Concert recording 2020-02-15

[Track 1]. Fidelity in love for euphonium and piano / Yasuhide Ito -- [Track 2]. Cascades / Allen Vizzutti -- [Track 3]. Wie melodien zieht es mir / Johannes Brahms -- [Track 4]. Feldeinsamkeit, Op.86 No.2 [Track 5]. Hatsukoi first love / Tatsunosuke Koshitani -- [Track 6]. Euphoniada / Frigyes Hidas -- [Track 7]. Party piece / Philip Sparke -- [Track 8]. Fantaisie and variations on The carnival of Venice / Jean-Baptiste Arban -- [Track 9]. Two duets, op. 10. I. Puisqu\u27ici-bas toute âme [Track 10]. II. Tarentelle / Gabriel Fauré

Institutional Accord in Japanese Diplomatic Policymaking: Vicious and Virtuous Cycles in North Korea and Vietnam

Since 2002, Japan-North Korea relations have been largely stagnant. Policy responses in Japan since 2006 have been largely focused on sanctions, with little success having been achieved in making progress in Japan’s central policy objectives of reducing the security threat and rescuing its abducted citizens. Indeed, these problems have only deepened in severity in recent years. Nonetheless, this did not necessarily have to be. Vietnam, a fellow isolated, autocratic, communist state, was in a similar position to North Korea as the Cold War ended, and yet Japan successfully fostered a stable long-term political and economic relationship with it. This thesis explores Japanese diplomatic policy towards both, and questions what factors in the Japanese policymaking process led to the relative success or failure of Japan in achieving its core policy objectives in each. While the issues which North Korea itself has presented are well-known, significantly less attention has been paid to the institutional politics in Japan and how they influenced policy processes and outcomes. This thesis employs comparative analysis between Japan’s engagements with North Korea and Vietnam, supplemented by elite-level interview data, in order to determine causal factors in Japan’s policy outcomes with both. It argues that a major factor in both Japan’s failure to achieve its objectives with North Korea and its success in achieving them with Vietnam was institutional accord – the relative weight of consensus or the lack thereof behind specific policies. In arguing this, it demonstrates the criticality of non-core policymaking institutions in Japan, and the importance of consensus in the engagement of democracies with autocracies. It argues that institutional accord can lead to highly sustainable, effective policy in cases where it is present, but that a lack of it can create long term acrimony and policy fossilisation in cases where it is not

Altered actin centripetal retrograde flow in physically restricted immunological synapses

Antigen recognition by T cells involves large scale spatial reorganization of numerous receptor, adhesion, and costimulatory proteins within the T cell-antigen presenting cell (APC) junction. The resulting patterns can be distinctive, and are collectively known as the immunological synapse. Dynamical assembly of cytoskeletal network is believed to play an important role in driving these assembly processes. In one experimental strategy, the APC is replaced with a synthetic supported membrane. An advantage of this configuration is that solid structures patterned onto the underlying substrate can guide immunological synapse assembly into altered patterns. Here, we use mobile anti-CD3ε on the spatial-partitioned supported bilayer to ligate and trigger T cell receptor (TCR) in live Jurkat T cells. Simultaneous tracking of both TCR clusters and GFP-actin speckles reveals their dynamic association and individual flow patterns. Actin retrograde flow directs the inward transport of TCR clusters. Flow-based particle tracking algorithms allow us to investigate the velocity distribution of actin flow field across the whole synapse, and centripetal velocity of actin flow decreases as it moves toward the center of synapse. Localized actin flow analysis reveals that, while there is no influence on actin motion from substrate patterns directly, velocity differences of actin are observed over physically trapped TCR clusters. Actin flow regains its velocity immediately after passing through confined TCR clusters. These observations are consistent with a dynamic and dissipative coupling between TCR clusters and viscoelastic actin network. © 2010 Yu et al.published_or_final_versio

Correlated diffusion of membrane proteins and their effect on membrane viscosity

We extend the Saffman theory of membrane hydrodynamics to account for the correlated motion of membrane proteins, along with the effect of protein concentration on that correlation and on the response of the membrane to stresses. Expressions for the coupling diffusion coefficients of protein pairs and their concentration dependence are derived in the limit of small protein size relative to the inter-protein separation. The additional role of membrane viscosity as determining the characteristic length scale for membrane response leads to unusual concentration effects at large separation -- the transverse coupling increases with protein concentration, whereas the longitudinal one becomes concentration-independent.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure