LEAVING NORMAL

The poems in my thesis were written in the classes I’ve taken since Summer 2010. I have added poems this current semester, Winter 2014. When I embarked on this journey to learn the craft of poetry I had no idea where it would take me. I have been challenged and inspired by my fellow students, by the poetry we read in class, and by the renowned poets I’ve been privileged to meet: Donald Hall, Henry Hughes, Natasha Trethewey, Martha Silano, Laura Kasischke, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Jonathan Johnson. With their encouragement and that of the Northern Michigan University faculty, I found my voice in poetry. My thesis is presented in four sections. The first section is largely biographical and reflects the path I’ve traveled to become who I am today. The second section’s poems are more diverse. They deal with issues that intrigue me as a Registered Nurse and also represent my over-active imagination. The third section reflects my Catholic faith. It includes a collection about the life of a ninety year old nun and three elegies for friends who died this year. The fourth and final section is representative of the intrinsic love I feel for the heart-stopping beauty of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The windows from my desk display a small lake, maple trees and Monet inspired sunsets. I want to show you through my words how much a part of me it and its everyday magic are

Military Service Records and Unit Histories: A Guide to Locating Sources

This guide provides information on locating military unit histories and individual service records of discharged, retired, and deceased military personnel. It includes contact information for military history centers, websites for additional sources of research, and a bibliography of other publications

Community Outreach through Genomics Education Partnership

The J Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) has recently partnered with undergraduate university faculty to expand the scope of education and outreach program as part of the NIAID’s BRC initiative, by joining forces with faculty members participating in the Genomics Education Partnership (GEP). The goal of the GEP is to provide opportunities for undergraduate students to participate in genomics research and gain hands on experience. Faculty members trained on annotation methodologies and tools during the Prokaryotic Annotation Workshop conducted at JCVI, impart their knowledge in the classroom as part of the semester course. As a pilot project, we are currently collaborating with 3 groups lead by a faculty member, spread across 3 universities in the community curation of bacterial genomes. Each participating undergraduate group collectively annotates a specific bacterial genome that was sequenced at JCVI and run through the automatic annotation pipeline. Remote access to genome sequence data, pre-computed gene predictions, search results, automatic annotation and bioinformatics analysis is provided through our web-based manual annotation tool, MANATEE. The students log into JCVI genome databases with user specific ids and password and learn to annotate single genes, entire metabolic pathways leading to analysis of a question that may be unique to the genome being analyzed. Users of the genome data receive dedicated support and guidance from our in house annotation experts on the usage of JCVI’s tools and annotation methodologies. Through this exercise, the undergraduate students are introduced to concepts of genomics and bioinformatics and gain deeper understanding of the concepts of cellular metabolism and disease pathology, which may lead them to making scientific research their career path. Some groups are focusing on genome specific pathways and plan to conduct wet lab experiments to understand unique genome features. We are highly encouraged that this model of web based, remote access, community annotation has been successful and propose to leverage the community of annotators to update annotations of pathogen genomes in Pathema-BRC

Experimental Characterization of A Piezoelectric Transducer Array Taking into Account Crosstalk Phenomenon

Ultrasonic transducer arrays are generally composed of several piezoelectric elements arranged in 1D or 2D ways. Crosstalk is an undesirable phenomenon decreasing the performance of these devices. It generates parasitic displacements at the elements' radiating surfaces, which changes the directivity of the array. Furthermore, the transducer's displacement plays a critical role in terms of the focal area and transferred intensities. The objective of this paper is to characterize a piezoelectric array composed of seven-elements made of PZ 27 ceramic experimentally. It investigates the effects of the crosstalk phenomenon on the array's performance in particular. The results have shown that the array's elements vibrate mainly in thickness mode, but the displacement is not uniform along their length due to the contribution of a parasitic length mode. Moreover, the major parasitic displacements are obtained on the neighboring passive elements: about -7.3 dB, -11 dB, and -12 dB, on the first, the second, and the third elements, respectively

Bibliothèques de musées, bibliothèques universitaires : des collections au service de l’histoire de l’art

By moving into the Labrouste reading room, the library of the Institut national de l’histoire de l’art will fulfill years of preparation, reflection, and debates that have punctuated its long gestation. As a descendant of the Bibliothèque d’art et d’archéologie Jacques Doucet, its affiliation with the university is today lively and meaningful. The incorporation of the Bibliothèque centrale des musées nationaux, formerly at the Louvre, on January 1, 2016 has invited museums into the heart of INHA’s collections. For the three entities concerned, this change has involved – and still involves – a questioning of the orientation and missions of the libraries they represent. The Louvre museum has launched a vast project of promotion and coordination of its libraries. After extensive preparatory work, the Bibliothèque centrale des musées nationaux (BCMN) has been physically absorbed into the INHA, requiring a necessary examination at the INHA, not only of its history, but also of its project. Indeed, for the INHA library, the foundation stone that is the BCMN consolidates this inauguration in completely renovated spaces: a reading room with four hundred seats, together with open-access stacks containing 150,000 documents on three levels, opening with the Bibliothèque nationale de France and in particular its département des Estampes et de la photographie, but also with the École nationale des chartes. The three texts that follow must therefore be read interactively as exchanges relating to what makes writing the history of art possible

De bois, de terre et d’eau : patrimoine archéologique, historique et culturel autour de la forêt de Cerisy

Depuis son lancement, en 2015, ce PCR propose d’étudier les transformations d’un espace forestier, situé au cœur du Bessin et correspondant en gros aux anciennes forêts médiévales de Bur-le-Roy, dont les droits et usages ont été consignés vers 1400 dans le Coutumier des forêts, dit d’Hector de Chartres. L’analyse s’inscrit sur la longue durée, depuis la fondation de l’abbaye de Cerisy jusqu’au développement de la mine de Littry et s’articule autour de cinq thématiques : le contrôle du territo..

