Animation, Abstraction, Sampling: Kota Ezawa in Conversation with Karen Beckman

Kota Ezawa Kota Ezawa is a Japanese-German artist currently based in San Francisco. He re-creates, frame by frame, animated sequences from television, cinema, and art history using basic digital drawing and animation software. He has had solo exhibitions at venues that include The Box, Wexner Center for the Arts; Hayward Gallery, London; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; and the Santa Monica Museum of Art. in Conversation with Karen Beckman Karen Beckman is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Modern Media and interim chair of the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an editor of Grey Room

Isatin Derivatives as Inhibitors of Microtubule Assembly

This thesis describes the rationale, design, and syntheses of derivatives of isatin (1-H-indole-2,3-dione). Isatin was identified, during a high throughput screen of 10,000 compounds, as a potential scaffold for microtubule-destabilizing agents. Additional screening of purchased isatin derivatives gave rise to four substitution patterns of interest, 7-arylisatins, 5-methyl-N¬-alkyl/aryl isatins, 5-chloro-N-alkyl/aryl isatins and 5,7-dichloro-N-alkylated isatins. Series of compounds with the substitutions of interest were synthesized to further probe the structure-activity relationship (SAR) of isatin. The SAR study showed that substitutions in the 5- and 7- positions of the aromatic ring combined with N-substitutions increased the disruption of microtubule assembly. The 7-phenylisatin and N-arylisatin derivatives were inactive in the biological assay. Several of the 5-chloro-N-alkylisatins and the 5,7-dichloro-N-alkylisatins were cytotoxic in both MCF-7 and NCI/ADR-RES cell lines. 5,7-Dichloro-N-(4-bromobenzyl)isatin was the most active compound against MCF-7 cells, IC50 = 2.1 µM. To date the most cytotoxic compound tested is 5-methyl-N-(1-propyl)isatin, with an IC50 value of 52 nM (microtubule assembly IC50 = 2.6 µM) in the drug resistant cancer cell line NCI/ADR-RES

Crash

Artists, writers, and filmmakers from Andy Warhol and J. G. Ballard to Alejandro González Iñárritu and Ousmane Sembène have repeatedly used representations of immobilized and crashed cars to wrestle with the conundrums of modernity. In Crash, Karen Beckman argues that representations of the crash parallel the encounter of film with other media, and that these collisions between media offer useful ways to think about alterity, politics, and desire. Examining the significance of automobile collisions in film genres including the “cinema of attractions,” slapstick comedies, and industrial-safety movies, Beckman reveals how the car crash gives visual form to fantasies and anxieties regarding speed and stasis, risk and safety, immunity and contamination, and impermeability and penetration

Associations of PON1 and genetic ancestry with obesity in early childhood.

Obesity in children has become an epidemic in the U.S. and is particularly prominent in minority populations such as Mexican-Americans. In addition to physical activity and diet, genetics also plays a role in obesity etiology. A few studies in adults and adolescents suggest a link between obesity and paraoxonase 1 (PON1), a multifunctional enzyme that can metabolize organophosphate pesticides and also has antioxidant properties. We determined PON1192 genotype and arylesterase levels (ARYase, measure of PON1 enzyme quantity), to characterize the relationship between PON1 and obesity in young Mexican-American children (n = 373) living in an agricultural community in California. Since PON1 polymorphisms and obesity both vary between ethnic groups, we estimated proportional genetic ancestry using 106 ancestral informative markers (AIMs). Among children, PON1192 allele frequencies were 0.5 for both alleles, and the prevalence of obesity was high (15% and 33% at ages two and five, respectively). The average proportion of European, African, and Native American ancestry was 0.40, 0.09, and 0.51, yet there was wide inter-individual variation. We found a significantly higher odds of obesity (9.3 and 2.5- fold) in PON1192QQ children compared to PON1192RR children at ages two and five, respectively. Similar relationships were seen with BMI Z-scores at age two and waist circumference at age five. After adjusting for genetic ancestry in models of PON1 and BMI Z-score, effect estimates for PON1192 genotype changed 15% and 9% among two and five year old children, respectively, providing evidence of genetic confounding by population stratification. However even after adjustment for genetic ancestry, the trend of increased BMI Z-scores with increased number of PON1192 Q alleles remained. Our findings suggest that PON1 may play a role in obesity independent of genetic ancestry and that studies of PON1 and health outcomes, especially in admixed populations, should account for differences due to population stratification

Community Policing and Changing Crime Rates: Does What Police Do Matter?

