The branch banking boom in Illinois: a byproduct of restrictive branching laws

What’s behind the boom in bank branches across Illinois, particularly in Chicago? The authors explore the history of branch banking within the state and across the nation to help explain this recent trend and discuss its future implications.Branch banks ; Branch banks - Illinois ; Banks and banking - History

Federal preemption of state bank regulation: a conference panel summary

The Chicago Fed's 42nd Annual Conference on Bank Structure and Competition, which took place May 17–19, 2006, included a panel on federal preemption of state banking regulation. The panelists discussed the wide-ranging impact of rules issued by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal agency that regulates national banks.Bank supervision

The Pattern of Modernity: Textiles in Art, Fashion, and Cultural Memory in Nigeria since 1960

This thesis explores the appropriation of printed and tie-dyed textiles in visual art and culture produced in Nigeria since 1960. By examining the social and political functions of the Yoruba indigo dyed fabric called adire as they evolved over the 20th century, the analyses of artistic appropriations are informed by the perspectives and histories of the cultural production of women in Nigeria's southwest dyeing centers. Questions related to the gendered production of both "traditional crafts" and "modern art" are raised and reformulated for the specific context of textiles. Additionally, the ideology of 'Natural Synthesis' that was a formative force for the post-Independence generation of artists is considered as an influence on the drive to appropriate textiles and their patterns, as well as to conceive of them as "traditional" culture within an artistic paradigm of tradition and modernity. It argues that appropriations of textiles by modernist artists seize and sometimes erase the modernity of female and indigenous cultural production. Since these late modernist movements, artistic appropriations of textiles have continued within the field of visual arts, but underwent significant evolution in terms of media, subject matter, and conceptual underpinnings. Artists no longer undermine the modernity of cultural producers, but use it as a critical tool. These changes represent both a departure from modernist styles that characterized artistic practices in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a renegotiation with the relationship of textiles to the historical and cultural past of a young nation. As artists and designers of the late 20th and 21st centuries explore the textile in new media and on different terms from their predecessors, new themes emerge such as consumerism, memory and history that situate this generation of cultural producers within global artistic genres and spheres that have dominated since the 1980s

But Them Can’t Be God: Chinese Textiles in Nigerian Dress and the Art of Ayo Akinwande

This article explores the influence of Chinese actors in the Nigerian textile industry through the lens of a work by the artist Ayo Akinwande. By examining a sartorial practice called aso-ebi, the author argues that the growth of this practice over the course of the 20th century paved the way for an influx of cheap, printed cloth from China. Akinwande’s work titled, “Win-Win,” uses the metaphor of indigenous dress and patterned fabric to illustrate that Chinese involvement in Nigerian affairs extends beyond textiles to the construction industry

Annotated Bibliography: The Reference Desk: Grand Idea or Gone Down the River?

This bibliography is from a panel presentation at the 2017 ACL Conference. The goal of this panel was to explore different rationales or sets of values that illustrated the continuation of the reference desk and reference service as essential to the success of the academic community. We discovered that “what to do with reference” is far from a settled question. We discovered passionate arguments, diverse models, and an array of data. In this current stage of figuring out the value of academic libraries to the campus as a whole and to students in particular, it seemed that there was limited hard data connecting Reference services to how they met students’ needs. How do we make ourselves valuable, important, essential, and useful? Maybe we need to change our model? If so, how do we examine ourselves and our environment appropriately to make this happen? What factors should we examine? Which ones must we keep? What things can we discard or change? When students come to seek assistance, they generally need the short, instant, and personal help, without having to attend a whole training session or class. Individual and personalized guidance for their immediate need is the most important factor for them. How do libraries provide that

Tracking the Continuing Trends of the Self-Represented Litigant Phenomenon

From 2011-2013, Dr. Julie Macfarlane conducted a study about experiences of self-representation in Canada. Her results were based on interviews and/or focus group interviews with 259 self-represented litigants (SRLs). Since the release of the “The National Self-Represented Litigants Project: Identifying and Meeting the Needs of Self-Represented Litigants”, the National Self-Represented Litigants Project (NSRLP) has continued to collect data from a variety of SRLs across Canada by asking those who contact us to complete an Intake Form in Survey Monkey, linked to the website. This paper sets out to relate the new intake data to the original demographic data in the 2013 Research Repor

