After the War with Hannelore : A Berliner War Child's Testimony from 1945 to 1989

"I met Hannelore and her husband, Jean Devigne, in 1994, years after both my parents passed away. At first, we established a client-artist relationship when they became interested in my paintings. Out of this grew a personal friendship which now has elements resembling a familial relationship. As I got to know Hannelore, I became interested in her childhood and adult years in Berlin after the war. The impetus behind making this film was her stories, my personal attachment to her, and my interest in WWII history and the changing face of Berlin since WWII and the Cold War." -- Publisher's website

Dans l’Griff-In Griffintown: Three personal French Canadian narratives on their homes, public spaces, and buildings in the former industrial neighbourhood of Griffintown.

Abstract Dans l’Griff-In Griffintown: Three personal French Canadian narratives on their homes, public spaces, and buildings in the former industrial neighbourhood of Griffintown. G. Scott MacLeod This Master’s thesis focuses on a two-generation French Canadian family, who through a series of interviews and a selection of their personal photographs from the 1940s to the 2000s, describe their Griffintown community experience. Griffintown is a former industrial inner-city neighbourhood reflecting Montreal’s industrial past, just south of the city’s downtown. With only a handful of the original civic, residential and industrial sites remaining, the once thriving community of predominantly working class Anglo-Protestants, Irish Catholics and French Canadians has all but disappeared. Currently Griffintown is claimed and viewed by some as a once predominantly Irish neighbourhood; little has been done to recognize that other cultures and communities occupied Griffintown. The current gentrification of the neighbourhood has brought a condo boom, bringing in a new generation of young professionals and retired couples but the former community endures in memory, via recent, books, films and community art projects. Using an arts-informed research methodology for my interviews and a photo elicitation process, I triggered the Merciers’ memories and stories about their former homes and community life, enabling them to recount their French Canadian experience in Griffintown. Using a short documentary film and educational website, this study articulates their personal narratives and memories from family homes and community living to reveal the importance of public spaces, buildings and communities. This thesis and documentary also highlight their views on the current condo projects changing the face of Griffintown. This arts-informed template and framework are designed for similar studies while the documentary and website are created for educational use in the field of Art Education

Meeting with the Goddesses

"Meeting with the Goddesses is a chapter title I have taken from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, as this body of work deals with several themes centred around the sacred feminine, mythology, the archetypal mind, temples and funerary objects. The first is the theme of the mystery of life, and as part of that mystery, the search for meaning embodied by the notion of goddesses — a single or multiple 'source of all things.' I am interested in the spiritual process of asking the source/creator in order to manifest creation — whether this be an abundant harvest or victory in war. It is difficult to remove spirituality and explorations of the divine from the formal strictures and mandates of religion; thus, another theme explored in the exhibition will be the dualities of creation and destruction that are part of our concept of the divine, and which are exercised by human beings in the practice of religion. Many goddesses have creative and destructive powers. These are embodied in the terrible fury of the god of War, the life-giving fecundity of ancient Venus figurines, the breathtaking and abundant tableaux of life forms in cave drawings, depictions of human sacrifice or works that honor and venerate the First Nations, Celtic, Nordic, and Greek goddesses." -- p. [5]

The Lachine Canal : Past and Present : Paintings and Drawings by G. Scott MacLeod

" For Lachine Canal : Past and Present, I studied Yvon Desloges and Alain Gelly’s book The Lachine Canal, Riding the Waves of Industrial and Urban Development 1860-1950 to get a better understanding of the people who settled in the Lachine Canal region, the technology they used, and the goods they manufactured. I created this exhibition to compare how the canal looked in the mid to late 1800s to how it appears today. For me, the value of studying history is the insight we gain into human nature and our past. In reflection we can learn how we may improve upon the way we do things in the future.[...] What I have tried to represent in The Lachine Canal: Past and Present is a comparative study of the canal’s past and present, focussing not simply on the canal and the surrounding architecture but on the memory and history of the people and companies who built the neighbourhoods that we know today as Lachine, LaSalle, Verdun, St- Henri, Côte Saint Paul, Griffintown, Little Burgundy, Point St-Charles, and the port of Old Montreal." -- p. [6, 8]

Distinct APC subtypes drive spatially segregated CD4+ and CD8+ T-Cell effector activity during skin infection with HSV-1

Efficient infection control requires potent T-cell responses at sites of pathogen replication. However, the regulation of T-cell effector function in situ remains poorly understood. Here, we show key differences in the regulation of effector activity between CD4+ and CD8+ T-cells during skin infection with HSV-1. IFN-γ-producing CD4+ T cells disseminated widely throughout the skin and draining lymph nodes (LN), clearly exceeding the epithelial distribution of infectious virus. By contrast, IFN-γ-producing CD8+ T cells were only found within the infected epidermal layer of the skin and associated hair follicles. Mechanistically, while various subsets of lymphoid- and skin-derived dendritic cells (DC) elicited IFN-γ production by CD4+ T cells, CD8+ T cells responded exclusively to infected epidermal cells directly presenting viral antigen. Notably, uninfected cross-presenting DCs from both skin and LNs failed to trigger IFN-γ production by CD8+ T-cells. Thus, we describe a previously unappreciated complexity in the regulation of CD4+ and CD8+ T-cell effector activity that is subset-specific, microanatomically distinct and involves largely non-overlapping types of antigen-presenting cells (APC).The work was funded by grant (APP628423 and APP1059514) and fellowship support from the National Health and Medical Research Council Australia (NHMRC)and the Australian Research Council (ARC). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

The Time-Domain Spectroscopic Survey: Understanding the Optically Variable Sky with SEQUELS in SDSS-III

The Time-Domain Spectroscopic Survey (TDSS) is an SDSS-IV eBOSS subproject primarily aimed at obtaining identification spectra of ~220,000 optically-variable objects systematically selected from SDSS/Pan-STARRS1 multi-epoch imaging. We present a preview of the science enabled by TDSS, based on TDSS spectra taken over ~320 deg^2 of sky as part of the SEQUELS survey in SDSS-III, which is in part a pilot survey for eBOSS in SDSS-IV. Using the 15,746 TDSS-selected single-epoch spectra of photometrically variable objects in SEQUELS, we determine the demographics of our variability-selected sample, and investigate the unique spectral characteristics inherent in samples selected by variability. We show that variability-based selection of quasars complements color-based selection by selecting additional redder quasars, and mitigates redshift biases to produce a smooth quasar redshift distribution over a wide range of redshifts. The resulting quasar sample contains systematically higher fractions of blazars and broad absorption line quasars than from color-selected samples. Similarly, we show that M-dwarfs in the TDSS-selected stellar sample have systematically higher chromospheric active fractions than the underlying M-dwarf population, based on their H-alpha emission. TDSS also contains a large number of RR Lyrae and eclipsing binary stars with main-sequence colors, including a few composite-spectrum binaries. Finally, our visual inspection of TDSS spectra uncovers a significant number of peculiar spectra, and we highlight a few cases of these interesting objects. With a factor of ~15 more spectra, the main TDSS survey in SDSS-IV will leverage the lessons learned from these early results for a variety of time-domain science applications.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figures, submitted to Ap

The relationship between deprivation, tumour stage and the systemic inflammatory response in patients with primary operable breast cancer

The extent of deprivation (Carstairs deprivation index) was directly associated with the magnitude of the systemic inflammatory response (reduced albumin and elevated C-reactive protein, P<0.01) in patients with primary operable breast cancer (n=314). Deprivation was not associated with age, tumour size, tumour type, grade, and the proportion of patients with involved lymph nodes and oestrogen receptor status