Magnificent Distance: Five Site-Specific Installations Washington DC 2012

5x5, Washington DC’s inaugural public art festival, was conceived as a flagship biennial in which five curators would each be invited to curate new site-specific artworks by five artists – leading to the simultaneous installation of twenty-five artworks across Washington DC. The primary research question explored in the curation of the five Magnificent Distance artworks was the slippage between the symbolic DC of the worldwide public imagination and the ‘domestic’, human DC with its complex histories and communities. Many of the exhibition sites, selected as part of my curatorial role, were at the interstices of these two DC realities – at the meeting point between federal and community environments, in locations undergoing transformation from one use to another, and at points where differing scales of architecture meet

How to Educate Entrepreneurs?

Entrepreneurship education has two purposes: To improve students’ entrepreneurial skills and to provide impetus to those suited to entrepreneurship while discouraging the rest. While entrepreneurship education helps students to make a vocational decision its effects may conflict for those not suited to entrepreneurship. This study shows that vocational and the skill formation effects of entrepreneurship education can be identified empirically by drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior. This is embedded in a structural equation model which we estimate and test using a robust 2SLS estimator. We find that the attitudinal factors posited by the Theory of Planned Behavior are positively correlated with students’ entrepreneurial intentions. While conflicting effects of vocational and skill directed course content are observed in some individuals, overall these types of content are complements. This finding contradicts previous results in the literature. We reconcile the conflicting findings and discuss implications for the design of entrepreneurship courses

Pearl Lunt Robinson Correspondence

Entries include brief biographical information, a handwritten biography and reply to Fuller\u27s request to list Robinson in a Who\u27s Who of Maine Poets in the Maine Library Bulletin, and the typed transcript of correspondence with a note concerning Robinson\u27s visit to the Maine State Library to present her book

Constitutivism

A brief explanation and overview of constitutivism

The twilight of the Liberal Social Contract? On the Reception of Rawlsian Political Liberalism

This chapter discusses the Rawlsian project of public reason, or public justification-based 'political' liberalism, and its reception. After a brief philosophical rather than philological reconstruction of the project, the chapter revolves around a distinction between idealist and realist responses to it. Focusing on political liberalism’s critical reception illuminates an overarching question: was Rawls’s revival of a contractualist approach to liberal legitimacy a fruitful move for liberalism and/or the social contract tradition? The last section contains a largely negative answer to that question. Nonetheless the chapter's conclusion shows that the research programme of political liberalism provided and continues to provide illuminating insights into the limitations of liberal contractualism, especially under conditions of persistent and radical diversity. The programme is, however, less receptive to challenges to do with the relative decline of the power of modern states

The Major Histocompatibility Complex–related Fc Receptor for IgG (FcRn) Binds Albumin and Prolongs Its Lifespan

The inverse relationship between serum albumin concentration and its half-life suggested to early workers that albumin would be protected from a catabolic fate by a receptor-mediated mechanism much like that proposed for IgG. We show here that albumin binds FcRn in a pH dependent fashion, that the lifespan of albumin is shortened in FcRn-deficient mice, and that the plasma albumin concentration of FcRn-deficient mice is less than half that of wild-type mice. These results affirm the hypothesis that the major histocompatibility complex–related Fc receptor protects albumin from degradation just as it does IgG, prolonging the half-lives of both

A review on probabilistic graphical models in evolutionary computation

Thanks to their inherent properties, probabilistic graphical models are one of the prime candidates for machine learning and decision making tasks especially in uncertain domains. Their capabilities, like representation, inference and learning, if used effectively, can greatly help to build intelligent systems that are able to act accordingly in different problem domains. Evolutionary algorithms is one such discipline that has employed probabilistic graphical models to improve the search for optimal solutions in complex problems. This paper shows how probabilistic graphical models have been used in evolutionary algorithms to improve their performance in solving complex problems. Specifically, we give a survey of probabilistic model building-based evolutionary algorithms, called estimation of distribution algorithms, and compare different methods for probabilistic modeling in these algorithms

What is behind a summary-evaluation decision?

Research in psychology has reported that, among the variety of possibilities for assessment methodologies, summary evaluation offers a particularly adequate context for inferring text comprehension and topic understanding. However, grades obtained in this methodology are hard to quantify objectively. Therefore, we carried out an empirical study to analyze the decisions underlying human summary-grading behavior. The task consisted of expert evaluation of summaries produced in critically relevant contexts of summarization development, and the resulting data were modeled by means of Bayesian networks using an application called Elvira, which allows for graphically observing the predictive power (if any) of the resultant variables. Thus, in this article, we analyzed summary-evaluation decision making in a computational framewor

Why Are Outcomes Different for Registry Patients Enrolled Prospectively and Retrospectively? Insights from the Global Anticoagulant Registry in the FIELD-Atrial Fibrillation (GARFIELD-AF).

Background: Retrospective and prospective observational studies are designed to reflect real-world evidence on clinical practice, but can yield conflicting results. The GARFIELD-AF Registry includes both methods of enrolment and allows analysis of differences in patient characteristics and outcomes that may result. Methods and Results: Patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) and ≥1 risk factor for stroke at diagnosis of AF were recruited either retrospectively (n = 5069) or prospectively (n = 5501) from 19 countries and then followed prospectively. The retrospectively enrolled cohort comprised patients with established AF (for a least 6, and up to 24 months before enrolment), who were identified retrospectively (and baseline and partial follow-up data were collected from the emedical records) and then followed prospectively between 0-18 months (such that the total time of follow-up was 24 months; data collection Dec-2009 and Oct-2010). In the prospectively enrolled cohort, patients with newly diagnosed AF (≤6 weeks after diagnosis) were recruited between Mar-2010 and Oct-2011 and were followed for 24 months after enrolment. Differences between the cohorts were observed in clinical characteristics, including type of AF, stroke prevention strategies, and event rates. More patients in the retrospectively identified cohort received vitamin K antagonists (62.1% vs. 53.2%) and fewer received non-vitamin K oral anticoagulants (1.8% vs . 4.2%). All-cause mortality rates per 100 person-years during the prospective follow-up (starting the first study visit up to 1 year) were significantly lower in the retrospective than prospectively identified cohort (3.04 [95% CI 2.51 to 3.67] vs . 4.05 [95% CI 3.53 to 4.63]; p = 0.016). Conclusions: Interpretations of data from registries that aim to evaluate the characteristics and outcomes of patients with AF must take account of differences in registry design and the impact of recall bias and survivorship bias that is incurred with retrospective enrolment. Clinical Trial Registration: - URL: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov . Unique identifier for GARFIELD-AF (NCT01090362)

Corrected score methods for estimating Bayesian networks with error-prone nodes

Motivated by inferring cellular signaling networks using noisy flow cytometry data, we develop procedures to draw inference for Bayesian networks based on error-prone data. Two methods for inferring causal relationships between nodes in a network are proposed based on penalized estimation methods that account for measurement error and encourage sparsity. We discuss consistency of the proposed network estimators and develop an approach for selecting the tuning parameter in the penalized estimation methods. Empirical studies are carried out to compare the proposed methods and a naive method that ignores measurement error with applications to synthetic data and to single cell flow cytometry data