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Of course it's brilliant. The Free World represents the hugely ambitious culmination of the efforts of a scholar of exceptional talent to explicate mid-century American culture, and to put it within a broad political and social context. With its immense attention to detail, The Free World frequently offers such fresh readings of a wide variety of topics that perhaps only subspecialists can profess to find familiar the evidence and interpretations that Louis Menand provides. It is emblazoned with bold personal opinions that keep the reader interested. At the Center is a very different book. It is a collective effort, and the authors seem to seek to avoid the kind of personalized style that Menand displays. But the effort that Casey Nelson Blake, Daniel H. Borus, and Howard Brick make to tie the disparate threads together distinguish At the Center from Menand's volume, and therefore offer an invaluable contrast. These books are aimed at different categories of reader, provide divergent temporal and geographic frames, and rarely overlap in attentiveness to the same material. Such variations can make for vigorous scholarly arguments about how to pack thought and culture into American historiography.

This study evaluated the effects of climate perturbations on snowmelt, soil moisture and streamflow generation in small Canadian Prairie basins using a modeling approach based on classification of basin biophysical and hydraulic parameters. Seven basin classes that encompass the entirety of the Prairie ecozone in Canada were determined by cluster analysis of biophysical characteristics. Individual semi-distributed virtual basin (VB) models representing these classes were parameterized in the Cold Regions Hydrological Model (CRHM) platform which includes modules for snowmelt and sublimation, soil freezing and thawing, actual evapotranspiration (ET), soil moisture dynamics, groundwater recharge and depressional storage dynamics including fill and spill runoff generation and variable connected areas. Precipitation (P) and temperature (T) perturbation scenarios covering the range of climate model predictions for the 21st century were used to evaluate climate sensitivity of hydrological processes in individual land cover and basin types across the Prairie ecozone. Results indicated that snow accumulation in wetlands had a greater sensitivity to P and T than that in croplands and grasslands in all the basin types. Wetland soil moisture was also more sensitive to T than the cropland and grassland soil moisture. Jointly influenced by land cover distribution and local climate, basin-average snow accumulation was more sensitive to T in the drier and grassland-characterized basins than in the wetter basins dominated by cropland, whilst basin-average soil moisture was most sensitive to T and P perturbations in basins typified by pothole depressions and broad river valleys. Annual streamflow had the greatest sensitivities to T and P in the dry and poorly connected Interior Grassland basins but the smallest in the wet and well-connected Southern Manitoba basins. The ability of P to compensate for warming induced reductions in snow accumulation and streamflow was much higher in the wetter and cropland-dominated basins than in the drier and grassland-characterized basins, whilst decreases in cropland soil moisture induced by the maximum expected warming of 6 °C could be fully offset by P increase of 11 % in all the basins. These results can be used to 1) identify locations which had the largest hydrological sensitivities to changing climate; and 2) diagnose underlying processes responsible for hydrological responses to expected climate change. Variations of hydrological sensitivity in land cover and basin types suggest that different water management and adaptation methods are needed to address enhanced water stress due to expected climate change in different regions of the Prairie ecozone.

PDF file - 72K, Primers utilised in this study.

PDF file - 67K, TP53 pathway alterations do not mediate sarcoma cytostatic response to Nutlin-3a.

PDF file - 44K, Comparison of sequencing facilities.

PDF file - 58K, GADD45A and sarcoma pathology.

PDF file - 178K, Nutlin-3a induces cytostatic responses in sarcoma patient material.

PDF file - 43K, Induction of GADD45A and BBC3 is associated with Nutlin-3a induced apoptosis.

Nutlin-3a is a small-molecule antagonist of p53/MDM2 that is being explored as a treatment for sarcoma. In this study, we examined the molecular mechanisms underlying the sensitivity of sarcomas to Nutlin-3a. In an ex vivo tissue explant system, we found that TP53 pathway alterations (TP53 status, MDM2/MDM4 genomic amplification/mRNA overexpression, MDM2 SNP309, and TP53 SNP72) did not confer apoptotic or cytostatic responses in sarcoma tissue biopsies (n = 24). Unexpectedly, MDM2 status did not predict Nutlin-3a sensitivity. RNA sequencing revealed that the global transcriptomic profiles of these sarcomas provided a more robust prediction of apoptotic responses to Nutlin-3a. Expression profiling revealed a subset of TP53 target genes that were transactivated specifically in sarcomas that were highly sensitive to Nutlin-3a. Of these target genes, the GADD45A promoter region was shown to be hypermethylated in 82% of wild-type TP53 sarcomas that did not respond to Nutlin-3a, thereby providing mechanistic insight into the innate ability of sarcomas to resist apoptotic death following Nutlin-3a treatment. Collectively, our findings argue that the existing benchmark biomarker for MDM2 antagonist efficacy (MDM2 amplification) should not be used to predict outcome but rather global gene expression profiles and epigenetic status of sarcomas dictate their sensitivity to p53/MDM2 antagonists. Cancer Res; 74(3); 921–31. ©2013 AACR.

The subjects of these two books basically belonged to the same generation. Philip Rahv (1908–73) and Michael Gold (1894–1967) shared origins in the Jewish lower class, and rose to literary prominence during the Great Depression. But from the perspective of posterity, what especially links their names is the notion of “proletarian literature.” In novels and short stories, in sketches and poetry, in drama and reportage, the writers who generally accepted this label repudiated the genteel tradition that had crested in the late Victorian era. To be sure, that decorous era of belles lettres had always been contested. It had its outliers – most famously Mark Twain. The list of those who troubled the taste of the era also included, among younger writers, the barely housebroken Theodore Dreiser and Jack London.

