Prologue in Nieremberg. Aforismsos y Fragmentos Sobre la Naturaleza Humana

Prologue to to bilingual (Spanish - Albanian) edition of aphorisms of the Spanish Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595-1658)

Seeing in Imagination: Visual Representation and Spiritual Contemplation in the Ascetical Treatises of Juan Eusebio Nieremberg

The once famous Spanish Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nieremberg engages the readers of his ascetical treatises De la diferencia entre lo temporal y eterno (1640) and De la hermosura de Dios (1641) in seeing in their imagination a seemly contradictory set of images of the material world: one in contempt, the other in wonder. However, the images serve the same purpose of fostering a greater appreciation for the eternal. This paper examines how Nieremberg’s visually descriptive narrative relates to the ways in which painters of the Spanish Golden Age –Valdés Leal, Sánchez Cotán and Murillo– display items on their canvases, but also explores its connection to the method of imaginative contemplation, specifically the “composition of place,” in the Spiritual Exercises (1548) of Ignatius Loyola. In doing so, this paper shows how visual representation, both textual and pictorial, related to Jesuit spiritual and pedagogical practices in seventeenth-century Spain

The Story of the Predestined Pilgrim and His Brother Reprobate. Alexandre de Gusmão. Trans. Christopher C. Lund. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 489; Medieval and Renaissance Latin America 2. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2016. xxxvi + 138 pp. $55.

The Story of the Predestined Pilgrim and His Brother Reprobate, published in Portugal in 1682, is an allegorical novel originally written in Portuguese by Father Alexandre de Gusmão (1629–1724) in the Jesuit mission territory of Brazil. Subsequent editions were printed in both Portuguese and Spanish in Europe and the Americas. Christopher C. Lund’s translation is part of the Latin America series in the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and is the first English-language edition. It is a welcome addition to scholarly work in the fields of colonial Latin American history and Jesuit history

John W. O’Malley, S.J. The Jesuits and the Popes: A Historical Sketch of Their Relationship. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2016. Pp. 149. Hb, $40.

A review of John W. O\u27Malley\u27s book, The Jesuits and the Popes: A Historical Sketch of Their Relationship

Practical tooling for serverless computing

Cloud applications are increasingly built from a mixture of runtime technologies. Hosted functions and service-oriented web hooks are among the most recent ones which are natively supported by cloud platforms. They are collectively referred to as serverless computing by application engineers due to the transparent on-demand instance activation and microbilling without the need to provision infrastructure explicitly. This half-day tutorial explains the use cases for serverless computing and the drivers and existing software solutions behind the programming and deployment model also known as Function-as-a-Service in the overall cloud computing stack. Furthermore, it presents practical open source tools for deriving functions from legacy code and for the management and execution of functions in private and public clouds

The Ideological Divide: Conflict and the Supreme Court\u27s Certiorari Decision

This Article bridges a gap in existing literature by evaluating, from an empirical perspective, the impact of conflict among the lower courts on the Supreme Court’s decision to grant or deny a petition for a writ of certiorari. Specifically, this Article looks at the political ideology of the lower courts involved in a split of authority on federal law and compares those positions to the political ideology of the Supreme Court itself. This Article concludes that the ideological content of lower court opinions in a conflict case impacts the Supreme Court’s certiorari decisions in a statistically significant way, and thus sheds new light on the role lower court conflict plays in whether the Supreme Court’s exercise of its discretion to grant cert

A lightweight method for improving coordination in distributed, high-variability product companies

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering; in conjunction with the Leaders for Global Operations Program at MIT, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 71-75).Product companies face new challenges as they continue to expand their international footprints. Whereas globalization initially sought savings by outsourcing production to low-cost regions, emerging markets now present new sales opportunities with unique customer demands. Companies increasingly must be sensitive to local expectations at the same time that products are becoming more technology rich and with shorter life cycles. Improved coordination that enables greater speed, flexibility, and multi-market effectiveness is particularly important as companies shift engineering and commercial responsibilities to formerly production-only centers. This study develops and demonstrates an approach to one domain of coordination-the flow of material and related information between globally distributed sites-based on lessons from engineer-to- order (ETO) operating models. By examining contemporary trends in ETO and identifying several generalizable tensions, this study outlines key parameters that distinguish dynamic coordination needs from those embedded in conventional process improvement frameworks. The five-step approach developed in this paper takes a dynamic systems perspective on organizational interfaces and seeks to build feedback mechanisms at multiple levels. It targets the knowledge-transfer, business planning, and execution levels of material management while also addressing the behavioral and practical components of implementation. In doing so, the approach recognizes that uneven process maturity and uncertain external demands must be accommodated. It argues that traditional approaches to coordination have had limited success, because they are slow to adapt and encourage circumvention. Whereas these past methods have exchanged reduced process "waste" for greatly increased rigidity and process housekeeping, the proposed method seeks reinforcing loops that align stakeholders without exhaustive process definition or significant maintenance. A detailed case study at a global ETO business group illustrates the method and its initial results in an environment of limited patience for formal process development. The resulting portfolio of change initiatives, which includes inter-site service level commitments, local forecast sharing, service parts forecasting, and reverse logistics, demonstrates an integrative approach to business site interfaces that attempts to tie local short-term performance with global long-term success.by Brian S. Hendrickson.S.M.M.B.A

An Estradiol-Inducible Promoter Enables Fast, Graduated Control of Gene Expression in Fission Yeast [preprint]

The fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe lacks a diverse toolkit of inducible promoters for experimental manipulation. Available inducible promoters suffer from slow induction kinetics, limited control of expression levels and/or a requirement for defined growth medium. In particular, no S. pombe inducible promoter systems exhibit a linear dose response, which would allow expression to be tuned to specific levels. We have adapted a fast, orthogonal promoter system with a large dynamic range and a linear dose response, based on β-estradiol-regulated function of the human estrogen receptor, for use in S. pombe. We show that this promoter system, termed Z3EV, turns on quickly, can reach a maximal induction of 20 fold, and exhibits a linear dose response over its entire induction range, with few off target effects. We demonstrate the utility of this system by regulating the mitotic inhibitor Wee1 to create a strain in which cell size is regulated by β-estradiol concentration. This promoter system will be of great utility for experimentally regulating gene expression in fission yeast