Vertex-Based Analysis of Cerebral Blood Flow and Fractional Amplitude of Low-Frequency Fluctuations (CBF-fALFF) Coupling in Moderate-to-Severe Traumatic Brain Injury During the First Year Post-Injury

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is known to involve damage in the neurovascular unit. TBI may disrupt the brain’s neurovascular coupling–the relationship between cerebral blood flow and neural activity–that can lead to cognitive and functional impairments. This study attempted to non-invasively investigate neurovascular coupling in patients with moderate to severe TBI (msTBI) during the first year post-injury using a combined metric of cerebral blood flow (CBF) and fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (fALFF), a proxy for spontaneous neural activity. Using arterial spin labeling (ASL) and functional MRI sequences, CBF and fALFF were measured in 29 msTBI patients 3-, 6- and 12-months post-injury for within-group longitudinal comparisons. Thirty-four demographically matched healthy controls were assessed once for between-group comparisons. A vertex-based preprocessing pipeline was used to map spatial patterns of CBF-fALFF coupling across the cortical surface. Across-vertex global coupling was estimated by association (measured by regression or correlation coefficients) between CBF and fALFF values across the whole hemisphere. In addition, vertex-wise regional coupling values were calculated using locally weighted regression between fALFF and CBF. The coupling calculated on a global level revealed significant group differences between controls and TBI patients, indicating potential neurovascular coupling dysfunction in chronic msTBI patients. At 6 months post-injury, the duration of post-traumatic amnesia was significantly correlated with global coupling values based on regression coefficients. In contrast, after correcting for multiple comparisons, the vertex-wise regional group comparison showed no significant differences in CBF-fALFF coupling between msTBI patients and controls. Neither globally nor locally defined coupling metrics showed significant longitudinal changes or relationships with neuropsychological variables within the patient group. Potential explanations underlying the absence of longitudinal differences and the dissociation between the global and local coupling findings were discussed

À la poursuite de Céline à New York

Louis-Ferdinand Céline n’a cessé de multiplier les allers-retours entre Paris et New York, jusqu’à la veille de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Le voyage commence dès 1925. Sa première expérience avec la Société des Nations (ancêtre de l’ONU), en tant que “responsable des échanges de médecins spécialistes”, prouve également son bon niveau en anglais. C\u27est sous l\u27égide de l’organisation internationale que le Docteur Louis Destouches se voit confier la direction d\u27une délégation de médecins sud-américains, qui l\u27amène à traverser toute l\u27Amérique de Nord. Ce périple de quatre mois le conduit de Cuba à la Louisiane, de New York à Montréal, esquissant déjà la trajectoire de l’odyssée célinienne. Après la publication de son roman phare, Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), l\u27auteur revient à trois reprises sur le continent nord-américain. Une destination qui va étrangement se resserrer autour de New York, à partir de 1937. Sous la couverture officielle d’un écrivain talentueux, notre étude permet de mieux comprendre quelles furent ses intentions réelles. Au fil du temps, ses voyages promotionnels vont se muer en voyages politiques, où partout sur son passage se croisent les chefs de fil de mouvements nationalistes. Cet itinéraire met en lumière l’ambition et la sincérité de son engagement dans l’idéologie du IIIème Reich. Notre enquête explore les convictions profondes de l’écrivain, qui vont le conduire à organiser une partie de la propagande nazie à l’échelle internationale, notamment à travers la publication et la diffusion de pamphlets à partir de 1937. Louis-Ferdinand Céline continued to travel back and forth between Paris and New York until the eve of the Second World War. The journey began in 1925. His first experience with the League of Nations (the forerunner of the UN), as “responsible for the exchange of specialist doctors”, also proved his good level of English. It was under the aegis of the international organization that Doctor Louis Destouches was entrusted with the leadership of a delegation of South American doctors, which led him to cross the whole of North America. This four-month journey took him from Cuba to Louisiana, from New York to Montreal, already outlining the trajectory of Céline’s odyssey. After the publication of his flagship novel, Journey to the End of the Night (1932), the author returned to the North American continent three times. A destination that would strangely narrow around New York, from 1937. Under the official cover of a talented writer, our study allows us to better understand what his real intentions were. Over time, his promotional trips would turn into political trips, where everywhere he went, the leaders of nationalist movements would cross paths. This itinerary highlights the ambition and sincerity of his commitment to the ideology of the Third Reich. Our investigation explores the writer\u27s deep convictions, which would lead him to organize part of the Nazi propaganda on an international scale, notably through the publication and distribution of pamphlets from 1937

