An Apparatus (Georgiou-Petri Dish) for Growing Fungi and other Microorganisms on Liquid Media in a Petri Dish

This work describes a new apparatus for growing fungi and other microorganisms on liquid nutrient media in a Petri dish. The apparatus is composed of a net supporting a cellophane membrane stretched between an outer and an inner ring that is placed inside a Petri dish. This modification of the standard Petri dish offers many advantages for studying growth, metabolism, differentiation, and other aspects of fungi in liquid cultures with minimal waste of expensive chemicals. Monitoring of excreted or absorbed substances by the fungi, the aseptic transfer of undisturbed fungal colonies from dish to dish, and harvesting are made easier, using this apparatus.     

Instagram-City: New Media,and the Social Perception of Public Spaces

How are we to recognize the social dimension of place without limiting ourselves to the physical? What tools can we use? What happens when we deal with new public spaces in a large and complex metropolitan reality? Things become complicated. But some new information technologies offer us the possibility of capturing an enormous quantity of data and images published by users online, using various applications designed for tablets and smartphones. Perhaps the most common one is Instagram: one of the most relevant mass phenomena in the era of social media, for having implemented a process of democratization of artistic photography, and the sharing of moments of everyday life. In the case of Le Centquatre and Place de la République, two very different public spaces in Paris, Instagram was used as a tool for documentation, as an observatory in the search for urban dynamics and the changes that are underway in contemporary society.     

Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery

Remaking. World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery. Veena Das. Arthur Kleinman. Margaret Lock. Mamphele Ramphele. and Pamela Reynolds. eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 294 pp.     

Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery

Remaking. World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery. Veena Das. Arthur Kleinman. Margaret Lock. Mamphela Ramphele. and Pamela Reynolds. eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. viii. 294 pp.     

Lepidostroma vilgalysii, a new basidiolichen from the New World

The lichenized basidiomycete Lepidostroma vilgalysii from Mexico is described based on morphological analyses. The species is only the second representative of the family Lepidostromataceae documented from the New World, and is one of the few described lichens with an inverted morphology, with the algae in a layer at the base of the thallus. Molecular sequence data from the nuclear ribosomal LSU locus are used to confirm the placement of the holotype in Lepidostroma and to evaluate the molecular distinctiveness of the species from all other described species in the family and genus.     

The Mass Media and Their Role in Social Life

The last several decades of the 20th century have been marked by the significant development of mass communications — the propagation of information (knowledge, spiritual values, moral and legal norms, etc.) by technological media (the press, radio, movies, television) to numerically large and spatially dispersed audiences. Within the life span of a single generation, this process has come, by one means or another, to encompass the entire globe. The technological media for the spread of information have penetrated into places where for centuries the only source of information about the world beyond the confines of the patriarchal community had been the spoken word. This penetration, aided by the spread of literacy, has brought about far-reaching changes in people's consciousness and in their attitudes toward objective facts and toward themselves. These changes have created the preconditions for drawing into political life and struggle masses of new people who had formerly lived in conformity to only the interests of their own economically closed and culturally isolated little worlds. The political and ideological cleavages of today's world have caused these preconditions to bear real fruit.     

Diving-for-Food: A New Model to Assess Social Roles in a Group of Laboratory Rats

In an experimental situation called “diving for food”, groups of laboratory rats are tested in an aquarium where they have to dive and swim under water to reach the single source of food located at the other end. A behavioural differentiation appears: some rats — the carriers — dive to get food and others — non-carriers — stay in the cage and feed by stealing. We examine whether carrier and non-carrier profiles can be considered as social roles, defined as supraindividual features dependent on the social context. Carrier/non-carrier differentiation resulted in all groups tested. Individually tested, almost all rats can get food by diving and swimming. Differentiation also occurred in groups that had been previously trained alone in the device, and in groups whose members had all been carriers or non-carriers exclusively in a preliminary stage. As the access-to-food behaviour of a rat having to cope with the diving-for-food situation is settled by its social environment, we consider that the present experimental model is promising for the study of interactions between the individual and the social structure.     

Miniprimer PCR, a New Lens for Viewing the Microbial World

Molecular methods based on the 16S rRNA gene sequence are used widely in microbial ecology to reveal the diversity of microbial populations in environmental samples. Here we show that a new PCR method using an engineered polymerase and 10-nucleotide “miniprimers” expands the scope of detectable sequences beyond those detected by standard methods using longer primers and Taq polymerase. After testing the method in silico to identify divergent ribosomal genes in previously cloned environmental sequences, we applied the method to soil and microbial mat samples, which revealed novel 16S rRNA gene sequences that would not have been detected with standard primers. Deeply divergent sequences were discovered with high frequency and included representatives that define two new division-level taxa, designated CR1 and CR2, suggesting that miniprimer PCR may reveal new dimensions of microbial diversity.     

