John Robert Stanley Fincham. 11 August 1926 — 9 February 2005

2006 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 83-95
Author(s):  
Robin Holliday ◽  
Richard B. Flavell

Professor John Fincham was one of the UK's leading geneticists, with a remarkably broad knowledge of the subject across all the biological kingdoms. He became an international leader through being at the forefront of microbial genetics as some of the founding principles of the relationships between gene structure, activity and enzyme functions were being uncovered. He spearheaded discoveries from the one gene–one enzyme concept, through genetic complementation, protein structure and recombination. Much of his experimental microbial research centred on the genetic and enzyme variants of glutamate dehydrogenase in the fungus Neurospora . He also brought his outstanding mind and comprehensive interest in genetics to the then obscure features of unstable genes and transposable elements in plants. His standing was recognized by holding prestigious chairs in Leeds, Edinburgh and Cambridge universities. He was a talented writer, producing several textbooks and especially the leading text Fungal genetics . He was also a practitioner and lover of sports and in his early career was politically active. His successes in life made him an extraordinarily talented man who achieved much as a leader in genetics in the UK and internationally.

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. iv-vi
Author(s):  
Gerda Wielander ◽  
Heather Inwood

This issue falls into two thematic sections, one on the politics of Chinese identities, the other on art and collections. The first part deals with possibly the most pertinent topic in Chinese studies at present, and that is the question of Chinese identity, how it relates to China in the narrow sense of the PRC on the one hand and to alternative identity categories on the other. The question is of particular pertinence in the context of the surge of racism against Chinese and other East and Southeast Asian communities since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK and across the world. We alert you to our call for papers on Chinese Identity in an Age of Anti-Asian Racism and #StopAsianHate with a deadline of 15 August. The four articles engaging with the question of identity in this issue address the problematic in different timeframes and with different conceptualisations. The second half of this issue features three articles which each deal with differing aspects of art, aesthetics, and media in the contemporary PRC; it includes the prize-winning essay of the 2020 Early Career Researcher Prize by Angela Becher. We conclude with an elegy on a Hui Muslim mosque.  Image @ Zhang Xiaotao


2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 33-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Evans

This paper considers the relationship between social science and the food industry, and it suggests that collaboration can be intellectually productive and morally rewarding. It explores the middle ground that exists between paid consultancy models of collaboration on the one hand and a principled stance of nonengagement on the other. Drawing on recent experiences of researching with a major food retailer in the UK, I discuss the ways in which collaborating with retailers can open up opportunities for accessing data that might not otherwise be available to social scientists. Additionally, I put forward the argument that researchers with an interest in the sustainability—ecological or otherwise—of food systems, especially those of a critical persuasion, ought to be empirically engaging with food businesses. I suggest that this is important in terms of generating better understandings of the objectionable arrangements that they seek to critique, and in terms of opening up conduits through which to affect positive changes. Cutting across these points is the claim that while resistance to commercial engagement might be misguided, it is nevertheless important to acknowledge the power-geometries of collaboration and to find ways of leveling and/or leveraging them. To conclude, I suggest that universities have an important institutional role to play in defining the terms of engagement as well as maintaining the boundaries between scholarship and consultancy—a line that can otherwise become quite fuzzy when the worlds of commerce and academic research collide.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothea E. Schulz

Starting with the controversial esoteric employment of audio recordings by followers of the charismatic Muslim preacher Sharif Haidara in Mali, the article explores the dynamics emerging at the interface of different technologies and techniques employed by those engaging the realm of the Divine. I focus attention on the “border zone” between, on the one hand, techniques for appropriating scriptures based on long-standing religious conventions, and, on the other, audio recording technologies, whose adoption not yet established authoritative and standardized forms of practice, thereby generating insecurities and becoming the subject of heated debate. I argue that “recyclage” aptly describes the dynamics of this “border zone” because it captures the ways conventional techniques of accessing the Divine are reassessed and reemployed, by integrating new materials and rituals. Historically, appropriations of the Qur’an for esoteric purposes have been widespread in Muslim West Africa. These esoteric appropriations are at the basis of the considerable continuities, overlaps and crossovers, between scripture-related esoteric practices on one side, and the treatment by Sharif Haidara’s followers of audio taped sermons as vessels of his spiritual power, on the other.


