"Neon Gradient with palm trees" summer classes research help posters

These posters were created to make BU students aware of BU Libraries' continued services throughout the summer term

Valentine's Day "Dewey belong together?" posters

These posters were created to celebrate Valentine's Day and to promote the resources available to BU students through BU Libraries

"New Year, new semester 2020" New Year posters

This poster was created to celebrate the new year of 2020

Aktivierende Methodik im Fremdsprachenunterricht – Nutzen, Wirkung, praktische Beispiele

"Spielen im Unterricht macht Spaß, aber dafür fehlt uns die Zeit, wir haben in einem Semester so viel Stoff zu bewältigen, dass wir kaum Zeit für Spiele haben, außerdem finden die Studierenden das eher kindisch." Im Folgenden zeigen wir anhand theoretischer Überlegungen und praktischer Beispiele, dass man gerade bei spielerischen, aktivierenden Methoden lernt. Im ersten Teil dieses Beitrags werden theoretische Grundlagen für das aktivierende, spielerische Lernen vorgestellt. Im zweiten Teil werden methodische Grundsätze präsentiert, und im dritten und letzten Teil berichten wir von praktischen Beispielen aus unserem Unterricht. Die Tatsache, dass die Beispiele dem Fremdsprachenunterricht entnommen sind, bedeutet jedoch nicht, dass aktivierende Methodik nur dort sinnvoll eingesetzt werden kann. Vielmehr hat sie einen allgemeinen Nutzen für die Hochschuldidaktik in allen Fachgebieten. Gerade heute, wo Lernziele an Hochschulen zunehmend nicht nur über den „Stoff“ definiert werden, sondern kompetenzorientiert sein und die Autonomie der Lernenden fördern sollen, können aktivierende Methoden in jedem Fachgebiet und in jeder Art von Lehrveranstaltung bedeutsam sein

Contradictions in municipal transformation from apartheid to democracy : the battle over local water privatization in South Africa

This paper traces the ebb and flow of municipal fiscal crises, investment strategies, pricing and related issues, political activism, and the politics of resistance. Job guarantees protected apartheid-era civil servants; white voters were given an effective triple weight in elections as well as veto power over local council decisions if they held as little as one-third of the council votes (1992,1993). Locally, for South Africa’s 843 municipalities, neoliberalism meant intensifying budget constraints, cost-recovery principles, lower levels of services (such as pit latrines in new low-income residential developments instead of flush toilets) and unprecedented cut-offs of services to those residents unable to pay municipal bills

Consistency-based fault isolation for uncertain systems with applications to quantitative dynamic models

This paper presents the Probabilistic General Diagnostic Engine (PGDE), a novel method of offline consistency-based fault isolation. Many existing proposals require qualitative logic mod- els for consistency-based diagnosis due to their ability to speed the search for conflict sets through the use of an ATMS. However, for many applications, quantitative dynamic models are preferred or al- ready available. The key strength of the PGDE is that it allows the use of any modelling language for which an appropriate calculation en- gine can be written. It also offers graceful degradation in the presence of uncertainty, commonly caused by noise or modelling errors. Fi- nally, given perfect knowledge, it can be shown that the PGDE com- putes the same result as existing consistency-based diagnosis meth- ods. To demonstrate the performance of the algorithm, we have used a quantitative dynamic model of the fluid power circuit of a single- degree of freedom hydraulic test bench and developed an appropri- ate calculation engine for computing consistency between measured values and predicted results. Various failures were generated on the physical test bench and the PGDE isolated the faults with approxi- mately 85% accuracy

9S1R Nullomer Peptide Induces Mitochondrial Pathology, Metabolic Suppression, and Enhanced Immune Cell Infiltration, in Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Mouse Model

Nullomers are the shortest strings of absent amino acid (aa) sequences in a species or group of species. Primes are those nullomers that have not been detected in the genome of any species. 9S1R is a 5-aa peptide prime sequence attached to 5-arginine aa, used to treat triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) in an in vivo mouse model. This unique peptide, administered with a trehalose carrier (9S1R-NulloPT), offers enhanced solubility and exhibits distinct anti-cancer effects against TNBC. In our study, we investigated the effect of 9S1R-NulloPT on tumor growth, metabolism, metastatic burden, tumor immune-microenvironment (TME), and transcriptome of aggressive mouse TNBC tumors. Notably, treated mice had smaller tumors in the initial phase of the treatment, as compared to untreated control, and diminished in vivo and ex vivo bioluminescence at later-stages - indicative of metabolically quiescent, dying tumors. The treatment also caused changes in TME with increased infiltration of immune cells and altered tumor transcriptome, with 365 upregulated genes and 710 downregulated genes. Consistent with in vitro data, downregulated genes were enriched in cellular metabolic processes (179), specifically mitochondrial TCA cycle/oxidative phosphorylation (44), and translation machinery/ribosome biogenesis (45). The upregulated genes were associated with the developmental (13), ECM organization (12) and focal adhesion pathways (7). In conclusion, our study demonstrates that 9S1R-NulloPT effectively reduced tumor growth during its initial phase, altering the TME and tumor transcriptome. The treatment induced mitochondrial pathology which led to a metabolic deceleration in tumors, aligning with in vitro observations

CMB likelihood approximation by a Gaussianized Blackwell-Rao estimator

We introduce a new CMB temperature likelihood approximation called the Gaussianized Blackwell-Rao (GBR) estimator. This estimator is derived by transforming the observed marginal power spectrum distributions obtained by the CMB Gibbs sampler into standard univariate Gaussians, and then approximate their joint transformed distribution by a multivariate Gaussian. The method is exact for full-sky coverage and uniform noise, and an excellent approximation for sky cuts and scanning patterns relevant for modern satellite experiments such as WMAP and Planck. A single evaluation of this estimator between l=2 and 200 takes ~0.2 CPU milliseconds, while for comparison, a single pixel space likelihood evaluation between l=2 and 30 for a map with ~2500 pixels requires ~20 seconds. We apply this tool to the 5-year WMAP temperature data, and re-estimate the angular temperature power spectrum, $C_{\ell}$, and likelihood, L(C_l), for l<=200, and derive new cosmological parameters for the standard six-parameter LambdaCDM model. Our spectrum is in excellent agreement with the official WMAP spectrum, but we find slight differences in the derived cosmological parameters. Most importantly, the spectral index of scalar perturbations is n_s=0.973 +/- 0.014, 1.9 sigma away from unity and 0.6 sigma higher than the official WMAP result, n_s = 0.965 +/- 0.014. This suggests that an exact likelihood treatment is required to higher l's than previously believed, reinforcing and extending our conclusions from the 3-year WMAP analysis. In that case, we found that the sub-optimal likelihood approximation adopted between l=12 and 30 by the WMAP team biased n_s low by 0.4 sigma, while here we find that the same approximation between l=30 and 200 introduces a bias of 0.6 sigma in n_s.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, submitted to Ap

Calibrating CHIME, A New Radio Interferometer to Probe Dark Energy

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is a transit interferometer currently being built at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) in Penticton, BC, Canada. We will use CHIME to map neutral hydrogen in the frequency range 400 -- 800\,MHz over half of the sky, producing a measurement of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) at redshifts between 0.8 -- 2.5 to probe dark energy. We have deployed a pathfinder version of CHIME that will yield constraints on the BAO power spectrum and provide a test-bed for our calibration scheme. I will discuss the CHIME calibration requirements and describe instrumentation we are developing to meet these requirements