Untangling Gender Divides Through Girly and Gendered Visual Culture

The rise of girly culture has brought new dimensions and challenges to art education. As art educators, we are concerned about what we can do to meaningfully understand and educate children—girls and boys—growing up with girly culture. To this end, this paper presents our exploratory study, utilizing the methods of literature review, focus group discussion, and classroom observation, and findings on the following: (1) discourses of girly (visual) culture specifically related to age metaphor, visual representations of sexuality, and girly aesthetics; (2) postfeminist conceptualizations, critiques, and justifications of gender divides manifested through girly visual culture; (3) preadolescent children’s perceptions of gendered visual culture and gender divides; and (4) gendered visual culture projects and pedagogical strategies for fostering gender-inclusive, playful, and empowering learning

Modeling the Non-Thermal X-ray Tail Emission of Anomalous X-ray Pulsars

The paradigm for Anomalous X-ray Pulsars (AXPs) has evolved recently with the discovery by INTEGRAL and RXTE of flat, hard X-ray components in three AXPs. These non-thermal spectral components differ dramatically from the steeper quasi-power-law tails seen in the classic X-ray band in these sources, and can naturally be attributed to activity in the magnetosphere. Resonant, magnetic Compton upscattering is a candidate mechanism for generating this new component, since it is very efficient in the strong fields present near AXP surfaces. In this paper, results from an inner magnetospheric model for upscattering of surface thermal X-rays in AXPs are presented, using a kinetic equation formalism and employing a QED magnetic scattering cross section. Characteristically flat and strongly-polarized emission spectra are produced by non-thermal electrons injected in the emission region. Spectral results depend strongly on the observer's orientation and the magnetospheric locale of the scattering, which couple directly to the angular distributions of photons sampled. Constraints imposed by the Comptel upper bounds for these AXPs are mentioned.Comment: 8 pages, 2 embedded figures, in Proc. of the Huangshan conference "Astrophysics of Compact Objects," (2008) eds. Y.-F. Yuan, X.-D. Li and D. Lai, (AIP Conf. Proc. 968, New York) p. 9

Textual entailment from image caption denotations

Understanding the meaning of linguistic expressions is a fundamental task of natural language processing. While distributed representations have become a powerful technique for modeling lexical semantics, but they have traditionally relied on ungrounded text corpora to identify semantically similar words. In contrast, this thesis explicitly models the denotation of linguistic expressions by building representations from grounded image captions. This allows us to use descriptions of the world to learn connections that would be difficult to identify in text-based corpora. In particular, we explore novel approaches to entailment that capture everyday world knowledge missing from other NLP tasks, on both existing datasets and our own new dataset. We also present a novel embedding model that produces phrase representations that are informed by our grounded representation. We conclude with an analysis of how grounded embeddings differ from standard distributional embeddings and suggestions for future refinement of this approach

Fucosyltransferase 1 and 2 play pivotal roles in breast cancer cells.

FUT1 and FUT2 encode alpha 1, 2-fucosyltransferases which catalyze the addition of alpha 1, 2-linked fucose to glycans. Glycan products of FUT1 and FUT2, such as Globo H and Lewis Y, are highly expressed on malignant tissues, including breast cancer. Herein, we investigated the roles of FUT1 and FUT2 in breast cancer. Silencing of FUT1 or FUT2 by shRNAs inhibited cell proliferation in vitro and tumorigenicity in mice. This was associated with diminished properties of cancer stem cell (CSC), including mammosphere formation and CSC marker both in vitro and in xenografts. Silencing of FUT2, but not FUT1, significantly changed the cuboidal morphology to dense clusters of small and round cells with reduced adhesion to polystyrene and extracellular matrix, including laminin, fibronectin and collagen. Silencing of FUT1 or FUT2 suppressed cell migration in wound healing assay, whereas FUT1 and FUT2 overexpression increased cell migration and invasion in vitro and metastasis of breast cancer in vivo. A decrease in mesenchymal like markers such as fibronectin, vimentin, and twist, along with increased epithelial like marker, E-cadherin, was observed upon FUT1/2 knockdown, while the opposite was noted by overexpression of FUT1 or FUT2. As expected, FUT1 or FUT2 knockdown reduced Globo H, whereas FUT1 or FUT2 overexpression showed contrary effects. Exogenous addition of Globo H-ceramide reversed the suppression of cell migration by FUT1 knockdown but not the inhibition of cell adhesion by FUT2 silencing, suggesting that at least part of the effects of FUT1/2 knockdown were mediated by Globo H. Our results imply that FUT1 and FUT2 play important roles in regulating growth, adhesion, migration and CSC properties of breast cancer, and may serve as therapeutic targets for breast cancer

