Les mots qui nous guident

I wrote this poem to express my feelings about learning French. As a native English speaker with a passion for the English language, I find that using my second language can be cumbersome, slow, and imprecise. By contrast, when I speak English, words light up with connections, connotations, context, and history. My interests in poetry, literature, etymology, and linguistics give me many insights, but these insights are largely limited to the English language. Because I lack this rich background in French, I often feel like I am stumbling in the dark when I speak it. As you can imagine, this makes it hard to stay motivated as I learn. I wrote this poem to remind myself that, as I build my French skills, they will allow me to understand individuals, points of view, cultures, and entire worlds that would otherwise be inaccessible to me. I will be able to appreciate and be enriched by nuances that would otherwise be lost due to the shift in connotation and cultural context which is inherent to translation. This knowledge will certainly benefit me individually, but the effort I make to gain it also honors the lives and stories of French speakers everywhere. This poem reminds me of the value in this learning journey, even when it is tedious and difficult. This poem reminds me that each new word I learn will guide me on that journey, until the francophone world lights up just as much as my anglophone world does

WIMBY: What's in my backyard?

Location-aware social media is increasing being used to inform decisions in a spatiotemporal context. However, collecting, fusing, processing and merging information from different social media platforms is a challenge because of diversity of information between different platforms. Here, we present the WIMBY, which is able to access multiple social media platforms to help users answer the question "What's in my Backyard?". In doing so, the WIMBY helps to address the challenge of dealing with diverse social media information. It is believed that the WIMBY can be extended to include more information sources (including other social media platforms) to help inform decision makers in a wider array of applications

Novel Kelch-like Protein, KLEIP, Is Involved in Actin Assembly at Cell-Cell Contact Sites of Madin-Darby Canine Kidney Cells

Dynamic rearrangements of cell-cell adhesion underlie a diverse range of physiological processes, but their precise molecular mechanisms are still obscure. Thus, identification of novel players that are involved in cell-cell adhesion would be important. We isolated a human kelch-related protein, Kelch-like ECT2 interacting protein (KLEIP), which contains the broad-complex, tramtrack, bric-a-brac (BTB)/poxvirus, zinc finger (POZ) motif and six-tandem kelch repeats. KLEIP interacted with F-actin and was concentrated at cell-cell contact sites of Madin-Darby canine kidney cells, where it colocalized with F-actin. Interestingly, this localization took place transiently during the induction of cell-cell contact and was not seen at mature junctions. KLEIP recruitment and actin assembly were induced around E-cadherin–coated beads placed on cell surfaces. The actin depolymerizing agent cytochalasin B inhibited this KLEIP recruitment around E-cadherin–coated beads. Moreover, constitutively active Rac1 enhanced the recruitment of KLEIP as well as F-actin to the adhesion sites. These observations strongly suggest that KLEIP is localized on actin filaments at the contact sites. We also found that N-terminal half of KLEIP, which lacks the actin-binding site and contains the sufficient sequence for the localization at the cell-cell contact sites, inhibited constitutively active Rac1-induced actin assembly at the contact sites. We propose that KLEIP is involved in Rac1-induced actin organization during cell-cell contact in Madin-Darby canine kidney cells