Culturally Competent Strategies for Tutoring Writing with International ELL Students

Welcome: A brief overview about what will be discussed and what participants can take away ● “International ELL students face a variety of unique challenges that require writing tutors to adjust their approaches to tutoring. In our short time together, I will review some of the many academic and cultural barriers that international ELL students experience in university writing centers as well as culturally competent strategies tutors can implement when working with this population.

Big monodromy theorem for abelian varieties over finitely generated fields

An abelian variety over a field K is said to have big monodromy, if the image of the Galois representation on l-torsion points, for almost all primes l contains the full symplectic group. We prove that all abelian varieties over a finitely generated field K with endomorphism ring Z and semistable reduction of toric dimension one at a place of the base field K have big monodromy. We make no assumption on the transcendence degree or on the characteristic of K. This generalizes a recent result of Chris Hall.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1010.244

Historical Dialogues, Collective Memory Work, and the (Dis)continuation of Conflicts

This article is at once about historical dialogues and itself a dialogue: In an effort to discuss historical dialogues in the intersection between the academic field of memory studies and the practical field of peace-building, the article offers a semi-structured conversation between an academic and two practitioners. It is on the one hand an exploratory dialogue aimed at identifying and observing potential entry points for analysis and practice in conflict transformations, whilst on the other a discussion of how historical dialogues themselves are framed as open and exploratory or principled and tied to preconditions. The first conversation is between an academic and a practitioner engaged directly in historical dialogues through a storytelling project in Northern Ireland. They bring together theoretical, practical, and methodological considerations of moving between levels of memory as well as understanding historical dialogues at once as processes and products. The second conversation is with a practitioner who works with peacebuilding and dialogue, but not yet from an explicit entry point of historical dialogue. This conversation explores the role of religion and religiouspractice as powerful institutions and instruments in bridging individual and collective memory, as well as challenging community cohesion. As such, the article deals with historical dialogues that bring the past into the present, i.e. storytelling projects (the first conversation), or upon which memory work may be brought to bear, i.e. reading preventive dialogues also as historical dialogues (second conversation). The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of how memory work can become part of peacebuilding practices

The Degradation of Synthetic Polymeric Scaffolds With Strut-like Architecture Influences the Mechanics-dependent Repair Process of an Osteochondral Defect in Silico

Current clinical treatments of osteochondral defects in articulating joints are frequently not successful in restoring articular surfaces. Novel scaffold-based tissue engineering strategies may help to improve current treatment options and foster a true regeneration of articulating structures. A frequently desired property of scaffolds is their ability to degrade over time and allow a full restoration of tissue and function. However, it remains largely unknown how scaffold degradation influences the mechanical stability of the tissue in a defect region and, in turn, the regenerative process. Such differing goals-supporting regeneration by degrading its own structure-can hardly be analyzed for tissue engineered constructs in clinical trials and in vivo preclinical experiments. Using an in silico analysis, we investigated the degradation-induced modifications in material and architectural properties of a scaffold with strut-like architecture over the healing course and their influence on the mechanics-dependent tissue formation in osteochondral defects. The repair outcome greatly varied depending on the degradation modality, i.e. surface erosion or bulk degradation with and without autocatalysis, and of the degradation speed, i.e. faster, equal or slower than the expected repair time. Bulk degradation with autocatalysis, independently of degradation speed, caused the mechanical failure of the scaffold prior to osteochondral defect repair and was thereby deemed inappropriate for further application. On the other hand, scaffolds with strut-like architecture degrading by both surface erosion and bulk degradation with slow degradation speed resulted in comparably good repair outcomes, thereby indicating such degradation modalities as favorable for the application in osteochondral defects

Scaffold-Dependent Mechanical and Architectural Cues Guide Osteochondral Defect Healing in silico

