Making apartments affordable: Moving from speculative to deliberative development

Urban planning policies in Australia presuppose apartments as the new dominant housing type, but much of what the market has delivered is criticised as over-development, and as being generic, poorly-designed, environmentally unsustainable and unaffordable. Policy responses to this problem typically focus on planning regulation and construction costs as the primary issues needing to be addressed in order to increase the supply of quality, affordable apartment housing. In contrast, this paper uses Ball’s (1983) ‘structures of provision’ approach to outline the key processes informing apartment development and identifies a substantial gap in critical understanding of how apartments are developed in Australia. This reveals economic problems not typically considered by policymakers. Using mainstream economic analysis to review the market itself, the authors found high search costs, demand risk, problems with exchange, and lack of competition present key barriers to achieving greater affordability and limit the extent to which ‘speculative’ developers can respond to the preferences of would be owner-occupiers of apartments. The existing development model, which is reliant on capturing uplift in site value, suits investors seeking rental yields in the first instance and capital gains in the second instance, and actively encourages housing price inflation. This is exacerbated by lack of density restrictions, such as have existed in inner Melbourne for many years, which permits greater yields on redevelopment sites. The price of land in the vicinity of such redevelopment sites is pushed up as landholders' expectation of future yield is raised. All too frequently existing redevelopment sites go back onto the market as vendors seek to capture the uplift in site value and exit the project in a risk free manner...

Melanopsin ganglion cell function in early age-related macular degeneration

Purpose Melanopsin-expressing retinal ganglion cells (mRGCs) have non-image forming functions including mediation of the pupil light reflex (PLR). There is limited knowledge about mRGC function in retinal disease. Initial retinal changes in age-related macular degeneration (AMD) occur in the paracentral region where mRGCs have their highest density, making them vulnerable during disease onset. In this cross-sectional clinical study, we measured the PLR to determine if mRGC function is altered in early stages of macular degeneration. Methods Pupil responses were measured in 8 early AMD patients (AREDS 2001 classification; mean age 72.6 ± 7.2 years, 5M, and 3F) and 12 healthy control participants (mean age 66.6 ± 6.1 years, 8M and 4F) using a custom-built Maxwellian-view pupillometer. Stimuli were 0.5 Hz sinewaves (10 s duration, 35.6° diameter) of short wavelength light (464nm, blue; retinal irradiance = 14.5 log quanta.cm-2.s-1) to produce high melanopsin excitation and of long wavelength light (638nm, red; retinal irradiance = 14.9 log quanta.cm-2.s-1), to bias activation to outer retina and provide a control. Baseline pupil diameter was determined during a 10 s pre-stimulus period. The post illumination pupil response (PIPR) was recorded for 40 s. The 6 s PIPR and maximum pupil constriction were expressed as percentage baseline (M ± SD). Results The blue PIPR was significantly less sustained (p<0.01) in the early AMD group (75.49 ± 7.88%) than the control group (58.28 ± 9.05%). The red PIPR was not significantly different (p>0.05) between the early AMD (84.79 ± 4.03%) and control groups (82.01 ± 5.86%). Maximum constriction amplitude in the early AMD group for blue (43.67 ± 6.35%) and red (48.64 ± 6.49%) stimuli were not significantly different to the control group for blue (39.94 ± 3.66%) and red (44.98 ± 3.15%) stimuli (p>0.05). Conclusions These results are suggestive of inner retinal mRGC deficits in early AMD. This non-invasive, objective measure of pupil responses may provide a new method for quantifying mRGC function and monitoring AMD progression.

