Pietro Bembo’s Bias: Patronage, History, and the Italic Wars

During the Italic Wars, the Italian peninsula experienced foreign invasions and internal discord between rivaling duchies and city-states. Florence and Venice both faced internal and external discord due to the constant wars and political in fighting. Venetian Pietro Bembo wrote historical accounts of this period during the Renaissance. His contemporaries, Marino Sanudo, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Francesco Guicciardini, also wrote historical accounts of this time. My research spotlights Bembo’s history of the Venetian Republic. This history was written in a supposedly objective fashion, yet, scholarship shows that historical writing from this time contained bias. I focused on Bembo because there is a lack of scholarship that looks at his historical writings. This bias can be linked with the socio-political ties these men had. Examining his accounts of historical events and comparing them with the other three historians, Bembo’s slanted accounts illustrate the effect and importance of having a strong patronage network

Contemplating the intricate nature of reality and the influence of consciousness

contemplating the intricate nature of reality and the influence of consciousness is a site-specific installation project, where the gallery has been transformed into a labyrinth-like maze. Large, hollow structures, constructed out of wood and drywall are strategically placed in the gallery to create a walking path for the viewer to follow. A variety of lenses, arranged in flowing patterns, are inset in the walls along the path. Oil paintings, lit from within the structures, are sealed inside the walls. This causes the lenses to glow with organic images from the paintings. The lenses distort the portions of the painting they represent, fragmenting and skewing the viewer's perception of what they are seeing. The installation is designed as a progression from shrouded to revealed. After moving through this space with the lenses, the viewer enters into the center of the labyrinth. In this room, three large paintings displayed in their entirety, envelop and transport the viewer into beautiful, mystical realms. The paintings in this project also address the relationship between the tangible and intangible aspects of life. Organic, abstract and imaginary forms range from delicate and ethereal, to more substantial and solid, as they commingle within dark, ambiguous terrains. The paintings depict the relationship between the intangible realm of thought and the material world. The forms range from being clearly rendered to unclear and faint. This treatment is meant to parallel our experiences and perceptions, which can be clear or unclear, depending on our level of attention in the present moment. Through these juxtapositions, a visual language is created which investigates the nature of reality and the role of thought in the creation of our experiences.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 16)California State University, Northridge. Department of Art

EDS Usability Testing Final Report

Usability studies in academic libraries are essential tools to assess functionality and accessibility of library services. The University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries recently conducted usability studies on EBSCO’s Discovery Service, which is to be the default search platform on the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries’ website beginning on July 2017. During the spring of 2017, Information Resources Management’s Usability Team utilized surveys, focus groups, and hands-on testing of students and faculty to assess how library patrons interacted with the new discovery service (EDS) and other related library services. The following report documents this usability study, findings discovered, and recommendations hitherto. The following recommendations are broken into three categories: dataload (i.e. bibliographic records), design, and library services

Urban Biodiversity and Landscape Ecology: Patterns, Processes and Planning

Effective planning for biodiversity in cities and towns is increasingly important as urban areas and their human populations grow, both to achieve conservation goals and because ecological communities support services on which humans depend. Landscape ecology provides important frameworks for understanding and conserving urban biodiversity both within cities and considering whole cities in their regional context, and has played an important role in the development of a substantial and expanding body of knowledge about urban landscapes and communities. Characteristics of the whole city including size, overall amount of green space, age and regional context are important considerations for understanding and planning for biotic assemblages at the scale of entire cities, but have received relatively little research attention. Studies of biodiversity within cities are more abundant and show that longstanding principles regarding how patch size, configuration and composition influence biodiversity apply to urban areas as they do in other habitats. However, the fine spatial scales at which urban areas are fragmented and the altered temporal dynamics compared to non-urban areas indicate a need to apply hierarchical multi-scalar landscape ecology models to urban environments. Transferring results from landscape-scale urban biodiversity research into planning remains challenging, not least because of the requirements for urban green space to provide multiple functions. An increasing array of tools is available to meet this challenge and increasingly requires ecologists to work with planners to address biodiversity challenges. Biodiversity conservation and enhancement is just one strand in urban planning, but is increasingly important in a rapidly urbanising world

T cell receptor engineering targeting FOXM1 for the treatment of lung cancer

https://openworks.mdanderson.org/sumexp23/1069/thumbnail.jp

Structure génétique de la population de la région PACA du XIXe siècle à partir des patronymes

L’analyse de la distribution des patronymes à travers le temps et l’espace permet d’appréhender la structure des populations. L’étude de la diversité des stocks patronymiques rend possible l’observation des échanges entre les populations ou leur possible isolation. Dans la littérature scientifique, il a été montré que la région PACA était relativement isolée et différente sur la base des patronymes du reste de la France du XXe et du XXIe siècle. Classiquement les études analysant la structure..

Interpreting T-Cell Cross-reactivity through Structure: Implications for TCR-Based Cancer Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy has become one of the most promising avenues for cancer treatment, making use of the patient\u27s own immune system to eliminate cancer cells. Clinical trials with T-cell-based immunotherapies have shown dramatic tumor regressions, being effective in multiple cancer types and for many different patients. Unfortunately, this progress was tempered by reports of serious (even fatal) side effects. Such therapies rely on the use of cytotoxic T-cell lymphocytes, an essential part of the adaptive immune system. Cytotoxic T-cells are regularly involved in surveillance and are capable of both eliminating diseased cells and generating protective immunological memory. The specificity of a given T-cell is determined through the structural interaction between the T-cell receptor (TCR) and a peptide-loaded major histocompatibility complex (MHC); i.e., an intracellular peptide-ligand displayed at the cell surface by an MHC molecule. However, a given TCR can recognize different peptide-MHC (pMHC) complexes, which can sometimes trigger an unwanted response that is referred to as T-cell cross-reactivity. This has become a major safety issue in TCR-based immunotherapies, following reports of melanoma-specific T-cells causing cytotoxic damage to healthy tissues (e.g., heart and nervous system). T-cell cross-reactivity has been extensively studied in the context of viral immunology and tissue transplantation. Growing evidence suggests that it is largely driven by structural similarities of seemingly unrelated pMHC complexes. Here, we review recent reports about the existence of pMHC hot-spots for cross-reactivity and propose the existence of a TCR interaction profile (i.e., a refinement of a more general TCR footprint in which some amino acid residues are more important than others in triggering T-cell cross-reactivity). We also make use of available structural data and pMHC models to interpret previously reported cross-reactivity patterns among virus-derived peptides. Our study provides further evidence that structural analyses of pMHC complexes can be used to assess the intrinsic likelihood of cross-reactivity among peptide-targets. Furthermore, we hypothesize that some apparent inconsistencies in reported cross-reactivities, such as a preferential directionality, might also be driven by particular structural features of the targeted pMHC complex. Finally, we explain why TCR-based immunotherapy provides a special context in which meaningful T-cell cross-reactivity predictions can be made