This article uses John Kelly’s mobilisation framework, with its foundational concept of injustice, to explore workers’ propensity towards unionism in England’s outsourced social care sector. Drawing on 60 interviews with union organisers and officers, care workers, support workers and care company managers, this research highlights the difficulties of union organising in the sector and explores theorisations of mobilising. The research contends that for mobilisation theory to provide insight into relationships between work and unionism, varieties of injustice and collectivism need to be contextualised. Paid care provision generates both employment-related injustices and care-related injustices, which lead to divergent collective identities and attitudes towards unions. An absence of a coherent entity for workers to attach blame to – within a context where private providers frequently remain reliant on state funding levels – affects whether injustice and collectivism progress to mobilisation and unionisation.

Extensive wetland drainage has occurred across the Canadian Prairies, and drainage activities are ongoing in many areas (Dahl 1990; Watmough and Schmoll 2007; Bartzen et al. 2010; Dahl 2014; Prairi...

Publié en 1939 et adapté à l’écran l’année suivante, Les Raisins de la colère, roman de John Steinbeck, eut un impact immédiat et extraordinaire pour le portrait sans concession qu’il dressait d’un capitalisme américain qui semblait avoir abandonné sa progéniture la plus loyale, la plus assidue et la plus courageuse, celle qui labourait la terre en plein coeur de la république. Écrit à la toute fin de la « Décennie rouge », mais juste avant que les États-Unis entrent dans la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Les Raisins de la colère exprimaient, d’une certaine manière, la colère accumulée contre un système économique qui avait trahi le prolétariat rural. Le roman, tout comme le film de John Ford (1940), furent compris par le grand public de l’époque, et bien des années plus tard, comme une protestation clairement gauchiste, voire radicale, contre une telle injustice. Mais cet essai montre combien les idées politiques de ces œuvres jumelées sont en réalité difficiles à saisir et combien il est hasardeux de définir, quel que soit l’effort rétrospectif, la critique que Steinbeck et Ford ont proposée dans leur version des Raisins de la colère, une œuvre inoubliable, déchirante mais ambiguë sur le plan politique.

Wetland drainage has been pervasive in the North American Prairie Pothole Region. There is strong evidence that this drainage increases the hydrological connectivity of previously isolated wetlands and, in turn, runoff response to snowmelt and rainfall. It can be hard to disentangle the role of climate from the influence of wetland drainage in observed records. In this study, a basin-classification-based virtual modelling approach is described that can isolate these effects on runoff regimes. The basin class which was examined, entitled Pothole Till, extends throughout much of Canada's portion of the Prairie Pothole Region. Three knowledge gaps were addressed. First, it was determined that the spatial pattern in which wetlands are drained has little influence on how much the runoff regime was altered. Second, no threshold could be identified below which wetland drainage has no effect on the runoff regime, with drainage thresholds as low as 10 % in the area being evaluated. Third, wetter regions were less sensitive to drainage as they tend to be better hydrologically connected, even in the absence of drainage. Low flows were the least affected by drainage. Conversely, during extremely wet years, runoff depths could double as the result of complete wetland removal. Simulated median annual runoff depths were the most responsive, potentially tripling under typical conditions with high degrees of wetland drainage. As storage capacity is removed from the landscape through wetland drainage, the size of the storage deficit of median years begins to decrease and to converge on those of the extreme wet years. Model simulations of flood frequency suggest that, because of these changes in antecedent conditions, precipitation that once could generate a median event with wetland drainage can generate what would have been a maximum event without wetland drainage. The advantage of the basin-classification-based virtual modelling approach employed here is that it simulated a long period that included a wide variety of precipitation and antecedent storage conditions across a diversity of wetland complexes. This has allowed seemingly disparate results of past research to be put into context and finds that conflicting results are often only because of differences in spatial scale and temporal scope of investigation. A conceptual framework is provided that shows, in general, how annual runoff in different climatic and drainage situations will likely respond to wetland drainage in the Prairie Pothole Region.

The combination of DNA-origami and synthetic polymers paves the way to a new class of structurally precise biohybrid nanomaterials for diverse applications. Herein, we introduce the grafting to method with high conversions (70-90%) under ambient conditions to generate DNA-polymer conjugates, which can hybridized precisely to DNA-origami architectures. We generated homo and block copolymers from three different polymer families (acrylates, methacrylates and acrylamides), coupled them to single stranded DNA (ssDNA) and pattern different DNA-origami architectures to demonstrate the formation of precise surface nanopatterns.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Henri Bergson (1859–1941) ranked among the world’s most eminent philosophers. His distinction between clock-time and time as subjectively experienced, as well as his invocation of the élan vital as driving humanity to higher planes of creativity and freedom, enabled him to enjoy unparalleled influence among French students as well as international writers. Bergson personified philosophy. He also seemed to justify the gamble of emancipation that France had taken barely a century earlier, in granting talented Jews the opportunity to flourish. In 1927 Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet very soon thereafter, the prominence that he had enjoyed quite precipitously declined, and he drifted into obscurity from which his writings have yet to recover. How can such an eclipse be explained? Part of the reason was an inevitable shift in philosophic fashion. By the 1920s, belles-lettres aimed at an educated public yielded to linguistic analysis in the Anglo-American world and to phenomenology on the continent. Part of the reason was the shock of the First World War. Its carnage led to disillusionment and to pessimism, which made Bergson’s paeans to the intuitive powers of humanity seem tone-deaf. Another part of the reason was an illness that left him virtually speechless—and thus unresponsive—for the last fifteen years of his life, which was cut short by the German invasion and occupation. Registering as a Jew in the dead of winter, Bergson died—a victim of Nazism—of pneumonia.