A multiscale study on the structural and mechanical properties of the luffa sponge from Luffa cylindrica plant

Cellular materials that are often observed in biological systems exhibit excellent mechanical properties at remarkably low densities. Luffa sponge is one of such materials with a complex interconnecting porous structure. In this paper, we studied the relationship between its structural and mechanical properties at different levels of its hierarchical organization from a single fiber to a segment of whole sponge. The tensile mechanical behaviors of three single fibers were examined by an Instron testing machine and the ultrastructure of a fractured single fiber was observed in a scanning electronic microscope. Moreover, the compressive mechanical behaviors of the foam-like blocks from different locations of the sponge were examined. The difference of the compressive stress-strain responses of four sets of segmental samples were also compared. The result shows that the single fiber is a porous composite material mainly consisting of cellulose fibrils and lignin/hemicellulose matrix, and its Young's modulus and strength are comparable to wood. The mechanical behavior of the block samples from the hoop wall is superior to that from the core part. Furthermore, it shows that the influence of the inner surface on the mechanical property of the segmental sample is stronger than that of the core part; in particular, the former's Young's modulus, strength and strain energy absorbed are about 1.6 times higher. The present work can improve our understanding of the structure-function relationship of the natural material, which may inspire fabrication of new biomimetic foams with desirable mechanical efficiency for further applications in anti-crushing devices and super-light sandwich panels.

Die Personennamen und Titel der mittelmongolischen Dokumente : Eine lexikalische Untersuchung

The present research is an investigation into the corpus of personal names and titles that are found in sources from the Middle Mongolian period, that is the time from the 13th to the beginning of the 15th century. The entry for every name or title has been divided into three parts: occurence(s) of a given name in Middle Mongolian sources (primary sources), etymology, and occurence(s) in sources other than Middle Mongolian (secondary sources). Culturally and lingistically the corpus can be divided into six sub-groups: Mongolian, Turkic (Old, Middle and Modern), Arabo-Persian (Islamic), Indo-Iranian and Tibetan (Buddhist), as well as Chinese. Among these, the largest group is formed by Mongolian and Turkic, followed by Chinese (mostly titles), Indo-Iranian, Arabo-Persian and Tibetan. With regard to the primary and secondary occurences the research is based mainly on primary sources including text-publications and dictionaries. Every name or title is documented as completely as possible within a Central Asian framework. However, due to the divergency of the sources available as well as diachronical importance, each sub-group has been dealt with slightly differently, but consistently. The corpus of investigated names and titles gives a fairly correct picture of the multi-ethnical composition of the Mongolian world-empire. It also shows the foreign influences on Mongolian names and titles, being in this respect a mirror of the influences that are visible in other parts of the Middle Mongolian culture too. Furthermore, the investigated corpus reflects the transitory stage of the 13th to 15th century in Central Asian history, and includes thus material from the past (Indo-Iranian, Old and Middle Turkic), and material that points to the future (Arabo-Persian, Tibetan, Modern Turkic).

Ivanov-mistik : Okkul'tnye motivy v poèzii i proze Vjačeslava Ivanova (1907-1919)

The subject of this work is the mysticism of Russian poet, critic and philosopher Vjacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949). The approach adopted involves the textual and discourse analysis and findings of the history of ideas. The subject has been considered important because of Ivanov's visions of his dead wife, writer Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal, which were combined with audible messages ("automatic writings"). Several automatic writings and descriptions of the visions from Ivanov's archive collections in St.Petersburg and Moscow are presented in this work. Right after the beginning of his hallucinations in the autumn of 1907, Ivanov was totally captivated by the theosophical ideas of Anna Mintslova, the background figure for this work. Anna Mintslova, a disciple of Rudolf Steiner's Esoteric School, offered Ivanov the theosophical concept of initiation to interpret paranormal phenomena in his intimate life. The work is divided into three main chapters, an introduction and aconclusion. The first chapter is called The Mystical Person: Anthropology of Ivanov and describes the role of the inner "Higher Self" in Ivanov's views on the nature of human consciousness. The political implications of the concepts, "mystical anarchism" and "sobornost" (religious unity) are also examined. The acquaintance and contacts with Anna Mintslova during 1906-1907 gave a framework to Ivanov's search for an organic society and personal religious experience. The second part, Mystics of Initiation and Visionary Aesthetics describes the influence of the initiation concept on Ivanov's aesthetic views (mainly "realistic symbolism"). On the other hand, some connections between the imagery of his visions and symbols in his verses of that period are established. Since Mintslova represented the ideas of Rudolf Steiner in Russia, several symbols shared by Steiner and Ivanov ("rose", "rose and cross") have been another subject of investigation. The preference for strict verse form in the lyrics of Ivanov's visionary period is interpreted as an attempt to place his own poetic creation within two traditions, a mystical and literary one. The third part of this work, Mystics of Hope and Terror, examines Ivanov's conception of Russia in connection with Mintslova's ideas of occult danger from the East. Ivanov's view of the "Russian idea" and his nationalistic idea during World War I are considered as a representation of the fear of the danger. Ivanov's interpretation of the October revolution is influenced by the theosophical concept of the "keeper of the threshold" which occurs in the context of the discourse of occult danger.

