Degree Of Breadth Research Articles

Regional Development Corporations: Foreign Experience and Russian Practice

The article is focused on the chronology and classification of territorial development agencies (corporations) as an instrument of state regional policy. The paper shows the threat of transformation of the potentially constructive role of corporations into a negative plane. The example of Poland illustrates the EUʼs intervention in the countryʼs internal affairs through regional development corporations as contact points. In Kazakhstan, the first wave of social and entrepreneurial corporations, which were created in 2006–2007 on an extraterritorial basis, caused an internal conflict between the elites, which led to the reformatting of this institution and its subordination to the existing system of regional management (“one district – one region”). The pluralism of approaches to the formation of a network of regional development corporations (“bottom-up” – “top-down”, monoterritoriality – extraterritoriality, etc.) provides opportunities for managerial experimentation, the results of which in the territory of the Russian Federation were expressed in the mass of economic and managerial structures at the federal and regional levels. At the same time, the macroeconomic success of their joint activities remains unclear. For the Russian Federation, the model of consolidation and development of the internal economic space on the basis of corporations of macroregions representing a set of neighboring subjects of the Russian Federation and historically having economic ties of varying degrees of breadth and strength seems appropriate. The model under consideration is based on a new institution of state ownership (macroregion ownership), which allows solving the problems of economic integration of territories by building extraterritorial production and economic complexes.

Peace to those of Faith: Political Affiliation and Belonging in Classical Islamic Thought

This chapter examines some of the central concepts of human community and belonging and their implications in a number of classical legal and exegetical works. This is done by highlighting early and classical Islamic concepts that occupied a place comparable to ideas of nation and citizenship, understood as a specific form of political status and identity, or the “need to belong to a community,” (as described in Heater 1990, 182), with an emphasis on the disciplines of Quranic exegesis and substantive law. I argue that, in several noteworthy texts in both of these scholarly domains, classical Muslim intellectuals continued to think of concepts pertaining to human association through the lens of tribe-like formations. For classical scholars, humans belonged to circles of kinship of various degrees of breadth and quality. As with tribal affiliation, the methods and boundaries of belonging were fluid and multi-layered. Affiliation did not occur in a strict institutional way, nor were there universal notions of identification in the writings of such scholars. Rather than an abstract nation, institutionalized within a political entity that individuals could join under certain conditions, acquiring a certain set of rights (as theorized, for example, in Heater 1990, 1-15), classical Muslim scholarship adopted a more pragmatic approach based on actual kinship and centered on the extent to which a person could be trusted as a peaceful or potentially harmful participant in a community.

A Novel Rabbit Monoclonal Antibody Platform To Dissect the Diverse Repertoire of Antibody Epitopes for HIV-1 Env Immunogen Design

The majority of available monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) in the current HIV vaccine field are generated from HIV-1-infected people. In contrast, preclinical immunogenicity studies have mainly focused on polyclonal antibody responses in experimental animals. Although rabbits have been widely used for antibody studies, there has been no report of using rabbit MAbs to dissect the specificity of antibody responses for AIDS vaccine development. Here we report on the production of a panel of 12 MAbs from a New Zealand White (NZW) rabbit that was immunized with an HIV-1 JR-FL gp120 DNA prime and protein boost vaccination regimen. These rabbit MAbs recognized a diverse repertoire of envelope (Env) epitopes ranging from the highly immunogenic V3 region to several previously underappreciated epitopes in the C1, C4, and C5 regions. Nine MAbs showed cross-reactivity to gp120s of clades other than clade B. Increased somatic mutation and extended CDR3 were observed with Ig genes of several molecularly cloned rabbit MAbs. Phylogenic tree analysis showed that the heavy chains of MAbs recognizing the same region on gp120 tend to segregate into an independent subtree. At least three rabbit MAbs showed neutralizing activities with various degrees of breadth and potency. The establishment of this rabbit MAb platform will significantly enhance our ability to test optimal designs of Env immunogens to gain a better understanding of the structural specificity and evolution process of Env-specific antibody responses elicited by candidate AIDS vaccines.

GPI-anchored single chain Fv--an effective way to capture transiently-exposed neutralization epitopes on HIV-1 envelope spike.

