bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Where are public service unions headed in Europe?
Authors: Fischbach-Pyttel Carola
Published: January 2010

This paper outlines the way in which European integration affects public services and pinpoints the demands which public service unions in Europe have to face. It also describes the membership structure, internal decision-making and working practices, basic objectives and fields of activity of the EPSU (European Federation of Public Service Unions). The author addresses the question of how the EPSU is trying to develop its influence over its own member organisations as well as vis-à-vis the European institutions. Current developments in European social dialogue in the public sector are also discussed.
Workers' attitudes in the Czech Republic: results of the IVVM (Institute for Public Opinion) survey two years on
Authors: Fišera Ivan , Kadavá Charlotte
Published: January 2010

The article reports, analyses and comments upon the results of a public opinion poll commissioned by the CMKOS trade union confederation in September 1996 and designed to collect information about trade union membership as well as workers' political leanings and their views on a wide range of employment- and workplace-related matters including attitudes to their jobs, their supervisors and their employers and their perception of the usefulness of trade unions and collective bargaining. In analysing respondents' replies, the authors compare them with the findings of a similar survey conducted two years earlier, identifying trends and new developments characteristic of the course of transition in the Czech Republic, and drawing lessons for future trade union recruitment and policy strategies. The conclusion is reached, among others, that the relative stability observed in attitudes over the period represents a positive indicator of the establishment of democracy.
The problems of reconstituting a union in a reorganised state enterprise: an exploration of aspects of Hungary's shop floor industrial relations
Authors: Pittaway Mark
Published: January 2010

In this micro-level study of Hungarian industrial relations, the author describes, using extensive archive materials and numerous personal interviews with workers and local residents, the changing fortunes of the enterprise trade union in a large former (non-identified) state-owned and now semi-privatised heavy industrial site in central Hungary. After a brief introduction to the history and some of the factors specific to the case enterprise, which was first set up in the 1940s, the article examines the relationship between the workers and the union in the period preceding 1988 before looking at how management, union and workforce came to terms with the process of political, social and economic transformation which occurred after that date, in order to show both the achievements and limits of the process of union reconstruction which occurred.
Trade unions in crisis - a European renaissance ?
Authors: Hege Adelheid
Published: January 2010

Do the national trade unions have a European future? Observers and protagonists concur in identifying three decisive obstacles on the road to Europeanisation of the trade union movement. Established positions in the national arenas are showing cracks; the structures for supranational action fall short of requirements; the convergence required for harmonisation of national systems is barely perceptible. However, the attempt to think through the question of Europeanisation of the trade unions would not be complete if it failed to incorporate an additional area of data concerned with the internal springs of trade union action. How do the trade unions gain their status as actors on the national and European stage? From where do they derive their capacity for action and adaptation? The article focuses upon the "representative capacity" of the trade unions and shows that their strategic capacity is tied up with the requirement that they be representative of their membership. While representativeness remains a perennial objective of which the trade unions cannot afford to lose sight, it flows into different and deeply ingrained channels in different countries. It is also important to stress the dialectical nature of the construction of representative capacity. The conquest of representativeness depends perhaps less on the determination to reconcile the different and sometimes contradictory interests expressed by workers than on the trade unions' capacity to forge and confirm new collective identities.
Urban time policies in Italy: an overview of time-oriented research
Authors: Bonfiglioli Sandra
Published: January 2010

Italian urban times policies ( "tempi della città") started in the early 1990s when a reform of the local authorities empowered mayors to coordinate timetables of services to the public in order to gear their availability more closely to their users' needs. Such coordination involves close examination of the schedules that regulate human relationships in the urban setting. A number of municipalities have embarked on such projects, sometimes within a broader framework of regional regulation. The distinctive feature of the Italian experience, in a European perspective, is its emphasis on practical innovation, experimentation, and intervention at local level, starting out from the first experiments in Modena and Reggio Emilia.

The cultural, social and economic transformations currently underway in Europe call for an informal rather than a rigidly legislative approach to time policies. The main new trends, in terms of time-related issues, may be summarised as follows: a new organisation of daily working time and annual schedules; increasing mobility; a new approach to reconciling occupational work and caring activities; a new interpretation of rationality; an "electronic" time dimension. Flexibility, mobility, speed, and objective time, but also memory, identity, and presence are typical features of the post-modern cultural landscape and are expressions based on time. The debate over urban times is strongly imbued with women's influence, in its attention to subjects present in their habitat, to the value of everyday life and activity, to the complex rationalities that inspire action. In this way bodies become the yardstick for action to shape city times. Public policy on city times initially focused on redesigning timetables for services to the public or trading activities. Today, within a framework geared to a qualitative transformation of services to the public, we are striving to improve the overall quality of life in the cities.
Towards institutionalising urban time policy
Authors: Mückenberger Ulrich
Published: January 2010