2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (6S) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
A Gangloff ◽  
L Nadeau

Objective: Evaluation of the UK NEQAS 2008 guidelines for the interpretation of spectrophotometric xanthochromia. Method: A search of the laboratory database for all the xanthochromia test results between May 1st 2008 and May 1st 2009 was performed. Medical charts were reviewed for patients of Hôpital de l’Enfant-Jésus (HEJ) that had at least one detectable pigment (bilirubin, oxyhemoglobin, or methemoglobin). Xanthochromia results obtained with 4 different criteria (Chalmers original, Modified Chalmers, Duiser and UK NEQAS 2008) were compared. Results: We reviewed 41 medical charts (2 patients with duplicate lumbar punctures (LP) for a total of 43 LP). For these 41 patients there were 11 positive xanthochromia results, 5 of which were in concordance with a final diagnosis of subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). The diagnosis of the 6 other positive xanthochromia results were as follow: meningeal spread of a lymphoma, cerebral amyloid angiopathy, exertional headache, viral encephalitis with a possibility of petechiaes on the cerebral CT and second LP. Interpretation (negative/positive) of 40/43 LP was identical for the 4 methods. 2 LP were positive with Duiser and UK NEQAS 2008 but negative with Chalmers approaches (final diagnosis: SAH and cerebral amyloid angiopathy). 1 LP was positive only by the Duiser method (viral encephalitis). Conclusions: UK NEQAS 2008 guidelines identified all SAH but are sensitive to traumatic and pathologic meningeal lesions. Except for a case of viral encephalitis with a suspicion of cerebral petechiaes on CT, UK NEQAS 2008 gave xanthochromia results similar to the one in use at HEJ (Duiser). Chalmers original and Modified Chalmers methods missed one of the five SAH.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (11) ◽  
pp. 11-15
Author(s):  
Gan N.Yu. ◽  
Ponomareva L.I. ◽  
Obukhova K.A.

Today, worldview, spiritual and moral problems that have always been reflected in education and upbringing come to the fore in society. In this situation, there is a demand for philosophical categories. One of the priority goals of education in modern conditions is the formation of a reasonable, reflexive person who is able to analyze their actions and the actions of other people. Modern science is characterized by an understanding of the absolute value and significance of childhood in the development of the individual, which implies the need for its multilateral study. In the conditions of democratization of all spheres of life, the child ceases to be a passive object of education and training, and becomes an active carrier of their own meanings of being and the subject of world creation. One of the realities of childhood is philosophizing, so it is extremely timely to address the identification of its place and role in the world of childhood. Children's philosophizing is extremely poorly studied, although the need for its analysis is becoming more obvious. Children's philosophizing is one of the forms of philosophical reflection, which has its own qualitative specificity, on the one hand, and commonality with all other forms of philosophizing, on the other. The social relevance of the proposed research lies in the fact that children's philosophizing can be considered as an intellectual indicator of a child's socialization, since the process of reflection involves the adoption and development of culture. Modern society, in contrast to the traditional one, is ready to "accept" a philosophizing child, which means that it is necessary to determine the main characteristics and conditions of children's philosophizing.


Author(s):  
Iryna Rusnak

The author of the article analyses the problem of the female emancipation in the little-known feuilleton “Amazonia: A Very Inept Story” (1924) by Mykola Chirsky. The author determines the genre affiliation of the work and examines its compositional structure. Three parts are distinguished in the architectonics of associative feuilleton: associative conception; deployment of a “small” topic; conclusion. The author of the article clarifies the role of intertextual elements and the method of constantly switching the tone from serious to comic to reveal the thematic direction of the work. Mykola Chirsky’s interest in the problem of female emancipation is corresponded to the general mood of the era. The subject of ridicule in provocative feuilleton is the woman’s radical metamorphoses, since repulsive manifestations of emancipation becomes commonplace. At the same time, the writer shows respect for the woman, appreciates her femininity, internal and external beauty, personality. He associates the positive in women with the functions of a faithful wife, a caring mother, and a skilled housewife. In feuilleton, the writer does not bypass the problem of the modern man role in a family, but analyses the value and moral and ethical guidelines of his character. The husband’s bad habits receive a caricatured interpretation in the strange behaviour of relatives. On the one hand, the writer does not perceive the extremes brought by female emancipation, and on the other, he mercilessly criticises the male “virtues” of contemporaries far from the standard. The artistic heritage of Mykola Chirsky remains little studied. The urgent task of modern literary studies is the introduction of Mykola Chirsky’s unknown works into the scientific circulation and their thorough scientific understanding.


