In vertebrate and invertebrate nonmuscle myosins, light‐ and heavy‐chain phosphorylation regulate myosin assembly into filaments, and interaction with actin. Vertebrate non‐muscle myosins can exist in vitro in three main states, either ‘folded’ (assembly‐blocked) or ‘extended’ (assembly‐competent) monomers, and filaments. Light‐chain phosphorylation regulates the ‘dynamic equilibrium’ between these states. The ability of the myosin to undergo changes in conformation and state of assembly may be an important mechanism in regulating the organization of the cytoskeleton and cell motility.

Most donated organs in the United States come from brain dead donors, while a small percentage come from patients who die in “controlled,” or expected, circumstances, typically after the family or surrogate makes a decision to withdraw life support. The number of organs available for transplant could be substantially if donations were permitted in “uncontrolled” circumstances–that is, from people who die unexpectedly, often outside the hospital. According to projections from the Institute of Medicine, establishing programs permitting “uncontrolled donation after circulatory (...) determination of death,” or uDCDD, throughout the United States has the potential to provide 22,000 more donation opportunities annually. In contrast, U.S. controlled donation after circulatory determination of death, or cDCDD, cases have increased progressively over the past decade from 87 to 848 donors, but currently account for only 10.6 percent of all deceased donors. Following the IOM recommendations, several projects exploring the feasibility of uDCDD were funded by the federal government, including a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration that supported a pilot project in New York City in which the authors of this article participated.A key feature of our protocol, and indeed of many uDCDD protocols, is the initiation of preservation methods such as chest compressions and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation shortly after death in order to perfuse and preserve the donor's organs. Critics of uDCDD argue that the means of determining death deviates from generally ascribed principles. They assert that reinstituting circulation in order to preserve organs has the effect of “undoing” the prior determination of death. The result is that cDCDD is widely accepted and practiced routinely even though it only marginally increases the number of organs available for transplantation, and uDCDD is widely considered unacceptable despite being ethically embraced and proven to significantly increase organ donation opportunities in other countries. This article explores the evolution of this counterintuitive state of affairs and calls for a policy that, in line with the IOM report, allows for both cDCDD and uDCDD protocols. (shrink)

This article focuses on the ways that one individual child, Christina, experienced urban life in and outside of a diversely populated elementary school with a multicultural curriculum. Labeled by the school and her parents as white, Christina identified as Latina, and used specific spaces in the city to support this claim. Drawing on data from a year-long ethnographic study, I show how Christina navigated her life in the city and explore the ways that she consciously represented herself over (...) time, in multiple social spaces, as non-white. Three particular spaces are explored here: the city bus ride to school, Christina's neighborhood, and classroom discussions. Christina used a variety of resources to negotiate each space, in effect drawing a map of her racial identity as she lived in the city. Her case offers ideas about how such a curriculum might influence the senses of self of children in diversely populated classrooms. (shrink)

Despite the acknowledged importance of strategic planning in business and other organizations, there are few studies focusing on strategy texts and the related processes of their production and consumption. In this article, we attempt to partially fill this research gap by examining the institutionalized aspects of strategy discourse: what strategy is as genre. Combining textual analysis and analysis of conversation, the article focuses on the official strategy of the City of Lahti in Finland. Our analysis shows how specific communicative (...) purposes and lexico-grammatical features characterize the genre of strategy and how the actual negotiations over strategy text involve particular kinds of intersubjectivity and intertextuality. (shrink)

Public sector institutions are increasingly investing resources in data collection and data analytics to provide better public services at lower cost, to anticipate demand for services, to identify high-risk groups, and to develop targeted interventions. Prior research has shown that the media shape understanding of the possibilities of technology and creates related expectations. In this article we explore how artificial intelligence and emerging data-driven technologies are made familiar and by whose voices they are talked about in the media. Empirically, we (...) explore communication materials and media coverage from the joint AI experiment between the City of Espoo and Tieto Corporation in 2017–18. In this experiment, Tieto Corporation combined customer data from the City of Espoo’s social and health care and early childhood education from 2002–2016 and analysed this data using artificial intelligence methods. Theoretically, we draw on the tradition of the social construction of technology and especially its branch that focuses on the domestication of technologies. The results show that the means of narration used by the media – repetition and highlighting the voice of the representatives of the institutional actors involved in the AI experiment – strengthen the agency and interests of the parties involved as well as their visibility in the media, while reducing the space for possible critical discussion. We argue that this way, AI is made familiar and acceptable to citizens and in public services in Finland. (shrink)