Urban time policies have to be regarded and embarked upon as a democratic and "cross-sectional" process. For such policies to become institutionalised requires citizens' forums, model experiments and surveys within the community as well as interdisciplinary cooperation between the various branches of the local authority administration. The trend towards a "disappearance of the cities" poses new problems. It leads to a decentering of the cities: decentralisation (into smaller parts of the cities, neighbourhoods), but also supra-city connections (territorial networks). It leads also, due to the increasing number of immigrants, tourists, commuters, and city users, in the direction of a split between a city's "citizens" and its "population". The author suggests some ways of coping with these new challenges.
Time in the cities - a new action field for trade unions
Authors: Hoffmann Reiner
Published: January 2010

Working time policy has always been an essential trade union concern but it has been apparent for quite some time now that the unions are broadening their traditional policy horizon in this respect - namely, the workplace - and bringing in new perspectives on this issue. Increasingly they concern themselves not just with working time but with time itself, asking how working time interacts with and relates to non-working time and how the resulting interface, which entails far more than a mere "work-leisure" dichotomy, can be organised. How can shop-opening hours and the provision of services to the public be combined with the need for a more flexible organisation of working time? How can account be taken at one and the same time of the needs of those employed in these areas and of the wishes of the users of the services in question? How can trade unions influence the time rhythms of cities and regions in such a way as to reduce the over-hectic pace of modern life?

In the search for appropriate answers to these questions the trade unions, with their experience in collective bargaining, workplace representation and structural and employment policy, are playing an increasingly important role. Their involvement in this process, as in areas such as environmental policy and women's policy, entails, however, participation in the social dialogue and cooperation with other players.
The ETUC's role in the EU's new economic and monetary architecture
Authors: Coldrick Peter
Published: January 2010

The trade union debate about EMU is moving on: the issue is no longer why or how, but what to do with it once we've got it. For the ETUC the answer is clear: convergence and stability are not ends but means of achieving better jobs and living standards. To try to ensure that this will be the case, the ETUC will have to influence the other post-EMU players: the European Central Bank, which will be responsible for monetary policy, and the economic authority(ies) which will be responsible for budgetary policy. Initial discussions with the "bankers" have been promising, but who is to be the 'champion' of the real economy of jobs, investment and growth? EcoFin with its mantra of 'stability oriented policies' has seemed to be more central bankist than the central bankers. Perhaps this has partly reflected the lost national room for manoeuvre that market-driven integration produced, but EMU, with its convergence and its stability, and with its new institutional possibilities - including the Employment Chapter and the Euro X Council - will create new opportunities for active macroeconomic management. A first test of the post-EMU architecture is already upon us - the Asian crisis. No one wants to talk this up, but nor do we want the European recovery to be aborted, unnecessarily, again. We therefore need to monitor demand and not just supply conditions in the European economy so that we can act swiftly, on a coordinated basis, if demand looks like falling below 3-3.5 per cent in real terms or 5-5.5 per cent in nominal terms. These are the levels of growth required to put unemployment on to a firmly downward path. In terms of recent history the figures may appear high, but we've got a lot of leeway to make up - and EMU is giving us the potential to do it. To repeat, that's what EMU, and the sacrifices made to achieve it, has all been about.
Neo-entrepreneurs of the social and health care sector in Finland
Authors: Kovalainen Anne , Simonen Leila
Published: January 2010

Recession, crisis of the welfare state, unemployment and a desire to affirm the dignity of one's own professional skills were reasons for the creation of neo-entrepreneurship in the social and health care sector in Finland. A total of 371 private social and health care sector entrepreneurs responded to the survey conducted by the National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health (STAKES). These companies are not attempting to compete with care offered by the local authorities but to offer alternative options. The companies in question were rest homes, sheltered housing units, etc.

The social and health care sector entrepreneurs were researched both statistically and descriptively. In the majority of cases the companies were started up by persons who left employment in the public sector out of a desire to set up their own innovative and multidisciplinary service. Some of the entrepreneurs started up on their own while unemployed or under threat of unemployment. The entrepreneurs emphasised autonomy, creativity and the search for professional and psychological growth and satisfaction as their reasons for starting up their own company. They worked longer hours and were paid less than those in similar jobs in the public sector. However, they still considered entrepreneurship the right choice and also recommended it warmly to others.
France: a recurrent aim, repeated near-failures and a new law
Authors: Freyssinet Jacques
Published: January 2010

A glance back through history shows the leading role played by the State in working time developments in France. The flip side, namely the weakness of the two sides of industry, turned out in the 1980s and 1990s to be the obstacle to further working time reductions based on "reduction in return for flexibility" trade-offs. This accounts for the virtual standstill in working time developments since the beginning of the eighties. Accordingly, when it comes to the practical effects of the statutory introduction of the 35-hour week, the policies of both the employers and the trade unions will be of vital significance.
Last best: experiences of Dutch European works councils
Authors: Veersma Ulke
Published: January 2010

Dutch works councils are bodies of workers' representation that are equipped to influence enterprise policy at the national level. Possibilities for information disclosure, training and for the resolution of disputes through the court are. in broad terms, well established. The introduction of European Works Councils (EWC)1, however, look more time than in other countries. Nevertheless, the Directive has had its effects in the Netherlands since the first EWC was installed at the ING bank in April 1996. EWCs now operate in many Multinational Corporations (MNCs).

