The Impact of Environment on the Perception of Art

When we see a work of art, no matter the environmental setting, we have some sort of reaction to the piece. An analysis of some of the art housed in museums in New York City, Paris, and Rome, this thesis outlines some examples of different environmental factors affecting a viewer’s perception of that specific visual representation. The surrounding works, the accompanying wall texts and labels, as well as the structure of the building or specific room that houses the work, affects how a viewer might perceive it. Similar works offer different experiences when displayed in different places, such as Monet’s Water Lilies in MoMA and in the Musée de l’Orangerie. Other art pieces gain significance because of the harmony or contrast that they create with their surroundings--whether it be other paintings, as in the Frick Collection, or large machinery, as in the case of the Centrale Montemartini in Rome.Plan II Honors Progra

The social burden of malaria: what are we measuring?

Definitions of the burden of malaria vary by public health discipline. Epidemiologists and economists commonly use a quantitative approach to measure risk factors and associate them with disease outcomes. In contrast, since burden is itself a cultural construct, an anthropologic perspective of the burden of disease considers the sociocultural context in which these risk factors exist. This broader concept of burden is rarely tackled, most likely stemming from a lack of understanding of what is meant by the term social burden. This report describes the concept from an anthropologic perspective. The aim is to provide a better understanding of the process through which social and cultural factors affect the biomedical burden of malaria. The consequences of adopting this perspective for public health in general and malaria interventions in particular are discussed

Time for change: a new training programme for morpho-molecular pathologists?

The evolution of cellular pathology as a specialty has always been driven by technological developments and the clinical relevance of incorporating novel investigations into diagnostic practice. In recent years, the molecular characterisation of cancer has become of crucial relevance in patient treatment both for predictive testing and subclassification of certain tumours. Much of this has become possible due to the availability of next-generation sequencing technologies and the whole-genome sequencing of tumours is now being rolled out into clinical practice in England via the 100 000 Genome Project. The effective integration of cellular pathology reporting and genomic characterisation is crucial to ensure the morphological and genomic data are interpreted in the relevant context, though despite this, in many UK centres molecular testing is entirely detached from cellular pathology departments. The CM-Path initiative recognises there is a genomics knowledge and skills gap within cellular pathology that needs to be bridged through an upskilling of the current workforce and a redesign of pathology training. Bridging this gap will allow the development of an integrated 'morphomolecular pathology' specialty, which can maintain the relevance of cellular pathology at the centre of cancer patient management and allow the pathology community to continue to be a major influence in cancer discovery as well as playing a driving role in the delivery of precision medicine approaches. Here, several alternative models of pathology training, designed to address this challenge, are presented and appraised

Cenozoic evolution of the eastern Black Sea: a test of depth-dependent stretching models

Subsidence analysis of the eastern Black Sea basin suggests that the stratigraphy of this deep, extensional basin can be explained by a predominantly pure-shear stretching history. A strain-rate inversion method that assumes pure-shear extension obtains good fits between observed and predicted stratigraphy. A relatively pure-shear strain distribution is also obtained when a strain-rate inversion algorithm is applied that allows extension to vary with depth without assuming its existence or form. The timing of opening of the eastern Black Sea, which occupied a back-arc position during the closure of the Tethys Ocean, has also been a subject of intense debate; competing theories called for basin opening during the Jurassic, Cretaceous or Paleocene/Eocene. Our work suggests that extension likely continued into the early Cenozoic, in agreement with stratigraphic relationships onshore and with estimates for the timing of arc magmatism. Further basin deepening also appears to have occurred in the last 20 myr. This anomalous subsidence event is focused in the northern part of the basin and reaches its peak at 15–10 Ma. We suggest that this comparatively localized shortening is associated with the northward movement of the Arabian plate. We also explore the effects of paleowater depth and elastic thickness on the results. These parameters are controversial, particularly for deep-water basins and margins, but their estimation is a necessary step in any analysis of the tectonic subsidence record stored in stratigraphy. <br/

Insight into the fundamental trade-offs of diffusion MRI from polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography in ex vivo human brain

