This study evaluated the effect of a massed versus distributed repetition schedule on the variability of force and surface electromyographic (sEMG) activity during maximal voluntary isometric elbow flexion contractions. The massed group (N = 13) performed 15 contractions on 1 day, while the distributed group (N = 13) performed 15 contractions across three consecutive days (five per day). Two retention tests (five contractions each) occurred 2 weeks and 3 months after the final trial of the initial test sessions. Force and sEMG of the biceps and triceps brachii muscles were recorded concurrently. Both groups had comparable increases in force and biceps brachii sEMG that continued over short- and longer-term retention tests (p < 0.05). Triceps brachii sEMG exhibited a more complicated pattern of successive decreases and increases (p < 0.05). The massed repetition schedule resulted in significantly (p < 0.05) less variability in maintaining a constant force [root mean square (RMS) error]. There was a significant decrease in the variability of the force-time and sEMG-time curves as assessed by the variance ratio (VR) (p < 0.05). Only biceps sEMG and VR correlated highly with force VR for the distributed group. Total (biceps + triceps) sEMG magnitude and variability correlated highly with both RMS error and force VR for the massed group. It was concluded that the massed contraction pattern allowed participants to learn how to regulate joint stiffness in addition to the variability of muscle activity. This allowed for greater decreases in RMS error than could be obtained by regulating the variability of muscle activity alone.
Government-donor relations in Bangladesh are shaped by a history of donor dependence and reaction against it. Sustained growth, substantial social sector achievements and a growing proportion of the investment budget serviced from national resources now gives the government confidence and increasing room for manoeuvre. But many in Bangladesh see donor pressure for public sector reform as a sign of low government ownership and a loss of sovereignty in economic management. Donor policies can be seen as a result of 'group think' at the top level of agencies, leading to the perception that donors are 'ganging up' on the government. Each donor, at implementation level, tends to demand compliance, leaving little room for local interpretation of needs. On the government side the centre-perceiving itself to be weak and subject to sustained criticism-tries to keep a hold on funds and programmes, leaving little room for manoeuvre or discretion on the part of programme-level officers. The resultant tension between the government and the donor community underlies aid management relationships and stands in contrast to the language of partnership that donors these days propose. This article reviews the concerns of Bangladesh government officials managing aid in regard to donor practices, particularly the difficulties that they perceive in donor conditionality; and donors' seemingly poor appreciation of the government's systems, priorities and limited capacity. Donor perspectives on the other hand are conditioned by the ever-changing value imperatives of aid as well as the ever-present need to disburse. Experience with the Local Consultative Group, a donor side initiative to build partnership, illustrates the theme.
This short article reviews recent efforts to measure the costs to recipient governments of how aid is managed. Overall measurement of transaction costs was found to be impractical, so the focus of empirical work shifted to ranking categories of perceived costs. Results indicated that recipient governments find the lack of fit of donor approaches with their own to be more burdensome than the administrative costs of dealing with multiple donors. Subsequent surveys have monitored changes in alignment and harmonisation. While there is clear progress in defining and assessing indicators of donor behaviour, two issues stand out for urgent attention. First, the need to give priority in future surveys to assessing changes in capacity of recipient governments, since capacity underlies alignment. Second, the need for conceptually consistent and reliable international data on aid flows, particularly to enable quantitative assessment of the effectiveness of different types of aid.
Britain in the fin de siècle was home to many significant communities of political émigrés. Among Russian revolutionaries who made London their home were Sergei Stepniak and Feliks Volkhovskii, forced to flee Russia as a result of their revolutionary activities in the 1870s. Britain became a symbol of liberty in their writings as a source of comparison with tsarist rule. These comparisons also supported their justifications of the use of terrorism by Russian revolutionaries when writing for audiences with concerns about the use of terrorism in Britain. The emphasis on Russian otherness in these comparisons also helped to justify their opposition to Russian imperialism, while at the same time praising a benevolent imperialism rooted in social and cultural activism. Their thought represents a blending of liberal and socialist ideas employed to place the Russian experience beyond the scope of modernity and liberal political understanding.
