River Spen

The River Spen, known colloquially as Spen Beck, is a river in the county of West Yorkshire, England and is a tributary of the River Calder. It rises north of Cleckheaton, runs through Liversedge and flows into the River Calder, West Yorkshire south of Dewsbury at Ravensthorpe. The average rainfall for the river valley is between 600-1000mm per annum. Combined with the steep narrow river channel, this makes the Spen susceptible to regular flooding.

Course

The river becomes the Spen at the confluence of Hunsworth Beck and Nann Hall Beck in Cleckheaton. It flows south past local Industrial premises parallel to a dismantled railway line before turning south east on the outskirts of Liversedge. It continues flowing in this direction through the heart of the Industrial centre of the town before returning southwards along the edge of Heckmondwike. On the outskirts of the village of Ravensthorpe it turns south east again before joining the River Calder.

Natural History

The river is mainly an urban waterway and has suffered from sewage effluent and industrial waste, though levels of pollutants and mine water discharges have decreased since 1999. Heavy rain can cause pollutant levels to rise and the river suffers from tipping and urban litter.

SPEN

Msx2-interacting protein is a protein that in humans is encoded by the SPEN gene.

This gene encodes a hormone inducible transcriptional repressor. Repression of transcription by this gene product can occur through interactions with other repressors, by the recruitment of proteins involved in histone deacetylation, or through sequestration of transcriptional activators. The product of this gene contains a carboxy-terminal domain that permits binding to other corepressor proteins. This domain also permits interaction with members of the NuRD complex, a nucleosome remodeling protein complex that contains deacetylase activity. In addition, this repressor contains several RNA recognition motifs that confer binding to a steroid receptor RNA coactivator; this binding can modulate the activity of both liganded and nonliganded steroid receptors.

Interactions

SPEN has been shown to interact with HDAC1,SRA1 and Nuclear receptor co-repressor 2.

References

Further reading

Ispendje

İspençe was a tax in the Ottoman Empire.

İspençe was a land-tax on non-Muslims in parts of the Ottoman Empire; its counterpart, for Muslim taxpayers, was the resm-i çift - which was set at slightly lower rate. The treasury was well aware of the difference in tax takes, and the incentive to convert; the legal reforms of Bayezid II halved some criminal penalties on nonmuslim taxpayers "so that the taxpayers shall not vanish"; this rule was reconfimed, a century later, in 1587. In other cases, local taxes were imposed on nonmuslims specifically to encourage conversion.

İspençe had existed in the Balkans before the Ottoman conquest; the Ottoman Empire typically adapted local taxes and institutions in each conquered area, leading to a patchwork of different taxes and rates. The concept of İspençe, theoretically a payment in lieu of corvee labour, was derived from the Byzantine "zeugaratikion", a land tax based on the zeugarion - the area of farmland which could be ploughed by a pair of oxen. The zeugarion itself was taken up as the Ottoman "çift", a word meaning "pair".