Images of Truth: True Doxa in Plato\u27s Republic

Up till the late twentieth-century, many had assumed that Plato’s epistemological distinction between epistêmê, often translated as ‘knowledge’ or ‘understanding’, and doxa, often translated as ‘belief’, ‘opinion’, or ‘judgment’, tracked his ontological distinction between the intelligible realm of the Forms and the perceptible world. Given the relation Plato held between the Forms and Truth, it follows that one has to turn away from the perceptible world and towards the Forms in one’s cognitive endeavors, so as to get at Truth through epistêmê. However, Plato sometimes speaks of true doxa, i.e., alêthês doxa and other variants, where ‘Truth’ (used in the technical sense in connection with the Forms) is an adjective attributed to doxa. In this dissertation, I ask and answer: what is the relation between doxa and Truth, so as to account for true doxa in Plato’s view? While many prominent accounts of ‘true doxa’ within analytic Plato scholarship today take for granted that true doxa is explained as a deficient grasp of the Forms in one’s cognitive endeavors, I defend the traditional view that one cannot get at the Forms—and therefore the Truth—through doxa. Building on recent work on Plato’s doxa in Jessica Moss’s Plato’s Epistemology: Being and Seeming, this dissertation argues that the best epistemic position one can achieve with respect to perceptibles is simply a response to a good image of the Forms—‘good’, as evaluated by those with epistêmê of the Forms, and especially the Form of the Good. If so, Plato’s use of ‘true doxa’ in the Republic is primarily achieved by those in ideal epistemic communities, which I define as epistemic communities within which those who have epistêmê of the Forms are recognized as experts on account of their epistêmê. Upon achieving epistêmê, Plato’s Philosophers are to establish such ideal epistemic communities in the perceptible world, doing so by establishing and maintaining good images of the Forms in the perceptible world. In so doing, they are able to guide those within their epistemic communities toward true doxai. In turn, by placing their trust in the epistêmê of Philosophers, those under their rule are able to act in ways that preserve the order and harmony in their souls, which is reflected in the order and harmony of the ideal epistemic community as a whole. In Chapter 1, I focus on Moss’s argument that the objects of doxa are images—‘what seems’ or ‘seemings’—to be contrasted with the Forms, that which are True. This problematizes doxa’s relation to Truth, such that there is no Truth that one can ‘get at’ in the perceptible world. In Chapter 2, I argue that the achievement of true doxa within the Kallipolis is a reflection of the images of ‘what seems’ or ‘seemings’ allowed into the epistemic community of the Kallipolis. Although these images are not True, I submit that they are nevertheless epistemically valuable for reasons other than getting at Truth (such as cultivating behaviors that ensure one acts in the city’s best interests), and are for that reason evaluated as valuable or useful by the hypothetical founders of the Kallipolis—namely, Socrates and his interlocutors. Chapter 3 discusses the epistemic position of Socrates and his interlocutors as founders of the hypothetical Kallipolis, namely dianoia, which Moss characterizes as an intermediate power between epistêmê and doxa set over ‘images of the Forms recognized as images’. While Moss allows for one to grasp the Forms in a deficient way through dianoia, I maintain that dianoia does not allow Socrates and his interlocutors to get at Truth in the perceptible world. Finally, in Chapter 4, I turn to the ethical and political consequences of never attaining Truth in the perceptible world. Although Philosophers’ epistêmê remains restricted to the Forms, I argue that their grasp of the Truth allows them to establish ideal epistemic communities, within which the achievement of true doxa allows even those who lack epistêmê to live virtuous or excellent lives. This is because those under the rule of Philosophers are able to act in ways that preserve the order and harmony of their souls, only because they place their trust in the epistêmê of Philosophers and act on the doxai that they accept as seeming true (despite not getting at Truth). To conclude, while epistêmê of the Forms remains a lofty ideal towards which one should strive, then, this dissertation suggests that cognitive endeavors in the perceptible world should be aimed toward identifying Philosophers who are in the position to establish ideal epistemic communities—thereby granting true doxa a more central position than hitherto discussed in the literature. This is a novel approach to Plato’s epistemology in the Republic, which has thus far been centered on epistêmê rather than doxa

Synchronizing Work and Teaching Practices with the Spatial DNA of Distributed Work and Learning