Konstrukcija mnimosti : K poètike "Voskovoj persony" Ju. Tynjanova

The subject of this work is the poetics of «The Wax Effigy», a short novel or novella by Jurii Tynianov, Russian writer, literary critic, historian of literature and prominent literary theoretician. The plot structure of the novel is based upon a real event, the creation by Bartolomeo Carlo Rastrelli in 1725 of a wax sculpture of the first Russian emperor, Peter the Great. «Construction of the Sham» consists of three chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. Due to the fact that Tynianov was at the same time a prose writer and theoretician of literature it seemed important to consider the reception of his prose and his works on literary theory in relationship to each other. The introduction is devoted to this task. The first chapter is about the history of the creation of the novel and its reception. Tynianov stopped writing one short story in order to write the novel; these two works have some common traits. It seems almost obvious that his work on the first text was a real step toward the creation of the second. In the first story there is an opposition of dead/alive which is semantic prefiguring of a central motif in «The Wax Effigy». An analysis of the reception of the novel demonstrated that almost every critic writing about the novel has described it as nonsense. Critics considered Tynianov's work in terms of «devices» and «content» and could not understand how devices are related to the content of the novel: the novel was thought as a signifier without any signified. Implicitly, critics thought the signified of the novel as a traditional one of the historical novel, as the historiosophical «idea», embodied in the system of literary devices. In this case literature becomes something instrumental, a kind of expression of extraliterary content. In contradistinction to that Tynianov considered literary semantics as an effect of the literary structure. From his point of view the literary sense is immanent to the process of signification accomplished inside the literary text. The second chapter is devoted to a rhetorical analysis of the opposition dead/alive. Tynianov systematically compares both terms of the opposition. As a result of this strategy the wax effigy of the dead emperor becomes «as if» alive and the world of living people «as if» dead. The qualifier «as if» refers to the fact that Tynianov creates an ambiguous semantic system. This rhetoric is related to European Romanticism and his «fantastic literature» (Merimé, Hoffmann, Maupassant etc.). But Tynianov demonstrates a linguistic origin of the strange fantoms created by romantics; he demystifies these idols by parodying the fantastic literature, that is, showing «how it was done». At the same time, the opposition mentioned above refers to his idea of «incongruity» which plays a prominent role in Tynianov s theory but has never been conceptualised. The incongruity is a inner collision of the literary text; from Tynianov's point of view the meaning of the work of literature is always a dynamic collision of semantically heterogeneous elements struggling with each other. In «The Wax Effigy» Tynianov creates a metalevel of the work demonstrating the process of creation of the literary sense. The third chapter is a reconstruction of Tynianov's conception of the historical prose, specifically of the mechanisms by which historical facts are transformed into literary events. Tynianov thought that the task of the historical novelist is to depict his hero as an actor, to demonstrate that as a wearer of many masks he is a creator of appearances, ambiguities. Here, in the «figure of fiction» (Andrei Belyi), the very idea of the historical prose and rhetoric employed in «The Wax Effigy», history and literature meet each other. In his last theoretical work, «On parody» Tynianov writes about the so-called sham structure of parody. In his opinion every parody is a text about other texts and «serious» work which could be read at the same time as a text about «reality». This twofold structure of parody is that of «The Wax Effigy»: that text speaks about ambiguities of the history and about ambiguities of the literary sense, about social reality of the past and - about the working of the literature itself. «The Wax Effigy» is written as a autoreflective text, as an experiment in literary semantics, as a system of literary ambiguities - of hero, rhetoric and the text itself. The meaning of the novel is created not by the embodiment extraliterary idea, but by the process of signification accomplished inside the work of literature. In this sense Tynianov's novel is parody, a break with the tradition of the historical novel preceding «The Wax Effigy».