Explores the interrelationship of mind, self, emotion and the development of moral consciousness in the Nepalese city of Bhaktapur. The author investigates how the citizens have developed moral awareness in the context of cultural life.

This article explores the trends in the implementation of Islamic moderation through aqidah and sharia in Singkawang, as it is considered the most tolerant city in Indonesia based on a research report published in 2019. Using grounded research analysis, the authors found three structured patterns: implementation strategies, implementation processes and implementation patterns. This study shows that these strategies and methods, implemented through a flexible, straightforward and easy-to-implement model are relevant to the fundamental values of Islamic education and offer a (...) means of forming a complete and comprehensive network. These implementation patterns encourage religious communities to develop and maintain healthy social relationships. Hopefully, such implementation patterns can be imitated and modified by policyholders to realise Islam rahmatanlil ‘alamin [as a blessing for all].Contribution: Scholars in the fields may benefit from the findings of the research as it provides a new perspective of the Islamic educational moderation theory grounded from the field research. It argues that the practice of community tolerance, especially by the Muslims, has been based on the good understanding of the theology of Islamic education moderation. Education matters in the process of community peace building and in generating tolerance through the implementation of Islamic moderation values. (shrink)

When the COVID-19 surge hit New York City hospitals, the Division of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College, and our affiliated ethics consultation services, faced waves of ethical issues sweeping forward with intensity and urgency. In this article, we describe our experience over an eight-week period (16 March through 10 May 2020), and describe three types of services: clinical ethics consultation (CEC); service practice communications/interventions (SPCI); and organizational ethics advisement (OEA). We tell this narrative through the prism of (...) time, describing the evolution of ethical issues and trends as the pandemic unfolded. We delineate three phases: anticipation and preparation, crisis management, and reflection and adjustment. The first phase focused predominantly on ways to address impending resource shortages and to plan for remote ethics consultation, and CECs focused on code status discussions with surrogates. The second phase was characterized by the dramatic convergence of a rapid increase in the number of critically ill patients, a growing scarcity of resources, and the reassignment/ redeployment of staff outside their specialty areas. The third phase was characterized by the recognition that while the worst of the crisis was waning, its medium- and long-term consequences continued to pose immense challenges. We note that there were times during the crisis that serving in the role of clinical ethics consultant created a sense of dis-ease as novel as the coronavirus itself. In retrospect we learned that our activities far exceeded the familiar terrain of clinical ethics consultation and extended into other spheres of organizational life in novel ways that were unanticipated before this pandemic. To that end, we defined and categorized a middle level of ethics consultation, which we have termed service practice communication intervention (SPCI). This is an underappreciated dimension of the work that ethics consult services are capable of in times of crisis. We believe that the pandemic has revealed the many enduring ways that ethics consultation services can more robustly contribute to the ethical life of their institutions moving forward. (shrink)

To date, research examining the socio-spatial effects of smart city technologies have charted how they are reconfiguring the production of space, spatiality and mobility, and how urban space is governed, but have paid little attention to how the temporality of cities is being reshaped by systems and infrastructure that capture, process and act on real-time data. In this article, we map out the ways in which city-scale Internet of Things infrastructures, and their associated networks of sensors, meters, transponders, (...) actuators and algorithms, are used to measure, monitor and regulate the polymorphic temporal rhythms of urban life. Drawing on Lefebvre, and subsequent research, we employ rhythmanalysis in conjunction with Miyazaki’s notion of ‘algorhythm’ and nascent work on algorithmic governance, to develop a concept of ‘algorhythmic governance’. We then use this framing to make sense of two empirical case studies: a traffic management system and sound monitoring and modelling. Our analysis reveals: how smart city technologies computationally perform rhythmanalysis and undertake rhythm-making that intervenes in space-time processes; distinct forms of algorhythmic governance, varying on the basis of adaptiveness, immediacy of action, and whether humans are in-, on-, or, off-the-loop; and a number of factors that shape how algorhythmic governance works in practice. (shrink)