In this article the first experiences of European Works Councils (EWCs) are reported. EWCs were surveyed on, among other things, the main impediments to their effective functioning at the European level, Furthermore, the article addresses the question of what strategies are being developed. Dutch MNCs appear to be generally behind with the establishment of EWCs. Another general conclusion of the survey is that, with the establishment of the EWC, different elements of industrial relations from other countries are being introduced, which can be seen as a first step towards the europeanisation of the system of national works councils in the Netherlands.

It has yet to be seen if Dutch works councils will be able to maintain their relatively high standards, and possibly raise them to match those of other European countries, or whether a downgrading harmonisation has been put into force. More comparative research, which has to cover a longer period of lime, is required to point out whether the last will be the best at the European level.
The third pillar: adaptability
Authors: Meulders Danièle , Plasman Robert
Published: January 2010

In most of the European Union countries, decisions related to the third pillar guidelines fall to those involved in collective bargaining. This is certainly the case for everything covered under Guideline 16 and, in particular, questions related to the reduction, reorganisation or modernisation of working time, with the exception of part-time work, which is very often the subject of statutory or legislative measures. Thus, we find numerous references to part-time work in the NAPs, whether to measures intended to facilitate the use of this form of work by employers or employees, or to the need to improve the working conditions of part-timers. On the other hand, all of the NAPs - with a few exceptions - are very circumspect, or not very explicit, about aspects linked to the duration and organisation of working time.

It is difficult, moreover, to judge the progress made within the Member States with respect to partnership at all levels, as encouraged in the guidelines, which is meant to be one of the essential factors contributing to a modernisation of work organisation and an improvement in firms' adaptability. Although social pacts have been concluded in certain countries (Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg, Finland), their real scope cannot be evaluated by studying the National Action Plans. Moreover, their possible effects can only be judged over time.

Investment in human capital is without doubt the aspect which comes up least in the NAPs, or can in any case be described as the dimension where innovative input is most lacking.

Finally, the gender dimension puts in too rare an appearance in the third pillar, even though working time, employment contracts and training are three areas where the gender dimension is essential and causes significant stratification.

It emerges from a close examination of the NAPs that the third pillar is interpreted in too restrictive a manner, underestimating the modernisation of work organisation aspect, and lacking an overall vision of the true potential of a strategy to modernise the organisation of work and working time.
Global transcriptional analysis of nitrogen fixation and ammonium repression in root-associated Pseudomonas stutzeri A1501
Authors: Yan Yongliang , Ping Shuzhen , Peng Junping , Han Yunlei , Li Liang , Yang Jian , Dou Yuetan , Li Yan , Fan Huili , Fan Ying , Li Danhua , Zhan Yuhua , Chen Ming , Lu Wei , Zhang Wei , Cheng Qi , Jin Qi , Lin Min
Published: January 2010

Background

Biological nitrogen fixation is highly controlled at the transcriptional level by regulatory networks that respond to the availability of fixed nitrogen. In many diazotrophs, addition of excess ammonium in the growth medium results in immediate repression of nif gene transcription. Although the regulatory cascades that control the transcription of the nif genes in proteobacteria have been well investigated, there are limited data on the kinetics of ammonium-dependent repression of nitrogen fixation.

Results

Here we report a global transcriptional profiling analysis of nitrogen fixation and ammonium repression in Pseudomonas stutzeri A1501, a root-associated and nitrogen-fixing bacterium. A total of 166 genes, including those coding for the global nitrogen regulation (Ntr) and Nif-specific regulatory proteins, were upregulated under nitrogen fixation conditions but rapidly downregulated as early as 10 min after ammonium shock. Among these nitrogen fixation-inducible genes, 95 have orthologs in each of Azoarcus sp. BH72 and Azotobacter vinelandii AvoP. In particular, a 49-kb expression island containing nif and other associated genes was markedly downregulated by ammonium shock. Further functional characterization of pnfA, a new NifA-σ54-dependent gene chromosomally linked to nifHDK, is reported. This gene encodes a protein product with an amino acid sequence similar to that of five hypothetical proteins found only in diazotrophic strains. No noticeable differences in the transcription of nifHDK were detected between the wild type strain and pnfA mutant. However, the mutant strain exhibited a significant decrease in nitrogenase activity under microaerobic conditions and lost its ability to use nitrate as a terminal electron acceptor for the support of nitrogen fixation under anaerobic conditions.