Function and activation of signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) in adipose tissue formation and metabolism

Obesity is a significant medical and public heath concern due to its prevalence, associated co-morbidities, and economic impact. Obesity ensues when adipocytes accommodate excess energy through enhanced triacylglycerol (TAG) storage, and when adipocytes increase in number via adipogenesis. Signal Transducer and Activator of Transcription 3 (STAT3), a mitogenic signaling protein, is activated during the proliferative phases of adipogenesis. We hypothesized therefore, that STAT3 plays a necessary role in adipogenesis. This dissertation describes two independent projects that examined the function and activation of STAT3 in adipose tissue formation and adipocyte metabolism. Using an adipocyte cell line, we determined that STAT3 activation during adipogenesis occurred indirectly through the synthesis of an autocrine/paracrine factor. We identified the factor to be midkine, a pleiotrophic growth factor, and determined that the midkine-STAT3 signaling pathway plays a necessary role in adipogenesis. This study supported the hypothesis that STAT3 is necessary for adipogenesis and prompted a subsequent study aimed to determine the physiological role of STAT3 in adipogenesis in animals. In this study we used Cre-loxP DNA recombination to create mice with an adipocyte-specific disruption of the STAT3 gene (ASKO mice). aP2-Cre driven disappearance of STAT3 expression occurred on day 6 of adipogenesis, a time point when preadipocytes have already undergone conversion to adipocytes. Thus, this knockout model examined the role of STAT3 in mature, but not differentiating adipocytes ASKO mice weighed more than their littermate controls and had increased adipose tissue mass associated with adipocyte hypertrophy, but not adipocyte hyperplasia, hyperphagia, or reduced energy expenditure. Leptin-induced lipolysis was impaired in ASKO adipocytes, which may partially explain the adipocyte hypertrophy. Despite reduced adiponectin and increased liver TAG, ASKO mice did not develop impaired glucose tolerance or other obesity-related metabolic perturbations. Overall, this work improved our understanding of preadipocyte proliferation, differentiation, and metabolism by establishing a necessary role for STAT3 and the midkine/STAT3 signaling pathway in these processes. This work will help to direct efforts to identify potential adipose-tissue driven causes of obesity and to discover targets for the treatment of diseases such as obesity, hepatic steatosis, and insulin resistance

Patterned Modernity: The Role of Women in the Production of Textiles and Contemporary Art in Nigeria

Through the modern history of the indigo-dyed textile adire, produced by the Yoruba in southwest Nigeria, this essay examines the relationship between the production of the textile, the gendered divisions of its production, the development of modernity, and the appropriation of textiles by artists working in Nigeria since the time of independence. The essay presents the argument that a close look at the role adire played in pre-independence decades will reveal that its women dyers were actively involved not only politically and socially in colonial resistance, but also as the producers of visual culture: they expressed themselves aesthetically through the textile pattern. Finally, the textile’s intimate connection to the construction and preservation of memory in Nigerian society is considered as a motive for the appropriation of its pattern language by several of Nigeria’s prominent modern and contemporary artists

A Light Challenge: First Graders Engineer an Obstacle Course with Flashlights

In this class, we wanted to support students’ knowledge of light and the ways in which it interacts with other materials through a series of connected learning experiences. These experiences are related to NGSS standard 1-PS4-3 Waves and Their Applications in Technologies for Information Transfer. Plan and conduct investigations to determine the effect of placing objects made with different materials in the path of a beam of light. We aimed for children to discover that light tends to move in a straight line unless something gets in the way, materials can affect the beam of light, and the way light moves can be impacted by moving the objects. The connected activities described here were guided by the 5E learning cycle. The students watched the video to spark their curiosity about the path in which something might travel, worked in teams to design and test ideas while exploring the properties of the light, and documented and communicated their observations