“What the Hell Just Happened?”: a Phenomenological Case Study of Teaching in the Covid Era

This is a phenomenological case study of teachers at an independent high school in New England during the COVID era. It includes analysis of their recollections of their experiences during the emergency remote shutdown in 2020, and also of their experiences during the 2020-2021 school year, in which they worked under a difficult and complicated hybrid model. It examines their experiences adapting to the pandemic and their perspectives on how it has changed them and their teaching practices. Through interviews with teachers and analysis of documents, this study uncovers positive and negative effects of the school’s organizational responses to pandemic guidelines. The differential experiences of faculty members caused fractures in the school’s sense of community that teachers were hopeful would heal in the post-pandemic era. This study also includes the impact on the administrator who led the school (and conducted the study). The study reveals the importance of communication between administrators and teachers. It also has important implications for research methods for scholarly practitioners

Cultural Convergences

As far back as I can remember my family has had two primary outlets in regards to entertainment; going to museum exhibitions and attending or watching football games. My parents have been members of the High Museum in Atlanta for years while simultaneously having season tickets to Georgia Tech football. My current series of paintings, drawings, prints and videos examine the cultural significance of sports in American society; specifically American football. As a big guy who was raised in the south, it is often assumed that I played football at some point in my life. Admittedly, I feed this stereotype with my interest in the sport, but the reality is I did not play the sport. I have always been interested in both the arts and sports and find that blending these two interests\u27 results in compelling art works. My research focuses on deeper investigation of American football; informed by both a deep investment in the culture of football in the south as well as the practice of art making. My work generates a dialogue between American football and the aesthetic properties of high art. I locate parallels and contradictions in both of these worlds--in doing this I pin two seemingly disparate worlds together to generate both a visual and psychological tension

Phenothiazines and their Evolving Roles in Clinical Practice: A Narrative Review.

Phenothiazines, a diverse class of drugs, can be used to treat multiple mental health and physical conditions. Phenothiazines have been used for decades to treat mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, mania in bipolar disorder, and psychosis. Additionally, these drugs offer relief for physical illnesses, including migraines, hiccups, nausea, and vomiting in both adults and children. Further research is needed to prove the efficacy of phenothiazines in treating physical symptoms. Phenothiazines are dopaminergic antagonists that inhibit D2 receptors with varying potency. High potency phenothiazines such as perphenazine are used to treat various psychiatric conditions such as the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, the symptoms of psychosis, and mania that can occur with bipolar disorder. Low/mid potency phenothiazines such as chlorpromazine antipsychotic drugs that have been used to treat schizophrenia and schizophrenia-like disorders since the 1950s and are utilized in numerous disease states. The present investigation aims to elucidate the effects of phenothiazines in clinical practice

Successful Transfection of the pC9T Plasmid into Tetrahymena Thermophila Using Liposomes

Tetrahymena thermophila have been used as a model system for decades, due in part to the fact that they are inexpensive and easy to grow. Cells can easily be grown in large quantities if protein or nucleic acid extraction is necessary. However, transfection of Tetrahymena thermophila with plasmids has traditionally been accomplished either by using electroporation or a gene gun, neither of which is particularly inexpensive or efficient. We sought to transfect Tetrahymena with the pCas9T plasmid using commercially available liposomes in order to present a simpler alternative to the classical transfection methods. Both DNA electrophoresis and RNA sequencing indicates that our plasmid is entering the cell

The Antimitotic Srug BAY-293 Reduces Acetylation at H3K27 and Decreases Diversity of Genes Expressed while Reducing Expression of rRNA and Ribosomal Proteins in Tetrahymena Thermophila

The methylation and acetylation of histone tails is a critical part of gene regulation which has implications for homeostasis and disease. In cancers such as diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) where many patients are heterozygous for a mutation on histone H3 that replaces lysine with methionine, cells show a higher amount of acetylation and less trimethylation at this position. Tetrahymena thermophila are free-living, eukaryotic ciliates that are often used for epigenetic studies due to their rapid rate of cell division and the ease with which they may be cultured. We have previously shown that BAY-293, an inhibitor of the Ras-GEF Sos, significantly impacts mitotic rate in Tetrahymena thermophila. Since lysine 27 of histone H3 is apparently a critical residue impacting growth regulation, we asked the following questions: 1. Would treatment with BAY-293 impact H3K27ac in Tetrahymena thermophila as measured by immunofluorescence? 2. Would BAY-293 affect gene expression in this organism as measured by total RNA sequencing? Our results indicate that 90-minute exposure to BAY-293 significantly reduces acetylation at H3K27. Acetylation returns to normal once the drug has been washed out for 90 minutes. 90-minute exposure to BAY-293 also reduces a number of cellular RNA populations, including mRNA and rRNA

Type 2 innate lymphoid cells treat and prevent acute gastrointestinal graft-versus-host disease

