VEINGLORY: EXPLORING PROCESSES OF BLOOD TRANSFER BETWEEN PERSONS

This article examines processes involved in blood donation and 'blood management' in an anthropological light. It claims that blood management is not restricted to the procedures that medical professionals employ on blood outside of bodies, but that 'management' practice is enforced by donors themselves onto their own internal bodily processes. It suggests that donation and transfusion centre on issues of time-management and production; concepts of temporal synchrony and investment are employed to explore the implications of this dimension of blood donation. By way of a comparison with gift-giving amongst Jains in India, this article argues for an 'overlapping' of – and dependency between – different economies within blood-banking processes. In examining the general processes involved in blood donation, it aims to provide the groundwork for future comparative analyses of blood-banking processes.     

Burnout: From Popular Culture to Psychiatric Diagnosis in Sweden

This article aims to understand how burn-out became an object of thought, through the study of certain processes of legitimization. It traces the genealogy of the burn-out concept from the initial article from 1974, via its confirmation as a “disease” in the 1980s, to its appearance as a legitimate diagnosis in Sweden in 1997. The theoretical framework is that of applied metaphysics, which means a study on how a specific phenomenon came into being. Consequently, I take departure from ontology in motion with an approach that concerns the legitimization processes. The conclusion will show the underlying processes of legitimization in relation to the making of a psychiatric object of thought in Swedish society.     

The genetics of g in human and mouse

The g factor refers to the substantial overlap that exists between individual differences in diverse cognitive processes in humans. In this article, I argue that a mouse model of g could provide a powerful analytic tool for exploring cognitive processes that are linked functionally by genes.     

ANOVA Method for Variance Component Decomposition and Diagnosis in Batch Manufacturing Processes

In batch manufacturing processes, the total process variation is generally decomposed into batch-by-batch variation and within-batch variation. Since different variation components may be caused by different sources, separation, testing, and estimation of each variance component are essential to the process improvement. Most of the previous SPC research emphasized reducing variations due to assignable causes by implementing control charts for process monitoring. Different from this focus, this article aims to analyze and reduce inherent natural process variations by applying the ANOVA method. The key issue of using the ANOVA method is how to develop appropriate statistical models for all variation components of interest. The article provides a generic framework for decomposition of three typical variation components in batch manufacturing processes. For the purpose of variation root causes diagnosis, the corresponding linear contrasts are defined to represent the possible site variation patterns and the statistical nested effect models are developed accordingly. The article shows that the use of a full factor decomposition model can expedite the determination of the number of nested effect models and the model structure. Finally, an example is given for the variation reduction in the screening conductive gridline printing process for solar battery fabrication.     

Prions and protein inhibitors of proteinases: structural analogies and their consequences. III. Additive risk factor in transgenic technologies

The article presents the risk factor connected with transgenous technologies. The probable risk is stipulated by a possibility to produce the proteins capable to initiate prion-conditioned neurodegenerative processes as a consequence of possible membrane folding of the recombinant protein portion.     

Twice-Born, Once Conceived: Meaning Construction and Cultural Cognition

Cultural cognition is the product of two different sorts of meaning: (a) the (objective) semiotic organization of cultural texts or models, and (b) the (subjective) processes of meaning construction through which cultural symbols become available to consciousness as "experience." This article proposes a way to bridge these two kinds of meaning by considering how cultural knowledge is grounded in sensory experience. Several cognitive processes (schematization, synesthesia, secondary intersubjectivity) are proposed for linking the objectively available schemata found in cultural practices and the processes of meaning construction by which individuals appropriate symbols to consciousness. The nature of the relation between public symbols and individual experience is discussed in relation to a number of current issues in post-structuralist culture theory.     

