Disrupting Conventions: When and Why Writers Take Up Innovation

Genre scholars have exposed the ideological nature of genres by examining how they promote and normalize certain values, epistemologies, and power relations. Recently, scholars have extended this work to uptake--the ways in which writers take up others' actions, texts, and genres. Doing so has revealed how uptakes become normalized and, thus, conventional, yet less attention has been given to how conventional uptakes can be disrupted through critical interventions. Given that composition pedagogies often seek to disrupt reading and writing practices to encourage critical awareness, a stronger understanding of when and why writers innovate or use convention is necessary and timely. This dissertation explores theoretically when and why writers innovate or follow conventions and also performs a qualitative research study that tests "a pedagogy of uptake awareness and disruption." By doing so, it theoretically contributes to uptake studies and it argues for conventionalizing alternative uptakes in the composition classroom to encourage rhetorical agency

The Capstone ePortfolio in an Undergraduate Public Health Program: Accreditation, Assessment, and Audience

The Bachelor of Science in Public Health (BSPH) degree program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte) was launched in 2007, and was initially accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health in 2009. We admit approximately 40–45 students each fall to the upper division major, through a competitive admissions process. During the junior and senior years, BSPH majors complete a core set of required courses including internship; 18 credit hours of restricted electives; and any minor offered by the university (except public health). During 2014–2015, the Department of Public Health Sciences was one of five campus units supported by UNC General Administration to pilot the use of ePortfolios as a tool to help students integrate learning across the courses that make up the major. The pilot program continued for 2 additional years, to promote enduring faculty efforts. We subsequently outline the development and implementation of ePortfolio pedagogy in the BSPH program at UNC Charlotte, including preliminary assessment of outcomes the past 3 years. The adoption of ePortfolios has been instrumental in students' educational experiences for over 2 decades. The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has advocated that “ePortfolios allow faculty and other educational professionals to help students organize their learning; preserve the variety of forms in which their learning occurs; and reflect upon their learning.” We have learned that effective student ePortfolios do not arise in a vacuum. In collaboration with like-minded campus colleagues including those associated with the university's Communication Across the Curriculum program, we have encountered contributing forces related to the process of “collection, selection, and reflection” including intentional assignments that yield effective student artifacts; and authentic feedback to students through adoption and modification of the AAC&U VALUE rubrics. We conclude that internal and external forces drive the development of ePortfolio content; students embrace opportunities to document learning when those opportunities are structured; the development of the ePortfolio is relational—consistent with student attributes; and ePortfolios enable evidence-based approaches to meet accreditation demands, assessment needs, and workforce expectations

BOSC 2019, the 20th annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference.

The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference is a volunteer-organized meeting that covers open source software development and open science in bioinformatics. Launched in 2000, BOSC has been held every year since. BOSC 2019, the 20th annual BOSC, took place as one of the Communities of Special Interest (COSIs) at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology meeting (ISMB/ECCB 2019). The two-day meeting included a total of 46 talks and 55 posters, as well as eight Birds of a Feather interest groups. The keynote speaker was University of Cape Town professor Dr. Nicola Mulder, who spoke on "Building infrastructure for responsible open science in Africa". Immediately after BOSC 2019, about 50 people participated in the two-day CollaborationFest (CoFest for short), an open and free community-driven event at which participants work together to contribute to bioinformatics software, documentation, training materials, and use cases

Calcineurin signaling promotes Takotsubo syndrome

Acknowledgements We thank P. Nawroth (Department of Endocrinology, University Hospital Heidelberg, Germany) for the opportunity to conduct RIA (corticosterone), HPLC (catecholamines) and automated Cobas (hs-TnT) analysis in his laboratory. S. Martinache (Department of General Internal Medicine and Psychosomatics, University Hospital Heidelberg, Germany), J. Krebs-Haupenthal, S. Harrack and M. Oestringer (all affiliated with the Institute of Experimental Cardiology, Medical Faculty, Heidelberg University, Germany) provided excellent technical assistance. This work was supported by grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (BA 2258/9-1 and the CRC 1550, INST 35/1699-1) and the Deutsches Zentrum für Herz-Kreislauf-Forschung (DZHK; German Centre for Cardiovascular Research), from the BMBF (German Ministry of Education and Research) to J.B., from the German Cardiac Society (DGK) to B.B., I.B. and M.S., and from the German Heart Foundation (DHS) to M.A. C.D. and N.F. were also supported by the CRC 1550 and DZHK. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, the decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Computational strategies for dissecting the high-dimensional complexity of adaptive immune repertoires