Contrôle électrique de la propagation d'ondes élastiques dans des cristaux phononiques piézoélectriques

Les cristaux phononiques permettent d’obtenir des propriétés inhabituelles de propagation des ondes élastiques à l'échelle de la longueur d'onde comme l’apparition de bandes de fréquences interdites où l’onde est évanescente. Malgré le grand nombre d’applications potentielles, (isolation acoustique, filtrage et le démultiplexage en fréquence, guidage d'onde, 'cape d'inaudibilité', réfraction négative, super-résolution…) peu de cristaux phononiques ont été intégrés dans des dispositifs fonctionnels, partiellement à cause de leur manque de flexibilité : le contrôle de l'onde élastique, souvent obtenu dans une gamme de fréquence réduite, est complètement déterminé par la géométrie et les propriétés des matériaux constitutifs lors de l'étape de fabrication. L’intégration de matériaux piézoélectriques dans ces structures permet d’envisager le développement de cristaux phononiques dont les propriétés de propagation sont contrôlées électriquement. La géométrie considérée dans ce travail est un cristal phononique à une dimension constitué par une alternance de couches élastiques et de couches piézoélectriques dont chaque surface est recouverte d’une électrode. Le contrôle électrique est obtenu en modifiant l’impédance électrique reliant les électrodes de chaque couche piézoélectrique (court-circuit, circuit ouvert ou capacité). Les courbes de dispersion calculées à partir d’un modèle analytique montrent que ce contrôle électrique permet d’ajuster la position en fréquence et la largeur des bandes de fréquence interdites

Primary Graft Failure after Heart Transplantation

Primary graft failure (PGF) is a devastating complication that occurs in the immediate postoperative period following heart transplantation. It manifests as severe ventricular dysfunction of the donor graft and carries significant mortality and morbidity. In the last decade, advances in pharmacological treatment and mechanical circulatory support have improved the outlook for heart transplant recipients who develop this complication. Despite these advances in treatment, PGF is still the leading cause of death in the first 30 days after transplantation. In today's climate of significant organ shortages and growing waiting lists, transplant units worldwide have increasingly utilised “marginal donors” to try and bridge the gap between “supply and demand.” One of the costs of this strategy has been an increased incidence of PGF. As the threat of PGF increases, the challenges of predicting and preventing its occurrence, as well as the identification of more effective treatment modalities, are vital areas of active research and development

Immunofluorescent Detection of Two Thymidine Analogues (CldU and IdU) in Primary Tissue

Accurate measurement of cell division is a fundamental challenge in experimental biology that becomes increasingly complex when slowly dividing cells are analyzed. Established methods to detect cell division include direct visualization by continuous microscopy in cell culture, dilution of vital dyes such as carboxyfluorescein di-aetate succinimidyl ester (CFSE), immuno-detection of mitogenic antigens such as ki67 or PCNA, and thymidine analogues. Thymidine analogues can be detected by a variety of methods including radio-detection for tritiated thymidine, immuno-detection for bromo-deoxyuridine (BrdU), chloro-deoxyuridine (CldU) and iodo-deoxyuridine (IdU), and chemical detection for ethinyl-deoxyuridine (EdU). We have derived a strategy to detect sequential incorporation of different thymidine analogues (CldU and IdU) into tissues of adult mice. Our method allows investigators to accurately quantify two successive rounds of cell division. By optimizing immunostaining protocols our approach can detect very low dose thymidine analogues administered via the drinking water, safe to administer to mice for prolonged periods of time. Consequently, our technique can be used to detect cell turnover in very long-lived tissues. Optimal immunofluoresent staining results can be achieved in multiple tissue types, including pancreas, skin, gut, liver, adrenal, testis, ovary, thyroid, lymph node, and brain. We have also applied this technique to identify oncogenic transformation within tissues. We have further applied this technique to determine if transit-amplifying cells contribute to growth or renewal of tissues. In this sense, sequential administration of thymidine analogues represents a novel approach for studying the origins and survival of cells involved in tissue homeostasis

Computational Inference of Neural Information Flow Networks

Determining how information flows along anatomical brain pathways is a fundamental requirement for understanding how animals perceive their environments, learn, and behave. Attempts to reveal such neural information flow have been made using linear computational methods, but neural interactions are known to be nonlinear. Here, we demonstrate that a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) inference algorithm we originally developed to infer nonlinear transcriptional regulatory networks from gene expression data collected with microarrays is also successful at inferring nonlinear neural information flow networks from electrophysiology data collected with microelectrode arrays. The inferred networks we recover from the songbird auditory pathway are correctly restricted to a subset of known anatomical paths, are consistent with timing of the system, and reveal both the importance of reciprocal feedback in auditory processing and greater information flow to higher-order auditory areas when birds hear natural as opposed to synthetic sounds. A linear method applied to the same data incorrectly produces networks with information flow to non-neural tissue and over paths known not to exist. To our knowledge, this study represents the first biologically validated demonstration of an algorithm to successfully infer neural information flow networks