Conclusions

Based on our results, we conclude that transcriptional regulation of nif gene expression in A1501 is mediated by the nif- specific and ntr gene regulatory systems. Furthermore, microarray and mutational analyses revealed that many genes of unknown function may play some essential roles in controlling the expression or activity of nitrogenase. The findings presented here establish the foundation for further studies on the physiological function of nitrogen fixation-inducible genes.
Evaluation of the diagnostic performance of infrared imaging of the breast: a preliminary study
Authors: Wang Jane , Chang King-Jen , Chen Chin-Yu , Chien Kuo-Liong , Tsai Yuh-Show , Wu Yuh-Ming , Teng Yu-Chuan , Shih Tiffany Ting-Fang
Published: January 2010

Background

The study was conducted to investigate the diagnostic performance of infrared (IR) imaging of the breast using an interpretive model derived from a scoring system.

Methods

The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of our hospital. A total of 276 women (mean age = 50.8 years, SD 11.8) with suspicious findings on mammograms or ultrasound received IR imaging of the breast before excisional biopsy. The interpreting radiologists scored the lesions using a scoring system that combines five IR signs. The ROC (receiver operating characteristic) curve and AUC (area under the ROC curve) were analyzed by the univariate logistic regression model for each IR sign and an age-adjusted multivariate logistic regression model including 5 IR signs. The cut-off values and corresponding sensitivity, specificity, Youden's Index (Index = sensitivity+specificity-1), positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV) were estimated from the age-adjusted multivariate model. The most optimal cut-off value was determined by the one with highest Youden's Index.

Results

For the univariate model, the AUC of the ROC curve from five IR signs ranged from 0.557 to 0.701, and the AUC of the ROC from the age-adjusted multivariate model was 0.828. From the ROC derived from the multivariate model, the sensitivity of the most optimal cut-off value would be 72.4% with the corresponding specificity 76.6% (Youden's Index = 0.49), PPV 81.3% and NPV 66.4%.

Conclusions

We established an interpretive age-adjusted multivariate model for IR imaging of the breast. The cut-off values and the corresponding sensitivity and specificity can be inferred from the model in a subpopulation for diagnostic purpose.

Trial Registration

NCT00166998.
Dentin dysplasia type I: a case report and review of the literature
Authors: Toomarian Lida , Mashhadiabbas Fatemeh , Mirkarimi Mahkameh , Mehrdad Leili
Published: January 2010

Introduction

Dentin dysplasia is a rare hereditary disturbance of dentin formation characterized by defective dentin development with clinically normal appearing crowns, severe hypermobility of teeth and spontaneous dental abscesses or cysts. Radiographic analysis shows obliteration of all pulp chambers, short, blunted and malformed or absent roots and peri-apical radiolucencies of non carious teeth.

Case presentation

We present a case of dentin dysplasia type I in a 12-year-old Iranian boy, and the clinical, radiographic and histopathologic findings of this condition and treatment are described.

Conclusions

There are still many inconclusive issues in the diagnosis and management of patients with dentin dysplasia. The diagnostic features of this rare disturbance will remain incompletely defined until additional cases have been described. Early diagnosis of the condition and initiation of effective regular dental treatments may help these patients to prevent or delay loss of dentition.
Jane Austen's Periods
Authors: Favret Mary A.
Published: January 2010

Did Jane Austen have a period? Did she have periods? This essay surveys the particularly gendered politics that attempt to situate Austen and her work within a fixed and dateable period. To counter that impulse, it introduces a different temporal understanding of the period as periodical: a repetitive round or return. Finally, it turns to Austen's own meditations on the word period, within those carefully formed periods that are her sentences, to reveal the implications and complications arising from our investment in periods and periodizing.
Photographic Fictions
Authors: Flint Kate
Published: January 2010

Photographers tend to come off very badly in contemporary fiction—portrayed as emotionally warped, as voyeurs, or as exploitative, they are seen not as artists but as operating a piece of technology. Their photographs are understood in referential rather than imaginative terms: as depicting what was, what happened. In this piece, however, I show how much contemporary narrative photography challenges precisely those views of photography that are most frequently found within fiction itself. Looking both at staged photography of the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and at more recent enigmatic photographs that allow plenty of play for the observer's imaginative speculation (including work by Jeff Wall, Justine Kurland, Lynne Cohen, and Connie Samaras), I ask why there should be such a discrepancy between fictional and nonfictional understandings of the work that can be done by photography. I argue that many novelists need the idea of photography as freezing a moment in time to meet their own narrative ends, to signify an instant of stopped action: that way, too, they retain authorial control of the (imaginary) photograph's signification. Their version of photography is underwritten by the theories of Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida; many innovative contemporary photographers, however, have preferred an earlier Barthean model in which spectators are set loose to find their own interpretations of an image, effectively becoming writers of fictions themselves.
The Early Novel and Catastrophe
Authors: Juengel Scott J.
Published: January 2010