The adaptive immune system recognizes antigens via an immense array of antigen-binding antibodies and T-cell receptors, the immune repertoire. The interrogation of immune repertoires is of high relevance for understanding the adaptive immune response in disease and infection (e.g., autoimmunity, cancer, HIV). Adaptive immune receptor repertoire sequencing (AIRR-seq) has driven the quantitative and molecular-level profiling of immune repertoires thereby revealing the high-dimensional complexity of the immune receptor sequence landscape. Several methods for the computational and statistical analysis of large-scale AIRR-seq data have been developed to resolve immune repertoire complexity in order to understand the dynamics of adaptive immunity. Here, we review the current research on (i) diversity, (ii) clustering and network, (iii) phylogenetic and (iv) machine learning methods applied to dissect, quantify and compare the architecture, evolution, and specificity of immune repertoires. We summarize outstanding questions in computational immunology and propose future directions for systems immunology towards coupling AIRR-seq with the computational discovery of immunotherapeutics, vaccines, and immunodiagnostics.Comment: 27 pages, 2 figure

Collaborating with consumer and community representatives in health and medical research in Australia: results from an evaluation

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Objective</p> <p>To collaborate with consumer and community representatives in the <it>Alcohol and Pregnancy Project </it>from 2006-2008 <url>http://www.ichr.uwa.edu.au/alcoholandpregnancy</url> and evaluate researchers' and consumer and community representatives' perceptions of the process, context and impact of consumer and community participation in the project.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We formed two reference groups and sought consumer and community representatives' perspectives on all aspects of the project over a three year period. We developed an evaluation framework and asked consumer and community representatives and researchers to complete a self-administered questionnaire at the end of the project.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Fifteen researchers (93.8%) and seven (53.8%) consumer and community representatives completed a questionnaire. Most consumer and community representatives agreed that the process and context measures of their participation had been achieved. Both researchers and consumer and community representatives identified areas for improvement and offered suggestions how these could be improved for future research. Researchers thought consumer and community participation contributed to project outputs and outcomes by enhancing scientific and ethical standards, providing legitimacy and authority, and increasing the project's credibility and participation. They saw it was fundamental to the research process and acknowledged consumer and community representatives for their excellent contribution. Consumer and community representatives were able to directly influence decisions about the research. They thought that consumer and community participation had significant influence on the success of project outputs and outcomes.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Consumer and community participation is an essential component of good research practice and contributed to the <it>Alcohol and Pregnancy Project </it>by enhancing research processes, outputs and outcomes, and this participation was valued by community and consumer representatives and researchers. The National Health and Medical Research Council in Australia expects researchers to work in partnership and involve consumer and community representatives in health and medical research, and to evaluate community and consumer participation. It is important to demonstrate whether consumer and community participation makes a difference to health and medical research.</p

T-Lymphocytes Enable Osteoblast Maturation via IL-17F during the Early Phase of Fracture Repair

While it is well known that the presence of lymphocytes and cytokines are important for fracture healing, the exact role of the various cytokines expressed by cells of the immune system on osteoblast biology remains unclear. To study the role of inflammatory cytokines in fracture repair, we studied tibial bone healing in wild-type and Rag1−/− mice. Histological analysis, µCT stereology, biomechanical testing, calcein staining and quantitative RNA gene expression studies were performed on healing tibial fractures. These data provide support for Rag1−/− mice as a model of impaired fracture healing compared to wild-type. Moreover, the pro-inflammatory cytokine, IL-17F, was found to be a key mediator in the cellular response of the immune system in osteogenesis. In vitro studies showed that IL-17F alone stimulated osteoblast maturation. We propose a model in which the Th17 subset of T-lymphocytes produces IL-17F to stimulate bone healing. This is a pivotal link in advancing our current understanding of the molecular and cellular basis of fracture healing, which in turn may aid in optimizing fracture management and in the treatment of impaired bone healing

