Vocabulary building through the use of visual reinforcements

Thesis (Ed.M.)—Boston Universit

A Principled Approach to Property Rights in Canadian Aquaculture

The 1995 Federal Aquaculture Development Strategy summarized some of the difficulties facing aquaculture development in a federal state such as Canada, where the jurisdictional entitlements relevant to this “new” (or at least newly significant) industry are by no means clear: Aquaculture is a formidable policy challenge. As a new industry, it straddles the line between fishing and farming, cuts across significant regional differences and is placed in a context involving the participation of municipal, provincial/territorial and federal governments

Optimization of NANOGrav's Time Allocation for Maximum Sensitivity to Single Sources

Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) are a collection of precisely timed millisecond pulsars (MSPs) that can search for gravitational waves (GWs) in the nanohertz frequency range by observing characteristic signatures in the timing residuals. The sensitivity of a PTA depends on the direction of the propagating gravitational wave source, the timing accuracy of the pulsars, and the allocation of the available observing time. The goal of this paper is to determine the optimal time allocation strategy among the MSPs in the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) for a single source of GW under a particular set of assumptions. We consider both an isotropic distribution of sources across the sky and a specific source in the Virgo cluster. This work improves on previous efforts by modeling the effect of intrinsic spin noise for each pulsar. We find that, in general, the array is optimized by maximizing time spent on the best-timed pulsars, with sensitivity improvements typically ranging from a factor of 1.5 to 4.Comment: Accepted by Astrophyiscal Journa

Molecular therapies for HCC: Looking outside the box

Summary Over the past decade, sorafenib has been the only systemic agent with proven clinical efficacy for patients with unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Recently, lenvatinib was shown to be non-inferior to sorafenib, while regorafenib, cabozantinib, and ramucirumab were shown to be superior to placebo in patients failing sorafenib. In addition, trials of immune checkpoint inhibitors reported encouraging efficacy signals. However, apart from alpha-fetoprotein, which is used to select patients for ramucirumab, no biomarkers are available to identify patients that may respond to a specific treatment. Different synergisms have been postulated based on the potential interplay between antiangiogenic drugs and immunotherapy, with several clinical trials currently testing this hypothesis. Indeed, encouraging preliminary results of phase I studies of bevacizumab plus atezolizumab and lenvatinib plus pembrolizumab have led to the design of ongoing phase III trials, including both antiangiogenics and immune checkpoint inhibitors in the front-line setting. Other important phase II studies have tested molecular therapies directed against different novel targets, such as transforming growth factor-beta, MET (hepatocyte growth factor receptor), and fibroblast growth factor receptor 4. These studies integrated translational research with the aim of better defining the biological tumour profile and identifying tumour and blood biomarkers that select patients who may really benefit from a specific molecular therapy. Importantly, good safety profiles make these drugs suitable for future combinations. In this review, we discuss the most recent data on novel combination strategies and targets, as well as looking ahead to the future role of molecular therapies in the treatment of patients with advanced HCC

A cognitive linguistic approach to describing the communication of mental illness in comics

This thesis examines the ways in which subjective experience is communicated through comics about mental illness and how such communication can be described and analysed. I chose to focus on comics about mental illness to draw on my own lived experience and because of their common thematic focus on subjectivity. I applied a mixed methods approach, using personal reflection, qualitative analysis of discussion group data and intuitive linguistic analysis. The central analysis focuses on three contemporary comics that tell stories about experiences of mental illness: Lighter than My Shadow by Katie Green, Tangles, by Sarah Leavitt, and The Nao of Brown by Glyn Dillon. I propose a means of describing comics based on aspects of cognitive linguistics, including Text World Theory and cognitive grammar. Given its grounding in aspects of cognitive psychology such as attention, focusing, scanning and construal, cognitive grammar provides a common rubric for engaging with the text, images, and composition of comics. I supplement this approach with aspects of Text World Theory, which provides a framework for describing the interface between the content of comics, the context of their production and reading, and how these two aspects of communication relate to one another. In carrying out this analysis, I used data from reading group discussions of the three comics to guide the focus of my analysis and to supplement my own interpretations with the more naturalistic reading experiences of reading group participants. This led me to focus on aspects of reading including discourse structure, agency, multimodal metaphor, archetypal roles, perspective, event structuring, and reality conceptions. As well providing developments to the application of cognitive linguistics to multimodal communication, my overall findings point to the importance of alternatives to verbal communication, such as comics, as means of differently framing the conceptualisation of experiences of mental illness

The T.V. in the Swimming Pool

It's quiet, then sounds on a Baby Monitor..