TRANSNATIONAL JAZZ AND BLUES: AURAL AESTHETICS AND AFRICAN DIASPORIC FICTION

This dissertation examines the influence of jazz and blues on African Diasporic fiction. While the influences of jazz and blues on African American cultural production have received critical attention for many decades, I contend that literary criticism neglects to recognize that jazz and blues are more than just national forms. They are international forms that have influenced a diverse group of writers and their novels. My work fills gaps in current scholarship by examining well-known and lesser-known novels that depict jazz and blues both within and without American contexts. This international approach is crucial to any examination of jazz, blues, and fiction because it expands our understanding of how authors aim to represent the experiences of African Diasporic people throughout the world. Building on the work in African American literary criticism and jazz studies, this dissertation examines the varying elements of jazz and blues -- what I refer to as "aural aesthetics" -- that writers incorporate into fiction in order to understand the continued influence of music on African Diasporic fiction. In Chapter One, I contend that Langston Hughes uses the blues as a form of protest in his first published novel Not Without Laughter (1930) to advance critiques of racism and African American involvement in World War I. In Chapter Two, I argue that Ann Petry fills her first novel The Street (1946) with a blues aesthetic that not only undergirds her representations of protest but also responds to the call for the use of vernacular forms in literature. In Chapter Three, I argue that Jackie Kay in Trumpet (1999) and Paule Marshall in The Fisher King (2000) represent the jazz-inflected solo as a means through which their characters build individual identities that challenge notions of an undifferentiated, monolithic African Diaspora. In Chapter Four, I contend that John A. Williams in Clifford's Blues (1999) and Xam Wilson Cartiér in Muse-Echo Blues (1991) present protagonists as composers that use jazz and blues as methods to assert individual African Diasporic identities and to express communal histories that are not present elsewhere in literature. By providing a critical framework for understanding the influence of jazz and blues in African Diasporic fiction, this project responds directly to criticism that limits the study of jazz and blues to American texts and contexts, calls for a reconsideration of those nationalistic tendencies, and argues for the critical engagement of jazz and blues as forms international in scope

Ransomware against Police: Diagnosis of Risk Factors via Application of Cyber-Routine Activities Theory

Technologically advanced hackers are able to commit a crime and leave undiscovered by the authorities. Recent increases in cyber-attacks utilizing technology known as ransomware are leaving police departments and other institutions in the serious situation of having to pay ransom to cybercriminals. The present study employs a Cyber-Routine Theoretical approach in explaining why ransomware victimization has become a viral phenomenon. Data were derived from the recent reported cases of ransomware attacks towards police departments in the U.S. and analyzed in order to build a victim profile. This study shows that online lifestyle and cybersecurity are the salient factors that contribute to the ransomware victimization. Future potential preventive measures and policies will be discussed

Boundary Entropy Can Increase Under Bulk RG Flow

The boundary entropy log(g) of a critical one-dimensional quantum system (or two-dimensional conformal field theory) is known to decrease under renormalization group (RG) flow of the boundary theory. We study instead the behavior of the boundary entropy as the bulk theory flows between two nearby critical points. We use conformal perturbation theory to calculate the change in g due to a slightly relevant bulk perturbation and find that it has no preferred sign. The boundary entropy log(g) can therefore increase during appropriate bulk flows. This is demonstrated explicitly in flows between minimal models. We discuss the applications of this result to D-branes in string theory and to impurity problems in condensed matter.Comment: 20 page

Treatment With Mycophenolate and Cyclophosphamide Leads to Clinically Meaningful Improvements in Patient‐Reported Outcomes in Scleroderma Lung Disease: Results of Scleroderma Lung Study II

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/156000/1/acr211125.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/156000/2/acr211125_am.pd

BPI-fold (BPIF) containing/plunc protein expression in human fetal major and minor salivary glands.

The aim of this study was to determine expression, not previously described, of PLUNC (palate, lung, and nasal epithelium clone) (BPI-fold containing) proteins in major and minor salivary glands from very early fetal tissue to the end of the second trimester and thus gain further insight into the function of these proteins. Early fetal heads, and major and minor salivary glands were collected retrospectively and glands were classified according to morphodifferentiation stage. Expression of BPI-fold containing proteins was localized through immunohistochemistry. BPIFA2, the major BPI-fold containing protein in adult salivary glands, was detected only in the laryngeal pharynx; the lack of staining in salivary glands suggested salivary expression is either very late in development or is only in adult tissues. Early expression of BPIFA1 was seen in the trachea and nasal cavity with salivary gland expression only seen in late morphodifferentiation stages. BPIFB1 was seen in early neural tissue and at later stages in submandibular and sublingual glands. BPIFA1 is significantly expressed in early fetal oral tissue but BPIFB1 has extremely limited expression and the major salivary BPIF protein (BPIFA2) is not produced in fetal development. Further studies, with more sensitive techniques, will confirm the expression pattern and enable a better understanding of embryonic BPIF protein function

Yang Baxter and anisotropic sigma and lambda models, cyclic RG and exact S-matrices

Integrable deformation of SU(2) sigma and lambda models are considered at the classical and quantum levels. These are the Yang-Baxter and XXZ-type anisotropic deformations. The XXZ type deformations are UV safe in one regime, while in another regime, like the Yang-Baxter deformations, they exhibit cyclic RG behaviour. The associated affine quantum group symmetry, realised classically at the Poisson bracket level, has q a complex phase in the UV safe regime and q real in the cyclic RG regime, where q is an RG invariant. Based on the symmetries and RG flow we propose exact factorisable S-matrices to describe the scattering of states in the lambda models, from which the sigma models follow by taking a limit and non-abelian T-duality. In the cyclic RG regimes, the S-matrices are periodic functions of rapidity, at large rapidity, and in the Yang-Baxter case violate parity

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe