Otherworldly but not the Otherworld: Tolkien’s Adaptation of Medieval Faerie and Fairies into a Sub-creative Elvendom

Through a comparative analysis of Lothlorien and the medieval stories of Lanval and Sir Orfeo, this article attempts to shed some light on how the inherently pessimistic and recursive nature of Tolkien\u27s sub-creation affects his adaptation of medieval Faerie into a sub-creative elvendom born of the creative instincts of the elves. In doing so, the article also questions Tolkien\u27s adherence to parameters of Faerie and characteristics of elves as laid out in OFS

Developing a Monitoring Protocol for the Monkey River Watershed, Belize, Central America

The study of tropical aquatic systems has been limited. Research in developing countries can be challenging due to inadequate resources and cultural variety. Generally, efforts are concentrated on developing and maintaining economic stability rather than ecological sustainability. The aim of this project was to preliminarily develop and utilize a rapid bioassessment protocol (RBP) for the Monkey River watershed in Belize by determining which metrics best described overall stream health. Like biomonitoring protocols already established for temperate systems, a regional tropical aquatic watershed monitoring program should provide information including stream and watershed health. These protocols score systems on a variety of parameters including water chemistry, land use, stream physiognomy, and biological components. Since an understanding of tropical aquatic environments cannot be gained through studying temperate systems, this project was necessary. Human impacts are an important factor in aquatic systems. Changes in land use practices in a watershed can drastically alter stream processes. The RPB used measures of basic water chemistry and stream morphometrics. The protocol included categorical assessment of biological attributes of each reach. Land cover was determined using satellite imagery and ground truth data. Results from human impact assessment, land cover determination, and the RBP were compared to show trends in the aquatic ecosystem of the Monkey River basin. Few factors measured using the RBP showed significant trends with regard to human impact. Temperature, pH, fish, and algae all showed trends with increasing human impacts. PCA showed that pH, specific conductivity, depth, and riparian zone width were important in determining differences among sites. Future studies including continuous monitoring of land use and stream ecosystems may show evidence of how land affects streams in Belize

Acoustic Wave Separation – A non-filtration approach for continuous clarification of perfusion cell culture prior to capture chromatography

Advances in perfusion cell culture have led to cell densities in excess of 100 million cells/mL with product titers similar to those obtained in fed batch (3-5 g/L). This performance has necessitated improvements in the yield and efficiency of the cell harvest and clarification stage to generate a stream of Harvested Cell Culture Fluid (HCCF) for capture chromatography and subsequent downstream processing. This is further driven by the evolution of continuous processes where there is a preference for a continuous feed of HCCF available for direct load to the continuous multicolumn capture chromatography step. In the present work we report on a novel disruptive and scalable single-use technology for cell retention during perfusion cell culture based on an acoustophoretic separation. Acoustic Wave Separation (AWS) technology exploits the use of low frequency acoustic forces to generate a three-dimensional standing wave across a flow channel. Recirculating cell culture from a perfusion bioreactor enters the flow channel and passes below the acoustic zone. The product-containing stream of HCCF is removed from the recirculating cell culture by passage through the acoustic zone. This yields a well clarified HCCF that can be polished using a small area filter. We report the continuous cell retention during a perfusion culture of a CHO cell line expressing a mAb. At process development (PD) scale we demonstrate the ability to continuously process CHO cell culture and retain cells at densities of up to 100 million cells/mL, at flow rates of up to 2 bioreactor volumes per day. Since the clarification technology does not involve the use of hollow fiber tangential flow filtration (TFF) we ensure 100% transmission of the mAb through the AWS device. The closed system remains operational for up to 60 days enabling this scalable technology to be suitable for use in clinical manufacture. The post-AWS HCCF is 99% clarified and any residual cellular material can be removed using a small gamma stable membrane filter or directly loaded onto a 0.2 micron filter prior to chromatography. Additionally, no demonstrable adverse effects have been identified for the quality of the HCCF, the product itself, or the viability of the returning perfusion cell culture following cell retention using AWS technology. AWS technology enables the continuous cell retention from recirculating cell culture withdrawn from perfusion bioreactors in a single-use operation. AWS technology has been shown to perform well at cell densities of up to 100 million cells/mL, so is well positioned to meet the cell retention requirements of emerging higher cell density perfusion processes that are gaining momentum in the biotech space. This novel cell retention approach offers economic benefits in terms of yield improvement as well as eliminating the hollow fiber TFF operation. This offers the advantage of a stable mAb concentration in the HCCF stream during the perfusion process. This facilitates improved process control since the volume of HCCF to load on to the capture columns remains constant which is especially important during continuous multicolumn chromatography. By comparison with hollow fiber TFF, the mAb concentration varies during the cell retention process making an integrated process more complex to control

Agglomerative clustering using cosine and Jaccard distances: a computational approach to Roman vessel taxonomy

This paper addresses the issue of standardization in the cross-comparability of different vessel assemblages. It presents a computational method for building vessel categories from the bottom up, by comparing the specified attributes of a collection of vessel-types, and grouping like with like. Thus, it provides a platform for translating vessel data which may have been classified or divided by type using one taxonomy, bringing them into communication with those categorized by another. Two different methods of measuring the similarity among vessel-types (cosine similarity and the Jaccard index) are explored, toward providing a control on the resulting ‘synthetic’ categories. An exploratory dataset, collected from published data of archaeological projects in Italy focusing on ceramic vessels of the last two centuries BCE, was used to test the performance of this approach. Project data and results are open source and are available online at https://github.com/scollinselliott/synthkat/

