World Television Straubhaar, Joseph D
2007, 2007-05-18, 2007-05-01
eBook
This new assessment of the interdependence of television across cultures and nations brings together the most current research and theories on the subject. By examining recent devlopments in the ...world system of television as well as some of the theories of culture, industry, genre, and audience, the author brings new insights to the topic. The author argues that television is being simultaneously globalized, regionalized, nationalized, and even localized the book therefore looks at all these levels of operation. Drawing on both quantative and cultural studies perspectives, the author provides a new model which attempts to move beyond the current controversies about dependency and globalization.
As plastic marine debris continues to accumulate in the oceans, many important questions surround this global dilemma. In particular, how many descriptors would be necessary to model the degradation ...behavior of ocean plastics or understand if degradation is possible? Here, we report a data-driven approach to elucidate degradation trends of plastic debris by linking abiotic and biotic degradation behavior in seawater with physical properties and molecular structures. The results reveal a hierarchy of predictors to quantify surface erosion as well as combinations of features, like glass transition temperature and hydrophobicity, to classify ocean plastics into fast, medium, and slow degradation categories. Furthermore, to account for weathering and environmental factors, two equations model the influence of seawater temperature and mechanical forces.
Chronic venous disease and venous leg ulceration are a common disease affecting millions of individuals. The fundamental problem is venous hypertension with resultant clinical manifestations of ...venous disease including varicose veins, skin changes, and venous leg ulceration. The pathophysiology leading to venous hypertension is complex and multifactorial, involving genetic predisposition, environmental factors, hormones, endothelial dysfunction, inflammatory cells and molecules and activation on the endothelium and vein wall, and disturbances in the balance of cytokines and matrix metalloproteinases. Understanding the pathophysiology of chronic venous disease and venous leg ulcers identifies cellular pathways, biomarkers, metabolic signatures, and cellular cross-talk for targeted therapy.
Over the past few years, substantial effort has been put into the functional annotation of variation in human genome sequences. Such annotations can have a critical role in identifying putatively ...causal variants for a disease or trait among the abundant natural variation that occurs at a locus of interest. The main challenges in using these various annotations include their large numbers and their diversity. Here we develop an unsupervised approach to integrate these different annotations into one measure of functional importance (Eigen) that, unlike most existing methods, is not based on any labeled training data. We show that the resulting meta-score has better discriminatory ability using disease-associated and putatively benign variants from published studies (in both coding and noncoding regions) than the recently proposed CADD score. Across varied scenarios, the Eigen score performs generally better than any single individual annotation, representing a powerful single functional score that can be incorporated in fine-mapping studies.
Magnesium alloys that contain certain rare-earth (RE) additions are known to have improved formability and this can be partly attributed to the different texture they display after recrystallization. ...Previous experimental work has identified segregation of RE to grain boundaries and dislocations as being potentially important in producing this change in behavior. In the present paper, two classical models (Langmuir–McClean and Cahn–Lücke–Stüwe) are used to explore the likely effect of RE additions on grain boundary solute concentration and drag. It is demonstrated that a wide range of RE elements are predicted to segregate strongly to grain boundaries due to the large atomic size misfit with magnesium. The maximum level of segregation is produced for elements such as Y or Gd that combine a high misfit and high bulk solubility. Segregated Y is predicted to produce a solute drag pressure on migrating boundaries several orders of magnitude greater than that obtained by Al or Zn additions. It is demonstrated that while this drag is predicted to be insufficient to strongly retard static recrystallization under typical annealing conditions, it is expected to suppress dynamic recrystallization by any mechanism requiring boundary migration.
This paper shows that incentives created by the impending turnover of local politicians can accelerate the pace of initial public offering (IPO) activity in certain politicized environments. Focusing ...on China, we exploit a research setting where politicians are rewarded for capital market development, firms rely on political connections for access to capital, rent-seeking behavior is rampant, and the objectives of the state might not be to maximize capital market efficiency. We find that the rate of exchange eligible firms engaging in an IPO temporarily increases in advance of impending political promotion events. This effect holds for both state-owned and non-state-owned entities. For state-owned firms, the effect is strongest in those provinces where the politicians are more likely to be rewarded for market development activity. For non-state-owned firms, the temporary increase in IPO activity appears to be (rationally) opportunistic in nature, with the effect stronger around events more likely to disrupt the firms' political connections. Promotion period IPOs underperform non-promotion period IPOs in terms of both future financial performance and long-run stock returns, have controlling shareholders who retain a larger fraction of the company, and are more likely to divert proceeds away from their intended use after the offering.
Cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of death worldwide. The limited capability of heart tissue to regenerate has prompted methodological developments for creating de novo cardiomyocytes, both ...in vitro and in vivo. Beyond uses in cell replacement therapy, patient-specific cardiomyocytes may find applications in drug testing, drug discovery, and disease modeling. Recently, approaches for generating cardiomyocytes have expanded to encompass three major sources of starting cells: human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), adult heart-derived cardiac progenitor cells (CPCs), and reprogrammed fibroblasts. We discuss state-of-the-art methods for generating de novo cardiomyocytes from hPSCs and reprogrammed fibroblasts, highlighting potential applications and future challenges.
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