This essay sets out to think the novel in the time of catastrophe (which is always, necessarily, to think after catastrophe; which is to say, finally, that I want to think in the chronotope of mass death). I couch this in the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope—so integral to his theory of novelistic discourse—because catastrophe is, in what follows, a figure of time, a figure of eventfulness that always and ineluctably worries while it structures the broader protocols of meaning. In particular, my essay returns to Daniel Defoe and his strange preoccupation with disastrous events—shipwrecks, earthquakes, plagues, massacres, hurricanes—as a way to imagine the emergent novel's rapprochement with a multitude exposed to time. What is the relationship between the novel's prescriptive everydayness and intense concern with singular experiences, and the mass historicity of disaster that clearly fascinated Defoe? How might novelistic emplotment, and specifically the always lingering question of providence in Defoe, register the gradual disenchantment of nature and history? The essay ends with a consideration of three works that Defoe composed immediately after the 1703 hurricane that slammed into England and Europe; taken together, these “storm” texts begin to imagine the novel genre and its dread remainder.
Abstraction and the Subject of Novel Reading: Drifting throughRomola
Authors: Kurnick David
Published: January 2010

This essay aims to deepen our understanding of the intellectual and affective characteristics of novel reading by examining the tendency of George Eliot's heroines to drift free of the constraints of their own plots. It focuses on Eliot's historical novel Romola (1862-63) and in particular on the stylistic and narrative features that make the eponymous heroine of that book seem a visitant in her own story. Noting that the novel insistently figures Romola's abstraction as erotically charged, I argue that this character is Eliot's means of reflecting on the situation of the novel reader, a being contradictorily characterized in Eliot's day and ours as both dilettantish and overinvested, both distracted from and passionately identified with the fiction she absorbs. Although conducted in a different theoretical vocabulary, today's critical discourse on reading resonates with nineteenth-century arguments over whether the novel reader was (erotically) entranced or (intellectually) edified. My claim is that the reader of Eliot is always both, and that implicit in Eliot's method of narrating character is the idea that novel reading offers access to a form of insight through submission. The essay thus engages with the recent affirmations of detachment as a critical value in the work of scholars like Amanda Anderson and David Wayne Thomas; but where these critics have stressed the Victorian ideal of detachment as a goal to be worked at, Eliot's vision of the novel reader as at once detached and erotically passive suggests a more unsettling route to critical insight precisely through the abandonment of will.
Novel (Sapphic) Subjects: The Sexual History of Form
Authors: Lanser Susan S.
Published: January 2010

Scholars have rightly argued that one underpinning of the novel as it “rises” in the eighteenth century is its investment in consolidating heteronormativity. Reading narrative form as a site of sexual content, however, makes the case for a sapphic undertext embedded primarily in narration rather than in event and sometimes in a contest between the two. This sapphic structuring of the novel first takes form in seventeenth-century erotic fictions, but more surprisingly, it also characterizes such eighteenth-century domestic novels as Eliza Haywood's The Masqueraders, Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni's Lettres de Milady Juliette Catesby, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse. As the narration of erotic pleasure and erotic danger gets filtered through the intimacy between a female narrator and her female narratee, the story of the heterosexual subject, which the eighteenth-century novel seems bent on confirming, is revealed as a story of the failure or incompleteness of the novel's own heteronormative project. Nineteenth-century novels eschew the structure of what I call the sapphic dialogic, suggesting yet another stage in the management of same-sex intimacies and their representations. In arguing for sapphic form as an underpinning of the novel's domestic subject, I hope to suggest that form does function as novelistic content and that the history of sexuality—in the novel and in general—needs to encompass the history of the novel's formal practices.
Narrative Networks: Bleak House and the Affordances of Form
Authors: Levine Caroline
Published: January 2010

This essay asks what the form of the long Victorian novel is peculiarly capable of accomplishing. It introduces the term affordance, from cognitive psychology and design, which refers to the range of potential actions and uses latent in objects and materials. What potentialities lie latent in the length itself of the triple-decker novel? A reading of Bleak House suggests that its expansive form specifically allowed Dickens to represent multiple social, economic, and institutional networks. Linking the many characters in Bleak House is a dense overlapping of networked relationships, some voluntary and some coercive, including the law, the space of the city, gossip, class, disease, philanthropy, and kinship. These various principles of interconnection are both separate and overlapping: each has its own logic, but each is also capable of connecting the same groups of characters as the others. Moreover, they are not homologous, so sometimes they derail and subvert one another. Dickens uses the capacious size of the novel, then, to imagine English society as a network of networks. In the process, this essay argues, Bleak House disrupts ideologies of individualism and domesticity that usually underpin the Victorian novel. The essay concludes by suggesting that the expansive length of Bleak House makes it more successful than many recent attempts at capturing the complexity and power of networked social experience, and it ends with the contention that Dickens merges narrative suspense with social networks in ways that unsettle conventional accounts of realism.
Fiction and State Crisis
Authors: Marx John
Published: January 2010

