Cancer Niche as a Garbage Disposal Machine: Implications of TCM-Mediated Balance of Body-Disease for Treatment of Cancer.

Cancer epidemic led to worldwide to search for a new "game changer" concept to govern cancer research and cancer treatment. Western medicine-based cancer research has been extending the impasse without resolution in sigh for improving survival of patients with solid malignant tumors in the last four decades due to heterogeneity in cancer tissues. Such a deadlock charts a course to learn lessons from the developing countries, directly or indirectly to complement the exhausted Western medicine. We propose a new concept of "Cancer niche as a garbage disposal machine" with implications of traditional Chinese medicine-mediated restoration of normal balance between body and disease to bring the fight against cancer under control

Touching Watelet: L'Art de peindre and the Performance of Philosophical Materialism

Writing on Claude-Henri Watelet's 1760 L'Art de peindre, Denis Diderot noted sneeringly: "If the poem belonged to me, I would cut out the vignettes, put them under glass, and throw the rest in the fire." Diderot imagines a violent dismemberment, touching Watelet's book with fingers, scissors, and fire. I too break apart L'Art de peindre. But rather than relegating it to blade and flame, I reassemble the whole and reframe its parts through the sense of touch. I analyze its engravings, poems, and related portrait by Jean-Baptiste Greuze each in relation to eighteenth-century conceptions of the artist's touch and philosophies of materialism. By using touch to tackle L'Art de peindre historically and theoretically, I argue Watelet's book performs Étienne Bonnot de Condillac's theories of combinatory imagination and sensorial knowledge--particularly, the "double experience" of touch--through its representation of both self and external world, Watelet and the art of painting.Master of Art

Antiquity and Empire: The Construction of History in Western European Representations of the Ottoman Empire, 1650-1830

European interest in antiquities, particularly those associated with the Greco-Roman past or biblical geography, flourished in the early modern period. Travelers, as well as merchants and diplomats, increasingly sought out new sites in Anatolia and the Middle East wherein to study, draw, and collect a variety of ancient objects, from small coins and sculptural fragments to monumental architecture. Beginning with sixteenth-century Ottoman expansion into Attica and Syria and ending with the French and British excavations near Mosul in the 1840s, this dissertation examines how Europeans and Ottomans represented and claimed antiquity at Palmyra (Tadmor), Aleppo, Nineveh (Mosul), and Athens using images, texts, and collections. Although each chapter focuses on a specific site, the project conceptualizes Palmyra, Aleppo, Nineveh, and Athens as physical and discursive nodes in unwieldy antiquarian, mercantile, and political networks. Tracing the movement of individuals and objects through these networks is central to understanding how ideas about antiquity circulated in this period. By incorporating the sites’ ancient cultural heritage into their own narratives about the past, both materially and discursively, early modern artists, authors, and collectors justified European and Ottoman imperial claims to antiquities and the sites themselves. The first chapter on Palmyra examines visual and textual accounts created after Europeans “rediscovered” the desert city’s monumental classical architecture in the late seventeenth century. Chapter two analyzes the construction of Aleppo as a place of mercantile and cultural exchange in early modern art, architecture, travel literature, and collections. The third chapter proposes that Nineveh and Mosul were particularly flexible as formal and historical signs before the nineteenth-century excavations of Assyrian art and architecture. Chapter four argues early modern Athens functioned as a physical and discursive battleground over Hellenic antiquity because Europeans and Ottomans both creatively integrated the city’s ancient monuments into their own nationalistic narratives and religious practices. Lastly, the conclusion addresses how the images and objects considered in the project continue to inform current representations of and debates about ancient cultural heritage—both material and intangible—in Greece, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.Doctor of Philosoph

Breathing Signature as Vitality Score Index Created by Exercises of Qigong: Implications of Artificial Intelligence Tools Used in Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Rising concerns about the short- and long-term detrimental consequences of administration of conventional pharmacopeia are fueling the search for alternative, complementary, personalized, and comprehensive approaches to human healthcare. Qigong, a form of Traditional Chinese Medicine, represents a viable alternative approach. Here, we started with the practical, philosophical, and psychological background of Ki (in Japanese) or Qi (in Chinese) and their relationship to Qigong theory and clinical application. Noting the drawbacks of the current state of Qigong clinic, herein we propose that to manage the unique aspects of the Eastern 'non-linearity' and 'holistic' approach, it needs to be integrated with the Western "linearity" "one-direction" approach. This is done through developing the concepts of "Qigong breathing signatures," which can define our life breathing patterns associated with diseases using machine learning technology. We predict that this can be achieved by establishing an artificial intelligence (AI)-Medicine training camp of databases, which will integrate Qigong-like breathing patterns with different pathologies unique to individuals. Such an integrated connection will allow the AI-Medicine algorithm to identify breathing patterns and guide medical intervention. This unique view of potentially connecting Eastern Medicine and Western Technology can further add a novel insight to our current understanding of both Western and Eastern medicine, thereby establishing a vitality score index (VSI) that can predict the outcomes of lifestyle behaviors and medical conditions