Phygitality, the seamless and synergistic integration of physical and digital realms, is an indispensable and irrevocable part of contemporary office-based work. Phygitality facilitates spatially and temporally distributed or multi-local working where employees work from diverse locations such as their home, office, and third places at any time of day or night. It also makes nonterritorial working at temporary workspaces accessed on a session-by-session basis possible. This dissertation examines how phygital, multi-local, and nonterritorial working reshape individual and group work behaviors, organizational spatial practices, work-centric settings, non-work-centric settings, neighborhoods, cities, and regions. The Spatial DNA of Distributed Work encapsulates a conceptual framework that theorizes distributed work-built environment interactions. This original contribution resulted from a review and synthesis of literature (N=271) from interior design, architecture, environmental psychology, environment-behavior studies, facilities management, real estate studies, business management, organizational studies, urban planning and design, and economic geography. The dissertation adopts a case-study methodology to study nonterritorial and phygital practices in office-based knowledge work. It focuses on nonterritorial and phygital knowledge creation and transmission in teaching, research, mentoring, advising, and related academic activities conducted in university faculty offices and classrooms, such as architectural design studios. Mixed qualitative methods support the thematic analysis of hotdesking, a type of nonterritorial working popular in business and university offices. Direct and participant observation of doctoral students and contingent instructors working at hotdesks in a US public university facility (50 hours), semi-structured interviews with the hotdesk users (N=10), and archival research of public institutional data suggest worker performance and comfort are adversely impacted by the lack of workspace certainty, control, and continuity inherent in hotdesking. Interview participants identified technological, design, and managerial interventions that can provide cognitive, functional, and affective support to hotdesk workers. Post-COVID interviews of undergraduate and graduate students (N=27) and instructors (N=32) of US architecture programs facilitate the examination of phygital work practices in the campus- based architectural design studio, focusing on phygitality’s pedagogical implications. Participants embrace the campus-based studio’s phygital functionalities by incorporating online modalities as needed. For example, participants prefer in-person or co-located studio sessions for facilitating tactile, social, and vicarious learning during lecture demonstrations, model making, and informal co-working on studio project assignments. Participants blend online and in-person modalities to extend their social, cognitive, and teaching presence and foster relational proximity during office hours, lectures, group critique sessions, and final juries. Twenty-first-century businesses and universities must synchronize work, learning, teaching, and research practices with the Spatial DNA of Distributed Work to thrive in a phygital world. A successful transition to distributed work requires the collective and coordinated efforts of office employees and managers. Leaders and managers can facilitate the cultural transition to distributed work by aligning technological, spatial, and organizational decisions with workers\u27 and teams\u27 phygital, nonterritorial, and multi-local work needs. For example, nonterritorial workspaces work best when employees’ office visits are short or infrequent, usually less than three days a week. Coordinated office visits that ensure employees can collaborate and socialize with colleagues and clients in person energize hybrid workers and teams. The university case studies included in this dissertation demonstrate that prevailing culture shapes institutional responses to phygital, multi-local, and nonterritorial work practices. Since distributed work is a new workplace culture, office managers and leaders should be willing to iteratively refine distributed work practices with employee input. The Spatial DNA of Distributed Work equips planners with the foresight required to plan for the emerging geographies of distributed work. It explains how the dispersed, intensified, improvised, and phygital facets of distributed work reshape contemporary urban, suburban, peri-urban, and rural places structured by fixed work locations and times, regular journey-to-work patterns, and segregated land use zones. The Spatial DNA of Distributed Work anchors the evaluation of the comprehensive plans of three US metros (Austin, TX, Boston, MA, and St. Louis, MO), each grappling with varying levels of tech-driven growth and development. The comparative evaluation underscores the need for reimagining commercial real estate, local economic development, and housing practices to align with the shrinking spatial footprint of offices, distributed workscapes, polyfunctional spaces, and fragmented activity patterns wrought by distributed work. The ever evolving phygitality of workplaces requires proactive and agile planning responses

Improving Low-Resource Translation with Finite State Grammars

Scarcity of training data continues to pose a problem for the development of neural machine translation systems for low-resource languages. This study develops a method for the incorporation of linguistic information into the training of neural machine translation models for low-resource languages, using morphological grammars created using finite state transducers. This study explores the benefits, historical background, and effectiveness of this approach. This study incorporates morphological tags into a pre-trained multilingual neural machine translation model using a dual encoder structure. This study finds an improvement in performance in the Irish-English translation scenario. This method offers promising results with low computational requirements, and contributes to the understanding of techniques for low resource neural machine translation

