1,877 research outputs found
Chump Change, A Moral Tale of Misogyny and Accountability: A Screenplay
This Culmanating Project is a full-length motion picture screenplay titled Chump Change.
Chump Change is a moral tale of the accountability that a young misogynist named Clay has to face when his long-suffering wife, Lena, pulls the rug out from under their marriage. As Clay struggles to put his life back together while fighting Lena for the custody of his son, he has to face up to his own responsibility for his plight.
As Clay develops more consciousness about the darker side of his own nature, he searches for the answer to the question. 11 Can people really change? He aspires to enlightenment, but fears that his inability to create meaningful change may be insurmountable.
Clay\u27s newfound self-awareness is put to the test when he starts to date the spunky Caitland. Caitland, by all accounts, seems to have it all together. She is self-confident, secure in her sexuality, and always one-step ahead of any game-playing that Clay tries to bring to the relationship. Clay falls hard for Cait, and finds strength and maturity in the example set by Cait, even when the pressures of a custody battle for his son are at their peak.
But the weight of Clay\u27s past problems with women, authority, and ghosts of his childhood prove to be too much when Clay meets Cait\u27s overbearing father. Olay sees in Cait\u27s father his own botched upbringing and the man that he was destined to become had he not been forced out of his rut. Clay explodes in front of Cait\u27s parents, embarrassing Cait and effectively ending their relationship.
It is the loss of Cait, finally, that teaches Clay that a little personal sacrifice is a small price to pay for maintaining important relationships.
Chump Cha.nge\u27s themes of misogyny, layered symbolism, and dual interpretation were all inspired by other cinematic releases, as was it\u27s experimentation with a p rotagonist that may be unlikeable. These modern movies, Oleanna, Smoke, and In the Company of Men, influenced the style and content of the screenplay that is the core of the Culmanating Project. and are discussed at some length
Anderson v. Augusta Chronicle: The Plight of the Actual Malice Doctrine in South Carolina Defamation Jurisprudence
Non-unique factorization of polynomials over residue class rings of the integers
We investigate non-unique factorization of polynomials in Z_{p^n}[x] into
irreducibles. As a Noetherian ring whose zero-divisors are contained in the
Jacobson radical, Z_{p^n}[x] is atomic. We reduce the question of factoring
arbitrary non-zero polynomials into irreducibles to the problem of factoring
monic polynomials into monic irreducibles. The multiplicative monoid of monic
polynomials of Z_{p^n}[x] is a direct sum of monoids corresponding to
irreducible polynomials in Z_p[x], and we show that each of these monoids has
infinite elasticity. Moreover, for every positive integer m, there exists in
each of these monoids a product of 2 irreducibles that can also be represented
as a product of m irreducibles.Comment: 11 page
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Determining cooling rates from mica <sup>40</sup>Ar/ <sup>39</sup>Ar thermochronology data: effect of cooling path shape
Tectonic models are commonly underpinned by metamorphic cooling rates derived fromd iffusive-loss thermochronology data. Such cooling agesare usually linked to temperature via Dodson’s 1973 closure temperature (TC) formulation, which specifies a 1/time shaped cooling path. Geologists, however,commonly discuss cooling rates as a linear temperature/time shape. We present the results of a series of simple finite-difference diffusion models for Ar diffusion in muscovite and biotite that show that the difference in recorded age between 1/t and linear cooling paths increases significantly with hotter starting temperatures, slower cooling rates and smaller grain sizes. Our results show that it is essential to constrain the cooling path shape in order to make meaningful interpretations of the measured data
Buoyancy Instabilities in a Weakly Collisional Intracluster Medium
The intracluster medium of galaxy clusters is a weakly collisional, high-beta
plasma in which the transport of heat and momentum occurs primarily along
magnetic-field lines. Anisotropic heat conduction allows convective
instabilities to be driven by temperature gradients of either sign, the
magnetothermal instability (MTI) in the outskirts of non-isothermal clusters
and the heat-flux buoyancy-driven instability (HBI) in their cooling cores. We
employ the Athena MHD code to investigate the nonlinear evolution of these
instabilities, self-consistently including the effects of anisotropic viscosity
(i.e. Braginskii pressure anisotropy), anisotropic conduction, and radiative
cooling. We highlight the importance of the microscale instabilities that
inevitably accompany and regulate the pressure anisotropies generated by the
HBI and MTI. We find that, in all but the innermost regions of cool-core
clusters, anisotropic viscosity significantly impairs the ability of the HBI to
reorient magnetic-field lines orthogonal to the temperature gradient. Thus,
while radio-mode feedback appears necessary in the central few tens of kpc,
conduction may be capable of offsetting radiative losses throughout most of a
cool core over a significant fraction of the Hubble time. Magnetically-aligned
cold filaments are then able to form by local thermal instability. Viscous
dissipation during the formation of a cold filament produces accompanying hot
filaments, which can be searched for in deep Chandra observations of nearby
cool-core clusters. In the case of the MTI, anisotropic viscosity maintains the
coherence of magnetic-field lines over larger distances than in the inviscid
case, providing a natural lower limit for the scale on which the field can
fluctuate freely. In the nonlinear state, the magnetic field exhibits a folded
structure in which the field-line curvature and field strength are
anti-correlated.Comment: 20 pages, 20 figures, submitted to ApJ; Abstract abridge
Cell-specific discrimination of desmosterol and desmosterol mimetics confers selective regulation of LXR and SREBP in macrophages.