The sputtering temperature of a cooling cylindrical rod with an insulated core

By a standard application of Jones's method associated with the Wiener-Hopf technique an explicit solution is obtained for the temperature distribution inside a cylindrical rod with an insulated inner core when the rod is allowed to enter into a fluid of large extent with a uniform speed, and a simple integral expression is derived for the value of the sputtering temperature of the rod at the points of entry. Numerical results under certain special circumstances are also obtained and presented in the form of a table.

Arkeen pudonnut sibylla : Modernin naisen identiteetin rakentuminen Marja-Liisa Vartion romaanissa Kaikki naiset näkevät unia

A Sibyl fallen into everyday life. The enfolding of the identity of modern woman in Marja- Liisa Vartio s novel Kaikki naiset näkevät unia ( All Women Have Dreams ). --- Marja-Liisa Vartio played a remarkable part in renewing Finnish literature. My thesis examines her novel Kaikki naiset näkevät unia (1960), which describes the life of a middle-aged housewife, Mrs. Pyy ( Mrs. Hazel Hen ). She has moved from country to city and lives now in a suburb, in the Helsinki of the 1950 s. In Finnish literature, the novel is the first significant description of a modern city woman accomplished by modernistic means. My research examines the identity of a woman in the Finland of the 50 s, an epoch marked by the inevitable transition into modernity. My aim is to look into the ways in which the female identity enfolds in Kaikki naiset näkevät unia, how it takes its form, how it is described and commented. The primary method is contextual close reading; the novel is seen in the social, cultural and historical context of the time it was published. Essential elements in this study are literary motifs and images in the novel, and particularly transtextual relations as defined by Gérald Genette. The focus is on hypertextuality, intertextuality and paratextuality. Kaikki naiset näkevät unia emerges as a modern version of Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. A woman s life spent in illusive dreaming is transferred from a 1900th century bourgeois town in France to a middle class Finnish suburb in the 1950 s. Vartio s novel is a variant of an ancient Finnish ballad I, a bird without a nest , making it into a modern narration of transition. The inner, mental journey from country to city is of great length, and the liminal life in a suburb does not make the passage any easier. Like the lyrical voices in the poetry of Edith Södergran, also Mrs. Pyy finds it hard to discover any values of sisterhood or those of ideal femininity in modern times. In earlier studies of Marja-Liisa Vartio s prose, stress has been laid on the discourse of her narrators and characters, as well as on its modern literary form. In this research, however, urgent allusions to paintings, old and new, are taken into account, since Mrs. Pyy mirrors herself against art, both classical and modern. Principal images in this context are Michelangelo s Sibyls in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and a modern painting, which remains unidentified. Mrs. Pyy turns out to be a tragicomic character, who has magnanimous illusions about herself, but is compelled to accept the fact the she is only a mediocre person. She is nothing more than a first generation city dweller; she is not a modern, aloof outsider but a mere dilettante, who desperately tries to live out modern city life. Kaikki naiset näkevät unia is a striking picture of the 1950 s, a picture that is construed in the consciousness of Mrs. Pyy. We are shown everyday life growing more and more modern after the war and woman s role growing more and more subject to increasing pressure for change.