The Work of Morning: Administrative Ecologies & Institutional Poetics

This dissertation connects discourses in organization studies, movement studies, environmental studies, and poetry studies to explore the possibility of change from within at the nation’s largest, public urban university: the City University of New York. The first two chapters can be described as an institutional autoethnography. I analyze the various strata and activities of CUNY locales through the lens of a poet and administrator. The second chapter narrates my experiences in university administration while positing some theories of change that have come into resolution for me during my tenure. I theorize terms of art including publics, counterpublics, the public sphere, the state, institutions, counterinstitutions, and community in relation to CUNY. The third chapter is a fulcrum that moves the readership away from critical university studies and toward the realm of sociopolitical, environmental, and poetic justice. Poetry here is a tool to help us understand how certain ways of doing, making, and being at the intuitional level transform given norms and structures through daily reflexive and recursive use. That chapters is grounded in the term “geopoetics,” first introduced to me by Celina Su. The fourth and fifth chapters employ key theories borrowed from environmental management and design to consider the role of nature poetry in the fomentation of socioenvironmental change. The abiding principal of the dissertation is that a poet in the institution does not write poetry; a poet in the institution shifts the grammar of the institution so that those who animate its structures might imagine and manifest different forms and futures of governance

Cueing Motions in a String Quartet, An Exploratory Study of Motion Trajectories

A string quartet performance involves an array of different body movements which serve many functions, including sound production, expression, and communication. This dissertation examines the ways string quartet players execute specific communicative body motions called cues, which are anticipatory gestures meant to communicate tempo and timing as well as the musical intentions such as dynamics, articulation, and character to the co-performers. Some scholarly research exists on cueing, but a formalized description of the cueing motions involved has not yet been developed. This dissertation serves as an exploratory study examining the motion trajectories of cueing motions employed by the Argus Quartet, aiming to identify consistent patterns within and across players that may suggest a shared cueing practice within the group. The methodology for the dissertation relies on markerless motion caption using the Python-based program DeepLabCut. With DeepLabCut, I captured the movements of key Points of Interest (POIs) on each player, including the left hand, right hand, nose, frog, tip, and scroll. By comparing the motion trajectories of these POIs, I analyzed shape similarities both within individual players and across the ensemble. I specifically focus on what I term cue events, moments in the music that most likely require cueing. Cue events generally occur whenever performers look for guidance as to when and how to play together, such as at the beginnings of pieces, after musical interruptions, and after sudden tempo changes. The study used two stimuli: a group synchronization exercise from Heimann’s Exercises for String Quartet, designed to isolate cueing motions, and Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 33, No. 3, to explore cueing in a more authentic performance setting in a standard repertoire piece. Findings indicate a common repertoire of cueing motions from which players select specific cues. This exploratory research lays some foundational work toward a formalized description of cues and a cueing technique. A standardized cueing technique could improve musicians\u27 communicative effectiveness and cueing precision, impact string quartet pedagogy by making it easier to teach and learn cueing, and inform psychological research on group coordination, synchronization, and social dynamics such as nonverbal communication and leadership within musical ensembles

Development of Soil Survey Methods for Urban Areas

Urban soils are the foundation of urban ecosystems and play a vital role in long-term urban sustainability and resiliency. Accurate soil surveys of urban areas should be done at higher resolution since extensive human activities often result in urban soil being highly disturbed and spatially variable. Besides heterogeneity, one of the unique and challenging aspects of urban soil is the nature and properties of its organic carbon with a significant percentage of black carbon (a particulate product of incomplete combustion), which is less biologically active. Thus, in order to determine the ability of a soil to support biological activity and supply nutrients for plant growth, the properties of organic carbon need to be assessed. Conventional USDA-Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) methods take considerable time for full characterization of collected soil samples. This limitation could be overcome by geophysical tools such as ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and electromagnetic induction (EMI), which can image large areas in a relatively short time without excavating the soil. These tools can map subsurface features and the degree of heterogeneity, which can provide useful information for representative site selection and sampling. How well these geophysical data correlate with site characteristics, however, has not yet been well established. In this research, 13 soil series covering a wide range of soil conditions were investigated across New York City using standard conventional soil survey methods with geophysical methods employed for 10 of them. From each site, samples were collected for laboratory determination of bulk density, pH and soluble salts, black carbon, cation exchange capacity, and plant available nutrients using standard protocols in the NRCS Field and Lab Analysis. Additionally, total carbon and nitrogen, C/N ratio, readily labile carbon and nitrogen, microbial biomass carbon and nitrogen were determined using standard laboratory protocols. Organic carbon quality was found to be strongly influenced by human-altered and human-transported (HAHT) materials, playing a critical role in the ability of urban soils to support ecological and environmental functions. Data from geophysical tools (i.e., GPR and EMI) were compared with field observations and laboratory results, including texture, consistence, salt content, bulk density, depth to the water table, and soil composition at each site, to map subsurface features. The results of this study revealed that GPR and EMI are capable of providing valuable interpretations of some common soil properties. These tools can play significant roles in complementing and enhancing traditional soil survey methods, within urban environments, where soils exhibit considerable variations over short distances, and survey encounters various challenges. The findings will help soil practitioners and decision-makers in protecting, conserving, and managing urban soils for an ever-expanding world population