A Crop Yield Change Emulator for Use in GCAM and Similar Models: Persephone v1.0

Future changes in Earth system state will impact agricultural yields and, through these changed yields, can have profound impacts on the global economy. Global gridded crop models estimate the influence of these Earth system changes on future crop yields but are often too computationally intensive to dynamically couple into global multisector economic models, such as the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) and other similar-in-scale models. Yet, generalizing a faster site-specific crop models results to be used globally will introduce inaccuracies, and the question of which model to use is unclear given the wide variation in yield response across crop models. To examine the feedback loop among socioeconomics, Earth system changes, and crop yield changes, rapidly generated yield responses with some quantification of crop response uncertainty are desirable. The Persephone v1.0 response functions presented in this work are based on the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) Coordinated Climate-Crop Modeling Project (C3MP) sensitivity test data set and are focused on providing GCAM and similar models with a tractable number of rapid to evaluate dynamic yield response functions corresponding to a range of the yield response sensitivities seen in the C3MP data set. With the Persephone response functions, a new variety of agricultural impact experiments will be open to GCAM and other economic models: for example, examining the economic impacts of a multi-year drought in a key agricultural region and how economic changes in response to the drought can, in turn, impact the drought

A Tale of Two Sylamores: Understanding Relationships Among Land Use, Nutrients, and Aquatic Communities Across a Subsidy-Stress Gradient

Agricultural land use is known to degrade aquatic systems with high inputs of nutrients, sediments, and pesticides. Increased nutrients can lead to increased algal growth and thus possible hypoxic conditions in slow moving water, while increased sediment loads have been shown to obstruct light and reduce substrate stability. These conditions negatively impact primary producers, macroinvertebrates, and fish. However, small-scale changes in land use can subsidize an aquatic ecosystem instead, where an increase in nutrients allows nutrient-limited biota to flourish, and minor increases in sedimentation may help support populations of collector-filterers. The stimulation in performance caused by small disturbances is part of the subsidy-stress gradient, where increasing perturbation subsidizes an ecosystem until a certain threshold is reached, at which a decline in performance and increased variability starts to occur. The North and South Sylamore watersheds in north Arkansas provide a useful template to investigate the subsidy-stress gradient in relation to land use. North Sylamore flows through the Ozark National Forest and has a heavily forested catchment, while South Sylamore flows through mostly private land, some of which is pasture (23%). Physicochemical, macroinvertebrate, and fish data were collected from multiple sites within each watershed to determine if South Sylamore is exhibiting a response to pasture/agriculture characteristic of a subsidy-stress gradient. Sites within South Sylamore had significantly higher nitrate levels, larger macroinvertebrate populations dominated by collector-filterers, and greater abundance of algivorous fish, suggesting South Sylamore may be subsidized by the surrounding pastoral lands. However, South Sylamore also had a significantly lower proportional abundance of sensitive macroinvertebrate taxa and more unique tolerant fish taxa, suggesting South Sylamore is experiencing stress as well. Habitat quality of South Sylamore could be improved by restoration of trees within the riparian zone. Monitoring aquatic systems for subsidy-stress responses can inform restoration/management decisions and guide intervention prior to watersheds and aquatic communities becoming overly stressed

Bioenergy and the importance of land use policy in a carbon-constrained world

Policies aimed at limiting anthropogenic climate change would result in significant transformations of the energy and land-use systems. However, increasing the demand for bioenergy could have a tremendous impact on land use, and can result in land clearing and deforestation. Wise et al. (2009a,b) analyzed an idealized policy to limit the indirect land use change emissions from bioenergy. The policy, while effective, would be difficult, if not impossible, to implement in the real world. In this paper, we consider several different land use policies that deviate from this first-best, using the Joint Global Change Research Institute’s Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM). Specifically, these new frameworks are (1) a policy that focuses on just the above-ground or vegetative terrestrial carbon rather than the total carbon, (2) policies that focus exclusively on incentivizing and protecting forestland, and (3) policies that apply an economic penalty on the use of biomass as a proxy to limit indirect land use change emissions. For each policy, we examine its impact on land use, land-use change emissions, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, agricultural supply, and food prices

Clinical Faculty in the Legal Academy: Hiring, Promotion, and Retention

The Chair of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Clinical Legal Education appointed us in 2005 to the Task Force on the Status of Clinicians and the Legal Academy (Task Force) to examine who is teaching in clinical programs and using clinical methodologies in American law schools and to identify the most appropriate models for clinical appointments within the legal academy. Our charges reflected two ongoing concerns: 1) the need to collect valid, reliable, and helpful data that would inform discussions on the breadth of clinical education in the legal academy and the status of clinical educators within the academy; and 2) the need to have a foundation for complex conversations on how American law schools should view and value their clinical teachers. The first primarily describes the present, while the second carries implications for the future