The conventional wisdom that contemporary fiction has little use for the nation cannot explain the plurality of recent novels that attend to states in crisis. To detail the effects of state collapse is at the very least to insist on the state's continued relevance to the form. This fiction of failure also has a stake in the state's future. This essay considers how recent novels use civil wars as a setting for generic experimentation. It offers a truncated genealogy of literary interest in state crisis to demonstrate how fiction collaborates with political scientific scholarship in defining the “failed state” as a more or less normative condition in much of the world. It proposes that “the nation” has been subordinated to global logic of management both longer and more effectively than is often supposed and that formally adventurous novels have played a part in that subordination. The essay concentrates on the examples of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) while referencing a genealogy whose literary exemplars include works by Yvonne Vera, V. S. Naipaul, NgügË wa Thiong'o, and Rebecca West.
Transnationalism and the Novel: A Call for Periodization
Authors: McMurran Mary Helen
Published: January 2010

Nearly a quarter century after Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, the novel seems to be less a national subject than a flexible citizen. But before Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel, most novel histories took the mobility of prose fictions for granted; writers had long recognized and detailed the history of romance and then novel translations and adaptations. This essay takes stock of this return to translative novel history and calls for a more rigorously historicized use of the term transnational. When the novel became a modern, national literary phenomenon by the end of the eighteenth century, it also began its course as a transnational genre for the first time. Its transnationality was an effect of a particularly modern set of practices and attitudes about translating fiction in the European core. Thus transnationalism describes a new period in prose fiction's mobility that sets it apart from a premodern praxis of transmission—a historical juncture that has been occluded by novel theory. The novel was not always transnational, but its emergence as a modern genre depended on it.
Reduced myofibrillar connectivity and increased Z-disk width in nebulin-deficient skeletal muscle
Authors: Tonino Paola , Pappas Christopher T. , Hudson Bryan D. , Labeit Siegfried , Gregorio Carol C. , Granzier Henk
Published: January 2010

A prominent feature of striated muscle is the regular lateral alignment of adjacent sarcomeres. An important intermyofibrillar linking protein is the intermediate filament protein desmin, and based on biochemical and structural studies in primary cultures of myocytes it has been proposed that desmin interacts with the sarcomeric protein nebulin. Here we tested whether nebulin is part of a novel biomechanical linker complex, by using a recently developed nebulin knockout (KO) mouse model and measuring Z-disk displacement in adjacent myofibrils of both extensor digitorum longus (EDL) and soleus muscle. Z-disk displacement increased as sarcomere length (SL) was increased and the increase was significantly larger in KO fibers than in wild-type (WT) fibers; results in 3-day-old and 10-day-old mice were similar. Immunoelectron microscopy revealed reduced levels of desmin in intermyofibrillar spaces adjacent to Z-disks in KO fibers compared with WT fibers. We also performed siRNA knockdown of nebulin and expressed modules within the Z-disk portion of nebulin (M160-M170) in quail myotubes and found that this prevented the mature Z-disk localization of desmin filaments. Combined, these data suggest a model in which desmin attaches to the Z-disk through an interaction with nebulin. Finally, because nebulin has been proposed to play a role in specifying Z-disk width, we also measured Z-disk width in nebulin KO mice. Results show that most Z-disks of KO mice were modestly increased in width (~80 nm in soleus and ~40 nm in EDL fibers) whereas a small subset had severely increased widths (up to ~1 μm) and resembled nemaline rod bodies. In summary, structural studies on a nebulin KO mouse show that in the absence of nebulin, Z-disks are significantly wider and that myofibrils are misaligned. Thus the functional roles of nebulin extend beyond thin filament length regulation and include roles in maintaining physiological Z-disk widths and myofibrillar connectivity.
Increasing participant recruitment into large-scale screening trials: experience from the CADET II study
Authors: Gillan Maureen G C , Gilbert Fiona J , Flight Helen , Cooper Joanna , Wallis Matthew G , James Jonathan J , Boggis Caroline R M , Astley Susan M , Agbaje Olorunsola F , Duffy Stephen W
Published: January 2010

Objectives

Multicentre randomized trials frequently encounter difficulties in meeting their recruitment targets, resulting in extension of the trial and delays in implementation of the findings. We report on recruitment strategies implemented in a randomized evaluation of computer-aided detection in women attending routine screening in the UK Breast Screening Programme.

Setting

The target population for the trial was identified from an existing NHS database of women aged 50–70 invited for routine mammography in Coventry, Manchester and Nottingham, UK. Women were asked to consent to their mammograms being randomly allocated (in a ratio of 28:1:1) to one of three film-reading protocols. Trial information was mailed to women, along with the invitation to attend screening, and informed consent was obtained at the mammography appointment. Several strategies were implemented to increase recruitment rates.