Acute graft-versus-host disease (aGVHD) is the most common complication for patients undergoing allogeneic stem cell transplantation. Despite extremely aggressive therapy targeting donor T cells, patients with grade III or greater aGVHD of the lower GI tract, who do not respond to therapy with corticosteroids, have a dismal prognosis. Thus, efforts to improve understanding of the function of local immune and non-immune cells in regulating the inflammatory process in the GI tract during aGVHD are needed. Here, we demonstrate, using murine models of allogeneic BMT, that type 2 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2s) in the lower GI tract are sensitive to conditioning therapy and show very limited ability to repopulate from donor bone marrow. Infusion of donor ILC2s was effective in reducing the lethality of aGVHD and in treating lower GI tract disease. ILC2 infusion was associated with reduced donor proinflammatory Th1 and Th17 cells, accumulation of donor myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) mediated by ILC2 production of IL-13, improved GI tract barrier function, and a preserved graft-versus-leukemia (GVL) response. Collectively, these findings suggest that infusion of donor ILC2s to restore gastrointestinal tract homeostasis may improve treatment of severe lower GI tract aGVHD

Parents’ Disclosure of Their HIV Infection to Their Children in the Context of the Family

We interviewed 33 HIV-infected parents from the HIV Cost and Services Utilization Study (HCSUS), 27 of their minor children, 19 adult children, and 15 caregivers about the process of children learning that their parents were HIV positive. We summarize the retrospective descriptions of parents’ disclosure of their HIV status to their children, from the perspective of multiple family members. We analyzed transcripts of these interviews with systematic qualitative methods. Both parents and children reported unplanned disclosure experiences with positive and negative outcomes. Parents sometimes reported that disclosure was not as negative as they feared. However, within-household analysis showed disagreement between parents and children from the same household regarding disclosure outcomes. These findings suggest that disclosure should be addressed within a family context to facilitate communication and children’s coping. Parents should consider negative and positive outcomes, unplanned disclosure and children’s capacity to adapt after disclosure when deciding whether to disclose

Control region mutations and the 'common deletion' are frequent in the mitochondrial DNA of patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma

BACKGROUND: North central China has some of the highest rates of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma in the world with cumulative mortality surpassing 20%. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) accumulates more mutations than nuclear DNA and because of its high abundance has been proposed as a early detection device for subjects with cancer at various sites. We wished to examine the prevalence of mtDNA mutation and polymorphism in subjects from this high risk area of China. METHODS: We used DNA samples isolated from tumors, adjacent normal esophageal tissue, and blood from 21 esophageal squamous cell carcinoma cases and DNA isolated from blood from 23 healthy persons. We completely sequenced the control region (D-Loop) from each of these samples and used a PCR assay to assess the presence of the 4977 bp common deletion. RESULTS: Direct DNA sequencing revealed that 7/21 (33%, 95% CI = 17–55%) tumor samples had mutations in the control region, with clustering evident in the hyper-variable segment 1 (HSV1) and the homopolymeric stretch surrounding position 309. The number of mutations per subject ranged from 1 to 16 and there were a number of instances of heteroplasmy. We detected the 4977 bp 'common deletion' in 92% of the tumor and adjacent normal esophageal tissue samples examined, whereas no evidence of the common deletion was found in corresponding peripheral blood samples. CONCLUSIONS: Control region mutations were insufficiently common to warrant attempts to develop mtDNA mutation screening as a clinical test for ESCC. The common deletion was highly prevalent in the esophageal tissue of cancer cases but absent from peripheral blood. The potential utility of the common deletion in an early detection system will be pursued in further studies

Sepharadim/conversos and premodern Global Hispanism

Sepharadim participated in the Hispanic vernacular culture of the Iberian Peninsula. Even in the time of al-Andalus many spoke Hispano-Romance, and even their Hebrew literature belies a deep familiarity with and love of their native Hispano-Romance languages. However, since the early sixteenth century the vast majority of Sepharadim have never lived in the Hispanic world. Sepharadim lived not in Spanish colonies defined by Spanish conquest, but in a network of Mediterranean Jewish communities defined by diasporic values and institutions. By contrast, the conversos, those Sepharadim who converted to Catholicism, whether in Spain or later in Portugal, Italy, or the New World, lived mostly in Spanish Imperial lands, were officially Catholic, and spoke normative Castilian. Their connections, both real and imagined, with Sephardic cultural practice put them at risk of social marginalization, incarceration, even death. Some were devout Catholics whose heritage and family history doomed them to these outcomes. Not surprisingly, many Spanish and Portugese conversos sought refuge in lands outside of Spanish control where they might live openly as Jews. This exodus (1600s) from the lands formerly known as Sefarad led to a parallel Sephardic community of what conversos who re-embraced Judaism in Amsterdam and Italy by a generation of conversos trained in Spanish universities. The Sephardic/Converso cultural complex exceeds the boundaries of Spanish imperial geography, confuses Spanish, Portuguese, Catholic, and Jewish subjectivities, and defies traditional categories practiced in Hispanic studies, and are a unique example of the Global Hispanophone