Maintaining Undesired Relationships

As social creatures, we spend our lives in the company of others, rather than in isolation. Consequently, we maintain many relationships out of need rather than desire. Unfortunately, some of these relationships are ones that we would not maintain if given a choice. Although a considerable amount of research on relational dynamics can be applied to unwanted relationships, scholars have made little attempt to generate an integrated overview of what communication characteristics typify such relationships, how they differ from desirable relationships, or how they should best be maintained. The maintenance of unwanted relationships piques public interest. Articles with titles such as You Bug Me! (Precker, 2000) and Do You Attract People You’d Rather Repel? (Finella, 2000) that are scattered throughout the pages of newspapers and magazines, and books such as Dealing With People You Can’t Stand (Brinkman & Kirschner 1994) serve as a testament to the attraction such relationships have on people’s attention. But unwanted relationships should catch attention as well because a closer examination of these relationships could broaden and enrich our understanding of personal relationships. Relationships people want to maintain pose challenges (e.g., managing dialectical tensions or dealing with conflict), but greater challenges can arise in relationships that one or both parties wish did not exist. It seems likely that at both an individual and societal level, more problems arise from relationships people would not maintain if given a choice than from relationships that people choose to nurture. The widely documented tensions in Ireland, the Middle East, and the former Yugoslavia may illustrate some problems that result from social groups being unwillingly forced to coexist. At an interpersonal level, individuals face undesirable relationships on a regular basis and often experience negative consequences from them (Hess, 2000; Levitt, Silver, & Franco, 1996)

Vindicating karma: jazz and the Black Arts movement/

This dissertation examines certain dimensions of jazz rhetoric, performance, and organizational activity that occurred during the period of the Black Arts movement, the thrust of which corresponded to the larger goals and modes of expression of that phenomenon. The first chapter interrogates definitions of the Black Arts movement, and contextualizes the emergence of black consciousness themes arising in jazz in the 1960s and 1970s by considering the history of racial appeals and identity assertions in the music prior to this period. The second chapter documents the musical activities of the Black Arts era, identifying major tropes and analyzing and historicizing specific modes of carrying this Afrocentric message. The third chapter examines the rise of a generation of African American jazz critics, who sought to define the meaning of the music, and its relationship to black communities and the social and political movements engendering fundamental changes in the perception and practice of race in America. The fourth chapter engages the theme of African American community sponsorship of jazz. The relationship of jazz, and especially experimental jazz, to black communities has been considered largely a nil one. Focusing on the Black Experience in Sound concert series of The East, this chapter challenges the notion and presents evidence that many African Americans were quite invested in the music and its use as a nation-building tool. The conclusion briefly addresses organizational manifestations of self-determination in jazz, and makes an argument for a more expansive view of the Black Arts movement in assessing its achievements and lasting masterworks

The study of viral genetics via the construction of recombinant murine cytomegaloviruses

Cytomegaloviruses are highly host specific, and murine cytomegalovirus (MCMV) has been widely used as a model for studying human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) infections to overcome the difficulty of experimentation with HCMV in vivo. The ability to manipulate the viral genome and introduce specific mutations into viral genes should facilitate the investigation of mechanisms governing cytomegalovirus host specificity. Our laboratory has utilized a modified MCMV genome lacking a SwaI site to construct recombinant MCMVs through homologous recombination. However, it was not known whether this modification of the MCMV genome by removing the SwaI site would affect the biological properties of MCMV, or whether the SwaI mutation could be reversed should the need arose. To this end, two recombinant bacterial artificial chromosomes, pMCMV_ETwt and pMCMV_ETSwa-*, were constructed and characterized by restriction endonuclease analysis, demonstrating that only the expected genome modifications were present. Recombinant viruses were then reconstituted in tissue culture and their biological properties were compared to the Smith strain of MCMV as well as the parental MCMV_EGFP virus. Viral DNA isolated from infected cells showed the expected restriction patterns for MCMV-ETwt and MCMV-ETSwa-. The expression of MCMV proteins M112-113, ppM44 and gB, representative of those expressed in the early, delayed early, and late phases of infection, respectively, did not differ significantly between the recombinant viruses or the Smith strain of MCMV. In addition, virus growth in permissive Balb/3T3 cells at both low and high multiplicities of infection, and semi-permissive COS-1 cells at a high multiplicity of infection showed growth kinetics or patterns of infection that were similar to the Smith strain of MCMV. Results from these preliminary experiments suggested that the modification of the MCMV genome by removal of the SwaI site did not appear to affect the biological properties of MCMV in vitro. Furthermore, analysis of MCMV_ETwt demonstrated that we could reconstitute the SwaI site in the MCMV genome if necessary, resulting in a virus that should be identical to the Smith strain of MCMV. Therefore, these results suggest that the SwaI- MCMV genome will enable easier construction of recombinant MCMVs with desired alterations in any region of the viral genome

Statistical Inference in Positron Emission Tomography

In this report, we investigate mathematical algorithms for image reconstruction in the context of positron emission tomography (a medical diagnosis technique). We first take inspiration from the physics of PET to design a mathematical model tailored to the problem. We think of positron emissions as an output of an indirectly observed Poisson process and formulate the link between the emissions and the scanner records through the Radon transform. This model allows us to express the image reconstruction in terms of a standard problem in statistical estimation from incomplete data. Then, we investigate different algorithms as well as stopping criterion, and compare their relative efficiency