Lost in Transition? Emerging forms of residential architecture in Kathmandu

Kathmandu has been the last few cities in the world which retained its medieval urban culture up until twentieth century. Various Hindu and Buddhist religious practices shaped the arrangement of houses, roads and urban spaces giving the city a distinctive physical form, character and a unique oriental nativeness. In recent decades, the urban culture of the city has been changing with the forces of urbanisation and globalisation and the demand for new buildings and spaces. New residential design is increasingly dominated by distinctive patterns of Western suburban ideal comprising detached or semi-detached homes and high rise tower blocks. This architectural iconoclasm can be construed as a rather crude response to the indigenous spaces and builtform. The paper attempts to dismantle the current tension between traditional and contemporary 'culture' (and hence society) and housing (or builtform) in Kathmandu by engaging in a discussion that cuts across space, time and meaning of building. The paper concludes that residential architecture in Kathmandu today stands disoriented and lost in the transition.

John Thompson: Seeing through China

In 1848, Karl Marx predicted that a flow of cheap commodities would be the heavy artillery which would batter down all Chinese walls and open up the country to the west (Marx, 1978, p. 477). The Scottish photographer John Thomson (1837-1921) was both chronicler of and participant in the early moments of this process. Thomson was a commercial photographer who first arrived in the Far East in 1862. He earned the moniker of 'China' in a decade-long stay during which he photographed what he considered to be the key aspects of its culture and landscape. In this body of work, Illustrations of China and its People (first published in 1874) is perhaps the most comprehensive. It explores, through two hundred photographs and accompanying texts, a series of phenomena from the macro-scale of landscape, infrastructure and industry to the smaller scales of streetscapes, domestic spaces, individual portraits, and other details of everyday life. Despite his own description of the volumes as encyclopedic, Illustrations is geographically quite limited. Thomson's explorations into the hinterland proceed up the country’s principal rivers from those coastal ports which had already been wrested into western hands during the Opium Wars (of the 1840s) and subsequently opened up to trade. This is perhaps one of the reasons why Illustrations has been described as an explicitly colonial text, a guide-book for the prospective settler whose content offered the strategic knowledge of land, culture and natural resources necessary if the territorial advantages of the coastal periphery were to extended to the interior (Jeffrey, 1981, p. 64). It can also be argued, however, that Thomson’s volume offered justification for a potential colonial presence. Faced with a civilization whose history was as sophisticated as the west, it depicts a culture that is static and moribund, its addiction to traditional values an impediment to progress. While this is perhaps most explicit in the texts of Illustrations of China, it can also be seen in the images whose uniform chemical rendering also serves to make an essentially diverse culture seem homogenous. Yet it is these images that distinguish Illustrations from previous attempts to collate China’s culture and landscape. Here, the mechanical precision of his camera captures a reality that often subverts the colonial narrative, confounding stereotypes as Thomson’s mass-produced images allow another China to emerge.

Do Children still need to Escape Childhood? A Reassessment of John Holt and his Vision for Children's Rights

The work of children’s liberationists have been long been critiqued for pushing the parameters of rights discourse too far; specifically, by suggesting that there are no significant differences between children and adults, including their ability for self-determination. John Holt’s 1974 text Escape from Childhood is one such work which was deemed highly controversial for its time. This article uses Holt’s Escape from Childhood as an overarching framework against which to examine the current state of play on children’s rights as explicated through the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It suggests that whilst Holt has often been critiqued for being too radical, in the context of current children’s rights discourse Holt’s visioning is not as radical as it might first appear.

Hanna, John Connor (1871-1947)

Profile and biography entry of John Connor Hanna, early film censor

Retinal pigment epithelial cell multinucleation in the aging eye - a mechanism to repair damage and maintain homoeostasis

Retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells are central to retinal health and homoeostasis. Dysfunction or death of RPE cells underlies many age-related retinal degenerative disorders particularly age-related macular degeneration. During aging RPE cells decline in number, suggesting an age-dependent cell loss. RPE cells are considered to be postmitotic, and how they repair damage during aging remains poorly defined. We show that RPE cells increase in size and become multinucleate during aging in C57BL/6J mice. Multinucleation appeared not to be due to cell fusion, but to incomplete cell division, that is failure of cytokinesis. Interestingly, the phagocytic activity of multinucleate RPE cells was not different from that of mononuclear RPE cells. Furthermore, exposure of RPE cells in vitro to photoreceptor outer segment (POS), particularly oxidized POS, dose-dependently promoted multinucleation and suppressed cell proliferation. Both failure of cytokinesis and suppression of proliferation required contact with POS. Exposure to POS also induced reactive oxygen species and DNA oxidation in RPE cells. We propose that RPE cells have the potential to proliferate in vivo and to repair defects in the monolayer. We further propose that the conventionally accepted 'postmitotic' status of RPE cells is due to a modified form of contact inhibition mediated by POS and that RPE cells are released from this state when contact with POS is lost. This is seen in long-standing rhegmatogenous retinal detachment as overtly proliferating RPE cells (proliferative vitreoretinopathy) and more subtly as multinucleation during normal aging. Age-related oxidative stress may promote failure of cytokinesis and multinucleation in RPE cells.

Improving E-Assessment Systems With A focus On Adaptive Feedback And Marking

Institutions involved in the provision of tertiary education across Europe are feeling the pinch. European universities, and other higher education (HE) institutions, must operate in a climate where the pressure of government spending cuts (Garben, 2012) is in stark juxtaposition to the EU’s strategy to drive forward and maintain a growth of student numbers in the sector (eurostat, 2015).

