Promiscuous Relationship Research Articles

Galectokines: The Promiscuous Relationship between Galectins and Cytokines.

Galectins, a family of glycan-binding proteins, are well-known for their role in shaping the immune microenvironment. They can directly affect the activity and survival of different immune cell subtypes. Recent evidence suggests that galectins also indirectly affect the immune response by binding to members of another immunoregulatory protein family, i.e., cytokines. Such galectin-cytokine heterodimers, here referred to as galectokines, add a new layer of complexity to the regulation of immune homeostasis. Here, we summarize the current knowledge with regard to galectokine formation and function. We describe the known and potential mechanisms by which galectokines can help to shape the immune microenvironment. Finally, the outstanding questions and challenges for future research regarding the role of galectokines in immunomodulation are discussed.

The effect of borrower country financial system and corporate governance system types on the spread of syndicated loans

PurposeThis study aims to analyse the effect of borrower’s countries on syndicated loan spreads, featuring countries according to institutional factors, namely, financial systems and corporate governance systems.Design/methodology/approachThis study is an empirical investigation based on a unique sample of more than 85,000 syndicated loans from 122 countries. The paper uses standard and two-stage least squares regression analysis to test whether the types of financial and corporate governance systems affect loan spreads.FindingsThe paper finds that borrowers from countries with financial systems oriented towards the banking-based paradigm pay lower interest rate spreads than those from countries with financial systems oriented towards the market-based paradigm. In addition, there is evidence that borrowers from countries with more developed financial systems pay lower spreads. The results also show that borrowers from countries with an Anglo-Saxon governance system pay higher spreads than borrowers from countries with a Continental governance system.Research limitations/implicationsThis study does not consider potential promiscuous relationships that can arise at the ownership structure and governance level between banks and borrowers and may affect loan spreads.Practical implicationsThis study suggests that financial and corporate governance systems are essential factors in the financial intermediation process. Furthermore, the evidence indicates that corporates with higher potential agency costs and higher potential information asymmetry are requested to pay higher spreads. Therefore, the opportunities to such corporates invest optimally tend to be scarcer.Originality/valueThe paper highlights the impact of institutional factors on the cost of financing, characterising the countries according to the type of financial system and the type of corporate governance system. The study finds that borrowers from countries with bank-based financial systems pay lower interest rate spreads than those from countries with market-based financial systems. The paper also highlights how the level of financial development affects the cost of financing. The paper focusses on non-financial firms, unlike financial firms, which have been the focus of several empirical studies on topics relating to the cost of funding and corporate governance.

Sexual abuse leading to secondary syphilis in an intellectually disabled person: a case report

<p class="abstract">Syphilis is a sexual transmitted infection (STI) caused by a spirochete, <em>Treponema pallidum</em>. Condylomata lata is a characteristic lesion seen in secondary syphilis. Here we reported a case of 24 year old unmarried male with intellectual disability who presented with condyloma lata over the scrotum, prepuce and perianal region and with moth eaten alopecia over scalp since 1 month. Here the patients mother revealed he had promiscuous relationship with multiple friends, which is a sexual abuse since the patient is intellectually disabled. Clinically diagnosed as secondary syphilis. Venereal disease research laboratory (VDRL) test titre was reactive at 1:32 and <em>Treponema pallidum </em>hemagglutination test (TPHA) was positive. Biopsy was also done, which confirmed diagnosis. Single dose of injection benzathine penicillin G, 2.4 million units was administered intramuscularly. Patient did not develop a Jarisch-herxheimer reaction. On follow up his lesions healed and VDRL titres also came down and non-reactive at 3 months. Here in this case sexual abuse lead to secondary syphilis since patient was intellectually disabled so he couldn’t address his complaints clearly. Hence counselling was done to the patient and family members by dermatologist and psychiatrist.</p><p class="abstract"> </p>