The Vogue for Russia offers readers an insight into British intellectuals' engagement with Russian culture in the early twentieth century. Caroline Maclean surveys modernist art, literature, and film, using representations of the "unseen" to investigate the diffusion of Russian culture in Britain in this period. Maclean's definition of the unseen incorporates a variety of artistic practices that, she argues, reflect evolving notions of spirituality in the early years of the twentieth century.The Vogue for Russia offers a useful new addition to the growing field of study that considers a more interactive relationship between Russian and British intellectuals, artists, and political activists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, an earlier version of one of Maclean's four chapters was published in the groundbreaking collection Russia in Britain, 1880 to 1940: From Melodrama to Modernism (2013, edited by Rebecca Beasley and Phillip Ross Bullock. In this new offering, Maclean aims to deconstruct the assumption that Russian culture was popular in Britain simply because it was Russian (4). She argues that British intellectuals absorbed crucial notions of Russian cultural theory-concepts that shaped representations of the unseen in British modernist art, literature, and film. Each chapter is structured around theories developed or popularized by Russian artists and intellectuals because Maclean believes that it is important to investigate cultural transfers in terms of the whole, rather than simply mapping single elements or motifs (3). Her approach is particularly significant because of what it reveals about the influence of Russian ideas in Britain at large and not simply upon individuals or specific works of art or literature.Maclean's first and second chapters both look at methods of representing the world beyond the limits of physical form. She attends first to the practice of mosaicism in Virginia Woolf 's novels, arguing that Russian artists such as Boris Anrep influenced British writers' adoption the idea that observations of the physical world can only produce fragmented visions of reality, through which they aspired to Byzantine mysticism and spirituality.She then turns to the influence of Vasily Kandinsky's theory of art, focusing on discussions in the journal Rhythm of Kandinsky's argument that sketching out the artist's vision is more meaningful than depicting physical form. In the third and fourth chapters, Maclean focuses on British literature and film influenced by ideas of the fourth spatial dimension, first exploring how silence and disruption of narrative in literature were used to suggest the existence of this fourth dimension. The fourth chapter focuses on Sergei Eisenstein's theory of montage, a technique used to create a sense of the fourth dimension in observation. Both of Maclean's chapters on the fourth dimension suggest that it was used to create a heightened vision of reality.The Vogue for Russia offers both an analysis of hitherto neglected sources in addition to a new interpr...
Peter Kropotkin's life was not only transnational because of his movements. Kropotkin existed as an imagined figure in the sphere of transatlantic Anglophone print culture. This imagined Kropotkin was both representative of and contributed to British and American responses to the Russian Revolution in the period between 1881, when Kropotkin first became internationally infamous, and his death in 1921. This article argues that we can read in media representations of Kropotkin three main phases of revolutionary history. The first, the terrorist phase. The second, the ancient dignity of Russian culture. The third, decay, death, and despair. Kropotkin was one of the Revolution's greatest celebrities, meaning that when the Civil War emerged and Bolshevik power grew, it was through memories and representations of him that British and American audiences interpreted the Russian Revolution. So far as they saw it, Kropotkin was the Revolution, and had been for some time. As a result, Kropotkin's death marked an important moment both for Russian anarchists, but also a symbol of the passing of an age of Russian history and culture.
Background/Aims Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic autoimmune disease that results in joint damage and bony destruction. The inflammatory process is central in the pathology of RA, with cytokines mediating the inflammatory response. Cytokines, in particular IL-6, have been targeted as treatments for RA. The IL-27 cytokine is part of the IL-6 family, and acts via the same signalling pathway. IL-27 can have the same function as IL-6, but can also antagonise IL-6. The presence of ectopic lymphoid structures (ELSs) is associated with more severe disease and worse joint damage, and is also associated with low IL-27 levels. Hence, targeting IL-27 may aid in severe RA and offer a novel treatment option. Aims: 1) To generate a recombinant IL-27 antagonist, 2) to determine the concentration and bioactivity of IL-27 antagonist, 3) to test the bioactivity of IL-27 antagonist as an inhibitor of IL-27 activity. Methods Chinese hamster ovarian (CHO) cells were transduced with adenovirus to express the IL-27 antagonist. The concentration of these IL-27 antagonists was determined using ELISA. To determine the bioactivity of the IL-27 antagonist, both acute leukaemia cell lines (THP1 cells) and cells from C57BL/6J mice were treated with human IL-27 and IL-27 antagonists and STAT3 activation determined using flow cytometry and ELISA. Results THP1 cells treated with both 5ng/ml and 15ng/ml of human recombinant IL-27 showed STAT3 activation, with 29.4% and 30.7% of cells being STAT3 positive respectively. Cells that remained untreated only showed STAT3 activation in 2.54% of cells, indicating IL-27 has a role in the activation of the STAT3 pathway. STAT3 activation was not witnessed in CD4 cells from C57BL/6J mice treated with human recombinant IL-27. Furthermore, the recombinant IL-27 antagonist was not seen to be able to antagonise the actions IL-27 and alter STAT3 activation. Conclusion In conclusion, this study has demonstrated that IL-27 treatment of cells can cause increased STAT3 activation, however we were unable to demonstrate that the IL-27 antagonist was able to inhibit the actions of IL-27. IL-27 shows great potential for use as a novel therapy, since both its pro and anti-inflammatory functions can be targeted, however there needs to be much more information about the action of IL-27 as this is still largely unknown. Future studies could aim to optimise the protocol in order to understand the bioactivity of the IL-27 antagonist, thus understanding its role in altering STAT3 activation. Disclosure L. Green: None.
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