Saving State-Building: EU Contributions to Security Sector Reform in Afghanistan

State failure represents one of the most pressing concerns for international security in the 21st century, and Afghanistan represents one of the most concerted efforts ever witnessed to address this phenomenon in a lasting and sustainable way. This thesis takes the position that part of the difficulty in finding a remedy for state failure relates to the contradictions and dilemmas inherent within the state-building enterprise itself. The trade-offs required by certain fundamental aspects of state-building must be better understood if they are to be effectively managed, and these trade-offs cannot be understood without critically analysing the basic assumptions of state-building. To come to grips with these assumptions in concrete terms, this paper examines the European Union’s involvement in Afghanistan as a case study to apply and develop the analytical framework of “dilemma analysis.” The first major goal of this research will be to outline the tensions within state-building, and to assess their usefulness for explaining some of the difficulties facing state-builders in general terms. The second goal will be to analyse the significance of the specific combination of dilemmas relevant to the case of Afghanistan, in order to show how those dilemmas interact with each other to constrain the EU’s options for effective state-building. The third goal is to identify ways in which the EU and the international community in general can benefit from dilemma analysis when conducting state-building interventions in the future

Low Paid Older Workers: a quantitative and qualitative profile of low pay among workers aged over 50

Research on the topic of low pay has experienced a revival in Ireland over recent years triggered by a greater policy shift towards understanding and addressing low pay, growing interest in the challenges of employment precarity, and greater research and policy engagement on the relationship between earnings and living standards. While the overall scale and composition of low paid employment is now much better understood, there has been less focus on the nature and experiences of low pay among specific cohorts of the labour force. This research report examines one heretofore underexplored group, older workers in low pay and aims to establish insights into the scale and experience of low pay among employees aged 50 years and older. It brings together themes of ageing populations, labour market earnings and living conditions to explore the following questions: • what is the scale and profile of low pay among older workers? • does low pay differ between older workers and the low paid in general, and if so, how? • does the household and financial situation of older workers differ from that of the low paid in general, and if so, how? • what are the reasons behind why older workers become and remain low paid? • how do these workers evaluate their rate of pay given the work that they do? The study takes a mixed-methods approach using both quantitative and qualitative methods to explore these questions. While either of these methodological approaches could be taken by themselves to examine this issue, there are benefits associated with combining both so that the research analysis and findings offer a more comprehensive understanding of the nature, scale, contexts and experiences of low pay among older workers in Ireland.Low Pay Commission of Irelan

Use of a cAMP BRET Sensor to Characterize a Novel Regulation of cAMP by the Sphingosine 1-Phosphate/G13 Pathway

Regulation of intracellular cyclic adenosine 3',5'-monophosphate (cAMP) is integral in mediating cell growth, cell differentiation, and immune responses in hematopoietic cells. To facilitate studies of cAMP regulation we developed a BRET (bioluminescence resonance energy transfer) sensor for cAMP, CAMYEL (cAMP sensor using YFP-Epac-RLuc), which can quantitatively and rapidly monitor intracellular concentrations of cAMP in vivo. This sensor was used to characterize three distinct pathways for modulation of cAMP synthesis stimulated by presumed Gs-dependent receptors for isoproterenol and prostaglandin E2. Whereas two ligands, uridine 5'-diphosphate and complement C5a, appear to use known mechanisms for augmentation of cAMP via Gq/calcium and Gi, the action of sphingosine 1-phosphate (S1P) is novel. In these cells, S1P, a biologically active lysophospholipid, greatly enhances increases in intracellular cAMP triggered by the ligands for Gs-coupled receptors while having only a minimal effect by itself. The enhancement of cAMP by S1P is resistant to pertussis toxin and independent of intracellular calcium. Studies with RNAi and chemical perturbations demonstrate that the effect of S1P is mediated by the S1P2 receptor and the heterotrimeric G13 protein. Thus in these macrophage cells, all four major classes of G proteins can regulate intracellular cAMP

Isotope dependence of band-gap energy

The results of the quantitative investigations of the renormalization of the absorption edge of different compounds by the isotope effect are described.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure

Poverty rate prediction using multi-modal survey and earth observation data

This work presents an approach for combining household demographic and living standards survey questions with features derived from satellite imagery to predict the poverty rate of a region. Our approach utilizes visual features obtained from a single-step featurization method applied to freely available 10m/px Sentinel-2 surface reflectance satellite imagery. These visual features are combined with ten survey questions in a proxy means test (PMT) to estimate whether a household is below the poverty line. We show that the inclusion of visual features reduces the mean error in poverty rate estimates from 4.09% to 3.88% over a nationally representative out-of-sample test set. In addition to including satellite imagery features in proxy means tests, we propose an approach for selecting a subset of survey questions that are complementary to the visual features extracted from satellite imagery. Specifically, we design a survey variable selection approach guided by the full survey and image features and use the approach to determine the most relevant set of small survey questions to include in a PMT. We validate the choice of small survey questions in a downstream task of predicting the poverty rate using the small set of questions. This approach results in the best performance -- errors in poverty rate decrease from 4.09% to 3.71%. We show that extracted visual features encode geographic and urbanization differences between regions.Comment: In 2023 ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS 23) Short Papers Trac