The Edge of Democracy

Reviewed by: The Edge of Democracy (Democracia em Vertigem) by Petra Costa Sofia Paiva de Araujo (bio) The Edge of Democracy (Democracia em Vertigem). Petra Costa, 2019. Netflix. 123 mins. Petra Costa’s documentary The Edge of Democracy presents the 2016 impeachment of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff as a continuation of the old politics that led to the civil-military coup of 1964. It interprets the impeachment as a result of the institutional amnesia that followed the democratic transition initiated in 1979. The lack of punishment of crimes committed by the dictatorship is directly related to the deeply ingrained promiscuous relationship between the nation’s political and economic elites. Costa links the nonpunishment of the human rights abuses of the dictatorial period to the rise of the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. The documentary also relates the latter to the growing influence of evangelical fundamentalists and armed militant groups in Brazilian politics. Nevertheless, the uniqueness of the documentary lies in Costa’s approach to address such sensitive and complex issues. Using the formula of a documentary essay, Costa intentionally blurs the line between memoir and journalism, inserting herself in the narrative. The Edge of Democracy is personal, original, and passionate. Costa brings a sui generis perspective to the table by taking advantage of the complex ambiguities of her family’s background, which she ingeniously inter-weaves with major events of Brazilian history in a heartfelt first-person voice-over. On one hand, her maternal family is a token for the privileged economic elites who supported the 1964 coup and have since then shaped politics by funding politicians who enact their agenda and safeguard their interests. On the other hand, her parents’ political activism during the dictatorship led to their arrest and years of living in hiding, making them a token for the idealistic youth who put themselves at risk by fighting against an authoritarian and violent regime. Furthermore, Costa adds another layer of reflection by making an analogy between the development of Brazilian politics in the post—dictatorship era and her own process of growing political awareness: the director and Brazilian democracy are roughly the same age and have developed and matured together. Costa grew up believing Brazilian democracy was a right earned through the political activism of her parents’ generation. As she grew older and more critical, the director realized this right could not be taken for granted, as Brazil’s young democracy is fragile and vulnerable to power games. [End Page 187] The originality of the documentary results from a thorough interpretation of Brazilian politics crafted from a careful collage of more than 6,000 hours of footage. While some of the scenes use mainstream media news, most of the film shows footage collected by the director and her team, who made great use of the privileged social background and connections of Costa and her family. They walked the hallways of the House of Representatives, the Congress, and the president’s official residence; they interviewed politicians from both sides of the spectrum and closely followed Dilma Rousseff and her predecessor, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, before, during, and after the impeachment. As a result, The Edge of Democracy is a firsthand account of someone who actively witnessed “behind the scenes” negotiations in Brasília and passionately examined the origins of the country’s political crisis by quilting together the pieces of evidence she had gathered. However, Costa’s closeness to the leaders of the Workers’ Party led to criticism from both the Left and the Right, and the documentary received mixed reviews in Brazil. On one hand, people leaning Right on the political spectrum perceived The Edge of Democracy as biased—especially Bolsonaro’s supporters, who saw it as straightforward propaganda. On the other hand, members of the far Left used Costa’s family’s connections with the infamous construction company Andrade-Gutierrez to discredit the value of her argument—despite the fact that Costa is aware of her privileges and openly critical of the company’s involvement in politics and corruption scandals. Domestically, the documentary’s positive reviews came mainly from Workers’ Party militants and people in the center-Left and liberal Left. They praised Costa...

Lobbying and policy conflict: explaining interest groups’ promiscuous relationships to political parties

Do interest groups prefer to interact with party political supporters or opponents, and why do they do so? Recent research has provided different explanations and mixed findings for this question, highlighting the role of institutional contexts and differences between interests. Here, we focus on the effects of issue-level factors instead. We hypothesize that higher levels of conflict lead interest groups to lobby both supporters and opponents. Our argument emphasizes that the reason to do so lies in interest groups’ desire to gain or maintain prominence within a policy subsystem, rather than in persuasion attempts. Analyzing quantitative and qualitative data on the lobbying targets for 80 Dutch interest groups on more than 300 issues, we find support for our theoretical claims. When the level of conflict is high, prominence often trumps persuasion. These findings suggest that interest groups, by contacting many different parties, can contribute to policy making in positive ways.

Quest to Freedom: Reclaiming Individuality through Sado-Masochism in Faggots by Larry Kramer

Individuality is the quality or character of a particular person that distinguishes them from others of the same kind. In other words, it is the mark which separates its existence from the rest of the group. According to Fromm, the process of individuality begins at infancy level when the child is separated from the mother. This then takes an emotional toll on the child as he suffers from loneliness and anxiety which stem from the prior separation. The child will henceforth acquire his individuality through the process of socialization which requires constant interaction with people in his life. For this paper, we have selected a novel, Faggots, authored by Larry Kramer, to be the main text for our research. This article argues that the characters in the text are conflicted with feelings of anxiety and loneliness as they embark on respective quest to eradicate the feeling of loneliness by looking for a potential life partner. However, these characters go through a series of promiscuous relationships by living an active sexual lifestyle on the ground that they are in search of the “right” one. Therefore, this paper will look into the sadistic and masochistic (sometimes both; otherwise known as sadomasochistic) tendency practiced by the characters in the novel in their quest to reclaim their lost individuality. This research draws in the concept of freedom, sadism, and masochism as proposed by Erich Fromm to further consolidate the findings.

Images and Voices from Beyond the National: How the ‘Trans’ Affected Spanishness in the Cinema of J.A. Bardem

Juan Antonio Bardem (1922-2002) is a key cineaste if one wants to understand the evolution of Spanish cinema and its place in the history of European and World cinemas today. Since the 1950s, Bardem contested official nationalist cinema with often hermetic and symbolic narratives that spoke about Francoism’s cultural backwardness, its rigid religious and moral values, and its strict repression against those who lost the Civil War. With major critical and commercial successes as Muerte de un ciclista/Death of a cyclist (1955), Calle Mayor/Main Street (1956), Bardem achieved world recognition as an auteur, and started a career characterised by a clear fetish, hybridised transnational aestheticism. His cinema’s promiscuous relationship with Italian Neorealim and the conventions of the Hollywood genre film would eventually favour a hybrid cinema, which influenced the representation and the expression of identity within the national environment of Francoism. Due in part to the implications of European co-productions and in part to Bardem’s prolific use of intertextuality and obsessive focus on the “other cinemas” as an aesthetic and cultural starting point that both suited his political vision of nationhood and his vision of cinema as an industry, the national character or Spanishness of his films was gradually compromised. Using Mark Betz research on European co-productions during the 1950s and 1960s, this article also explores how the use of foreign actors and intra-national dubbing bespoke a political and aesthetic detachment, and how commercial and marketing strategies might have ended up suffocating identity and political detachment. I argue that while the Francoist’s enforced policy of dubbing foreign films into neutral Castilian Spanish helped nationalise foreign cinema and avoid international cultural and political intoxications, the use of foreign actors to represent Spanish roles in the films of Bardem contributed to a cancellation of the nationalistic purposes of such policies. Bardem’s cinema, although maintaining a detached position vis-a-vis Francoist official national narratives and aesthetics, was able to communicate Spanishness from the perspective of dissidence as long as his films were read as art cinema that contested other national cinema. On the other hand, the increasing tendency of co-productions with the purpose of counteracting or levelling up with the hegemony of Hollywood in Europe proved that the imbricate hybridised internalisation not only cancelled national discourses but also the identity of films, and as a consequence, of the director.

A Design Laboratory Above the Clouds: Black & White and Color Stories of Portugal's Airline (1945–1979)