Unconstrained three-dimensional reaching in Rhesus monkeys

To better understand normative behavior for quantitative evaluation of motor recovery after injury, we studied arm movements by non-injured Rhesus monkeys during a food-retrieval task. While seated, monkeys reached, grasped, and retrieved food items. We recorded three-dimensional kinematics and muscle activity, and used inverse dynamics to calculate joint moments due to gravity, segmental interactions, and to the muscles and tissues of the arm. Endpoint paths showed curvature in three dimensions, suggesting that maintaining straight paths was not an important constraint. Joint moments were dominated by gravity. Generalized muscle and interaction moments were less than half of the gravitational moments. The relationships between shoulder and elbow resultant moments were linear during both reach and retrieval. Although both reach and retrieval required elbow flexor moments, an elbow extensor (triceps brachii) was active during both phases. Antagonistic muscles of both the elbow and hand were co-activated during reach and retrieval. Joint behavior could be described by lumped-parameter models analogous to torsional springs at the joints. Minor alterations to joint quasi-stiffness properties, aided by interaction moments, result in reciprocal movements that evolve under the influence of gravity. The strategies identified in monkeys to reach, grasp, and retrieve items will allow the quantification of prehension during recovery after a spinal cord injury and the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions

The Psychological Science Accelerator: Advancing Psychology Through a Distributed Collaborative Network

Source at https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245918797607.Concerns about the veracity of psychological research have been growing. Many findings in psychological science are based on studies with insufficient statistical power and nonrepresentative samples, or may otherwise be limited to specific, ungeneralizable settings or populations. Crowdsourced research, a type of large-scale collaboration in which one or more research projects are conducted across multiple lab sites, offers a pragmatic solution to these and other current methodological challenges. The Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA) is a distributed network of laboratories designed to enable and support crowdsourced research projects. These projects can focus on novel research questions or replicate prior research in large, diverse samples. The PSA’s mission is to accelerate the accumulation of reliable and generalizable evidence in psychological science. Here, we describe the background, structure, principles, procedures, benefits, and challenges of the PSA. In contrast to other crowdsourced research networks, the PSA is ongoing (as opposed to time limited), efficient (in that structures and principles are reused for different projects), decentralized, diverse (in both subjects and researchers), and inclusive (of proposals, contributions, and other relevant input from anyone inside or outside the network). The PSA and other approaches to crowdsourced psychological science will advance understanding of mental processes and behaviors by enabling rigorous research and systematic examination of its generalizability

A global experiment on motivating social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic

Finding communication strategies that effectively motivate social distancing continues to be a global public health priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cross-country, preregistered experiment (n = 25,718 from 89 countries) tested hypotheses concerning generalizable positive and negative outcomes of social distancing messages that promoted personal agency and reflective choices (i.e., an autonomy-supportive message) or were restrictive and shaming (i.e., a controlling message) compared with no message at all. Results partially supported experimental hypotheses in that the controlling message increased controlled motivation (a poorly internalized form of motivation relying on shame, guilt, and fear of social consequences) relative to no message. On the other hand, the autonomy-supportive message lowered feelings of defiance compared with the controlling message, but the controlling message did not differ from receiving no message at all. Unexpectedly, messages did not influence autonomous motivation (a highly internalized form of motivation relying on one’s core values) or behavioral intentions. Results supported hypothesized associations between people’s existing autonomous and controlled motivations and self-reported behavioral intentions to engage in social distancing. Controlled motivation was associated with more defiance and less long-term behavioral intention to engage in social distancing, whereas autonomous motivation was associated with less defiance and more short- and long-term intentions to social distance. Overall, this work highlights the potential harm of using shaming and pressuring language in public health communication, with implications for the current and future global health challenges