Community policing is one of the most significant transformations in American policing (Maguire and King, 2004). While many assert that community policing played a significant role in the decline of national index crime over the last decade, research has yet to fully explore the contribution of community policing activities to aggregate crime trends (Eck and Maguire, 2001; GAO, 2005; Levitt, 2004; Zhao and Thurman, 2004). To fill this gap, this study assessed police involvement in eight community policing activities between 1997 and 2000. Focusing on subgroups of jurisdictions determined to be the most different on the basis of index crime rate change between the four year period of study, the research tested whether police involvement in community policing distinguished jurisdictions measuring improvement from those measuring worsened total, property, and violent index crime rates. Overall, the study found no discernible relationships between police involvement in the community policing activities of interest and improvements in index crime rates within the subgroups of jurisdictions and time period examined. These findings suggest community policing alone will unlikely affect crime change and emphasizes the need for improving measures of community policing practices in support of studies of effectiveness

A Case of Critical Aortic Stenosis Masquerading as Acute Coronary Syndrome

Serum cardiac troponins I and T are reliable and highly specific markers of myocardial injury. Studies have shown that at least 20% of patients with severe aortic stenosis have detectable serum troponins. This case report describes a patient who presented as suspected acute coronary syndrome with markedly elevated troponin levels, who was later found to have normal coronaries and critical aortic stenosis. This case highlights the need for comprehensive and accurate physical examination in patients who present with angina. Critical aortic stenosis may cause such severe subendocardial ischemia as to cause marked elevation in cardiac markers and mimic an acute coronary syndrome. Careful physical examination will lead to an earlier use of non invasive techniques, such as echocardiography to confirm the correct diagnosis and the avoidance of inappropriate treatments such as intravenous nitroglycerin and glycoprotein IIb/IIIa inhibitors

Improved cache performance in Monte Carlo transport calculations using energy banding

We present an energy banding algorithm for Monte Carlo (MC) neutral particle transport simulations which depend on large cross section lookup tables. In MC codes, read-only cross section data tables are accessed frequently, exhibit poor locality, and are typically too much large to fit in fast memory. Thus, performance is often limited by long latencies to RAM, or by off-node communication latencies when the data footprint is very large and must be decomposed on a distributed memory machine. The proposed energy banding algorithm allows maximal temporal reuse of data in band sizes that can flexibly accommodate different architectural features. The energy banding algorithm is general and has a number of benefits compared to the traditional approach. In the present analysis we explore its potential to achieve improvements in time-to-solution on modern cache-based architectures.United States. Department of Energy. Office of Science (Contract DE-AC02-06CH11357

Improved parental dietary quality is associated with children’s dietary intake through the home environment

Background Improving access to supermarkets has been shown to improve some dietary outcomes, yet there is little evidence for such effects on children. Relatedly, there is a dearth of research assessing the impact of a structural change (i.e. supermarket in a former food desert) on the home environment and its relationship with children’s diet. Objective Assess the relative impact of the home environment on children’s diet after the introduction of a new supermarket in a food desert. Methods Among a randomly selected cohort of households living in a food desert, parental diet was assessed before and after the opening of a full-service supermarket. The home environment and children’s intake of fruits and vegetables was measured at one point – after the store’s opening. Structural equation models were used to estimate the pathways between changes in parental dietary quality at follow-up and children’s dietary intake through the home environment. ResultsParental dietary improvement after the supermarket opened was associated with having a better home environment (β = 0.45, p = 0.001) and with healthier children’s dietary intake (β = 0.46, p Conclusions Policy solutions designed to improve diet among low-resource communities should take into account the importance of the home environment