Fair game : learning from La Salada

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 107-109).This thesis seeks to expand the potential role of urban design for informal places under the process of formalization. More specifically, it examines the spatial principles that comprise the successful cultural and economic underpinnings of a self-made place and then find opportunities for design to amplify or improve upon them. To make such strategies practical, the thesis asks a methodological question: how does one design for variety and participation, towards a vision that will unfold over time and by the hands of many actors, without compromising one's role as a designer? An exceptional case study, La Salada Fair, provides initial design principles. A large commercial market covering a dense half square mile in Buenos Aires, Argentina, La Salada represents the increasing tendency for users to shape sophisticated and culturally influential urban spaces in the modern metropolis, particularly in the context of weakened governance. Yet without an external eye overseeing the process, there are inherent limits to the scope of concerns. Shaped by new insights and critiques, a design proposal imagines a future for the factory-market. Taking the form of a conceptual game, the proposal compresses an incremental formation process, presents a method for collective evaluation, and clarifies the role of design.by Allison Hu.S.M

Endoglin Is Essential for the Maintenance of Self-Renewal and Chemoresistance in Renal Cancer Stem Cells.

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is a deadly malignancy due to its tendency to metastasize and resistance to chemotherapy. Stem-like tumor cells often confer these aggressive behaviors. We discovered an endoglin (CD105)-expressing subpopulation in human RCC xenografts and patient samples with a greater capability to form spheres in vitro and tumors in mice at low dilutions than parental cells. Knockdown of CD105 by short hairpin RNA and CRISPR/cas9 reduced stemness markers and sphere-formation ability while accelerating senescence in vitro. Importantly, downregulation of CD105 significantly decreased the tumorigenicity and gemcitabine resistance. This loss of stem-like properties can be rescued by CDA, MYC, or NANOG, and CDA might act as a demethylase maintaining MYC and NANOG. In this study, we showed that Endoglin (CD105) expression not only demarcates a cancer stem cell subpopulation but also confers self-renewal ability and contributes to chemoresistance in RCC

The MUSCLES Treasury Survey. V. FUV Flares on Active and Inactive M Dwarfs

M dwarf stars are known for their vigorous flaring. This flaring could impact the climate of orbiting planets, making it important to characterize M dwarf flares at the short wavelengths that drive atmospheric chemistry and escape. We conducted a far-ultraviolet flare survey of 6 M dwarfs from the recent MUSCLES (Measurements of the Ultraviolet Spectral Characteristics of Low-mass Exoplanetary Systems) observations, as well as 4 highly-active M dwarfs with archival data. When comparing absolute flare energies, we found the active-M-star flares to be about 10$\times$ more energetic than inactive-M-star flares. However, when flare energies were normalized by the star's quiescent flux, the active and inactive samples exhibited identical flare distributions, with a power-law index of -$0.76^{+0.1}_{-0.09}$ (cumulative distribution). The rate and distribution of flares are such that they could dominate the FUV energy budget of M dwarfs, assuming the same distribution holds to flares as energetic as those cataloged by Kepler and ground-based surveys. We used the observed events to create an idealized model flare with realistic spectral and temporal energy budgets to be used in photochemical simulations of exoplanet atmospheres. Applied to our own simulation of direct photolysis by photons alone (no particles), we find the most energetic observed flares have little effect on an Earth-like atmosphere, photolyzing $\sim$0.01% of the total O$_3$ column. The observations were too limited temporally (73 h cumulative exposure) to catch rare, highly energetic flares. Those that the power-law fit predicts occur monthly would photolyze $\sim$1% of the O$_3$ column and those it predicts occur yearly would photolyze the full O$_3$ column. Whether such energetic flares occur at the rate predicted is an open question.Comment: Accepted to ApJ. v2 fixed some transposed errors, added PDF To

Should I Stop or Should I Go: Early Stopping with Heterogeneous Populations

Randomized experiments often need to be stopped prematurely due to the treatment having an unintended harmful effect. Existing methods that determine when to stop an experiment early are typically applied to the data in aggregate and do not account for treatment effect heterogeneity. In this paper, we study the early stopping of experiments for harm on heterogeneous populations. We first establish that current methods often fail to stop experiments when the treatment harms a minority group of participants. We then use causal machine learning to develop CLASH, the first broadly-applicable method for heterogeneous early stopping. We demonstrate CLASH's performance on simulated and real data and show that it yields effective early stopping for both clinical trials and A/B tests.Comment: NeurIPS 2023 (spotlight

Photosynthetic biofilm reactor (PBR) for nutrient removal from wastewater

Faculty advisor: Bo HuThis research was supported by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)

Connexin 43 gap junctions contribute to brain endothelial barrier hyperpermeability in familial cerebral cavernous malformations type III by modulating tight junction structure

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154657/1/fsb2fj201700699r-sup-0003.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154657/2/fsb2fj201700699r.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154657/3/fsb2fj201700699r-sup-0002.pd