Take-Off Design has always been present in airlines as a way of giving them personality and transforming them. However, scientific studies on the relationship between aviation and design and its different elements—criticism, historiography, and culture—have been scarce around the world, and non-existent in Portugal.1 The study we have carried out allowed us to clarify the nature of the relationship between the profile of a company that represented the country (and helped to spread an image of modernity) and the different areas of design. The pronounced ideological conditioning, which is present visually in design projects produced for Transportes Aereos Portugueses (TAP), from the first years of its existence, emerged as the result of its status as flag carrier. The logos, the crew’s uniforms, the different types of communication media, and the planes’ interior design created a country that only existed “in the air.” In the real country, obliged to remain underdeveloped, poor, and rural, the “one way” ideology did not create job opportunities for designers outside the confines of what the regime understood to be official taste and expression—that is, following the historicist and grandiloquent Portuguese way.2 The political closure of the 1950s—a time which, metaphorically speaking, we paint in black & white—made way for a slow and progressive opening. The transition to the next decade saw the image shown in color, foreshadowing the “Marcelist Spring”3 in 1968 and the “Carnation Revolution” in 1974,4 which brought freedom to the country. In 1976, TAP kept the floral theme, with an image campaign called Spring Service. The close links between the rhetoric of the regime for external use and the TAP corporate image make for an unrivalled case study in the historiography of design in Portugal. 1 See Alexander von Vegesack and Jochen Eisenbrand, Airworld: Design and Architecture for Air Travel, 2 ed. ((Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 2006), 6. 2 This is a reference to Jose-Augusto Franca’s strategy to characterize some of the key figures in modern Portuguese art, whose work, to some extent, establishes a dialogue with tradition or modernity. See Almada, o portugues sem mestre [Almada, the Masterless Portuguese Man] (Lisbon: Estudios Cor, 1974); We can also see a seminal study on the promiscuous relationship between art and the political regime by Jose-Augusto Franca, A Arte em Portugal no seculo XX [Art in Portugal in the 20th Century] (Lisbon: Bertrand,1974). 3 On September 27,1968, Marcelo Caetano (1906–1980) was appointed by the President of the Republic to replace Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970). Recognizing the complex political and military situation in Portugal and the Overseas Provinces, Caetano attempted to reform and “open up” the regime. The period between September 27,1968 and January 21, 1971 raised hopes of a political renewal and was named the “Marcelist Spring.” 4 The carnation has become a symbol of the military coup on April 25, 1974, which ousted the Estado Novo. The name emerged because of a florist in Lisbon, who shared her joy at the end of the regime by giving her flowers to those around her, and to the soldiers, who placed them in the barrels of their rifles.

More than cool: Promiscuous relationships of menthol and other sensory compounds

Several temperature-activated transient receptor potential (thermoTRP) ion channels are the molecular receptors of natural compounds that evoke thermal and pain sensations. Menthol, popularly known for its cooling effect, activates TRPM8—a cold-activated thermoTRP ion channel. However, human physiological studies demonstrate a paradoxical role of menthol in modulation of warm sensation, and here, we show that menthol also activates heat-activated TRPV3. We further show that menthol inhibits TRPA1, potentially explaining the use of menthol as an analgesic. Similar to menthol, both camphor and cinnamaldehyde (initially reported to be specific activators of TRPV3 and TRPA1, respectively) also modulate other thermoTRPs. Therefore, we find that many “sensory compounds” presumed to be specific have a promiscuous relationship with thermoTRPs.

Sulfatases and sulfatase modifying factors: an exclusive and promiscuous relationship

Sulfatases catalyze the hydrolysis of sulfate ester bonds from a wide variety of substrates. Several human inherited diseases are caused by the deficiency of individual sulfatases, while in patients with multiple sulfatase deficiency mutations in the Sulfatase Modifying Factor 1 (SUMF1) gene cause a defect in the post-translational modification of a cysteine residue into C(alpha)-formylglycine (FGly) at the active site of all sulfatases. This unique modification mechanism, which is required for catalytic activity, has been highly conserved during evolution. Here, we used a genomic approach to investigate the relationship between sulfatases and their modifying factors in humans and several model systems. First, we determined the complete catalog of human sulfatases, which comprises 17 members (versus 14 in rodents) including four novel ones (ARSH, ARSI, ARSJ and ARSK). Secondly, we showed that the active site, which is the target of the post-translational modification, is the most evolutionarily constrained region of sulfatases and shows intraspecies sequence convergence. Exhaustive sequence analyses of available proteomes indicate that sulfatases are the only likely targets of their modifying factors. Thirdly, we showed that sulfatases and ectonucleotide pyrophosphatases share significant homology at their active sites, suggesting a common evolutionary origin as well as similar catalytic mechanisms. Most importantly, gene association studies performed on prokaryotes suggested the presence of at least two additional mechanisms of cysteine-to-FGly conversion, which do not require SUMF1. These results may have important implications in the study of diseases caused by sulfatase deficiencies and in the development of therapeutic strategies.

Indian Software-Trading Through Telecommunications

India's software exports rose 51% in the year to March 1994 to CHF 430 million as the Industry maintained the fast pace of growth of recent years. Increasingly Indian software companies carry out their work in India communicating with their clients and delivering their work over data communication lines. To do this successfully requires the development of deep long term rather than promiscuous relationships with their customers . Their costs are about 70% to 90% less than their Western competitors and their quality appears comparable or better.