AUMI-Futurism: the Elsewhere and "Elsewhen" of (Un)Rolling the Boulder and Turning the Page

This article discusses two performances that used the movement-to-music technology known as the "Adaptive Use Musical Instrument" or AUMI to allow differently-abled participants to collaborate with one another: (Un)Rolling the Boulder: Improvising New Communities, a multimedia, mixed-ability improvisation that was staged at the University of Kansas in October 2013 and Turning the Page, an interdisciplinary musical theatre piece premiered in Ottawa, Canada in April 2014. We theorize these performances as examples of "AUMI-Futurism”, combining insights gleaned from two different sources: the Afrofuturist philosophy of composer, improviser, and bandleader Sun Ra, and the work of disability studies scholar Alison Kafer. This essay examines the collaborative, improvisatory processes that surrounded (Un)Rolling the Boulder and Turning the Page, focusing in particular on the role that the AUMI software played in imagining and performing new communities

Economic Foundations of the Current Regulatory Reform Efforts

article published in economic journalAlmost since the inception of the risk and environmental agencies in the early 1970s, there has been a continuing concern with ensuring that regulations yield societal benefits commensurate with their costs. This recognition of the need for balance, in turn, has led policymakers to seek a greater role for economists, and the principles of economic analysis undoubtedly will continue to play a central role in the debate over the future of regulatory policy

The Strong Force meets the Dark Sector: a robust estimate of QCD uncertainties for anti-matter dark matter searches

In dark-matter annihilation channels to hadronic final states, stable particles — such as positrons, photons, antiprotons, and antineutrinos — are produced via complex sequences of phenomena including QED/QCD radiation, hadronisation, and hadron decays. These processes are normally modelled by Monte Carlo (MC) event generators whose limited accuracy imply intrinsic QCD uncertainties on the predictions for indirect-detection experiments like Fermi-LAT, Pamela, IceCube or Ams–02. In this article, we perform a comprehensive analysis of QCD uncertainties, meaning both perturbative and nonperturbative sources of uncertainty are included — estimated via variations of MC renormalization-scale and fragmentation-function parameters, respectively — in antimatter spectra from dark-matter annihilation, based on parametric variations of the Pythia 8 event generator. After performing several retunings of light-quark fragmentation functions, we define a set of variations that span a conservative estimate of the QCD uncertainties. We estimate the effects on antimatter spectra for various annihilation channels and final-state particle species, and discuss their impact on fitted values for the dark-matter mass and thermally-averaged annihilation cross section. We find dramatic impacts which can go up to O(40) GeV for uncertainties on the dark-matter mass and up to O(10%) for the annihilation cross section. We provide the spectra in tabulated form including QCD uncertainties and code snippets to perform fast dark-matter fits, in this github repository

Catastrophic Risk: Waking Up to the Reality of a Pandemic?

Will a major shock awaken the US citizens to the threat of catastrophic pandemic risk? Using a natural experiment administered both before and after the 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak, our evidence suggests “no.” Our results show that prior to the Ebola scare, the US citizens were relatively complacent and placed a low relative priority on public spending to prepare for a pandemic disease outbreak relative to an environmental disaster risk (e.g., Fukushima) or a terrorist attack (e.g., 9/11). After the Ebola scare, the average citizen did not over-react to the risk. This flat reaction was unexpected given the well-known availability heuristic—people tend to over-weigh judgments of events more heavily toward more recent information. In contrast, the average citizen continued to value pandemic risk less relative to terrorism or environmental risk

Late Cenozoic evolution of the eastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau: Inferences from ^(40)Ar/^(39)Ar and (U-Th)/He thermochronology

High topography in central Asia is perhaps the most fundamental expression of the Cenozoic Indo-Asian collision, yet an understanding of the timing and rates of development of the Tibetan Plateau remains elusive. Here we investigate the Cenozoic thermal histories of rocks along the eastern margin of the plateau adjacent to the Sichuan Basin in an effort to determine when the steep topographic escarpment that characterizes this margin developed. Temperature-time paths inferred from ^(40)Ar/^(39)Ar thermochronology of biotite, multiple diffusion domain modeling of alkali feldspar ^(40)Ar release spectra, and (U-Th)/He thermochronology of zircon and apatite imply that rocks at the present-day topographic front of the plateau underwent slow cooling (30°–50°C/m.y.) coincident with exhumation from inferred depths of ∼8–10 km, at denudation rates of 1–2 mm/yr. Samples from the interior of the plateau continued to cool relatively slowly during the same time period (∼3°C/m.y.), suggesting limited exhumation (1–2 km). However, these samples record a slight increase in cooling rate (from <1 to ∼3°C/m.y.) at some time during the middle Tertiary; the tectonic significance of this change remains uncertain. Regardless, late Cenozoic denudation in this region appears to have been markedly heterogeneous, with the highest rates of exhumation focused at the topographic front of the plateau margin. We infer that the onset of rapid cooling at the plateau margin reflects the erosional response to the development of regionally significant topographic gradients between the plateau and the stable Sichuan Basin and thus marks the onset of deformation related to the development of the Tibetan Plateau in this region. The present margin of the plateau adjacent to and north of the Sichuan Basin is apparently no older than the late Miocene or early Pliocene (∼5–12 Ma)

