Glasgian Novel in Work of Alasdair Gray

The representation of the urban space in the prose of the major Scottish writer A. Gray on the material of his key novels “Lanark” (1981), 1982, “Janine” (1982) and “Poor things” (1992) is analyzed in the article. It is noted that A. Gray made a significant contribution to the formation of the Glasgian novel, the specificity of which is defined more exactly in the works of M. Burgess and M. Gregorova. It is shown that, like other Glasgian writers, in his works A. Gray reflects on the consequences of the dehumanizing influence of the city on a person, however, in contrast to them, he makes a choice in favor of protagonists who are simultaneously representatives of the working and middle classes. The author note that in the novel “Lanark” the city is shown through the prism of three-time layers: a nostalgic past, a bleak present and an apocalyptic future. It is indicated that mortality becomes the thematic dominant, as a result of which Glasgow acquires the features of the underworld. It is proved that in A. Gray’s prose the Glasgian locus acts as a “place of memory”, while the motive of “recreating” memories from fragmentary facts of urban life plays a significant role in order to reconstruct the historical appearance of Glasgow or create fictitious memories of it in the reader.

FORMAL AND EVALUATIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF CRIMES COMMITTED IN THE SPHERE OF ECONOMIC ACTIVITY

In the article, the author consider the theoretical positions on the rules for the qualification of crimes in the field of economic activity. The author consider the judicial practice in criminal cases and formulates conclusions about the characteristics of the elements (signs) of corpus delicti (see also – delicti) set out in the dispositions of articles of Chapter 22 of the Criminal code of the Russian Federation. One of the objectives of the article is to consider formal and informal elements as content (context) delicti. At the same time, the author note that the formality or informality of signs (context) delicti has no legal significance. This conclusion follows from the provision that all the signs described in the norm of the Special part of the Criminal code of the Russian Federa-tion are legally mandatory. It is important to differentiate between elements of crimes in order to qualify crimes, especially those committed in the sphere of economic activity. The author notes that the dispositions of articles of the Special part of the Criminal code of the Russian Federation can combine elements of blankness, descriptive and evaluative. The author notes the accessory nature of criminal law from positive (regulatory) legal regulations, and the absence of concentration of legal sources. The author emphasized that the norms of the Special part of Criminal law contain two parts. The first part contains a description of the object of the crime, which the offender attempt on. Such an object is represented in the form of a legal order established by the norms of regulatory legislation. The author considers the fact of attempt on this law and order as event (hypothesis) of criminal liability. Clarification of this hypothesis take place in the process of qualifying crimes (in the sphere of criminal law application). Together, these parts of the disposition of the criminal law norm form a common whole, which indicate the legislator's idea of a criminal law prohibition. The article emphasizes the intersectoral nature of the institution of formulating grounds for criminal liability for crimes in the sphere of economic activity. The author identifies the types of evaluation signs delicti of economic crimes: quantitative (size), qualitative (can not be measured by cost) and cumulative. The author comes to the conclusion that it is expedient to further study the concept, types and role of evaluative signs of crimes. The role of evaluation signs is stated in the formulation of criminal law prohibitions. The author makes the following conclusions for the readers' discussion: the formulation of signs of crimes in the sphere of economic activity is based on the blank dispositions of the corresponding articles; a separate type of such description of the disposition is administrative prejudice; this administrative prejudice relates the grounds for criminal liability of a person for the act with his previous administrative penalty; assessment signs of the crime is determined not only by the normative legal act, judicial practice, but also in the process of qualification of a crime is determined by the consciousness of a person when it examines the being of the case.

Alternatively Activated Macrophages are the Primary Retinoic Acid Producing Cells in Human Decidua

In situ production and metabolism of all-trans retinoic acid (RA) in decidual tissue are critically important for endometrial stromal differentiation, embryo implantation, and healthy placentation. However, the cellular source(s) of RA in this tissue has yet to be determined. To identify the primary RA-producing cells in human term decidua, we isolated cells from decidua basalis of delivered placenta and quantified cellular retinal dehydrogenase (RALDH) activity, a major biosynthetic enzyme whose activity determines the synthesis of RA from retinol, using an Aldefluor assay and flow cytometry. RA production in decidual tissue and sorted cell subpopulations was evaluated by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. CD14+ cells (macrophages/monocytes) showed >4-fold higher RALDH activity than stromal cells (CD10+), T-cells (CD3+), or non-T lymphocytes (CD3-negative). CD11c+ cells that did not co-express CD14 showed about one-third the RALDH activity of their CD14 co-expressing counterparts. The highest RALDH activity was found in “alternatively activated” M2 macrophages delineated by the simultaneous expression of CD14 and CD163. The greater RA synthesizing capacity of M2 versus CD14+CD163-ve (M1) cells was confirmed by direct quantitation of RA biosynthesis from retinol. RA levels in whole decidua correlated with M2 cell density but not with stromal cell (CD10+) number, the major cell type comprising the decidua. These results identified M2 monocyte/macrophages as the primary source of RA in human term decidua. This finding may have implications for certain pregnancy complications that are known to be associated with reduced numbers of decidual M2 cells. Author note: This manuscript has been accepted for publication in the journal Reproductive Sciences