Consanguineous marriage is traditionally common throughout the Eastern Mediterranean region, especially in the mainly Muslim countries. To date, there is little information on consanguinity in Yemen. The aim of this study was to ascertain the rate of consanguineous marriage and average coefficient of inbreeding in Sanaa City by means of a multi-stage random sampling technique. A total of 1050 wives and husbands were interviewed on consanguinity in their households. The total incidence of consanguinity was 44·7% (95% CI 41·7–47·7%) with (...) first-cousin marriages constituting 71·6% of the total consanguineous marriages and 32% of all marriages. Paternal parallel first cousins (Type I) accounted for 49% of first-cousin marriages. The average coefficient of inbreeding (F) was 0·02442. The incidence of consanguinity is relatively high in Yemen with predominantly first-cousin marriage. This might be related to the deeply rooted social and cultural beliefs in the country. (shrink)

Over the last few years, smart cities have been a focus of scholarly attention. Most of these critical studies concentrated on the multinational corporations’ discourses and their implications on urban policies. Besides these factors, however, the data-driven city develops within a complex web of entanglements whereby data-driven technologies modulate the urban infrastructure in a multitude of ways contingent upon the social, political, material and technical aspects. As such, this article attends to the infrastructural implications of a smart city (...) product, Citymapper, which is a transport app built on open data available as part of London’s smart city planning. In order to establish the relationship between data and infrastructure, I use Gilbert Simondon’s notions of ‘transduction’, ‘individuation’ and ‘technicity’ to explore this relationship in a processual and relational way. In constructing this relationship as co-generative, whereby infrastructure and data transindividuate, I subsequently posit the term data/infrastructure. Against this theoretical background, I study the ways in which Citymapper individuates and thereby gains infrastructural power through technicity of data by studying the ways in which the users’ contribute to data generation that feed back into the app. Specifically, by following the transformation of the app from initially mediating the bus timetable to transducing users into environmental sensing nodes through which the app collects behavioural data, I foreground the epistemological, infrastructural and social consequences of Citymapper’s infrastructural power for the data-driven city. (shrink)

La explicación urbana, definida bajo conceptos psicoanalíticos trascendidos mediante el uso de tópicas complejas en la generación de los problemas urbanos, desarrolla la comprensión de las paradojas de la anti-ciudad en la ciudad, la identidad y la no-identidad, y la marginación y la inclusión. La ciudad es entendida desde el rapport del ámbito urbano, al descubrir su tópica urbana y subordinar su configuración esencial al urbanismo, en relación con la conciencia colectiva, para explicar y comprender los fenómenos que coadyuvan a (...) entender la identidad, la marginación y la violencia como fenómenos urbanos. Urban reason, defined under psychoanalytic concepts transcended through the use of complex topologies in the generation of urban problems, develops our understanding of the paradoxes of the anti-city within the city, identity and non-identity, and marginalization and inclusion. The city is understood from the rapport of the urban environment, as its urban topology is discovered and its essential configuration subordinated to urbanism, in relation to collective consciousness. This understanding leads to an explanation and comprehension of the phenomena that help to understand identity, marginalization, and violence as urban phenomena. (shrink)

Foreigners go home! This is a reverberating chorus at the heart of the migration crisis everywhere in the world. This call manifests itself in the recurring xenophobic or Afrophobic attacks directed at foreign nationals in South Africa. This article reflects on the most recent xenophobic attacks directed at foreign nationals during the anti-immigration march, held on 24 February 2017, in the City of Tshwane. This article states that calls for foreigners to go home and the xenophobic or Afrophobic violent (...) attacks that accompanied them were a direct attack on ubuntu. It was an attack that rendered ubuntu ‘homeless’ and reflected the direct opposite of what an African community generally stands for. It was also an attack directed towards the migrant God; hence, the article proposes a re-imagination of the theology of ubuntu and the agency of faith communities as an antidote to the recurring calls for foreigners to go home. (shrink)