Hagenbachia, a misplaced genus of New World Liliaceae

Hagenbachia , which until recently was included in Haemodoraceae, belongs in Asphodeleae in Liliaceae sensu lato or Anthericaceae sensu stricto. Hagenbachia and its putative relatives Echeandia, Anthericum , and Chlorophytum are characterized by anatropous ovules, curved or angled embryos, and nonarillate seeds, which indicate a position in Anthericaceae, as well as a black, colliculose seed coat. Hagenbachia includes five species of Central and South America; one, H. columbiana , is described here. The available data suggest the species are ecologically as well as geographically isolated. There are two broad leaved species. One is endemic to the lowlands of eastern Brazil and the second is found at middle elevations in Costa Rica and Panama and on the eastern slope of the Andes in Ecuador. Of the three narrow leaved species, one is endemic to the Cordillera Central in Columbia, a second is endemic to eastern Paraguay and southeastern Bolivia and the third occurs from eastern Bolivia northeast to east-central Brazil.     

Social Media,Public Participation,and the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

This research examines how information about an oil spill, its impacts, and the use of dispersants to treat the oil, moved through social media and the surrounding Internet during the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Using a collection of tweets captured during the spill, we employ a mixed-method approach including an in-depth qualitative analysis to examine the content of Twitter posts, the connections that Twitter users made with each other, and the links between Twitter content and the surrounding Internet. This article offers a range of findings to help practitioners and others understand how social media is used by a variety of different actors during a slow-moving, long-term, environmental disaster. We enumerate some of the most salient themes in the Twitter data, noting that concerns about health impacts were more likely to be communicated in tweets about dispersant use, than in the larger conversation. We describe the accounts and behaviors of highly retweeted Twitter users, noting how locals helped to shape the network and the conversation. Importantly, our results show the online crowd wanting to participate in and contribute to response efforts, a finding with implications for future oil spill response.     

Social Media and Internet Driven Study Recruitment: Evaluating a New Model for Promoting Collaborator Engagement and Participation

Aims

A substantial challenge facing multicentre audit and research projects is timely recruitment of collaborators and their study centres. Cost-effective strategies are required and fee-free social media has previously been identified as a potential conduit. We investigated and evaluated the effectiveness of a novel multi-format social media and Internet strategy for targeted recruitment to a national multicentre cohort study.

Methods

Interventions involved a new Twitter account, including weekly live question-and-answer sessions, a new Facebook group page, online YouTube presentations and an information page on a national association website. Link tracking analysis was undertaken using Google Analytics, which was then related to subsequent registration. Social influence was calculated using the proprietary Klout score.

Results

Internet traffic analysis identified a total of 1562 unique registration site views, of which 285 originated from social media (18.2%). Some 528 unique registrations were received, with 96 via social media platforms (18.2%). Traffic source analysis identified a separate national association webpage as resulting in the majority of registration page views (15.8%), followed by Facebook (11.9%), Twitter (4.8%) and YouTube (1.5%). A combination of publicity through Facebook, Twitter and the dedicated national association webpage contributed to the greatest rise in registration traffic and accounted for 312 (48%) of the total registrations within a 2-week period. A Twitter ‘social influence’ (Klout) score of 42/100 was obtained during this period.

Conclusions

Targeted social media substantially aided study dissemination and collaborator recruitment. It acted as an adjunct to traditional methods, accounting for 18.2% of collaborator registration in a short time period with no associated financial costs. We provide a practical model for designing future recruitment campaigns, and recommend Facebook, Twitter and targeted websites as the most effective adjuncts for maximising cost-effective study recruitment.     

Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond; New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere

Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond. Walter Armbrust. ed. Berkeley. University of California Press, 2000. 378 pp.
New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere. Dale Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson. eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. 213 pp.     

The AIDS Pandemic is New,but is HIV Not New?

The determinations made by Mindell, Shultz and Ewald regarding the ancestral host for immunodeficiency retroviruses, and their conclusion that monkeys acquired their infections as a result of a host-switch from humans, do not withstand rigorous scrutiny. Their hypothesis requires the complete uniformativeness of third position transitions and of gapped regions in the alignment. When all of the data are permitted to corroborate or refute relationships, optimizing hosts on the viral phylogeny renders either equivocal statements or an unequivocal simian ancestry. However, merely optimizing hosts as characters on the viral phylogeny is illogical. Not only does this treat hosts as dependent on the viruses (instead of the reverse) but it ignores 15 years of methodological developments specifically designed to answer questions regarding cospeciation or host-switching.     

Living in a World of Smart Everyday Objects—Social,Economic, and Ethical Implications

Visions of Pervasive Computing and ambient intelligence involve integrating tiny microelectronic processors and sensors into everyday objects in order to make them “smart.” Smart things can explore their environment, communicate with other smart things, and interact with humans, therefore helping users to cope with their tasks in new, intuitive ways. Although many concepts have already been tested out as prototypes in field trials, the repercussions of such extensive integration of computer technology into our everyday lives are difficult to predict. This article is a first attempt to classify the social, economic, and ethical implications of this development.