Alex La Guma: the literary and political functions of marginality in the colonial situation

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 5

Command and Control System Software Development

With the first launch of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Space Launch System heavy-lift expendable launch vehicle and Lockheed Martin's Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle scheduled for the year 2020, there exists a need to complete development of a new command and control system that will provide systems monitoring and launch control for NASA's Exploration Missions. One remaining task necessary for completion of this command and control system is to create and maintain comprehensive unit tests of the control system software packages. These tests should verify that the implementation of all required and desired functionality works as intended. This testing infrastructure is mostly in place, but the control system's open source automation server still reports software "bugs" (possible flaws or failures which may lead to unintended behavior) and intermittently failing unit tests. Since code correctness is of critical importance for human rated software systems, I was assigned to diagnose the root cause of failing unit tests, eliminate non-determinism in these tests, and fix bugs as reported by the automation server

Electronic health records to facilitate clinical research

Electronic health records (EHRs) provide opportunities to enhance patient care, embed performance measures in clinical practice, and facilitate clinical research. Concerns have been raised about the increasing recruitment challenges in trials, burdensome and obtrusive data collection, and uncertain generalizability of the results. Leveraging electronic health records to counterbalance these trends is an area of intense interest. The initial applications of electronic health records, as the primary data source is envisioned for observational studies, embedded pragmatic or post-marketing registry-based randomized studies, or comparative effectiveness studies. Advancing this approach to randomized clinical trials, electronic health records may potentially be used to assess study feasibility, to facilitate patient recruitment, and streamline data collection at baseline and follow-up. Ensuring data security and privacy, overcoming the challenges associated with linking diverse systems and maintaining infrastructure for repeat use of high quality data, are some of the challenges associated with using electronic health records in clinical research. Collaboration between academia, industry, regulatory bodies, policy makers, patients, and electronic health record vendors is critical for the greater use of electronic health records in clinical research. This manuscript identifies the key steps required to advance the role of electronic health records in cardiovascular clinical research

The characterization of the flavin-containing monooxygenase gene family of man

Flavin-containing monooxygenases (FMO) are a family of enzymes that metabolise a variety of foreign compounds such as pesticides, pharmaceuticals and toxicants. They are found in most tissues of all mammals. Five FMO isoforms (FMO1, 2, 3, 4 and 5) have been identified. Analysis of human genomic DNA by Southern blot hybridization with cDNAs encoding the different FMO isoforms gave simple patterns of hybridization suggesting that a single gene encodes each protein. Northern blot hybridization analyses and RNase protection assays showed that each FMO has a distinct tissue specific pattern of expression. This pattern differs between man and other species. The skin is a major portal of entry for a variety of chemicals and environmental pollutants. FMOs 1, 3 and 5 were found to be the major forms present in human skin. In situ hybridization demonstrated that FMOs 1, 3, 4 and 5 are expressed in the sebaceous gland and the epidermis. Western blotting analysis of FMOs in whole skin homogenates and microsomes was unsuccessful due to a high degree of cross-reactivity of the polyclonal antibodies used with other skin proteins. The methimazole assay was used to determine the presence of FMO activity in skin. The expression of FMOs in an immortalised human keratinocyte (HaCaT) cell line was also studied. These cells could offer an alternative system for biotransformation studies; this is possible only if HaCaT cells express a similar range of FMOs as the skin or primary human keratinocyte cultures. Primary cultures of human keratinocytes expressed FMOs 1, 2, and 3 to varying degrees, whereas HaCaT cells, expressed only FMOs 1, 4 and 5. An analysis of cytochromes P450 in whole human skin, primary keratinocyte cultures and HaCaT cells was undertaken. Regional localisation of CYP2As, CYP2B6 and CYP3As in the skin was the same as for FMOs

Queering Early Childhood Studies: Challenging the Discourse of Developmentally Appropriate Practice

This article reviews approaches to early childhood training and practice in Ontario and sets it in the wider context of feminist poststructural knowledge production. Through a feminist poststructural reading, this article uncovers dominant assumptions of universality underlying the heteronormative discourse of developmentally appropriate practice that dominates early childhood training, postsecondary program curriculum, and professional learning and practice. It argues that postsecondary studies in early childhood education must challenge the pervasive heteronormative discourse in order to shift early childhood practice toward a viewpoint that is counter-hegemonic and integrates queer perspectives

Gender and Microinsurance: A Study of Ethiopia

Microinsurance has been thought of as the cure for poverty in the Global South. In the Ethiopian context, the concept of microinsurance is fairly new. Due to a continuous dependence on agriculture as the main source of income and to low levels of education, most of the population rely on Edir and Equib as methods of coping with risk. This study uses data collected on Ethiopia in 2017 by the consulting firm MicroInsurance Center and focuses on coping mechanisms for agriculture and health crises for peoples in rural areas of the country. This study asks: What is the effect of gender on crop risk coping strategies? What are the perceptions of insurance in rural Ethiopia? An analysis of the data set reveals that few people in rural areas understood what microinsurance was or used it as a coping mechanism. In a crisis, men relied first on cash and savings, while women took on additional employment. Results suggest that policymakers might further the understanding of microinsurance in the country and that insurance companies design gender-sensitive microinsurance programs

Joyce Cary's African romances

African Studies Center Working Paper No.