A comparison of the performance and biological efficiency of new knapsack sprayers and a controlled droplet application (CDA) sprayer for the control of the diamondback moth, Plutella xylostella L. (Lepidoptera: Plutellidae)

Field trials and laboratory bioassays were undertaken to compare the performance and efficacy (mortality of diamondback moth larvae) of insecticides applied to cabbages with three high volume hydraulic knapsack sprayers (NS-16, PB-20 and Selecta 12V) and a controlled droplet application (CDA) sprayer. In field experiments, the high volume knapsack sprayers (application rate 500-600 L ha-') provided better spray coverage on the upper and lower surfaces of inner leaves, the upper surfaces of middle and outer leaves, and greater biological efficacy than the CDA sprayer (application rate 20~40 L ha-'). The PB-20 provided better spray coverage on the upper surface of middle leaves and both Surfaces of outer leaves when compared with the Selecta I2V. However, its biological efficacy in the field was not significantly different from that of the other high volume sprayers. Increasing the application rate from 20 to 40 L ha - ' for the CDA sprayer significantly increased droplet density but had no impact on test insect mortality. Laboratory evaluations of biological efficacy yielded higher estimates than field evaluations and there was no significant difference between the performance of the PB-20 and the CDA sprayer. Significant positive relationships were detected between insect mortality and droplet density deposited for both the PB-20 and the CDA sprayers

Kansallisvaltion teräsmiehestä valtakunnan sovittelijaksi : Poliisikulttuurin psykohistorialliset solmukohdat 1930-1997

From Steely Nation-State Superman to Conciliator of Economical Global Empire – A Psychohistory of Finnish Police Culture 1930-1997 My study concerns the way police culture has changed within the societal changes in Finnish society between 1930 and 1997. The method of my study was psycho-historical and post-structural analysis. The research was conducted by examining the psycho-historical plateaus traceable within Finnish police culture. I made a social diagnosis of the autopoietic relationship between the power-holders of Finnish society and the police (at various levels of hierarchical organization). According to police researcher John P. Crank, police culture should be understood as the cognitive processes behind the actions of the police. Among these processes are the values, beliefs, rituals, customs and advice which standardize their work and the common sense of policemen. According to Crank, police culture is defined by a mindset which thinks, judges and acts according to its evaluations filtered by its own preliminary comprehension. Police culture consists of all the unsaid assumptions of being a policeman, the organizational structures of police, official policies, unofficial ways of behaviour, forms of arrest, procedures of practice and different kinds of training habits, attitudes towards suspects and citizens, and also possible corruption. Police culture channels its members’ feelings and emotions. Crank says that police culture can be seen in how policemen express their feelings. He advises police researchers to ask themselves how it feels to be a member of the police. Ethos has been described as a communal frame for thought that guides one’s actions. According to sociologist Martti Grönfors, the Finnish mentality of the Protestant ethic is accentuated among Finnish policemen. The concept of ethos expresses very well the self-made mentality as an ethical tension which prevails in police work between communal belonging and individual freedom of choice. However, it is significant that it is a matter of the quality of relationships, and that the relationship is always tied to the context of the cultural history of dealing with one’s anxiety. According to criminologist Clifford Shearing, the values of police culture act as subterranean processes of the maintenance of social power in society. Policemen have been called microcosmic mediators, or street corner politicians. Robert Reiner argues that at the level of self-comprehension, policemen disparage the dimension of politics in their work. Reiner points out that all relationships which hold a dimension of power are political. Police culture has also been called a canteen culture. This idea expresses the day-to-day basis of the mentality of taking care of business which policing produces as a necessity for dealing with everyday hardships. According to police researcher Timo Korander, this figurative expression embodies the nature of police culture as a crew culture which is partly hidden from police chiefs who are at a different level. This multitude of standpoints depicts the diversity of police cultures. According to Reiner, one should not see police culture as one monolithic whole; instead one should assess it as the interplay of individuals negotiating with their environment and societal power networks. The cases analyzed formed different plateaus of study. The first plateau was the so-called ‘Rovaniemi arson’ case in the summer of 1930. The second plateau consisted of the examinations of alleged police assaults towards the Communists during the Finnish Continuation War of 1941 to 1944 and the threats that societal change after the war posed to Finnish Society. The third plateau was thematic. Here I investigated how using force towards police clients has changed culturally from the 1930s to the 1980s. The fourth plateau concerned with the material produced by the Security Police detectives traced the interaction between Soviet KGB agents and Finnish politicians during the long 1970s. The fifth plateau of larger changes in Finnish police culture then occurred during the 1980s as an aftermath of the former decade. The last, sixth plateau of changing relationships between policing and the national logic of action can be seen in the murder of two policemen in the autumn of 1997. My study shows that police culture has transformed from a “stone cold” steely fixed identity towards a more relational identity that tries to solve problems by negotiating with clients instead of using excessive force. However, in this process of change there is a traceable paradox in Finnish policing and police culture. On the one hand, policemen have, at the practical level, constructed their policing identity by protecting their inner self in their organizational role at work against the projections of anger and fear in society. On the other hand, however, they have had to safeguard themselves at the emotional level against the predominance of this same organizational role. Because of this dilemma they must simultaneously construct both a distance from their own role as police officers and the role of the police itself. This makes the task of policing susceptible to the political pressures of society. In an era of globalization, and after the heyday of the welfare state, this can produce heightened challenges for Finnish police culture.