In the first study comparing high angular resolution diffusion MRI (dMRI) in the human brain to axonal orientation measurements from polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PSOCT), we compare the accuracy of orientation estimates from various dMRI sampling schemes and reconstruction methods. We find that, if the reconstruction approach is chosen carefully, single-shell dMRI data can yield the same accuracy as multi-shell data, and only moderately lower accuracy than a full Cartesian-grid sampling scheme. Our results suggest that current dMRI reconstruction approaches do not benefit substantially from ultra-high b-values or from very large numbers of diffusion-encoding directions. We also show that accuracy remains stable across dMRI voxel sizes of 1 ​mm or smaller but degrades at 2 ​mm, particularly in areas of complex white-matter architecture. We also show that, as the spatial resolution is reduced, axonal configurations in a dMRI voxel can no longer be modeled as a small set of distinct axon populations, violating an assumption that is sometimes made by dMRI reconstruction techniques. Our findings have implications for in vivo studies and illustrate the value of PSOCT as a source of ground-truth measurements of white-matter organization that does not suffer from the distortions typical of histological techniques.Published versio

User-centered development of a Virtual Research Environment to support collaborative research events

This paper discusses the user-centred development process within the Collaborative Research Events on the Web (CREW) project, funded under the JISC Virtual Research Environments (VRE) programme. After presenting the project, its aims and the functionality of the CREW VRE, we focus on the user engagement approach, grounded in the method of co-realisation. We describe the different research settings and requirements of our three embedded user groups and the respective activities conducted so far. Finally we elaborate on the main challenges of our user engagement approach and end with the project’s next steps

Das Narrative Policy Framework: Ein Reiseführer für Policy-Narrative

The last decade has seen the rise of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) as a valuable theoretical framework for advancing knowledge of the policy process. In this article, we investigate the NPF’s “travel” capacities across geographies, political systems, policy fields, levels of analysis, methodological approaches, and other theories of the policy process. We assess these capabilities by reviewing extant research and mapping newly explored territories. While we find that the NPF embodies all necessary conditions to travel to different settings, the empirical applications remain largely confined to the U.S. and European contexts, environmental policy, the meso level of analysis, the use of content analysis of documents as a methodological approach, and only a few combinations with other theories of the policy process. Our findings indicate that the NPF can travel well. However, we call for further research to conceptualize the NPF’s macro level, to replicate NPF scholarship beyond liberal democratic institutional contexts, and to affirm the framework’s capacity to be generalizable in varied settings.In den letzten zehn Jahren hat sich das Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) zum wegweisenden theoretischen Rahmen bei der Erklärung der Rolle von Narrativen in Politikgestaltungsprozessen entwickelt. Dieser Artikel untersucht die Kapazitäten des NPF, in anderen Regionen und politischen Systemen, neuen Politikfeldern, Analyseebenen und methodologischen Ansätzen sowie in Kombination mit weiteren Theorien des Politikprozesses angewandt zu werden. Diese „Reisefähigkeit“ des NPF wird anhand eines systematischen Reviews der bestehenden NPF-Literatur bewertet. Dabei werden neue, kürzlich erkundete Territorien speziell hervorgehoben. Das systematische Review zeigt, dass das NPF zwar alle notwendigen Bedingungen erfüllt, um in verschiedene Umgebungen zu reisen. Trotzdem beschränken sich bisherige empirische Anwendungen des NPF weitgehend auf die amerikanischen und europäischen Kontexte, die Umweltpolitik, die Meso-Ebene der Analyse, die Inhaltsanalyse von Dokumenten und auf nur wenige Kombinationen mit anderen Theorien des Politikprozesses. Diese Ergebnisse weisen darauf hin, dass das NPF grundsätzlich gut reisen kann. Wir fordern jedoch weitere Forschung, um die Makro-Ebene des NPF zu konzeptualisieren, NPF-Forschung außerhalb von liberal-demokratischen Systemen zu replizieren und die Generalisierbarkeit des NPF in verschiedenen Kontexten zu bestätigen