Impact of caspase-1/11, -3, -7, or IL-1β/IL-18 deficiency on rabies virus-induced macrophage cell death and onset of disease

Rabies virus is a highly neurovirulent RNA virus, which causes about 59000 deaths in humans each year. Previously, we described macrophage cytotoxicity upon infection with rabies virus. Here we examined the type of cell death and the role of specific caspases in cell death and disease development upon infection with two laboratory strains of rabies virus: Challenge Virus Standard strain-11 (CVS-11) is highly neurotropic and lethal for mice, while the attenuated Evelyn-Rotnycki-Abelseth (ERA) strain has a broader cell tropism, is non-lethal and has been used as an oral vaccine for animals. Infection of Mf4/4 macrophages with both strains led to caspase-1 activation and IL-1β and IL-18 production, as well as activation of caspases-3, -7, -8, and -9. Moreover, absence of caspase-3, but not of caspase-1 and -11 or -7, partially inhibited virus-induced cell death of bone marrow-derived macrophages. Intranasal inoculation with CVS-11 of mice deficient for either caspase-1 and -11 or -7 or both IL-1β and IL-18 led to general brain infection and lethal disease similar to wild-type mice. Deficiency of caspase-3, on the other hand, significantly delayed the onset of disease, but did not prevent final lethal outcome. Interestingly, deficiency of caspase-1/11, the key executioner of pyroptosis, aggravated disease severity caused by ERA virus, whereas wild-type mice or mice deficient for either caspase-3, -7, or both IL-1β and IL-18 presented the typical mild symptoms associated with ERA virus. In conclusion, rabies virus infection of macrophages induces caspase-1- and caspase-3-dependent cell death. In vivo caspase-1/11 and caspase-3 differently affect disease development in response to infection with the attenuated ERA strain or the virulent CVS-11 strain, respectively. Inflammatory caspases seem to control attenuated rabies virus infection, while caspase-3 aggravates virulent rabies virus infection

Production of cyclooxygenase products and superoxide anion by macrophages in response to chemotactic factors

Mononuclear phagocytes are knwon to play a key role in various phlogistic reactions by synthesizing and releasing products that may potentiate or inhibit inflammatory processes. The expression of these products appears to be dependent on the source of the macrophage population as well as the stimulus employed. We have studied superoxide anion (O2-) production as well as the generation of PGE2, PGF2[alpha], and TXB2 from resident, oil-elicited and thiogylcollate-induced peritoneal macrophages in mice in the presence and absence of chemotactic peptides. Production of O2-, occurred only in elicited macrophages stimulated with high concentrations of FMLP or C5a; resident cells stimulated with either of the chemotactic peptides were completely unresponsive. Although resident peritoneal macrophages incubated with chemotactic peptides did not generate O2-, these cells did secrete significant levels of PGE2, PGF2[alpha], and TXB2 in response to C5a. FMLP had no stimulatory effect. Elicited macrophages generated increased levels of PGE2 and PGF2[alpha] when incubated with C5a. However, production of TXB2 was not stimulated. FMLP was inactive in stimulating PGE2, PGF2[alpha], and TXB2 in all types of macrophages studied. These studies indicate a heterogeneity in the production of inflammatory mediators from various macrophage populations in response to chemotactic factors.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/23796/1/0000034.pd

Left Ventricular Ballooning Patterns in Recurrent Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Reported Cases

Recurrent takotsubo cardiomyopathy (TTC) and the clinical profiles and outcomes of patients have not been fully evaluated, nor has the effect of left ventricular ballooning pattern. After searching the medical literature for reports of patients with recurrent TTC, we identified 84 articles with 101 case descriptions. We divided the cases into those with only apical left ventricular ballooning patterns at recurrence (typical, n=60), and those with at least one midventricular or basal ballooning pattern (atypical, n=41). We then compared their clinical profiles and outcomes. The groups were similar in terms of baseline demographic characteristics, presence and types of triggers, use of heart failure medications at TTC recurrence, electrocardiographic changes at presentation, initial left ventricular ejection fractions, timespans between recurrent TTC episodes, and recovery times after each event. However, patients in the atypical group had significantly fewer severe adverse events (cardiogenic shock and cardiac arrest) than did those in the typical group, with an estimated 63% lower odds (adjusted odds ratio=0.37; 95% CI, 0.14–0.97; P=0.039). Survival to hospital discharge was statistically similar but lower in the typical group (n=53; 88.3%) than in the atypical group (n=24; 96%). Our results suggest that left ventricular ballooning patterns influence clinical outcomes, and that outcomes are more favorable in patients with recurrent TTC who have atypical left ventricular ballooning patterns

A specific Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) for the determination of human C5a antigen

An enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay has been developed to detect human C5a antigen. This ELISA methodology has been shown to be a highly sensitive technique capable of detecting C5a antigen concentrations below 10 ng/ml. The microELISA technique used in this study is specific for human C5a and C5a des arg (C5a antigen) but not for human C5. Conditions to establish sensitivity and specificity are outlined in this report.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/25112/1/0000545.pd