The sputtering temperature of a cooling cylindrical rod with an insulated core

By a standard application of Jones's method associated with the Wiener-Hopf technique an explicit solution is obtained for the temperature distribution inside a cylindrical rod with an insulated inner core when the rod is allowed to enter into a fluid of large extent with a uniform speed, and a simple integral expression is derived for the value of the sputtering temperature of the rod at the points of entry. Numerical results under certain special circumstances are also obtained and presented in the form of a table.

The impact of private and shared open space on liveability in subtropical apartment buildings

The study explores the relationship between open space design, factors impacting open space provision, and resident satisfaction with open space in multistorey apartment buildings in the context of the subtropical lifestyle and climate of Brisbane Australia. The purpose of the paper is to identify the specific physical and spatial design characteristics residents perceive to be important in open spaces associated with their private dwellings and with shared open spaces. Firsthand resident evaluations of everyday experiences of residing in inner urban high density environments are explored through a survey of 636 residents and interviews with 24 residents. Private balconies are highly valued, but residents’ satisfaction would be enhanced by spaciousness for diverse activities, privacy and climate responsive design. Communal spaces and facilities are used infrequently by many residents who prefer interactions with community outside of the building. This is related to preferences for a level of anonymity in a setting where privacy is difficult to achieve due to physical proximity of neighbours.

Double-Edged Imitation : Theories and Practices of Pastiche in Literature

This study concentrates on the contested concept of pastiche in literary studies. It offers the first detailed examination of the history of the concept from its origins in the seventeenth century to the present, showing how pastiche emerged as a critical concept in interaction with the emerging conception of authorial originality and the copyright laws protecting it. One of the key results of this investigation is the contextualisation of the postmodern debate on pastiche. Even though postmodern critics often emphasise the radical novelty of pastiche, they in fact resuscitate older positions and arguments without necessarily reflecting on their historical conditions. This historical background is then used to analyse the distinction between the primarily French conception of pastiche as the imitation of style and the postmodern notion of it as the compilation of different elements. The latter s vagueness and inclusiveness detracts from its value as a critical concept. The study thus concentrates on the notion of stylistic pastiche, challenging the widespread prejudice that it is merely an indication of lack of talent. Because it is multiply based on repetition, pastiche is in fact a highly ambiguous or double-edged practice that calls into question the distinction between repetition and original, thereby undermining the received notion of individual unique authorship as a fundamental aesthetic value. Pastiche does not, however, constitute a radical upheaval of the basic assumptions on which the present institution of literature relies, since, in order to mark its difference, pastiche always refers to a source outside itself against which its difference is measured. Finally, the theoretical analysis of pastiche is applied to literary works. The pastiches written by Marcel Proust demonstrate how it can become an integral part of a writer s poetics: imitation of style is shown to provide Proust with a way of exploring the role of style as a connecting point between inner vision and reality. The pastiches of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Michael Dibdin, Nicholas Meyer and the duo Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr illustrate the functions of pastiche within a genre detective fiction that is itself fundamentally repetitive. A.S. Byatt s Possession and D.M. Thomas s Charlotte use Victorian pastiches to investigate the conditions of literary creation in the age of postmodern suspicion of creativity and individuality. The study thus argues that the concept of pastiche has valuable insights to offer to literary criticism and theory, and that literary pastiches, though often dismissed in reviews and criticism, are a particularly interesting object of study precisely because of their characteristic ambiguity.

