Estimating Individual Contributions to Complex DNA SNP Mixtures.,

High‐throughput sequencing (HTS) of large panels of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) provides an alternative or complimentary approach to short tandem repeats (STRs) panels for the analysis of complex DNA mixture forensic samples. For STRs, methods to estimate individual contribution concentrations compare capillary electrophoresis peak heights, peak areas, or HTS allele read counts within a mixture. This article introduces three approaches (mean, median, and slope methods) for estimating individual DNA contributions to forensic mixtures for HTS/massively parallel sequencing (MPS) SNP panels. For SNPs, the major:minor allele ratios or counts, unique to each contributor, were compared to estimate contributor proportion within the mixture using the mean, median, and slope intercept for these alleles. The estimates for these three methods were typically within 5% of planned experimental contributions for defined mixtures.     

Spotlight on research integrity: international insights on strengthening research culture in the forensic sciences and beyond

The Singapore Statement on Research Integrity, articulated during the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity in 2010, encompasses principles that apply to all research endeavours, including the various disciplines that comprise the field of forensic science Singapore Statement on Research Integrity (2010) (https://wcrif.org/guidance/singapore-statement). Cases of research misconduct and breaches of research integrity in any field undermine the trustworthiness of research and make it difficult if not impossible for others to rely upon and replicate research results. Moreover, problems in the research environment, whether in the academic, public, or private sector, can include bullying and harassment, discrimination, abuse of power and corruption, as well as competitive pressures related to employment and status.     

Kazin on Dreiser: What it Means to be a Literary Critic

Throughout his career as a literary critic, Alfred Kazin wrote often and with sympathy and insight about Theodore Dreiser, one of the most powerful, panoramic, and compassionate novelists in American literary history. Kazin was an intense reader and writer, committed in his books, essays, and reviews to connecting with and describing the personality of each author he examined. His interpretive work on Dreiser illuminates what it means to be a literary critic and teacher. When we read Kazin in the midst of twenty-first century theory, ideology, and professionalism, we realize all the more clearly the goal in his literary criticism that he aimed for, achieved, and represented—and that now is missing from literary education and experience.     

Performative Rhetorics in Invisibility: Phoebe Philo's Undone Authorship

ABSTRACT

This inquiry analyses the rhetoric of intentionally unfinished fashion contained in the collections from Céline as designed by Phoebe Philo and explicates the implications of this approach to fashion as a feminist text. Shoshana Felman’s seductive promise of speech, modified with insights from Paul de Man’s theory of autobiography as both giving face and defacement, is applied to Philo’s ‘new minimalism’ in order to highlight its appeal to modern female audiences. Using insights from the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, I examine ways in which wearers may seek to create a signature citationality via clothing that produces its own ‘unwriting’ therefore allowing the wearer to believe she inscribes her own iteration while maintaining control. Wearers are offered the chance to identify with a designer who is enlightened beyond fast and flashy fashion while hinting at the notion of the clothing having the substantialising effect that language has (instead of representational). Through this examination, clothing is shown to be a decision, and clothing is also shown to be a fiction. These decisions and fictions are open to failure; yet Felman offers that this failure acts as an opening remaining inadvertent or unacknowledged. Philo's designs invite an exploration of clothing as performative rhetoric.     

still,nothing: Mammy and black asexual possibility

Although many iterations of the mammy in the last two centuries have received analytical attention, the construction of this figure as asexual or undesiring and undesirable remains to be interrogated. This essay attends to this under-theorised dimension of her image. Resisting a reading of the mammy as fixed in silence, I assert that she might instead ‘say nothing’, and bring into focus a black asexual agency that I call a declarative silence. This strategy of ‘saying nothing’ is then explored in a reading of the withholdings of the character of Mama in Gayl Jones’s neo-slave narrative, Corregidora (1975).     

coloniality,political subjectivation and the gendered politics of protest in a ‘state of exception’

In this paper, I shall make the following propositions: in order to conceptually capture and represent the acts of political protest in a state of exception, we will need to reorient and supplement our representational apparatuses and also our theoretical frameworks for thinking about the gendered modes of protest under emergency laws and political abandonment. Through an analysis of the ‘naked protest’ of the Meira Peibis in Manipur, a ‘state of exception’ in democratic India, I shall argue that a series of supplementations to our current thinking on intersectionality, bare life and political subjectivation are required if we are to make sense of political acts of resistance, refusal and disavowal of the law of exception.