Biocompatibility of PCL-Graphene Nanostructured Scaffolds with Mouse Embryonic Stem Cell-derived Cardiomyocytes

Since adult cardiomyocytes are not readily available for clinical use, numerous efforts have been made to derive functional cardiomyocytes from pluripotent stem cells. [1,2]. A variety of cardiovascular tissue engineering strategies have been explored to develop engineered cardiac tissues for in vitro and in vivo applications utilizing fibrous tissue scaffolds, both single polymer scaffolds and hybrids of polymers with hydrogels, coatings or embedded materials[3-9]. While graphene, a single layer carbon crystal, has recently become a material of interest for tissue engineering applications including osteogenic, neural and stem cell differentiation [10-12], its potential for cardiac tissue engineering is yet unknown. The inherent electro-activity of the myocardium makes graphene an especially attractive option for cardiac tissue engineering due to its high electrical conductivity. Thus, a novel hybrid 3D scaffold with graphene has been developed and its effect on the function of stem cell derived cardiomyocytes is examined

GPER-induced signaling is essential for the survival of breast cancer stem cells.

G protein-coupled estrogen receptor-1 (GPER), a member of the G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) superfamily, mediates estrogen-induced proliferation of normal and malignant breast epithelial cells. However, its role in breast cancer stem cells (BCSCs) remains unclear. Here we showed greater expression of GPER in BCSCs than non-BCSCs of three patient-derived xenografts of ER- /PR+ breast cancers. GPER silencing reduced stemness features of BCSCs as reflected by reduced mammosphere forming capacity in vitro, and tumor growth in vivo with decreased BCSC populations. Comparative phosphoproteomics revealed greater GPER-mediated PKA/BAD signaling in BCSCs. Activation of GPER by its ligands, including tamoxifen (TMX), induced phosphorylation of PKA and BAD-Ser118 to sustain BCSC characteristics. Transfection with a dominant-negative mutant BAD (Ser118Ala) led to reduced cell survival. Taken together, GPER and its downstream signaling play a key role in maintaining the stemness of BCSCs, suggesting that GPER is a potential therapeutic target for eradicating BCSCs

Clinical global impression-severity score as a reliable measure for routine evaluation of remission in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorders

Aims: This study aimed to compare the performance of Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) symptom severity criteria established by the Remission in Schizophrenia Working Group (RSWG) with criteria based on Clinical Global Impression (CGI) severity score. The 6-month duration criterion was not taken into consideration. Methods: A convenience sample of 112 chronic psychotic outpatients was examined. Symptomatic remission was evaluated according to RSWG severity criterion and to a severity criterion indicated by the overall score obtained at CGI-Schizophrenia (CGI-SCH) rating scale (≤3) (CGI-S). Results: Clinical remission rates of 50% and 49.1%, respectively, were given by RSWG and CGI-S, with a significant level of agreement between the two criteria in identifying remitted and non-remitted cases. Mean scores at CGI-SCH and PANSS scales were significantly higher among remitters, independent of the remission criteria adopted. Measures of cognitive functioning were largely independent of clinical remission evaluated according to both RSWG and CGI-S. When applying RSWG and CGI-S criteria, the rates of overall good functioning yielded by Personal and Social Performance scale (PSP) were 32.1% and 32.7%, respectively, while the mean scores at PSP scale differed significantly between remitted and non-remitted patients, independent of criteria adopted. The proportion of patients judged to be in a state of well-being on Social Well-Being Under Neuroleptics-Short Version scale (SWN-K) were, respectively, 66.1% and 74.5% among remitters according to RSWG and CGI-S; the mean scores at the SWN scale were significantly higher only among remitters according to CGI-S criteria. Conclusions: CGI severity criteria may represent a valid and user-friendly alternative for use in identifying patients in remission, particularly in routine clinical practic