Publicly Private: Disclosing Grief on Facebook*

This essay examines the transition of the grieving process into the online realm of social network sites—specifically Facebook—through two prominent communication theories: social penetration theory and communication privacy management theory. The desire for both openness and human connection through the disclosure of personal information and the maintaining of privacy boundaries is made evident by analyzing this social phenomenon through these two theories. Disclosing grief on Facebook can be advantageous by developing relational closeness among mourners, but it can also create discomfort when acquaintances, or people with less intimate relationships with the discloser, view the personal feelings of loss. Additionally, disclosing such private information on Facebook calls into question matters of privacy ownership, boundary creation, and boundary turbulence. This social phenomenon broadens the scopes of these theories by transitioning them from simply traditional face-to-face communication to computer-mediated communication

A Portfolio of Compositions

The pieces in this portfolio cover a wide range of methods and styles - from work for a single vocalising percussionist, to singing bowl and electronics and a work for full orchestra. The aim of this portfolio is to demonstrate my technical and musical proficiency as well as to give an overview of my personal composing philosophy and style. The portfolio opens with a work for orchestra, A Study in Scarlet. It differs from my previous orchestral works and is based on a musical code of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's book, titled A Study in Scarlet. This was read in the 2009 Todd/ NSZO Young Composer Readings. The second work is .manatu.. It features tinkly piano, wind chimes and ethnic instrumentalists in a chamber ensemble to create a musical sound world. This was written for and premiered at Bang on a Can's summer music festival in Massachusetts 2009. The piano work .ātanga. is an adaptation of .manatu. for solo pianist and was written for the Dame Malvina Major Foundations Showcase Concert in New Plymouth. This adaptation proved to be a worthwhile exercise in efficient use of music material. Wrong Number is a Janet Frame poem set for soprano and real-time effect processing of audio. Confessions - Part I and II, for solo violin and string orchestra is based on the Fibonacci series and explores my love for string sonorities. Sand Song was written for a friend who asked me to set a poem she wrote. Here I demonstrate my love for setting text and voice to say something beautiful and precise. This song now stands as a eulogy for her Father. Parihaka, for vocalising percussionist, is a setting of Apirana Taylor's poem Parihaka and was written for Australian performer Louise Devenish. I explore further in the realm of live acoustic and electroacoustic music with Orison a piece I wrote for myself to perform live with singing bowl and Ableton Live. Finally The Headlines Today for five improvising musicians explores the music of shouting and the vernacular of place

Boom

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 33).This thesis is about my relationship to technology through the medium of my body. By implication it is about how our culture and society view and interact with technology's various manifestations. I use my voice as the medium of this exploration. Boom is a sound and video insertion embodying and re-presenting my vocal arguments and mergings with the machines of a cement pour at the Big Dig in Boston in the spring of the year 2000. Boom offers noise, physical auditive immersion, and hopefully a provocative and meaningful perspective on relating with machines. It creates temptations and in draughts of air around the metaphysical ideas it conjures with the humor and poetry of anarchy. By merging and falling out, struggling and capturing, losing and regaining, the machines and I are negotiating our relationship, our take on each other, our roles, our positions relative to each other. Each machine becomes an extension of my body, as I am resonating within its cavities and it is resonating within me. There is a constant arbitration of who is driving whom, my voice driving the machine's motor and/or the machine's vibrations moving my body, feelings, and perceptions of self within space. As I follow a machine's vibratory lead, try to keep up, to match, to catch, through matching vocalizations, I access previously unacknowledged places within myself. Something like the mantras of other cultures - magical brutal mysterious consonance expressed in broad daylight. Communication occurs through the correspondence of internal and external vibrations. Emanating and absorbing. The tones have an acupunctural precision, able to vibrate certain organs, interstitial tissues, cells, thereby accessing the body's warehouses. The performances of myself with the construction machines in the city throw new perspectives on how we conceive of not only the gigantic machines in our environments, but of other elements of technology as well, such as the intimate integration with small electronic devices being cultivated everywhere within our reach.by Kelly E. Dobson.S.M

Multiple breaking patterns in the Brout-Englert-Higgs effect beyond perturbation theory

In many BSM theories, especially GUTs, introducing a Brout-Englert-Higgs effect allows for multiple breaking patterns of the gauge symmetry. The possibility to select a particular pattern is usually decisive for the phenomenological viability of a theory. Beyond perturbation theory it is necessary to replace the Brout-Englert-Higgs effect by a manifestly gauge-invariant description. We study the simplest case with multiple breaking patterns, an $\textrm{SU}(3)$ Yang-Mills theory coupled to a single scalar `Higgs' field in the adjoint representation, on the lattice. We find that only one pattern remains at fixed parameters and gauge-fixing strategy, and that the associated quantum effective potential emerges from a non-trivial interplay of many aspects.Comment: 32 pages, 22 figures (with several subfigures), 1 tabl

Permission to Play: Fostering Enterprise Creativities in Music Technology through Extracurricular Interdisciplinary Collaboration

This chapter explores how an extra-curricular approach to enabling interdisciplinary collaboration at The University of Huddersfield has helped music technology undergraduates to become enterprising. It explains the format of a collaboration hub (referred to as CollabHub), and following a brief overview of the key concepts that informed this initiative it provides examples that begin to illustrate how we can recognise risk taking, creativity and enterprise in this assessment-free setting. The CollabHub presents a continually evolving context for collaborative play, which is starting to build a community of apprenticeship. It is framed by research that has what David Hargreaves described as a social agenda for examining collaborative creativity in music. Looking ahead, this work considers how we may begin recognising and rewarding enterprise in this kind of extra-curricular context. Considering these themes and the broader implications for creative practice within and beyond a HMEI, it raises implications questions that may guide new research on extra-curricular collaborative play and enterprise development in HMEIs

Cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging in severe aortic stenosis: impact of surgical and trans-catheter aortic valve replacement on reverse remodelling and fibrosis

Introduction: Aortic stenosis (AS) is the commonest valvular lesion in the developed world and is associated with adverse cardiac remodelling. With its excellent accuracy and reproducibility, cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging is an ideal tool to assess cardiac remodelling and reverse remodelling following surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) and transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI). The aims of this thesis were: 1) to evaluate gender differences in AS and following aortic valve replacement, 2) to evaluate the incidence of post-procedural myocardial infarction following SAVR and TAVI, 3) to describe the immediate effect of TAVI on reverse remodelling and 4) to assess the impact of TAVI-induced left bundle branch block (LBBB) . Methods: Between January 2009 and April 2015, patients with severe AS undergoing either TAVI or SAVR were prospectively recruited. Patients underwent comprehensive 1.5T CMR evaluation pre-procedure, prior to hospital discharge and 6m post-procedure. Results: 1) Women with severe AS have a lower indexed left ventricular (LV) mass than men (65.3± 18.4 vs. 81.5±21.3g/m2, p<0.001). 6m following valve replacement, LV mass regression is similar between genders (men 21.7±10.1 vs. women 18.4±11.0%, p=0.121). 2) Myocardial infarction (MI) is more frequent following SAVR than TAVI (n=10 (26%) vs. n=3 (5%), p=0.004). 3) Over 10% of LV mass regression occurs prior to hospital discharge following TAVI and is more pronounced in the absence of myocardial fibrosis (p=0.005). 4) TAVI-induced LBBB is associated with a reduced LVEF 6m following TAVI compared with those with a narrow QRS (-2.1±6.9 vs. +4.6±7.8%, p=0.002). Conclusions: TAVI and SAVR are associated with favourable cardiac reverse remodelling which does not differ according to gender and begins prior to hospital discharge. SAVR is associated with a higher incidence of post-procedural MI than TAVI. TAVI-induced LBBB should be avoided where possible due to its unfavourable effects on cardiac reverse remodelling

Categorisation of continuous risk factors in epidemiological publications: a survey of current practice

BACKGROUND: Reports of observational epidemiological studies often categorise (group) continuous risk factor (exposure) variables. However, there has been little systematic assessment of how categorisation is practiced or reported in the literature and no extended guidelines for the practice have been identified. Thus, we assessed the nature of such practice in the epidemiological literature. Two months (December 2007 and January 2008) of five epidemiological and five general medical journals were reviewed. All articles that examined the relationship between continuous risk factors and health outcomes were surveyed using a standard proforma, with the focus on the primary risk factor. Using the survey results we provide illustrative examples and, combined with ideas from the broader literature and from experience, we offer guidelines for good practice. RESULTS: Of the 254 articles reviewed, 58 were included in our survey. Categorisation occurred in 50 (86%) of them. Of those, 42% also analysed the variable continuously and 24% considered alternative groupings. Most (78%) used 3 to 5 groups. No articles relied solely on dichotomisation, although it did feature prominently in 3 articles. The choice of group boundaries varied: 34% used quantiles, 18% equally spaced categories, 12% external criteria, 34% other approaches and 2% did not describe the approach used. Categorical risk estimates were most commonly (66%) presented as pairwise comparisons to a reference group, usually the highest or lowest (79%). Reporting of categorical analysis was mostly in tables; only 20% in figures. CONCLUSIONS: Categorical analyses of continuous risk factors are common. Accordingly, we provide recommendations for good practice. Key issues include pre-defining appropriate choice of groupings and analysis strategies, clear presentation of grouped findings in tables and figures, and drawing valid conclusions from categorical analyses, avoiding injudicious use of multiple alternative analyses

Internal initiation of translation of the TrkB mRNA is mediated by multiple regions within the 5′ leader

Translational regulation of the dendritically localized mRNA encoding for the neurotrophin receptor TrkB has important ramifications for synaptic function. We examined whether the TrkB mRNA is translated through an internal initiation entry site (IRES). The human TrkB 5′ leaders are derived from the use of alternative promoters and alternative splicing, but all 5′ leaders share a common exon. Insertion of a full-length 5′ leader, as well as the common exon into the intercistronic region of a dicistronic luciferase construct, yielded luciferase activity generated from the second cistron that was either equivalent or higher than that observed from the encephalomyocarditis virus IRES. Moreover, inhibiting cap-dependent translation ex vivo and in in vitro lysates had only a minimal effect on the translation of mRNA containing the TrkB 5′ leader. Dissecting the 5′ leader showed that the IRES is located in the exon common to all TrkB 5′ leaders. Moreover, six regions ranging from 2 to 25 nt were identified that either promoted or inhibited IRES activity. Taken together, these results suggest that the 5′ leader of the human TrkB mRNA contains multiple cis-elements that regulate internal initiation of translation and that this mechanism may contribute significantly to the translation of the TrkB mRNA in neuronal dendrites

Être en sécurité, être soi-même : résultats de l’enquête canadienne sur la santé des jeunes trans

Cette étude a été financée par la subvention no MOP119472 des Instituts de recherche en santé du Canada, Institut de la santé des femmes et des hommes.Disponible en anglais dans EDUQ.info sous le titre "Being Safe, Being Me: Results of the Canadian Trans Youth Health Survey