Mainbocher - A Couturier's Contribution to Material Culture

Among the various organizations for the pro-duction of wearing apparel within a techno-logically developed nation, the house of couture, in the Parisian sense, is unique. Mainbocher, the only American who owned a Parisian couture house, is the subject of a study of clothing and its relationships to the society in which the designer produced. A couturier or dressmaker/ tailor is an individual whose most recent designs are presented in several collections per year and then produced mostly on an individual basis for specific clients. Mainbocher's design philosophy and procedures of production obviously met a particular need for his clients. This paper investigates this phenomenon from a material culture perspective by studying not only the artifact and its characteristics, but also the symbolic nature of that artifact and what it communicates to society- through its produc-tion and use by the upper-upper class clients of Mainbocher (though Mainbocher had clients from the theatre for personal and stage cos-tume). Actual garments from two university costume collections were utilized for the study. Résumé La maison de couture, au sens parisien du terme, est unique en son genre parmi les organisations productrices de vêtements des pays développés. Mainbocher, le seul Américain à avoir possédé une maison de couture à Paris, fait l'objet d'une étude sur le vêtement et ses rapports avec la société pour laquelle il a été créé. Le couturier est la personne qui présente chaque année plusieurs collections de ses plus récentes créations et dont la production est surtout destinée à des clients particuliers. De toute évidence, Mainbocher avait une conception de la mode et des procédés de fabrication qui répondaient aux besoins spécifiques de sa clientèle. Dans le présent document, les auteurs étudient ce phénomène du point de vue de la culture matérielle en examinant non seulement l'arte-fact dans toutes ses caractéristiques, mais aussi ce qu'il symbolise et le message qu'il transmet à la société, à travers les étapes de sa production et l'utilisation qu'en faisait la clientèle de la haute société (bien que Mainbocher ait eu aussi des clients dans le monde du théâtre, qui faisaient appel à ses services pour leurs besoins personnels et pour la confection de costumes). Aux fins de l'étude, les auteurs se sont servis de vêtements provenant des collections de costumes de deux universités

Sex difference and intra-operative tidal volume: Insights from the LAS VEGAS study

BACKGROUND: One key element of lung-protective ventilation is the use of a low tidal volume (VT). A sex difference in use of low tidal volume ventilation (LTVV) has been described in critically ill ICU patients.OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to determine whether a sex difference in use of LTVV also exists in operating room patients, and if present what factors drive this difference.DESIGN, PATIENTS AND SETTING: This is a posthoc analysis of LAS VEGAS, a 1-week worldwide observational study in adults requiring intra-operative ventilation during general anaesthesia for surgery in 146 hospitals in 29 countries.MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Women and men were compared with respect to use of LTVV, defined as VT of 8 ml kg-1 or less predicted bodyweight (PBW). A VT was deemed 'default' if the set VT was a round number. A mediation analysis assessed which factors may explain the sex difference in use of LTVV during intra-operative ventilation.RESULTS: This analysis includes 9864 patients, of whom 5425 (55%) were women. A default VT was often set, both in women and men; mode VT was 500 ml. Median [IQR] VT was higher in women than in men (8.6 [7.7 to 9.6] vs. 7.6 [6.8 to 8.4] ml kg-1 PBW, P < 0.001). Compared with men, women were twice as likely not to receive LTVV [68.8 vs. 36.0%; relative risk ratio 2.1 (95% CI 1.9 to 2.1), P < 0.001]. In the mediation analysis, patients' height and actual body weight (ABW) explained 81 and 18% of the sex difference in use of LTVV, respectively; it was not explained by the use of a default VT.CONCLUSION: In this worldwide cohort of patients receiving intra-operative ventilation during general anaesthesia for surgery, women received a higher VT than men during intra-operative ventilation. The risk for a female not to receive LTVV during surgery was double that of males. Height and ABW were the two mediators of the sex difference in use of LTVV.TRIAL REGISTRATION: The study was registered at Clinicaltrials.gov, NCT01601223

Electronic Version Approved:

The spray treatment planning project is designed to assist the pesticide management programs as a computerized decision support system for optimizing spray routes. This optimization problem is simplified as the capacitated vehicle routing problem. Because the exhaustive search costs a great deal of time to solve the combinatorial optimization problems, Ant Metaheuristic is used to find the solution in a more efficient way. The algorithm of Ant Metaheuristic is originally developed based on the phenomenon of ants ’ foraging behavior which is a kind of indirect communication by leaving pheromones. The results from Ant Metaheuristic are compared with the results from the exhaustive search and the Genetic Algorithm. The software CASPER is found to be a useful tool for calculating the results for different routes. Although the Ant Metaheuristic result is not optimal like the exhaustive search, the result is considered to be good enough, taking into account the program runtime and efficiency

A COMPARISON OF NATURE INSPIRED INTELLIGENT OPTIMIZATION METHODS IN AERIAL SPRAY DEPOSITION MANAGEMENT Electronic Version Approved:

The AGDISP aerial spray simulation model is used to predict the deposition of spray material released from an aircraft. Determining the optimal input values to AGDISP in order to produce a desired spray material deposition is extremely difficult (NP hard). SAGA, an intelligent optimization method based on the simple genetic algorithm, was developed to solve this problem. Our project is the subsequent work of SAGA. We apply several nature inspired heuristics, mainly based on genetic algorithms, to this problem. The first method still uses the genetic algorithm, but changes genetic algorithm type, selection method, crossover and mutation operators. The second method applies a neural network to improve the initial population, crossover and mutation. The third method uses GADO, a general-purpose approach to solving the parametric design problem. The fourth method uses simulated annealing. Finally, we compare their performance in the aerial spray deposition problem