The effect of burns on living tissues

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1947. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

The Church in the Dramas of T. S. Eliot

From the desolation of a sterile Waste Land populated by straw men, Eliot\u27s dramas increasingly portray a world of great meaning and hope. His early dramas portray a hostile and insensible world which must be fought and completely rejected by religious persons who are called to martyrdom and sainthood. Eliot\u27s acceptance of the material world and comfort with its society brings a steady transformation of his spiritual vision when at the end of his dramas the world is one of common people who strive to find meaning and make the best of a bad job, illumined by a vision of love. Especially this is seen when the rigidly drawn world forces gradually relax into common people open to change and amelioration of the human predicament, not dulled and insensible to any high destiny. A world in early plays described as waste and void becomes a brave new world in the last drama, The Elder Statesman, which most resembles the last Shakesperian world view of The Tempest with its emphasis on perfected love between men. The beneficial change in man\u27s life and the strength of the bond of love displayed increasingly throughout the dramas portray in secular terms Eliot\u27s evolving vision of the Church

Characterizing and influencing differentiation of Retinal Progenitor Cells

Blinding degenerative retinal diseases including retinitis pigmentosa, macular degeneration and glaucoma are characterized by loss of retinal neurons. At this time there is no way to replace retinal cell loss due to disease or injury since differentiated retinal cells are unable to regenerate. As a potential approach for treating retinal injury, neural progenitor cells have been proposed as a unique source of transplantable cells to replace lost cells in the damaged retina. Previous studies have transplanted a variety of neural stem cells to the eye in hopes of developing a therapy to replace retinal neurons lost to disease. Successful integration, survival and differentiation of the cell types have been variably successful. At the moment little is known about the fundamental biological differences between stem cell or progenitor cell types. Characterization of these differences will not only increase our general understanding of this broadly characterized group of cells, but also lead to development of criteria for sorting cells, evaluating their differentiation and predicting their suitability for transplantation.;In this dissertation we used protein expression profiling to characterize the molecular differences between two populations of in vitro expanded progenitor cells, retinal progenitor cells (RPCs) and brain progenitor cells (BPCs) isolated from mice of the same age and same genetic background. From this study we identified 4 stress-response proteins that were increased in expression in RPCs compared to BPCs. To see if these stress-response proteins were expressed during normal development, we used immunohistochemistry to characterize their expression in the developing retina. Finally, we tested the hypothesis that attenuation of oxidative stress would decrease the expression of stress-response proteins. We found that heat shock 60 (Hsp60), heat shock protein 70 (Hsp70), copper-zinc superoxide dismutase (Cu-Zn SOD) and catalase (CAT) are dynamically expressed in the developing retina. Further, we report that treatment of cultured progenitors with the antioxidant vitamin E (alpha-tocopherol) decreases expression of these proteins and alters their differentiation. These results are the first to characterize the expression of stress-response proteins during retinal development and demonstrate that reduction of oxidative load on cells can alter their differentiation profile

Levantine Late Neolithic pottery assemblages : the reworking of old 'cultural' typologies at Wadi ath-Thamad site 40

The relationships of the archaeological cultures of the Late Neolithic Period in the southern Levant have been the subject of much debate. As such, the excavation of the Late Neolithic site of WT-40, approximately 20 km southeast of Madaba, Jordan by the Wadi ath-Thamad Archaeological Project Survey team in 2004 will help to clarify and expand the understanding of this time period. The pottery collected from WT-40 has the potential to aid in establishing the chronological and cultural relationship between the Yarmukian and Jericho IX assemblages. The pottery assemblage from WT-40 is analyzed according to the typology developed by Garfinkel (1993), supplemented by an examination of the method of vessel construction. Statistical analyses are performed to validate the sample of pottery from WT-40 and compare it to other Late Neolithic pottery assemblages from the region. Analysis and comparison of the WT-40 pottery determined that it demonstrates typological, technological, and stylistic similarities to that of Sha 'ar Hagolan, as well as exhibiting the characteristic decoration of Jericho IX assemblages. The results indicate flaws in the current classificatory system based on "type sites" and fossiles directeurs. The overlap between Yarmukian and Jericho IX assemblages indicates that they belong to the same industry, and thus socioeconomic culture group. Pottery assemblages from Sha 'ar Hagolan and Dhra' each identify phases/facies within that industry. The assemblage from WT-40 then constitutes a regional subculture within that cultural group. This interpretation is significant in its attempt to clarify the debate concerning the Yarmukian-Jericho IX relationship, as well as to define the assemblage from WT-40 and orient subsequent research

Parent Perspectives of an Occupational Therapy Telehealth Intervention

Occupational therapy services delivered via telehealth can support families of young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in everyday routines such as mealtime, bedtime, and play. The aim of the current study was to understand the lived experiences of parents who participated in a 12-week, telehealth-delivered occupational therapy intervention (Occupation-Based Coaching). We used semi-structured interviews and subsequent thematic content analysis to understand how parents perceived the mechanism of service delivery (i.e., videoconferencing) and the content of the intervention. Themes that emerged from the data included Compatibility with Everyday Life, Collaborative Relationship, and Parent Empowerment. Parents expressed how telehealth fit within their daily lives, how telehealth supported a collaborative relationship with the occupational therapist, and how the content of the intervention built a sense of empowerment