L’histoire de l’art aux États-Unis et le tournant vers la mondialité

Depuis des débuts profondément régionaux, l’histoire de l’art aux États-Unis a évolué pour devenir une des ressources mondiales majeures sur le plan de l’édition, de la pédagogie et des expositions. Au regard des utopies initiales de « transnationalisme » et de cosmopolitisme qui ont émergé à l’aube du xxe siècle, nous affirmons que les obsessions actuelles à propos de la mondialisation ne sont pas simplement la conséquence du consensus induit par l’économie dans un monde de l’art dominé par l’Occident, mais qu’elles posent également de réels défis pour une discipline fondée sur les « écoles nationales » et la segmentation linguistique. L’histoire mondialisée de l’art que nous défendons s’appuie amplement sur les critiques poststructuraliste et postcoloniale. Ainsi, le récit euro-américain de l’évolution de l’art apparaît comme une des nombreuses histoires potentielles du mouvement des peuples et des cultures au cours de la longue histoire des pays en voie de développement.From deeply provincial beginnings, art history in the US has now become a primary purveyor of the global in books, pedagogy, and exhibitions. Reflecting on earlier dreams of “trans-nationalism” and cosmopolitan worldliness emerging at the dawn of the twentieth century, we argue that the current obsessions with the global are not merely the outcome of economically-driven consensus in a Western-dominated art world, but offer real challenges to a discipline founded on “national schools” and linguistic segmentation. The global art history we argue for takes full advantage of post-structural and post-colonial critique, positioning the Euro-American narrative of art’s progression as one among many potential stories of the movement of peoples and cultures in the long history of the developing world.Seit den zutiefst regionalen Anfängen hat sich die Kunstgeschichte in den USA zu einer der weltweit führenden Ressourcen im Bereich der Veröffentlichungen, der Lehre und der Ausstellungen entwickelt. In Anbetracht der anfänglichen Utopien des „Transnationalismus“ und des Kosmopolitismus zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts kommen wir zu der Behauptung, dass die aktuellen Obsessionen in Bezug auf die Globalisierung nicht lediglich als Konsequenz des ökonomisch getragenen Konsens einer westlich dominierten Kunstwelt zu verstehen sind, sondern auch als echte Herausforderungen einer Fachdisziplin, die ursprünglich auf „nationalen Schulen“ und sprachlicher Segmentierung beruht. Eine globalisierte Kunstgeschichte, wie wir sie verteidigen, stützt sich deutlich auf die poststrukturalistische und postkoloniale Kritik. Unter diesem Blickwinkel erscheint die euro-amerikanische Kunsterzählung als eine von vielen potentiellen Geschichten innerhalb der Bewegung von Völkern und Kulturen im Rahmen der langen Geschichte der Entwicklungsländer.Dopo un inizio profondamente “regionale”, la storia dell’arte negli Stati Uniti ha conosciuto un’evoluzione che l’ha portata ad essere una delle principali risorse mondiali sul piano dell’edizione, dell’insegnamento e delle mostre. Rispetto alle utopie iniziali di “transnazionalismo” e di cosmopolitismo emerse all’alba del Novecento, sosteniamo che le ossessioni attuali sulla mondializzazione non sono solo la conseguenza del consenso generato dall’economia in un mondo dell’arte dominato dall’Occidente, ma che esse lanciano anche delle sfide reali per una disciplina fondata sulle “scuole nazionali” e sulla segmentazione linguistica. La storia mondializzata dell’arte che noi difendiamo riposa molto sulle critiche del post-strutturalismo e del post-colonialismo. Il racconto euro-americano dell’evoluzione dell’arte appare pertanto come una delle numerose storie potenziali del movimento dei popoli e delle culture nel corso della lunga storia dei paesi in via di sviluppo.Después de un principio muy regional, la historia del arte en los Estados Unidos ha evolucionado para convertirse en uno de los mayores recursos mundiales a nivel de la edición, la pedagogía y las exposiciones. En vista de las utopías iniciales de «transnacionalismo» y cosmopolitismo que emergieron en los albores del siglo xx, podemos afirmar que las actuales obsesiones respecto de la mundialización no son la mera consecuencia del consenso inducido por la economía en un mundo del arte dominado por Occidente, sino que también plantean verdaderos desafíos en un campo de estudio basado en las «escuelas nacionales» y la segmentación lingüística. La historia mundializada del arte que defendemos se apoya ampliamente en las críticas postestructuralistas y postcoloniales. Así, el relato euroamericano de la evolución del arte aparece como una de las numerosas historias potenciales del movimiento de los pueblos y las culturas a lo largo de la extensa historia de los países en vía de desarrollo