BackgroundIdentification of broad neutralization epitopes in HIV-1 envelope spikes is paramount for HIV-1 vaccine development. A few broad neutralization epitopes identified so far are present on the surface of native HIV-1 envelope spikes whose recognition by antibodies does not depend on conformational changes of the envelope spikes. However, HIV-1 envelope spikes also contain transiently-exposed neutralization epitopes, which are more difficult to identify.ResultsIn this study, we constructed single chain Fvs (scFvs) derived from seven human monoclonal antibodies and genetically linked them with or without a glycosyl-phosphatidylinositol (GPI) attachment signal. We show that with a GPI attachment signal the scFvs are targeted to lipid rafts of plasma membranes. In addition, we demonstrate that four of the GPI-anchored scFvs, but not their secreted counterparts, neutralize HIV-1 with various degrees of breadth and potency. Among them, GPI-anchored scFv (X5) exhibits extremely potent and broad neutralization activity against multiple clades of HIV-1 strains tested. Moreover, we show that GPI-anchored scFv (4E10) also exhibited more potent neutralization activity than its secretory counterpart. Finally, we demonstrate that expression of GPI-anchored scFv (X5) in the lipid raft of plasma membrane of human CD4+ T cells confers long-term resistance to HIV-1 infection, HIV-1 envelope-mediated cell-cell fusion, and the infection of HIV-1 captured and transferred by human DCs.ConclusionsThus GPI-anchored scFv could be used as a general and effective way to identify antibodies that react with transiently-exposed neutralization epitopes in envelope proteins of HIV-1 and other enveloped viruses. The GPI-anchored scFv (X5), because of its breadth and potency, should have a great potential to be developed into anti-viral agent for HIV-1 prevention and therapy.

EMAIL LISTS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN OPEN AND MULTIFACETED IDENTITY

Known for its internal plurality, the ‘movement for alternative globalization’ regularly comes together in events such as the European Social Forum (ESF), which are integral to the process of networking and cross-fertilization among its diverse participants. Yet apart from physical meetings, ‘alter-globalization’ activists also meet in a variety of online spaces. This article investigates the role of such spaces in the communicative process of collective identity construction by examining three email lists devoted to the organizing of the London 2004 ESF – a European list, a national and a national-factional. Considering collective identity formation as a communicative process, the article has focused on the design of the selected lists and the social context or ‘we’ that each one helped constitute. It also explored the communicative affordances of the lists for the process of collective identity formation by looking at bonding, trust-building and interactivity. The results show that depending on their purpose, accessibility and geographical scale, the email lists served as distinct but overlapping loci of collective identity. These settings displayed varying degrees of breadth and heterogeneity in terms of their themes and focus, their types of author, as well as the language in which messages were written. They also exhibited different degrees of interactivity with the factional list helping the formation of a cohesive collective identity for its members, while the European one allowed the emergence of a much looser, open and fragmented sense of the collective.

Editorial

Editorial

Fuzzy concepts in a fuzzy hierarchy: varieties of anger.

This article argues that the concept of anger is not well characterized from the classical perspective. Instead, its membership is graded, its borders are fuzzy, and its subcategories fail to form a true class-inclusion hierarchy. Ss rated potential anger subcategories (fury, jealousy, annoyance, etc.) and remembered instances of their own anger as varying in degree of membership in anger. Degree of membership (prototypicality) predicted each subcategory's availability from memory given the category name, reaction time to verify its status as a subcategory, and its substitutability within naturally generated sentences about anger. Two predictions of a true class-inclusion hierarchy failed: that Ss would agree in adjudicating the membership of potential subcategories of anger and that all instances of a subcategory of anger would also be instances of anger. As an alternative to the classical view, emotion concepts are hypothesized to vary in their degree of breadth and overlap and to be mentally represented as scripts that allow different instantiations in different contexts.

Prospective Elementary School Teachers’ Understanding of Arithmetical Concepts

TEACHERS' understanding of basic arithmet ical concepts has been studied by Fulkerson (4), Glennon (5), Habel (6), Orleans (7), and Stip anowich (9). Considerable evidence is available to show that elementary school teachers do not understand many of the basic arithmetical con cepts they are expected to teach in the elementary school. Clark (1) points out in his recent writings that only teachers who understand arithmetical concepts and generalizations can do an effective job helping and judging the child's potential suc cess in making a given generalization. Teachers with a sound mathematical background can judge the degree of breadth and symbolism which I should characterize his generalization. While these studies point out the inadequacy of teacher preparation for many aspects of arithmetic, they do not show remedial and in-service techniques which are effective in helping teachers overcome these deficiencies. This study deals with an attempt to measure prospective elementary school teachers' understanding of arithmetical concepts before and after completing an upper division methods course in the teaching of arithmetic.