End-Semester Status Report-Year 2-Assistive Technology Lab

The Assistive Technology Lab continues to be an extremely significant piece of the Thinkfinity grant...The focus of the AT Lab at 163 Williams Street at Pace University is to help students, teacher-candidates, professors and the community with researching, studying and addressing the needs of the community within the area of assistive technology for the user. Various levels of progress have been made this semester regarding the types of equipment the lab needs to function, as well as amassing information for the AT Lab Committee and fulfilling the realization of a working lab

The Postcolonial Jew in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay and Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood

Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988) and Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood (1997) are novels that feature Jewish protagonists; both represent the history of the Holocaust and diverge from the postcolonial landscapes the authors are associated with. Though the Indian Desai and the Anglo-Caribbean Phillips are distinct as postcolonial subjects, their Jewish protagonists help to create what Rebecca Walkowitz terms “comparison literature,” the “work of books that analyse… the transnational contexts of their own production, circulation, and study.” In other words, Desai and Phillips are interested in the structures and dynamics of ethnic identification in a global context. Through what I term the postcolonial Jew, these novels move beyond the notion of ethnic authenticity to a cosmopolitan view of identity as hybrid and positional. The authenticity of and in these novels does not rely on the authors’ ethnic backgrounds, but is found in their ways of telling history. Their intention is to break from the traditional association of Jews with the Judeo-Christian tradition, to represent them instead as separate from the Occidental tradition. As a result, Desai and Phillips utilise a decentred Jew, one who is constantly in flux, disparate, conflicted, and the embodiment of diaspora. The existential condition of this Jew —the placeless place he is called upon to inhabit, which the reader is invited to visit— and the paradoxical states of belonging and displacement become the conditions of all displaced others and represent the constant deferral of meaning in the narrative act

A taxonomy and cultural analysis of intra‐hospital patient transfers

Existing research on intra‐hospital patient transitions focuses chiefly on handoffs, or exchanges of information, between clinicians. Less is known about patient transfers within hospitals, which include but extend beyond the exchange of information. Using participant observations and interviews at a 1,541‐bed, academic, tertiary medical center, we explored the ways in which staff define and understand patient transfers between units. We conducted observations of staff (n = 16) working in four hospital departments and interviewed staff (n = 29) involved in transfers to general medicine floors from either the Emergency Department or the Medical Intensive Care Unit between February and September 2015. The collected data allowed us to understand transfers in the context of several hospital cultural microsystems. Decisions were made through the lens of the specific unit identity to which staff felt they belonged; staff actively strategized to manage workload; and empty beds were treated as a scarce commodity. Staff concepts informed the development of a taxonomy of intra‐hospital transfers that includes five categories of activity: disposition, or determining the right floor and bed for the patient; notification to sending and receiving staff of patient assignment, departure and arrival; preparation to send and receive the patient; communication between sending and receiving units; and coordination to ensure that transfer components occur in a timely and seamless manner. This taxonomy widens the study of intra‐hospital patient transfers from a communication activity to a complex cultural phenomenon with several categories of activity and views them as part of multidimensional hospital culture, as constructed and understood by staff.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145512/1/nur21875.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145512/2/nur21875_am.pd

CD8+ T lymphocyte responses target functionally important regions of Protease and Integrase in HIV-1 infected subjects

BACKGROUND: CD8+ T cell responses are known to be important to the control of HIV-1 infection. While responses to reverse transcriptase and most structural and accessory proteins have been extensively studied, CD8 T cell responses specifically directed to the HIV-1 enzymes Protease and Integrase have not been well characterized, and few epitopes have been described in detail. METHODS: We assessed comprehensively the CD8 T cell responses to synthetic peptides spanning Protease and Integrase in 56 HIV-1 infected subjects with acute, chronic, or controlled infection using IFN-γ-Elispot assays and intracellular cytokine staining. Fine-characterization of novel CTL epitopes was performed on peptide-specific CTL lines in Elispot and (51)Chromium-release assays. RESULTS: Thirteen (23%) and 38 (68%) of the 56 subjects had detectable responses to Protease and Integrase, respectively, and together these targeted most regions within both proteins. Sequence variability analysis confirmed that responses cluster largely around conserved regions of Integrase, but responses against a large, highly conserved region of the N-terminal DNA-binding domain of Integrase were not readily detected. CD8 T cell responses targeted regions of Protease that contain known Protease inhibitor mutation residues, but strong Protease-specific CD8 T cell responses were rare. Fine-mapping of targeted epitopes allowed the identification of three novel, HLA class I-restricted, frequently-targeted optimal epitopes. There were no significant correlations between CD8 T cell responses to Protease and Integrase and clinical disease category in the study subjects, nor was there a correlation with viral load. CONCLUSIONS: These findings confirm that CD8 T cell responses directed against HIV-1 include potentially important functional regions of Protease and Integrase, and that pharmacologic targeting of these enzymes will place them under both drug and immune selection pressure

The Lantern Vol. 61, No. 1, December 1993

• In Order to Succeed • Essay • Power of Human Self-Interest: Man vs. Car • In Setterich • Wandering Wanda • Maybe Kitchens • Saltiness • Homecoming • Perfect • Sincerely, Jen • A Midterm and a Paper • Prophet Junkie • Soundless Memo • After Ireland, Part 1https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/lantern/1142/thumbnail.jp

The Lantern Vol. 60, No. 1, December 1992

• Bacon and Incense • The Rubix Cube • Recovery • Untitled • Star Six Nine • Breakfast Talk • Life as a Worker Bee • Cabal • One Cold Sunday Morning With Eggs • By the End of February • Eight Years and Five Minutes Away • Distance • Stuart\u27s Gift • Solitary Remembrance • The Gene Thing • Addictionhttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/lantern/1139/thumbnail.jp

BiblioBouts: A Scalable Online Social Game for the Development of Academic Research Skills

Researchers at the School of Information of the University of Michigan are designing, developing, and evaluating BiblioBouts, an online game that helps students learn academic research skills. Players practice using online library research tools while they work on an in-class assignment and produce a high-quality bibliography, at the same time as they are competing against each other to win the game! While librarians are experts at helping students who want to learn about academic research, most students are reluctant participants because they want just-in-time personal assistance that is tailored to their unique information needs, and faculty are reluctant to cede class time. The BiblioBouts project enlists games to teach undergraduate students information literacy skills and concepts in the classroom. Social gaming reinforces principles of good learning, including getting results by trial and error, self-discovery, following hunches and reinforcement through repetition. BiblioBouts also incorporates collaborative problem solving and participation in a community of learning. The project aims to explore how games can be utilized to achieve information literacy goals and to yield open-source game software that libraries could use immediately to enhance their information literacy programs. The LOEX presentation will incorporate a live interactive demo of the game, as well as videos demonstrating gameplay. We will discuss challenges in situating the game into the classroom and integrating it into existing course syllabi. The presentation will describe how we have adapted the game in response to feedback from students and instructors during the pilot process