Author(s):  
Daiva Milinkevičiūtė

The Age of Enlightenment is defined as the period when the universal ideas of progress, deism, humanism, naturalism and others were materialized and became a golden age for freemasons. It is wrong to assume that old and conservative Christian ideas were rejected. Conversely, freemasons put them into new general shapes and expressed them with the help of symbols in their daily routine. Symbols of freemasons had close ties with the past and gave them, on the one hand, a visible instrument, such as rituals and ideas to sense the transcendental, and on the other, intense gnostic aspirations. Freemasons put in a great amount of effort to improve themselves and to create their identity with the help of myths and symbols. It traces its origins to the biblical builders of King Solomon’s Temple, the posterity of the Templar Knights, and associations of the medieval craft guilds, which were also symbolical and became their link not only to each other but also to the secular world. In this work we analysed codified masonic symbols used in their rituals. The subject of our research is the universal Masonic idea and its aspects through the symbols in the daily life of the freemasons in Vilnius. Thanks to freemasons’ signets, we could find continuity, reception, and transformation of universal masonic ideas in the Lithuanian freemasonry and national characteristics of lodges. Taking everything into account, our article shows how the universal idea of freemasonry spread among Lithuanian freemasonry, and which forms and meanings it incorporated in its symbols. The objective of this research is to find a universal Masonic idea throughout their visual and oral symbols and see its impact on the daily life of the masons in Vilnius. Keywords: Freemasonry, Bible, lodge, symbols, rituals, freemasons’ signets.


Author(s):  
Frank S. Levin

Quantum tunneling, wherein a quanject has a non-zero probability of tunneling into and then exiting a barrier of finite width and height, is the subject of Chapter 13. The description for the one-dimensional case is extended to the barrier being inverted, which forms an attractive potential well. The first application of this analysis is to the emission of alpha particles from the decay of radioactive nuclei, where the alpha-nucleus attraction is modeled by a potential well and the barrier is the repulsive Coulomb potential. Excellent results are obtained. Ditto for the similar analysis of proton burning in stars and yet a different analysis that explains tunneling through a Josephson junction, the connector between two superconductors. The final application is to the scanning tunneling microscope, a device that allows the microscopic surfaces of solids to be mapped via electrons from the surface molecules tunneling into the tip of the STM probe.


Author(s):  
Ross McKibbin

This book is an examination of Britain as a democratic society; what it means to describe it as such; and how we can attempt such an examination. The book does this via a number of ‘case-studies’ which approach the subject in different ways: J.M. Keynes and his analysis of British social structures; the political career of Harold Nicolson and his understanding of democratic politics; the novels of A.J. Cronin, especially The Citadel, and what they tell us about the definition of democracy in the interwar years. The book also investigates the evolution of the British party political system until the present day and attempts to suggest why it has become so apparently unstable. There are also two chapters on sport as representative of the British social system as a whole as well as the ways in which the British influenced the sporting systems of other countries. The book has a marked comparative theme, including one chapter which compares British and Australian political cultures and which shows British democracy in a somewhat different light from the one usually shone on it. The concluding chapter brings together the overall argument.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002085232098340
Author(s):  
Paul Joyce

The UK government’s leaders initially believed that it was among the best-prepared governments for a pandemic. By June 2020, the outcome of the collision between the government’s initial confidence, on the one hand, and the aggressiveness and virulence of COVID-19, on the other, was evident. The UK had one of the worst COVID-19 mortality rates in the world. This article explores the UK government’s response to COVID-19 from a public administration and governance perspective. Using factual information and statistical data, it considers the government’s preparedness and strategic decisions, the delivery of the government response, and public confidence in the government. Points for practitioners Possible lessons for testing through application include: Use the precautionary principle to set planning assumptions in government strategies to create the possibility of government agility during a pandemic. Use central government’s leadership role to facilitate and enable local initiative and operational responses, as well as to take advantage of local resources and assets. Choose smart government responses that address tensions between the goal of saving lives and other government goals, and beware choices that are unsatisfactory compromises.


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