Multi-causational approach to illness in young children: the role of psychological and social factors

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

A politics of action: Hans Haacke in Germany, 1972-2006

Examining the works of Hans Haacke (b. 1936, Cologne) made in and about Germany between 1972-2006, this dissertation argues that the investigation of that country’s political structures comprises the very core of Haacke’s motivating concerns. Haacke’s long-term interrogation of German politics, now extending over more than three decades and including museum, gallery, and public art projects, reveals a new and crucial way of understanding his overarching enterprise, one which developed in direct response to the history of Nazi Germany and its aftermath in the following decades. His determination to figure out how things work stemmed, I argue, from his drive to understand how the Nazi history came to be, and to work against a repetition of such events in the future. In early work this focused on physical and biological systems before moving into the political sphere, examining how powerful people and institutions operate and act in the world according to their interests. The generous attention to the aftermath of Haacke’s most provocative works in both Germany and the United States, while certainly central to his oeuvre, has obscured crucial attention to the initiation of his work. I consider Haacke’s work in light of Hannah Arendt’s proposition of action, which focuses on the outset of a project and its inherent potential to initiate a process in a new direction. My chapters correspond to the central themes in Haacke’s German works—memory, the public sphere, and participatory citizenship—and are organized in terms of the “what,” “where,” and “how” of these projects. His individual works comprise a larger inquiry into the failures of Germany’s work of coming to terms with the past and are a type of memory work, but one attuned to historical recovery rather than trauma or mourning. In so doing, they engage questions of the “public,” both in physical terms of public space as well as in an engagement of public audiences, and generate a version of Arendt’s “space of appearance,” in which participants come together to examine and debate contentious histories and their current implications. Ultimately, I argue, Haacke’s works take on the fraught and sweeping question of citizenship in Germany—of who is included or excluded from the German people either by prejudice or law—and carry an implicit call for participation that challenges the interests of large-scale institutions. Accounting for multiple moments of first West Germany’s and then reunified Germany’s efforts to define themselves, I contextualize Haacke’s German works within the larger question that underlies this dissertation, and in which they are necessarily situated, namely, Germany’s postwar reckoning with its history

The real catecholamine content of secretory vesicles in the CNS revealed by electrochemical cytometry

Resolution of synaptic vesicle neurotransmitter content has mostly been limited to the study of stimulated release in cultured cell systems, and it has been controversial as to whether synaptic vesicle transmitter levels are saturated in vivo. We use electrochemical cytometry to count dopamine molecules in individual synaptic vesicles in populations directly sampled from brain tissue. Vesicles from the striatum yield an average of 33,000 dopamine molecules per vesicle, an amount considerably greater than typically measured during quantal release at cultured neurons. Vesicular content was markedly increased by L-DOPA or decreased by reserpine in a time-dependent manner in response to in vivo administration of drugs known to alter dopamine release. We investigated the effects of the psychostimulant amphetamine on vesicle content, finding that vesicular transmitter is rapidly depleted by 50% following in vivo administration, supporting the "weak base hypothesis'' that amphetamine reduces synaptic vesicle transmitter and quantal size

Mechanics of lipid bilayer junctions affecting the size of a connecting lipid nanotube

In this study we report a physical analysis of the membrane mechanics affecting the size of the highly curved region of a lipid nanotube (LNT) that is either connected between a lipid bilayer vesicle and the tip of a glass microinjection pipette (tube-only) or between a lipid bilayer vesicle and a vesicle that is attached to the tip of a glass microinjection pipette (two-vesicle). For the tube-only configuration (TOC), a micropipette is used to pull a LNT into the interior of a surface-immobilized vesicle, where the length of the tube L is determined by the distance of the micropipette to the vesicle wall. For the two-vesicle configuration (TVC), a small vesicle is inflated at the tip of the micropipette tip and the length of the tube L is in this case determined by the distance between the two interconnected vesicles. An electrochemical method monitoring diffusion of electroactive molecules through the nanotube has been used to determine the radius of the nanotube R as a function of nanotube length L for the two configurations. The data show that the LNT connected in the TVC constricts to a smaller radius in comparison to the tube-only mode and that tube radius shrinks at shorter tube lengths. To explain these electrochemical data, we developed a theoretical model taking into account the free energy of the membrane regions of the vesicles, the LNT and the high curvature junctions. In particular, this model allows us to estimate the surface tension coefficients from R(L) measurements

Transmitting and decoding facial expressions of emotion during healthy aging: more similarities than differences

Older adults tend to perform more poorly than younger adults on emotional expression identification tasks. The goal of the present study was to test a processing mechanism that might explain these differences in emotion recognition – specifically, age-related variation in the utilization of specific visual cues. Seventeen younger and 17 older adults completed a reverse correlation emotion categorization task (Bubbles paradigm), consisting of a large number of trials in each of which only part of the visual information used to convey an emotional facial expression was revealed to participants. The task allowed us to pinpoint the visual features each group used systematically to correctly recognize the emotional expressions shown. To address the possibility that faces of different age groups are differently processed by younger and older adults, we included younger, middle-aged, and older adult face models displaying happy, fearful, angry, disgusted, and sad facial expressions. Our results reveal strong similarity in the utilization of visual information by younger and older adult participants in decoding the emotional expressions from faces across ages – particularly for happy and fear emotions. These findings suggest that age-related differences in strategic information use are unlikely to contribute to the decline of facial expression recognition skills observed in later life

Aquilegia, Vol. 38 No. 4 - Fall, 2014, Newsletter of the Colorado Native Plant Society

https://epublications.regis.edu/aquilegia/1150/thumbnail.jp

Metamictization of zircon: Raman spectroscopic study

Raman spectroscopy of radiation-damaged natural zircon samples shows increased line broadening and shifts of phonon frequencies with increasing radiation dose. Stretching and bending frequencies of SiO4 tetrahedra soften dramatically with increasing radiation damage. The frequency shifts can be used to determine the degree of radiation damage. Broad spectral bands related to Si-O stretching vibrations between 900 and 1000 cm-1 were observed in metamict/amorphous zircon. The radiation-dose-independent spectral profiles and the coexistence of this broad background and relative sharp Raman modes in partially damaged samples indicate that these bands are correlated with amorphous domains in zircon. The spectral profiles of metamict zircon suggest that in comparison with silica, the SiO4 tetrahedra are less polymerized in metamict zircon. This study also shows that ZrO2 and SiO2 are not the principal products of metamictization in zircon. No indication of bulk chemical unmixing of zircon into ZrO2 and SiO2 was found in 26 samples with a large variation of radiation damage (maximum dose: 23.5 × 1018 -events g-1 ). Only one sample showed clearly, in all measured sample areas, extra sharp lines at 146, 260, 312, 460 and 642 cm-1 characteristic of tetragonal ZrO2 . The geological (and possibly artificial heating) history of this sample is not known. It is concluded that radiation damage without subsequent high temperature annealing does not cause unmixing of zircon into constituent oxides.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/48886/2/c00833.pd

Effects of antiplatelet therapy on stroke risk by brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases: subgroup analyses of the RESTART randomised, open-label trial

Background Findings from the RESTART trial suggest that starting antiplatelet therapy might reduce the risk of recurrent symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhage compared with avoiding antiplatelet therapy. Brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases (such as cerebral microbleeds) are associated with greater risks of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage. We did subgroup analyses of the RESTART trial to explore whether these brain imaging features modify the effects of antiplatelet therapy