Results

Recruitment rate increased significantly over time in the study ( P < 0.0010 in all centres) with an overall acceptance rate of 46% of those attending screening. Mailing of the trial information sheet separate from the screening invitation in Coventry and Nottingham increased the recruitment rate, even after adjustment for the trend over time and for socioeconomic status of the attendees ( P < 0.001). Extension of recruitment to mobile screening units in Nottingham, and the presence of an additional member of staff also improved recruitment ( P < 0.001). Simplification of the trial information sheet had little effect. Increases in recruitment rate were not attributable to socioeconomic status of the attendees.

Conclusions

In multicentre trials, monitoring of local recruitment protocols is required to ensure that each centre can maximize accrual targets.
Screening histories of invasive breast cancers diagnosed 1989–2006 in the West Midlands, UK: variation with time and impact on 10-year survival
Authors: Lawrence Gill , O'sullivan Emma , Kearins Olive , Tappenden Nancy , Martin Kate , Wallis Matthew
Published: January 2010

Objectives

To examine variations in screening status category with time for 20,862 invasive breast cancers diagnosed in the West Midlands between 1989 and 2006, and to provide 10-year relative survival rates for each category.

Method

Population-based breast screening was introduced in the West Midlands from 1988. Primary invasive breast cancers diagnosed from 1 April 1989 to 31 March 2006 in women eligible for breast screening were identified from the West Midlands Cancer Intelligence Unit's cancer registration database. A screening status was determined for each case using previously published methodology.

Results

Screening status rates are affected initially by the gradual rollout of the screening programme and more recently by the need to wait for three years before interval cancers and cancers in lapsed and non-attenders can be identified. In the steady-state period 1994–2003, 40.6% of invasive breast cancers were screen-detected, 36.3% were interval cancers and 11.2% were cancers in non-attenders (NA). Ten-year relative survival was 89.6% for screen-detected breast cancers, 73.3% for interval cancers and 51.9% for cancers in NA.

Conclusion

The detection of invasive breast cancers by screening has improved over time, with an equivalent reduction in the numbers of interval cancers. This, together with a stable rate of cancers in NA and an improvement in the survival of women with interval cancers, suggests that further improvements in breast cancer mortality can be predicted. International comparisons of interval cancer rates are difficult due to interprogramme differences in the time between screens.
HRPT2-related familial isolated hyperparathyroidism: could molecular studies direct the surgical approach?
Authors: Silveira Leticia G. , Dias Eduardo P. , Marinho Bruna C. G. , Gomez Ricardo S. , De Marco Luiz , Sarquis Marta S.
Published: January 2010

It is still debatable which is the best management to familial forms of hyperparathyroidism. Conservative, minimally invasive or aggressive surgical approaches have been proposed from different groups around the world. Our objective was to study the gene mutation, expression of HRPT2 and the clinical outcome after 32 years of follow-up in one Brazilian kindred with familial isolated hyperparathyroidism (FIHP). Clinical and biochemical data, direct sequencing of the HRPT2 gene, analysis of parafibromin expression using RT-PCR, and immunohistochemistry were done. A nonsense mutation was found in exon 1 (c.96G>A)(p.Trp32X) in all affected members studied. Using RT-PCR, mRNA transcription was altered with complete absence of both transcripts in tumor tissue. Immunohistochemical analysis of tumors showed loss of parafibromin immunoreactivity. In this kindred there was a high prevalence of recurrence (75%), or persistence after less than subtotal parathyroidectomy that led us to consider a more aggressive surgical approach should be discussed among the affected family members, once surgical criteria was met. We concluded that it is necessary to individualize the surgical approach for HRPT2-related hyperparathyroidism until we can gather a better phenotype-genotype correlation in larger series, to best define their treatment.
Pendred Syndrome in a large consanguineous Brazilian family caused by a homozygous mutation in the SLC26A4 gene
Authors: Lofrano-Porto Adriana , Barra Gustavo B. , Nascimento Paula P. , Costa Patrícia G. G. , Garcia Érica C. , Vaz Rodrigo F. , Batista Ana R. T. , Freitas Ana C. R. de , Cherulli Bruno L. B. , Bahmad Jr. Fayez , Figueiredo Larissa G. , Neves Francisco A. R. , Casulari Luiz Augusto
Published: January 2010