Enzymology and ecology of the nitrogen cycle

The nitrogen cycle describes the processes through which nitrogen is converted between its various chemical forms. These transformations involve both biological and abiotic redox processes. The principal processes involved in the nitrogen cycle are nitrogen fixation, nitrification, nitrate assimilation, respiratory reduction of nitrate to ammonia, anaerobic ammonia oxidation (anammox) and denitrification. All of these are carried out by micro-organisms, including bacteria, archaea and some specialized fungi. In the present article, we provide a brief introduction to both the biochemical and ecological aspects of these processes and consider how human activity over the last 100?years has changed the historic balance of the global nitrogen cycle.     

Boundaries of belief: religious practices and the construction of ethnic identity in Hui Muslim communities†

Though scholars of ethnicity remark that religion is an important qualifying attribute for membership in an ethnic group, the nature of the relationship between religious faith and ethnic identity requires further exploration. An approach that emphasizes the importance of religious practices in forming and maintaining ethnic boundaries may offer a more complete explanation of the relationship between religion and ethnicity. This article proposes a framework for understanding how religious practices influence ethnic boundary formation and maintenance processes. I propose that religious practices may play a universalizing, negotiating, or differentiating role in influencing the formation and maintenance of ethnic boundaries. To illustrate these various roles played by religious processes, the article presents a heuristic case study of Islamic faith in boundary setting processes in Hui Muslim communities in China.     

Preparing for motherhood: authoritative knowledge and the undercurrents of shared experience in two childbirth education courses in Cagliari, Italy

This article compares the social settings and teaching organization of two differently structured childbirth education courses in Cagliari, Italy, in order to understand how social processes and contexts work to negotiate authoritative knowledge. Although the explicit goal of both courses was to transmit biomedical knowledge, knowledge based in women's experience nonetheless dominated some course sessions. Thus, I examine the social processes and interactions that enabled women's experiential knowledge to dominate discussions and subsequently share in the authority of biomedical knowledge in some situations. Because few existing studies do so, this article also addresses a gap in our current understanding by exploring not only how experiential knowledge comes to share authority with biomedical knowledge, but also, why it is important that it does. Focusing on the efficacy of differently structured courses, this article informs the planning of future childbirth education courses in similar settings.     

Impacts of chilling temperatures on photosynthesis in warm-climate plants

Photosynthesis in warm-climate plants is substantially reduced after chilling. Tropical and subtropical species offer the opportunity to study the effects of low temperature on photosynthetic processes undisguised by the myriad of protective responses observed in temperate species. In this article, we highlight the primary components of photosynthesis that are affected by a short chill, in both the dark and the light, and discuss what is known of the mechanisms involved. Recent work implicates impaired redox and circadian regulation among other processes.     

Extracting quantitative information from tissue--an industrial perspective.

The focus of this article is to provide an overview of the current technologies for the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. Disease processes express themselves in the functional and structural disturbance of cellular systems. Cells and their metabolites constitute the building blocks of tissues and entire organisms. Studying the spatial and temporal phenotype of disease processes in tissues at the cellular level reveals a multitude of information about the progress and status of a disease. Detailed exploration of tissues by slide-based cytometry is an important source of information about disease processes. Technological and analytical advances allow us to shed a new light on tissues and to come to a better understanding of the complexity of disease processes. Dealing with complex multidimensional datasets from tissue samples requires an advanced approach to image processing and data management. The increase in computing power and the continuing research into imaging algorithms allow us to improve the exploration of the data content of tissues.     

Disambiguating Multi–Modal Scene Representations Using Perceptual Grouping Constraints

In its early stages, the visual system suffers from a lot of ambiguity and noise that severely limits the performance of early vision algorithms. This article presents feedback mechanisms between early visual processes, such as perceptual grouping, stereopsis and depth reconstruction, that allow the system to reduce this ambiguity and improve early representation of visual information. In the first part, the article proposes a local perceptual grouping algorithm that — in addition to commonly used geometric information — makes use of a novel multi–modal measure between local edge/line features. The grouping information is then used to: 1) disambiguate stereopsis by enforcing that stereo matches preserve groups; and 2) correct the reconstruction error due to the image pixel sampling using a linear interpolation over the groups. The integration of mutual feedback between early vision processes is shown to reduce considerably ambiguity and noise without the need for global constraints.     