This article seeks to map out the future of Christian mission in the city context. African cities like Tshwane are not only expanding, but also present the church with a new frontier that needs to be crossed without crossing geographical boundaries. This article indicates that life in the City of Tshwane is paradoxically placed. Whilst life in the valleys of Tshwane is like walking in the valley of the shadow of death, those on the high hills continue with (...) their dominance and pretence as solution providers, whilst hiding the presence of those who are marginalised. This article proposes that the future of the Christian mission lies not only in identifying those powers, but also in engaging them in a transformative way so as to usher the justice and shalom of God into this highly contested space. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the power-related infrastructural dynamic that actualises in the interrelations of big data collection and the bodily movement of urbanites in contemporary cities. By drawing from Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies of the body and combining them with recent theorisations on choreography, material media theory and critical technology studies, the authors address city dwellers’ embodied relations with mobile devices and ambient technologies as integral to the micro-, meso- and macro-level production of (...) urban infrastructures. By way of discussing the technologically mediated kinaesthesia and movement trajectories of lived bodies, the chapter develops a novel conceptualisation of urban choreography for exploring the mechanisms through which dwelling-in-the-city today functions in a globally extensive cybernetic feedback loop with profit-motivated and surveillant big data operations. (shrink)

This paper explores the religious origins of the secular. It troubles the often rigid and misleading opposition between the secular and sacred through an exploration of this relationship in the thought of Augustine, Calvin, Madison, up to Obama.

Violent conflict between individuals and groups was as common in the ancient world as it has been in more recent history. Detested in theory, it nevertheless became as frequent as war between sovereign states. The importance of such ‘_stasis_’ was recognised by political thinkers of the time, especially Thucydides and Aristotle, both of whom tried to analyse its causes. Violence, Civil Strife and Revolution in the Classical City, first published in 1982, gives a conspectus of _stasis_ in the societies (...) of Greek antiquity, and traces the development of civil strife as city-states grew in political, social and economic sophistication. Aristocratic rivalry, tensions between rich and poor, imperialism and constitutional crisis are all discussed, while special consideration is given to the attitudes of the participants and the theoretical explanations offered at the time. In conclusion, civil strife in the ancient world is compared to more recent conflicts, both domestic and international. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is embedded in a wide variety of Smart City applications and infrastructures, often without the citizens being aware of the nature of their “intelligence”. AI can affect citizens’ lives concretely, and thus, there may be uncertainty, concerns, or even fears related to AI. To build acceptable futures of Smart Cities with AI-enabled functionalities, the Human-Centered AI (HCAI) approach offers a relevant framework for understanding citizen perceptions. However, only a few studies have focused on clarifying the citizen (...) perceptions of AI in the context of smart city research. To address this gap, we conducted a two-phased study. In the pre-study, we explored citizen perceptions and experiences of AI with a short survey (N = 91). Second, scenario-based interviews (N = 7) were utilized to gain in-depth insights of citizen perceptions of AI in the Smart City context. Five central themes were recognized: (1) I don’t like them monitoring me, (2) I want maximum gain for minimum effort, (3) I don’t want AI to mimic people, (4) I’ll avoid using AI if I consider the risk too high, and (5) I don’t need to be concerned about AI. These offer an idea of human-centered requirements worth considering while designing AI applications for future Smart Cities. (shrink)

From mid-March through May 2020, New York City was the world’s epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, and its hospitals faced an unparalleled surge of patients who were critically ill with the virus. In addition to putting an enormous strain on medical resources, the pandemic presented many ethical issues to emotionally and physically stressed clinicians and hospital administrators. Analyses of the challenges faced by the ethics consultation services of the two campuses of New York Presbyterian Hospital, and how they assisted (...) their clinician and administrative colleagues, is the subject of the following four articles. (shrink)