The Accessibility Quotient: A New Measure of Open Access

INTRODUCTION The Accessibility Quotient (AQ), a new measure for assisting authors and librarians in assessing and characterizing the degree of accessibility for a group of papers, is proposed and described. The AQ offers a concise measure that assesses the accessibility of peer-reviewed research produced by an individual or group, by incorporating data on open availability to readers worldwide, the degree of financial barrier to access, and journal quality. The paper reports on the context for developing this measure, how the AQ is calculated, how it can be used in faculty outreach, and why it is a useful lens to use in assessing progress towards more open access to research. METHODS Journal articles published in 2009 and 2010 by faculty members from one department in each of MIT’s five schools were examined. The AQ was calculated using economist Ted Bergstrom’s Relative Price Index to assess affordability and quality, and data from SHERPA/RoMEO to assess the right to share the peer-reviewed version of an article. RESULTS The results show that 2009 and 2010 publications by the Media Lab and Physics have the potential to be more open than those of Sloan (Management), Mechanical Engineering, and Linguistics & Philosophy. DISCUSSION Appropriate interpretation and applications of the AQ are discussed and some limitations of the measure are examined, with suggestions for future studies which may improve the accuracy and relevance of the AQ. CONCLUSION The AQ offers a concise assessment of accessibility for authors, departments, disciplines, or universities who wish to characterize or understand the degree of access to their research output, capturing additional dimensions of accessibility that matter to faculty

Risk Propensity in Journalists: An Analysis of Journalists’ Personality Traits and How They Direct Behavior in the Field

Much like first responders, journalists run toward dangerous scenes instead of away from them, often putting themselves at risk. Unlike first responders, there is no research on a how a person’s risk propensity ties to their career. For this project, reporters of various ages and tenures were surveyed on their sensation-seeking levels and propensity to engage in risky behaviors while working as journalists. Journalism risk propensity correlated positively with sensation seeking. Risk motivations increase with age and tenure, meaning that older and more experienced journalists are more likely to engage in risky behavior. Males are more risk-prone than females. The research, which was conducted among journalists in the Southeast, indicates that hurricane news coverage yields the most positive correlations with sensation seeking, age, and tenure

Development of a marine bioassay system using the gooseneck barnacle, Pollicipes polymerus

The purpose of this study was to develop a marine bioassay procedure using eggs and larvae of Pollicipes polymerus, a stalked barnacle common on the west coast of North America. A series of experiments were run to determine optimal culture conditions for the eggs, to see if they could be grown without antibiotics, and to generate the necessary data on development time, hatching, and molting success required to design future experiments. Next, two bioassays were run to determine how the system performed in actual use. A phthalate ester plasticizer, dibutyl phthalate (DBP), was used as the test compound. The first of these experiments indicated there was a significant drop in molting success from larval stage I to stage II when eggs were exposed to 1000 ppb DBP. Variances in molting success, sometimes high in previous experiments, became unacceptable in this one, so the next experiment was designed to reduce these variances by more accurately identifying the time of first egg hatching. The end point used in previous experiments (3 days after first hatching) proved to be insufficient for enough of the controls to molt and, therefore, no conclusions could be drawn on the effects of DBP. The experiment did indicate how excessive variance in molting success could be avoided in future experiments, and how overall molting success could be improved. Hatching successes obtained in all these experiments compared favorably to those obtained by previous investigators. While testing the synthetic seawater used in the experiments for background phthalate levels, it was found that several phthalates, particularly DBP and diethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP) were persistent contaminants. Dibutyl phthalate levels could be reduced by treatment with activated charcoal. Tests were conducted to determine how much DBP remained in solution between water changes. Dibutyl phthalate loss was found to increase with increasing initial DBP concentration, but DBP loss from this system over 24 hours compared favorably to that observed in a similar experiment employing larval marine crustaceans. A design for equipment to culture P. polymerus in vitro and suggestions for conducting bioassay studies with eggs and larvae are described

Controlling Risk of Web Question Answering

Web question answering (QA) has become an indispensable component in modern search systems, which can significantly improve users' search experience by providing a direct answer to users' information need. This could be achieved by applying machine reading comprehension (MRC) models over the retrieved passages to extract answers with respect to the search query. With the development of deep learning techniques, state-of-the-art MRC performances have been achieved by recent deep methods. However, existing studies on MRC seldom address the predictive uncertainty issue, i.e., how likely the prediction of an MRC model is wrong, leading to uncontrollable risks in real-world Web QA applications. In this work, we first conduct an in-depth investigation over the risk of Web QA. We then introduce a novel risk control framework, which consists of a qualify model for uncertainty estimation using the probe idea, and a decision model for selectively output. For evaluation, we introduce risk-related metrics, rather than the traditional EM and F1 in MRC, for the evaluation of risk-aware Web QA. The empirical results over both the real-world Web QA dataset and the academic MRC benchmark collection demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieva

Initial Reports of the Deep Sea Drilling Project, vol. 85

Covering Leg 85 of the cruises of the Drilling Vessel Glomar Challenger Los Angeles, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii March-April 1982. Includes six chapters: 1. INTRODUCTION: BACKGROUND AND EXPLANATORY NOTES, DEEP SEA DRILLING PROJECT LEG 85, CENTRAL EQUATORIAL PACIFIC 2. SITE 571 3. SITE 572 4. SITE 573 5. SITE 574 6. SITE 57