Microbial production of organic acids: expanding the markets

Microbial production of organic acids is a promising approach for obtaining building-block chemicals from renewable carbon sources. Although some acids have been produced for some time and in-depth knowledge of these microbial production processes has been gained, further microbial production processes seem to be feasible, but large-scale production has not yet been possible. Citric, lactic and succinic acid production exemplify three processes in different stages of industrial development. Although the questions being addressed by current research on these processes are diverging, a comparison is helpful for understanding microbial organic acid production in general. In this article, through analysis of the current advances in production of these acids, we present guidelines for future developments in this fast-moving field.     

Bayesian estimators for conditional hazard functions

This article introduces a new Bayesian approach to the analysis of right-censored survival data. The hazard rate of interest is modeled as a product of conditionally independent stochastic processes corresponding to (1) a baseline hazard function and (2) a regression function representing the temporal influence of the covariates. These processes jump at times that form a time-homogeneous Poisson process and have a pairwise dependency structure for adjacent values. The two processes are assumed to be conditionally independent given their jump times. Features of the posterior distribution, such as the mean covariate effects and survival probabilities (conditional on the covariate), are evaluated using the Metropolis-Hastings-Green algorithm. We illustrate our methodology by an application to nasopharynx cancer survival data.     

Ethnicity and Educational Performance in the United Kingdom: Racism, Ethnicity, and Variability in Achievement

This article examines recent research on the variability of educational performance in Britain. The composition of Britain's minority population is reviewed, followed by a discussion of differences in attainment. The bulk of the article explores some of the social processes that lie behind the statistics, especially concerning teacher racism and student adaptations. The possibilities for improvement at the school level are considered briefly within the context of national reforms that prioritize market principles and marginalize equality concerns.     

Industrial carbohydrate biotransformations

Nearly all major industrial processes which involve carbohydrates, include biotechnological transformations. This is due to the complex nature of carbohydrates where stereo- and regioselectivity are highly complex and difficult to control. Enzymes and microorganisms work highly selectively and efficiently in water solution, and provide high yield in general. The article focuses on different types of reactions, including large-scale processes. Topics are hydrolytic reactions, including starch processing, oxidation and reduction transformations including organic acids, such as gluconic and ketogluconic acids and vitamin C synthesis, and isomerization and transfer reactions, which are established on a very large scale to produce glucose/fructose syrups and sucrose isomers. The article will further discuss some mechanistic aspects which are relevant for technology and present selected details of industrial-scale processing. Finally an outlook outlines perspectives of future processes.     

Linguistic and Activity Relativity in Cognition

Abstract

This work compares the features of cognitive processes uncovered in experimental studies undertaken to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with cultural features of thinking that are shaped by activity-related factors rather than by language that have been identified by cross-cultural research into thinking. It is concluded that this latter area of research has uncovered more essential differences in cognitive processes. There is discussion of the linguistic aspect of activity-related differences in thinking, in particular the possibility of using Hymes’ idea of functional linguistic relativity in cross-cultural research. The article concludes with a discussion of possible social-psychological reasons why the linguistic-relativity phenomenon is more popular than activity-related relativity.     

DNA structure and dynamics

This review primarily outlines the most recent atomic force microscopy (AFM) studies of DNA structure and dynamics. Sample preparation techniques allowing reliable and reproducible imaging of various DNA topologies are reviewed. Such important issues as imaging of supercoiled DNA conformations at different ionic conditions and detection of local alternative structures that are stabilized by negative DNA supercoiling are discussed in length in the article. The possibility of imaging DNA structural dynamics at different levels is another major focus of the article. Using time-lapse AFM imaging mode of nondried samples, such extensive DNA dynamic processes as transition of one local structure into another (H-DNA to B-form transition), the conformational transitions of DNA Holliday junctions and their branch migration were observed. Potential future applications of this single-molecule dynamics mode of AFM to analyses of various biochemical processes involving DNA are discussed.