Pendred Syndrome (PS) is an autossomal recessive disorder characterized by sensorineural deafness, goiter and iodide organification defect. The hearing loss is associated with inner ear abnormalities, ranging from an isolated enlarged vestibular aqueduct (EVA) to a typical coclear dysplasia. Mutations in the gene that encodes pendrin (SLC26A4), a chloride/iodide transporter, have been shown to be associated with PS. We describe the clinical and molecular characteristics of a large consanguineous family harboring a mutation in the SLC26A4 gene. The proband was a 26-year-old deaf Brazilian woman who presented a bulky multinodular goiter and hypothyroidism since puberty. Five other siblings were deaf: one brother had a similar phenotype, three siblings also had goiters but normal thyroid function tests, and one brother had only a subtle thyroid enlargement. Other 4 siblings had no thyroid or hearing disorder. Parents were first degree cousins and had normal hearing. The mother was healthy, except for subclinical hypothyroidism; the father was deceased. A perchlorate test in the proband showed a discharge of 21% of the incorporated iodide 2h after the administration of 1g of KClO4. Audiological examinations showed profound hearing loss in all deaf subjects; CT and MRI of the temporal bones showed EVA in all of them. Genomic DNA was isolated from whole blood, from the 6 affected and 4 unaffected siblings, the mother and control. The coding region of the PDS gene (exons 2-21), including exon/intron boundaries, were amplified by PCR and sequenced. A single base-pair (T) deletion at position 1197 of exon 10 was detected in homozygous state in the 6 deaf siblings. The mother and 2 unaffected siblings were heterozygous for this mutation, which has been described by Everett et al. The 1197delT mutation is predicted to result in a frameshift and a truncated protein. The existence of PS phenocopies and intrafamilial phenotypic variability are well documented. The definite diagnosis requires molecular analysis. Our study illustrates the value and challenges of mutational analysis in selected patients with PS.
União interétnica de nipo-brasileiros associada a hábitos alimentares menos saudáveis e ao pior perfil de risco cardiometabólico
Authors: Yamashita Carla , Damião Renata , Chaim Rita , Harima Helena Aiko , Kikuchi Mário , Franco Laércio J. , Ferreira Sandra Roberta G.
Published: January 2010

OBJETIVO: Casamento interétnico entre brasileiros nikkeis e não nikkeis pode favorecer a ocidentalização da dieta. Compararam-se consumo alimentar, dados clínico-laboratoriais e frequências de doenças metabólicas em população nipo-brasileira, com casamento intraétnico ou interétnico. MÉTODOS: Empregaram-se teste t, Mann-Whitney, qui-quadrado e coeficiente de Pearson. RESULTADOS: Em 1009 nipo-brasileiros havia 18,9% de casamentos interétnicos, mais frequentes entre homens nikkeis. Estes apresentaram maiores médias de IMC, cintura, pressão arterial, glicemia e triglicérides que mulheres. As frequências de obesidade, hipertrigliceridemia e síndrome metabólica foram 47,7%, 68,1% e 45,2%, sendo maiores nos casamentos interétnicos comparados aos intraétnicos. Comparando-se indivíduos com casamento interétnico, hipertrigliceridemia foi mais frequente nos homens e HDL-c baixo nas mulheres. O consumo de calorias, gorduras e dos grupos de álcool, doces e óleos foram maiores nos casamentos interétnicos. Indivíduos casados intraetnicamente consumiam mais carboidratos, proteínas, fibras, vitaminas, minerais, hortaliças, frutas/sucos, cereais e missoshiru. Comparando-se indivíduos com casamento interétnico, homens nikkeis apresentavam padrão mais ocidental que mulheres nikkeis. CONCLUSÃO: Casamento interétnico associa-se a hábitos alimentares menos saudáveis e pior perfil de risco cardiometabólico.
Controle da adipogênese por ácidos graxos
Authors: Queiroz Jean César Farias de , Alonso-Vale Maria Isabel Cardoso , Curi Rui , Lima Fabio Bessa
Published: January 2010

A obesidade é um dos principais problemas de saúde pública. Indivíduos obesos são mais suscetíveis a desenvolver doenças cardiovasculares e diabetes melito tipo 2. A obesidade resulta do aumento no tamanho e no número de adipócitos. O balanço entre adipogênese e adiposidade determina o grau de obesidade do indivíduo. Adipócitos maduros secretam adipocinas, tais como TNFα, IL-6, leptina e adiponectina, e lipocina, o ácido palmitoleico ω-7. A produção de adipocinas é maior na obesidade, o que contribui para o estabelecimento de resistência periférica à insulina. O conhecimento dos eventos moleculares que regulam a diferenciação dos pré-adipócitos e de células-tronco mesenquimais em adipócitos (adipogênese) é importante para o entendimento da gênese da obesidade. A ativação do fator de transcrição PPARγ é essencial na adipogênese. Certos ácidos graxos são ligantes de PPARγ e podem, assim, controlar a adipogênese. Além disso, alguns ácidos graxos atuam como moléculas sinalizadoras em adipócitos, regulando sua diferenciação ou morte. Dessa forma, a composição lipídica da dieta e os agonistas de PPARγ podem regular o balanço entre adipogênese e morte de adipócitos e, portanto, a obesidade.