In order to remain competitive, universities and HE institutions are making ever-greater use of electronic assessment (E-Assessment) systems (Chatzigavriil et all, 2015; Ferrell, 2012). These systems are attractive primarily because they offer a cost-effect and scalable approach for assessment. In addition to scalability, they also offer reliability, consistency and impartiality; furthermore, from the perspective of a student they are most popular because they can offer instant feedback (Walet, 2012).

There are disadvantages, though.

First, feedback is often returned to a student immediately on competition of their assessment. While it is possible to disable the instant feedback option (this is often the case during an end of semester exam period when assessment scores must be can be ratified before release), however, this option tends to be a global ‘all on’ or ‘all off’ configuration option which is controlled centrally rather than configurable on a per-assessment basis.

If a formative in-term assessment is to be taken by multiple groups of
students, each at different times, this restriction means that answers to each question will be disclosed to the first group of students undertaking the assessment. As soon as the answers are released “into the wild” the academic integrity of the assessment is lost for subsequent student groups.

Second, the style of feedback provided to a student for each question is often limited to a simple ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ indicator. While this type of feedback has its place, it often does not provide a student with enough insight to improve their understanding of a topic that they did not answer correctly.

Most E-Assessment systems boast a wide range of question types including Multiple Choice, Multiple Response, Free Text Entry/Text Matching and Numerical questions. The design of these types of questions is often quite restrictive and formulaic, which has a knock-on effect on the quality of feedback that can be provided in each case.

Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) are most prevalent as they are the most prescriptive and therefore most the straightforward to mark consistently. They are also the most amenable question types, which allow easy provision of meaningful, relevant feedback to each possible outcome chosen.
Text matching questions tend to be more problematic due to their free text entry nature. Common misspellings or case-sensitivity errors can often be accounted for by the software but they are by no means fool proof, as it is very difficult to predict in advance the range of possible variations on an answer that would be considered worthy of marks by a manual marker of a paper based equivalent of the same question.

Numerical questions are similarly restricted. An answer can be checked for accuracy or whether it is within a certain range of the correct answer, but unless it is a special purpose-built mathematical E-Assessment system the system is unlikely to have computational capability and so cannot, for example, account for “method marks” which are commonly awarded in paper-based marking.

From a pedagogical perspective, the importance of providing useful formative feedback to students at a point in their learning when they can benefit from the feedback and put it to use must not be understated (Grieve et all, 2015; Ferrell, 2012).

In this work, we propose a number of software-based solutions, which will overcome the limitations and inflexibilities of existing E-Assessment systems.

A sad tale: has the small mussel Idas argenteus lost its symbionts?

Idas argenteus (Bivalvia: Mytilidae) belongs to a genus of mussels that are often associated with sunken wood and vertebrate bones in the deep sea. By contrast to other species currently included within the genus Idas and other related genera, such as Bathymodiolus, I. argenteus was documented to lack chemosynthetic symbionts bacterial symbionts in its gills. In the present study, new specimens are assigned to I. argenteus based on shell and soft parts analysis. Molecular data confirm the absence or low abundance of symbionts. Phylogeny based on five genes indicates that the symbiont-bearing I. washingtonius is the closest relative of I. argenteus. Symbiosis loss or extreme reduction is thus inferred to have occurred subsequent to the speciation event, 11–13 Mya. This is the first report of a loss of symbiosis within the clade of deep-sea chemosynthetic mussels.

Introduction: Mapping Gwen John: Lives, Lines and Images

Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces explores issues, questions, and problems emerging in the analysis of epistolary and visual narratives. This book focuses in particular on Gwen John's letters and paintings. It offers an innovative theoretical approach to narrative analysis by drawing on Foucault's theory of power, Deleuze and Guattari's analytics of desire, and Cavarero's concept of the narratable self. Furthermore, it examines the use of letters as documents of life in narrative research and highlights the dynamics of spatiality in the constitution of the female self in art. This study brings together theoretical insights that emerge from the analysis of life documents - some of them previously unpublished - combining innovative research with specific methodological suggestions on doing narrative analysis.

Understanding the non-pharmacological correlates of self-reported efficacy of antidepressants

Objective: To explore the non-pharmacological correlates of the perceived effectiveness of antidepressants (ADs), thereby enhancing understanding of the mechanisms involved in recovery from depression while taking ADs. Method: An online survey was completed by 1781 New Zealand adults who had taken ADs in the previous 5 years. Results: All 18 psychosocial variables measured were associated with depression reduction, and 16 with improved quality of life (QoL). Logistic regression models revealed that the quality of the relationship with the prescriber was related to both depression reduction and improved QoL. In addition, depression reduction was related to younger age, higher income, being fully informed about ADs by the prescriber, fewer social causal beliefs for depression and not having lost a loved one in the 2 months prior to prescription. Furthermore, both outcome measures were positively related to belief in ‘chemical’ rather than ‘placebo’ effects. Conclusion: There are multiple non-pharmacological processes involved in recovery while taking ADs. Enhancing them, for example focusing on the prescriber–patient relationship and giving more information, may enhance recovery rates, with or without ADs.

Compte rendu: Johann Wolfgang Unger (2013), The Discursive Construction of the Scots Language : Education, Politics and Everyday Life, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, coll. « Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 51 », 178 p. [ISBN : 978-9-027-20642-8]

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Indenture deed between Calvin Spencer, Joseph Kershaw, and John Chestnut

This document is an indenture deed between Calvin Spencer, Joseph Kershaw, and John Chestnut.