Osteochondral defects in joints require surgical intervention to relieve pain and restore function. However, no current treatment enables a complete reconstitution of the articular surface. It is known that both mechanical and biological factors play a key role on osteochondral defect healing, however the underlying principles and how they can be used in the design of treatment strategies remain largely unknown. To unravel the underlying principles of mechanobiology in osteochondral defect healing, i.e., how mechanical stimuli can guide biological tissue formation, we employed a computational approach investigating the scaffold-associated mechanical and architectural properties that would enable a guided defect healing. A previous computer model of the knee joint was further developed to simulate healing of an empty osteochondral defect. Then, scaffolds were implanted in the defect and their architectures and material properties were systematically varied to identify their relevance in osteochondral defect healing. Scaffold mechanical and architectural properties were capable of influencing osteochondral defect healing. Specifically, scaffold material elastic modulus values in the range of cancellous bone (low GPa range) and a scaffold architecture that provided stability, i.e., resistance against displacement, in both the main loading direction and perpendicular to it supported the repair process. The here presented model, despite its simplifications, is regarded as a powerful tool to screen for promising properties of novel scaffold candidates fostering osteochondral defect regeneration prior to their implementation in vivo

Parabolic double cosets in Coxeter groups

International audienceParabolic subgroups WI of Coxeter systems (W,S) and their ordinary and double cosets W/WI and WI\W/WJ appear in many contexts in combinatorics and Lie theory, including the geometry and topology of generalized flag varieties and the symmetry groups of regular polytopes. The set of ordinary cosets wWI , for I ⊆ S, forms the Coxeter complex of W , and is well-studied. In this extended abstract, we look at a less studied object: the set of all double cosets WIwWJ for I,J ⊆ S. Each double coset can be presented by many different triples (I, w, J). We describe what we call the lex-minimal presentation and prove that there exists a unique such choice for each double coset. Lex-minimal presentations can be enumerated via a finite automaton depending on the Coxeter graph for (W, S). In particular, we present a formula for the number of parabolic double cosets with a fixed minimal element when W is the symmetric group Sn. In that case, parabolic subgroups are also known as Young subgroups. Our formula is almost always linear time computable in n, and the formula can be generalized to any Coxeter group

Datafied female health: Sociotechnical imaginaries of femtech in Danish public discourse

The digitalization of health promises individual empowerment while raising the threat of collective surveillance. Conceptualizing these threats and promises as sociotechnical imaginaries, we explore how issues of datafied female health are articulated in Danish public discourse. Empirically, we work with a large data set of Danish news media coverage of algorithmic technologies in the past 10 years (2011–2021). We locate coverage of female-oriented health technologies (or femtech) by using the data sprint methodology to track the emergence of such technologies as a topic of public concern. Across the data, we identify two broad sociotechnical imaginaries: one zooming in on individual uses of femtech, the other focusing on the collective benefits of public health initiatives. We conclude that sociotechnical imaginaries of femtech are increasingly entangled in everyday life, making female bodies knowable through algorithms and data. As such, female health becomes subject to instrumental rationality, not lived reality

Simvastatin therapy attenuates memory deficits that associate with brain monocyte infiltration in chronic hypercholesterolemia

Abstract Evidence associates cardiovascular risk factors with unfavorable systemic and neuro-inflammation and cognitive decline in the elderly. Cardiovascular therapeutics (e.g., statins and anti-hypertensives) possess immune-modulatory functions in parallel to their cholesterol- or blood pressure (BP)-lowering properties. How their ability to modify immune responses affects cognitive function is unknown. Here, we examined the effect of chronic hypercholesterolemia on inflammation and memory function in Apolipoprotein E (ApoE) knockout mice and normocholesterolemic wild-type mice. Chronic hypercholesterolemia that was accompanied by moderate blood pressure elevations associated with apparent immune system activation characterized by increases in circulating pro-inflammatory Ly6Chi monocytes in ApoE-/- mice. The persistent low-grade immune activation that is associated with chronic hypercholesterolemia facilitates the infiltration of pro-inflammatory Ly6Chi monocytes into the brain of aged ApoE-/- but not wild-type mice, and links to memory dysfunction. Therapeutic cholesterol-lowering through simvastatin reduced systemic and neuro-inflammation, and the occurrence of memory deficits in aged ApoE-/- mice with chronic hypercholesterolemia. BP-lowering therapy alone (i.e., hydralazine) attenuated some neuro-inflammatory signatures but not the occurrence of memory deficits. Our study suggests a link between chronic hypercholesterolemia, myeloid cell activation and neuro-inflammation with memory impairment and encourages cholesterol-lowering therapy as safe strategy to control hypercholesterolemia-associated memory decline during ageing