Effects of compassion training on brain responses to suffering others

What are the active ingredients and brain mechanisms of compassion training? To address these questions, we conducted a three-armed randomized trial (N = 57) of compassion meditation (CM). We compared a four-week CM program delivered by smartphone application to i) a placebo condition, in which participants inhaled sham oxytocin, which they were told would enhance compassion, and ii) a familiarity control condition, designed to control for increased familiarity with suffering others. Functional MRI was collected while participants listened to narratives describing suffering others at pre- and post-intervention. CM increased brain responses to suffering others in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) relative to both the placebo and familiarity control conditions, and in the nucleus accumbens relative to the familiarity control condition. Results support the specific efficacy of CM beyond effects of expectancy, demand characteristics, and increased familiarity with suffering others, and implicate affective and motivational pathways as brain mechanisms of CM.Author NoteFunded by the John Templeton Foundation’s Positive Neuroscience project (PIs Wager and Dimidjian), with additional support from NIH R01 R01DA035484 (PI Wager). Gratitude to research assistants Jenifer Mutari, Robin Kay, Scott Meyers, Nicholas Peterson, and Brandin Williams for help with data collection.

Generalizing to generalize: when (and when not) to be compositional in task structure learning

Humans routinely face novel environments in which they have to generalize in order toact adaptively. However, doing so involves the non-trivial challenge of deciding which aspects of a task domain to generalize. While it is sometimes appropriate to simply re-use a learned behavior, often adaptive generalization entails recombining distinct components of knowledge acquired across multiple contexts. Theoretical work has suggested a computational trade-off in which it can be more or less useful to learn and generalize aspects of task structure jointly or compositionally, depending on previous task statistics, but empirical studies are lacking. Here we develop a series of navigation tasks which manipulate the statistics of goal values (“what to do”) and state transitions (“how to do it”) across contexts, and assess whether human subjects generalize these task components separately or conjunctively. We find that human generalization is sensitive to the statistics of the previously experienced task domain, favoring compositional or conjunctive generalization when the task statistics are indicative of such structures, and a mixture of the two when they are more ambiguous. These results support the predictions of a normative “meta-generalization learning” agent that does not only generalize previous knowledge but also generalizes the statistical structure most likely to support generalization.Author NoteThis work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation Proposal 1460604 “How Prefrontal Cortex Augments Reinforcement Learning” to MJF. We thank Mark Ho for providing code used in the behavioral task. We thank Matt Nassar for helpful discussions. Correspondence should be addressed to Nicholas T. Franklin ([email protected]) or Michael J. Frank ([email protected]).

Optimized ICA-based removal of ocular EEG artifacts from free viewing experiments

Combining EEG with eye-tracking is a promising approach to study neural correlates of natural vision, but the resulting recordings are also heavily contaminated by activity of the eye balls, eye lids, and extraocular muscles. While Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is commonly used to suppress these ocular artifacts, its performance under free viewing conditions has not been systematically evaluated and many published findings display residual artifacts. Here I evaluated and optimized ICA-based correction for two tasks with unconstrained eye movements: visual search in images and sentence reading. In a first step, four parameters of the ICA pipeline were systematically varied: the (1) high-pass and (2) low-pass filter applied to the training data, (3) the proportion of training data containing myogenic saccadic spike potentials (SP), and (4) the threshold for eye tracker-based component rejection. In a second step, the eye-tracker was used to objectively quantify correction quality of each ICA solution, both in terms of undercorrection (residual artifacts) and overcorrection (removal of neurogenic activity). As a benchmark, results were compared to those obtained with an alternative spatial filter, Multiple Source Eye Correction (MSEC). With commonly used settings, Infomax ICA not only left artifacts in the data of both tasks, but also distorted neurogenic activity during eye movement-free intervals. However, correction could be drastically improved by training the ICA on optimally filtered data in which SPs were massively overweighted. With optimized procedures, ICA removed virtually all artifacts, including the SP and its associated spectral broadband artifact, with little distortion of neural activity. It also outperformed MSEC in terms of SP correction. Matlab code is provided.Author NoteI would like to acknowledge Maarten De Schuymer, who conducted early explorations of the effects of high-pass filtering that helped to initiate the current work. I am also grateful to Lisa Spiering for assisting with the MSEC correction and Werner Sommer for providing an excellent working environment. Collection of one of the datasets was supported by a grant from DFG (FG-868-A2). Comments or corrections are highly appreciated.