Pasteurella multocida Expresses Two Lipopolysaccharide Glycoforms Simultaneously, but Only a Single Form Is Required for Virulence: Identification of Two Acceptor-Specific Heptosyl I Transferases

Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is a critical virulence determinant in Pasteurella multocida and a major antigen responsible for host protective immunity. In other mucosal pathogens, variation in LPS or lipooligosaccharide structure typically occurs in the outer core oligosaccharide regions due to phase variation. P. multocida elaborates a conserved oligosaccharide extension attached to two different, simultaneously expressed inner core structures, one containing a single phosphorylated 3-deoxy-D-manno-octulosonic acid (Kdo) residue and the other containing two Kdo residues. We demonstrate that two heptosyltransferases, HptA and HptB, add the first heptose molecule to the Kdo1 residue and that each exclusively recognizes different acceptor molecules. HptA is specific for the glycoform containing a single, phosphorylated Kdo residue (glycoform A), while HptB is specific for the glycoform containing two Kdo residues (glycoform B). In addition, KdkA was identified as a Kdo kinase, required for phosphorylation of the first Kdo molecule. Importantly, virulence data obtained from infected chickens showed that while wild-type P. multocida expresses both LPS glycoforms in vivo, bacterial mutants that produced only glycoform B were fully virulent, demonstrating for the first time that expression of a single LPS form is sufficient for P. multocida survival in vivo. We conclude that the ability of P. multocida to elaborate alternative inner core LPS structures is due to the simultaneous expression of two different heptosyltransferases that add the first heptose residue to the nascent LPS molecule and to the expression of both a bifunctional Kdo transferase and a Kdo kinase, which results in the initial assembly of two inner core structures.

Tohtoriksi tulemisen tarina

The study examines the dissertation process. The thesis is based on twenty-three autobiographical stories. They were collected from PhDs who had taken their doctoral degrees at the University of Helsinki. The purpose is to investigate the experiences of these PhD recipients and find out what they recall of the events, traditions, and meanings associated with their PhD studies. An anthology collected from PhDs in the historical sciences, which was published in 1998, was used as reference material. This study begins with a general presentation of the history and values of the university and the traditions of the academic community in Finland. Thereafter, the data and the methodological framework of the study are presented. Attention is paid to the discipline background, sex and age of these PhDs, which may have affected their storytelling. The former studies concerning the academic life together with the experiences of the writers revealed that the process of becoming a PhD graduate is generally considered as an academic rite of passage. The change from student status to becoming a fully accepted professional member of one’s field is real, transforming and at certain points, ritualized. The finding of an inner logic to the doctoral process, which included meaningful turning points, was central to the narrative analysis approach. During the process there were different kinds of struggles and highlights. The family background, university studies and time in employment had directed the doctoral studies of some PhD students enormously. But generally the most memorable and value laden were the phases of actually writing the dissertation, the public examination, and the celebration party in the evening called “karonkka”. The picture that emerged from these various life-stories demonstrated that there was no ivory tower where doctoral candidates live an isolated existence. Everyday cares in ordinary life and tasks in academic life are both demanding and rewarding at the same time. The main point is that the academic community in general and PhD supervisors in particular should concentrate not only on the thesis-writing process their students but also on the doctoral students´ wider life situation. Doctoral students need scientific, financial, and mental support. Somebody must be available to inspire and offer encouragement otherwise the process will be disturbed. The successful completion of the PhD ritual gives the PhD graduate self-confidence and respect but its’ influence on the doctors’ subsequent academic career is diverse. The dissertation process is a personal and unique experience. The aim of the PhD graduation is that this traditional ritual leads to a successful completion and ensures a positive reward for the PhD graduate and the academic community. Keywords: autobiography, narratives, academic traditions, PhD graduates.