice with a specific focus on scandals involving numerical signs as moments where our understandings and the discursive function of previously inoffensive signs shifts through a collective involvement. We map the purpose and usefulness of Vollmer’s three-dimensional framework in the analysis of selected financial accounting practices and scandals as examples of instances where numbers are reframed to suddenly perform a different existential function in context of their calculative and symptomatic dimensions.

Environmental agreements as a Hawk-Dove game with confirmed proposals

This paper aims at two different contributions to the literature on international environmental agreements. First, we model environmental agreements as a generic situation, characterized as a Hawk-Dove game with multiple asymmetric equilibria. Second, the article applies the theory on non-cooperative games with confirmed proposals, based on an alternating proposals bargaining protocol, as a way of overcoming the usual problems of coordination and bargaining failures in environmental agreement games, due to payoff asymmetry and equilibrium multiplicity.

A new regime of carbon counting: the practices and politics of accounting for everyday carbon through C02e

Inspired by the commercial desires of global brands and retailers to access the lucrative green consumer market, carbon is increasingly being counted and made knowable at the mundane sites of everyday production and consumption, from the carbon footprint of a plastic kitchen fork to that of an online bank account. Despite the challenges of counting and making commensurable the global warming impact of a myriad of biophysical and societal activities, this desire to communicate a product or service's carbon footprint has sparked complicated carbon calculative practices and enrolled actors at literally every node of multi-scaled and vastly complex global supply chains. Against this landscape, this paper critically analyzes the counting practices that create the ‘e’ in ‘CO2e’. It is shown that, central to these practices are a series of tools, models and databases which, in building upon previous work (Eden, 2012 and Star and Griesemer, 1989) we conceptualize here as ‘boundary objects’. By enrolling everyday actors from farmers to consumers, these objects abstract and stabilize greenhouse gas emissions from their messy material and social contexts into units of CO2e which can then be translated along a product's supply chain, thereby establishing a new currency of ‘everyday supply chain carbon’. However, in making all greenhouse gas-related practices commensurable and in enrolling and stabilizing the transfer of information between multiple actors these objects oversee a process of simplification reliant upon, and subject to, a multiplicity of approximations, assumptions, errors, discrepancies and/or omissions. Further the outcomes of these tools are subject to the politicized and commercial agendas of the worlds they attempt to link, with each boundary actor inscribing different meanings to a product's carbon footprint in accordance with their specific subjectivities, commercial desires and epistemic framings. It is therefore shown that how a boundary object transforms greenhouse gas emissions into units of CO2e, is the outcome of distinct ideologies regarding ‘what’ a product's carbon footprint is and how it should be made legible. These politicized decisions, in turn, inform specific reduction activities and ultimately advance distinct, specific and increasingly durable transition pathways to a low carbon society.

Environmentalities of urban climate governance in Maputo, Mozambique

Interest in the role that cities can play in climate change as sites of transformation has increased but research has been limited in its practical applications and there has been limited consideration of how policies and technologies play out. These challenges necessitate a re-thinking of existing notions of urban governance in order to account for the practices that emerge from governments and a plethora of other actors in the context of uncertainty. We understand these practices to constitute adaptive governance, underpinned by social learning guiding the actions of the multiplicity of actors. The aim here is to unpack how social learning for adaptive governance requires attention to competing understandings of risk and identity, and the multiplicity of mechanisms in which change occurs or is blocked in urban climate governance. We adopt a novel lens of 'environmentalities' which allows us to assess the historical and institutional context and power relations in the informal settlements of Maputo, Mozambique. Our findings highlight how environmental identities around urban adaptation to climate change are constituted in the social and physical divisions between the formal and informal settlements, whilst existing knowledge models prioritise dominant economic and political interests and lead to the construction of new environmental subjects. While the findings of this study are contextually distinct, the generalizable lessons are that governance of urban adaptation occurs and is solidified within a complex multiplicity of socioecological relations.

Distinct subsets of hypothalamic genes are modulated by two different thermogenesis-inducing stimuli

Obesity results from an imbalance between food intake and energy expenditure, two vital functions that are tightly controlled by specialized neurons of the hypothalamus. The complex mechanisms that integrate these two functions are only beginning to be deciphered. The objective of this study was to determine the effect of two thermogenesis-inducing conditions, i.e., ingestion of a high-fat (HF) diet and exposure to cold environment, on the expression of 1,176 genes in the hypothalamus of Wistar rats. Hypothalamic gene expression was evaluated using a cDNA macroarray approach. mRNA and protein expressions were determined by reverse-transcription PCR (RT-PCR) and immunoblot. Cold exposure led to an increased expression of 43 genes and to a reduced expression of four genes. HF diet promoted an increased expression of 90 genes and a reduced expression of 78 genes. Only two genes (N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor 2B and guanosine triphosphate (GTP)-binding protein G-alpha-i1) were similarly affected by both thermogenesis-inducing conditions, undergoing an increment of expression. RT-PCR and immunoblot evaluations confirmed the modulation of NMDA receptor 2B and GTP-binding protein G-alpha-i1, only. This corresponds to 0.93% of all the responsive genes and 0.17% of the analyzed genes. These results indicate that distinct environmental thermogenic stimuli can modulate predominantly distinct profiles of genes reinforcing the complexity and multiplicity of the hypothalamic mechanisms that regulate energy conservation and expenditure.

Mixed multiplicities and the minimal number of generator of modules

Let (R, m) be a d-dimensional Noetherian local ring. In this work we prove that the mixed Buchsbaum-Rim multiplicity for a finite family of R-submodules of R(p) of finite colength coincides with the Buchsbaum-Rim multiplicity of the module generated by a suitable superficial sequence, that is, we generalize for modules the well-known Risler-Teissier theorem. As a consequence, we give a new proof of a generalization for modules of the fundamental Rees` mixed Multiplicity theorem, which was first proved by Kirby and Rees in (1994, [8]). We use the above result to give an upper bound for the minimal number of generators of a finite colength R-submodule of R(p) in terms of mixed multiplicities for modules, which generalize a similar bound obtained by Cruz and Verma in (2000, [5]) for m-primary ideals. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Positive solutions of the p-Laplacian involving a superlinear nonlinearity with zeros

Using a combination of several methods, such as variational methods. the sub and supersolutions method, comparison principles and a priori estimates. we study existence, multiplicity, and the behavior with respect to lambda of positive solutions of p-Laplace equations of the form -Delta(p)u = lambda h(x, u), where the nonlinear term has p-superlinear growth at infinity, is nonnegative, and satisfies h(x, a(x)) = 0 for a suitable positive function a. In order to manage the asymptotic behavior of the solutions we extend a result due to Redheffer and we establish a new Liouville-type theorem for the p-Laplacian operator, where the nonlinearity involved is superlinear, nonnegative, and has positive zeros. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.