Pietro Bembo’s Bias: Patronage, History, and the Italic Wars

During the Italic Wars, the Italian peninsula experienced foreign invasions and internal discord between rivaling duchies and city-states. Florence and Venice both faced internal and external discord due to the constant wars and political in fighting. Venetian Pietro Bembo wrote historical accounts of this period during the Renaissance. His contemporaries, Marino Sanudo, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Francesco Guicciardini, also wrote historical accounts of this time. My research spotlights Bembo’s history of the Venetian Republic. This history was written in a supposedly objective fashion, yet, scholarship shows that historical writing from this time contained bias. I focused on Bembo because there is a lack of scholarship that looks at his historical writings. This bias can be linked with the socio-political ties these men had. Examining his accounts of historical events and comparing them with the other three historians, Bembo’s slanted accounts illustrate the effect and importance of having a strong patronage network

EDS Usability Testing Final Report

Usability studies in academic libraries are essential tools to assess functionality and accessibility of library services. The University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries recently conducted usability studies on EBSCO’s Discovery Service, which is to be the default search platform on the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries’ website beginning on July 2017. During the spring of 2017, Information Resources Management’s Usability Team utilized surveys, focus groups, and hands-on testing of students and faculty to assess how library patrons interacted with the new discovery service (EDS) and other related library services. The following report documents this usability study, findings discovered, and recommendations hitherto. The following recommendations are broken into three categories: dataload (i.e. bibliographic records), design, and library services

Human effector CD8+ T cells derived from naive rather than memory subsets possess superior traits for adoptive immunotherapy

Cluster of differentiation (CD)8+ T cells exist as naive, central memory, and effector memory subsets, and any of these populations can be genetically engineered into tumor-reactive effector cells for adoptive immunotherapy. However, the optimal subset from which to derive effector CD8+ T cells for patient treatments is controversial and understudied. We investigated human CD8+ T cells and found that naive cells were not only the most abundant subset but also the population most capable of in vitro expansion and T-cell receptor transgene expression. Despite increased expansion, naive-derived cells displayed minimal effector differentiation, a quality associated with greater efficacy after cell infusion. Similarly, the markers of terminal differentiation, killer cell lectin-like receptor G1 and CD57, were expressed at lower levels in cells of naive origin. Finally, naive-derived effector cells expressed higher CD27 and retained longer telomeres, characteristics that suggest greater proliferative potential and that have been linked to greater efficacy in clinical trials. Thus, these data suggest that naive cells resist terminal differentiation, or “exhaustion,” maintain high replicative potential, and therefore may be the superior subset for use in adoptive immunotherapy