Sacred Objects and Sacred Places: Preserving Tribal Traditions

Sacred Objects and Sacred Places: Preserving Tribal Traditions. Andrew Gulliford. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 2000. 285 pp.     

The Use of Helical Net-Diagrams to Represent Protein Structures

The arrangement of side chains in α-helical regions of protein can be represented by helical net-diagrams. The addition of quantitative indices of the character of the residue at each net-point facilitates a straightforward examination of the groupings of residues of different character. As such the method complements that of Schiffer and Edmundson (1967). In addition, the reasons for non-helicity in some regions may be seen to be correlated with particular side-chain distributions. The method is illustrated with respect to myoglobin and lysozyme.     

Use of Helical Wheels to Represent the Structures of Proteins and to Identify Segments with Helical Potential

The three-dimensional structures of alpha-helices can be represented by two-dimensional projections which we call helical wheels. Initially, the wheels were employed as graphical restatements of the known structures determined by Kendrew, Perutz, Watson, and their colleagues at the University of Cambridge and by Phillips and his coworkers at The Royal Institution. The characteristics of the helices, discussed by Perutz et al. (1965), and Blake et al. (1965), can be readily visualized by examination of these wheels. For example, the projections for most helical segments of myoglobin, hemoglobin, and lysozyme have distinctive hydrophobic arcs. Moreover, the hydrophobic residues tend to be clustered in the n +/- 3, n, n +/- 4 positions of adjacent helical turns. Such hydrophobic arcs are not observed when the sequences of nonhelical segments are plotted on the wheels. Since the features of these projections are also distinctive, however, the wheels can be used to divide sequences into segments with either helical or nonhelical potential. The sequences of insulin, cytochrome c, ribonuclease A, chymotrypsinogen A, tobacco mosaic virus protein, and human growth hormone were chosen for application of the wheels for this purpose.     

Looking for Drugs in All the Wrong Places: Use of GCPII Inhibitors Outside the Brain

Neurochemical Research - In tribute to our friend and colleague Michael Robinson, we review his involvement in the identification, characterization and localization of the metallopeptidase...     

A Contribution to the Comparative Epidemiology of Schizophrenia in Urban and Rural Places

In psychiatry, epidemiology rests upon statistical studies of mental illness in the population. Much attention was given to this as early as the work of Esquirol, (1) and I. F. Riul' (2) in our country. Zemstvo psychiatrists contributed much in the field of psychiatric morbidity. (3-8) However, as a result of the lack of outpatient psychoneurological institutions in prerevolutionary Russia, these studies, like the majority of those currently being conducted by psychiatrists abroad, resolved fundamentally to isolated unidimensional selective surveys of particular groups in the population. The existence in the Soviet Union of a broad network of outpatient psychiatric institutions permits Soviet psychiatrists to go beyond single-factor selective surveys, to make a systematic study of mental illness in accordance with the data of current dispensary records, and to provide timely therapeutic and social prophylactic assistance to the ill, i.e., to conduct epidemiological research on a higher level of scientific methodology. A number of such studies has been published. (8-23) Therefore the statement by Lin and Standley, (24) who allege — in a monograph, The Role of Epidemiology in Psychiatry, published by the World Health Organization — the absence of epidemiological psychiatric studies in the Soviet Union, must be rejected as unfounded.     

Encompassing Others: The Magic of Modernity in Melanesia

Encompassing Others: The Magic of Modernity in Melanesia. Edward LiPuma. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 342 pp.     

Money and Modernity: State and Local Currencies in Melanesia

Money and Modernity: State and Local Currencies in Melanesia. David Akin and Joel Robbins. eds. ASAO Monograph Series, 17. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. 284 pp.     

Solomon Islander skin pigmentation: Ultrastructural differences related to genetic variation in Melanesia

Genetic differences between Solomon Islander populations are distinguishable on the basis of melanosome packaging in epidermal keratinocytes. By electron microscopic study of skin pigmentation in various Melanesian populations, we have found distinct inter-island differences in the mode of melanosome packaging. Melanosomes are found as singlets in the skin of Bougainville Islanders but are found aggregated in melanosome complexes in Malaita Islanders and Ontong Javanese. This variation in melanosome packaging represents an important biologic difference found between Solomon Islanders and may reflect the genetic diversity existing in the original Melanesian founding population or populations.     

Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An Exploration of the Comparative Method.

Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An Exploration of the Comparative Method. Thomas A. Gregory and Donald Tuzin. eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 392 pp.     

Twitter: A Good Place to Detect Health Conditions

With the proliferation of social networks and blogs, the Internet is increasingly being used to disseminate personal health information rather than just as a source of information. In this paper we exploit the wealth of user-generated data, available through the micro-blogging service Twitter, to estimate and track the incidence of health conditions in society. The method is based on two stages: we start by extracting possibly relevant tweets using a set of specially crafted regular expressions, and then classify these initial messages using machine learning methods. Furthermore, we selected relevant features to improve the results and the execution times. To test the method, we considered four health states or conditions, namely flu, depression, pregnancy and eating disorders, and two locations, Portugal and Spain. We present the results obtained and demonstrate that the detection results and the performance of the method are improved after feature selection. The results are promising, with areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve between 0.7 and 0.9, and f-measure values around 0.8 and 0.9. This fact indicates that such approach provides a feasible solution for measuring and tracking the evolution of health states within the society.     

Autophagy: Many paths to the same end

Different mechanisms lead to the degradation of intracellular proteins in the lysosomal compartment. Activation of one autophagic pathway or another, under specific cellular conditions, plays an important role in the ability of the cell to adapt to environmental changes. Each form of autophagy has its own individual characteristics, but it also shares common steps and components with the others. This interdependence of the autophagic pathways confers to the lysosomal system, both specificity and flexibility on substrate degradation. We describe in this review some of the recent findings on the molecular basis and regulation for each of the different autophagic pathways. We also discuss the cellular consequences of their interdependent function. Malfunctioning of the autophagic systems has dramatic consequences, especially in non-dividing differentiated cells. Using the heart as an example of such cells, we analyze the relevance of autophagy in aging and cell death, as well as in different pathological conditions. (Mol Cell Biochem 263: 55–72, 2004)     

Materialising Oceania: New ethnographies of things in Melanesia and Polynesia

Oceania occupies an intriguing place within anthropology’s genealogy. In the introduction to this collection of essays, we examine the role of the ethnography of Oceania in the development of our anthropological perspectives on materialisation, the dynamic process by which persons and things are inter‐related. Building upon the recent resurgence of theoretical interests in things we use the term materialisation (rather than material culture or materiality) to capture the vitality of the lived processes by which ideas of objectivity and subjectivity, persons and things, minds and bodies are entangled. Taking a processual view, we advocate for an Oceanic anthropology that continues to engage with things on the ground; that asks what strategies communities use to materialise their social relations, desires and values; and that recognises how these processes remain important tools for understanding historical and contemporary Oceanic societies. Examining these locally articulated processes and forms contributes to a material (re)turn for anthropology that clarifies how we, as scholars, think about things more widely.     

Social Relations and the Green Critique of Capitalism in Melanesia

ABSTRACT  In this article, I explore what a critical environmental perspective would look like in Melanesia, where the distinction between nature and culture, and the expectation that science interprets the former in terms of the latter, may not apply. I consider changes in scientific knowledge production and the shift from cultural ecology to political ecology in Melanesian anthropology, including the argument that Melanesians are neither conservationists nor environmentalists. In contrast, I show how people exposed to pollution from the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea mobilize their understandings of difference in a green critique of capitalism. I examine a strategy session of local activists, a public meeting about their campaign against the mine, and a sorcery tribunal. Finally, I suggest that Melanesian ideas about social relations provide a useful ethnographic analogy for thinking about the mobility and short temporal horizons of contemporary capitalism.