The Last Stand of Angraecum: Biogeographic and Evolutionary History of Darwin\u27s Muses

The Orchidaceae are notable for their remarkable diversity and are regarded as one of the most charismatic families of flowering plants. Notwithstanding the biological significance of Orchidaceae, numerous systematic challenges persist. Inter- and intrageneric relationships in several tribes and subtribes remain poorly understood, particularly within subtribe Angraecinae (tribe Vandeae), which impedes the exploration of its biogeographical and evolutionary history. While the evolutionary history of subtribe Angraecinae has recently been addressed by numerous authors, its biogeographical history has only been studied for a limited number of areas within its full geographic distribution and/or for only a few of its taxa. Herein, phylogenetic, divergence-time estimation, and historical-biogeographical analyses were conducted using a comprehensive molecular dataset of six loci for Angraecinae with the objective of reconstructing ancestral areas of distribution of the subtribe. The results of the biogeographical study indicate that Angraecinae originated during the Miocene and that Madagascar represents its ancestral area. The group has undergone several independent dispersal events to neighboring islands in the Indian Ocean and to continental Africa. However, a single major dispersal event towards continental Africa is responsible for all taxa of the Afro-Neotropical clade. The resulting phylogenies also corroborated the polyphyly of Angraecum, the subtribe’s most diverse genus. Furthermore, while sectional relationships were poorly resolved, the majority of the sections were also found to be polyphyletic. The absence of a robust phylogenetic classification of Angraecum continues to hinder the formulation of hypotheses regarding its evolutionary history. Phylogenetic analyses based on a limited number of markers derived from Sanger sequencing have proved to be insufficient for informing the construction of such a classification. Using Angiosperms353, a target sequence capture probe set, hundreds of low-copy nuclear genes were sequenced from a broad sampling of Angraecum species across most previously defined sections, along with representatives from associated genera. Phylogenetic analyses conducted in both concatenated and coalescence-based frameworks yielded a strongly supported phylogenetic hypothesis, coherent with the morphological characters of Angraecum species. It provided the basis for constructing a classification of Angraecum that better reflects evolutionary relationships and to redefine the sectional limits of the genus. Based on these results, 188 taxa (179 species, 3 subspecies and 5 varieties) of Angraecum are recognized, distributed among 11 sections. Thirteen species were excluded from the genus. By contrast, five species previously placed in Oeoniella Schltr. and Sobennikoffia Schltr. have herein been transferred to Angraecum, in two new sections. Finally, we confirmed that several species of Angraecum should also be excluded from the genus based on their phylogenetic position. This clade of five Angraecum species spread across four sections has consistently been found to be only distantly related to the rest of the genus and instead is closely related to Cryptopus Lindl., Oeonia Lindl. and allied genera. This clade was also recovered in the phylogenies resulting from two earlier studies, both using a small set of loci derived from Sanger sequencing and the phylogenomic dataset derived from high-throughput DNA sequencing. Based on the results reported here, synapomorphies could be identified for this clade of ex-Angraecum species and compared to the description and from material of other species representing eight sections of Angraecum (sensu stricto). In total, ten species share the morphology of the ex-Angraecum clade, including one taxonomic novelty. This clade is therefor described as a new genus of Angraecinae, Vavavoloina, or “hairy mouth” in Malagasy, referring to the hairs on the labellum at the spur entrance, which is one of its most striking features. Nine species are given new combinations and the taxonomic novelty is descrived as a new species, Vavavoloina punctata