Activation of liver X receptors (LXRs) with synthetic agonists promotes reverse cholesterol transport and protects against atherosclerosis in mouse models. Most synthetic LXR agonists also cause marked hypertriglyceridemia by inducing the expression of sterol regulatory element-binding protein (SREBP)1c and downstream genes that drive fatty acid biosynthesis. Recent studies demonstrated that desmosterol, an intermediate in the cholesterol biosynthetic pathway that suppresses SREBP processing by binding to SCAP, also binds and activates LXRs and is the most abundant LXR ligand in macrophage foam cells. Here we explore the potential of increasing endogenous desmosterol production or mimicking its activity as a means of inducing LXR activity while simultaneously suppressing SREBP1c-induced hypertriglyceridemia. Unexpectedly, while desmosterol strongly activated LXR target genes and suppressed SREBP pathways in mouse and human macrophages, it had almost no activity in mouse or human hepatocytes in vitro. We further demonstrate that sterol-based selective modulators of LXRs have biochemical and transcriptional properties predicted of desmosterol mimetics and selectively regulate LXR function in macrophages in vitro and in vivo. These studies thereby reveal cell-specific discrimination of endogenous and synthetic regulators of LXRs and SREBPs, providing a molecular basis for dissociation of LXR functions in macrophages from those in the liver that lead to hypertriglyceridemia
Analysis of sloppiness in model simulations: unveiling parameter uncertainty when mathematical models are fitted to data
This work introduces a Bayesian approach to assess the sensitivity of model
outputs to changes in parameter values, constrained by the combination of prior
beliefs and data. This novel approach identifies stiff parameter combinations
that strongly affect the quality of the model-data fit while simultaneously
revealing which of these key parameter combinations are informed primarily from
the data or are also substantively influenced by the priors. We focus on the
very common context in complex systems where the amount and quality of data are
low compared to the number of model parameters to be collectively estimated,
and showcase the benefits of our technique for applications in biochemistry,
ecology, and cardiac electrophysiology. We also show how stiff parameter
combinations, once identified, uncover controlling mechanisms underlying the
system being modeled and inform which of the model parameters need to be
prioritized in future experiments for improved parameter inference from
collective model-data fitting
SDSS galaxy bias from halo mass-bias relation and its cosmological implications
We combine the measurements of luminosity dependence of bias with the
luminosity dependent weak lensing analysis of dark matter around galaxies to
derive the galaxy bias and constrain nonlinear mass and cosmological
parameters. We take advantage of theoretical and simulation predictions that
predict that while halo bias is rapidly increasing with mass for high masses,
it is nearly constant in low mass halos. We use a new weak lensing analysis
around the same SDSS galaxies to determine their halo mass probability
distribution. These halo mass probability distributions are used to predict the
bias for each luminosity subsample and we find an excellent agreement with
observed values. The required nonlinear mass suggests slightly lower matter
density than usually assumed, Omegam=0.25+/- 0.03 for the simplest models. We
combine the bias constraints with those from the WMAP and the SDSS power
spectrum analysis to derive new constraints on bias and sigma_8. For the most
general parameter space we find sigma_8=0.88+/- 0.06 and b_*=0.99+/- 0.07. In
the context of spatially flat models we improve the limit on the neutrino mass
for the case of 3 degenerate families from m_nu<0.6eV without bias to
m_nu<0.18eV with bias (95% c.l.), which is weakened to m_nu<0.24eV if running
is allowed. The corresponding limit for 3 massless + 1 massive neutrino is
1.37eV.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, accepted in PR
Molecular characterization of microbiota in cerebrospinal fluid from patients with CSF shunt infections using whole genome amplification followed by shotgun sequencing
Understanding the etiology of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) shunt infections and reinfections requires detailed characterization of associated microorganisms. Traditionally, identification of bacteria present in the CSF has relied on culture methods, but recent studies have used high throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA genes. Here we evaluated the method of shotgun DNA sequencing for its potential to provide additional genomic information. CSF samples were collected from 3 patients near the beginning and end of each of 2 infection episodes. Extracted total DNA was sequenced by: (1) whole genome amplification followed by shotgun sequencing (WGA) and (2) high-throughput sequencing of the 16S rRNA V4 region (16S). Taxonomic assignments of sequences from WGA and 16S were compared with one another and with conventional microbiological cultures. While classification of bacteria was consistent among the 3 approaches, WGA provided additional insights into sample microbiological composition, such as showing relative abundances of microbial versus human DNA, identifying samples of questionable quality, and detecting significant viral load in some samples. One sample yielded sufficient non-human reads to allow assembly of a high-qualit
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