The White Building

The White Building project was a multi-year participatory transmedia project using art as a mechanism for community building and organising in the White Building in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The White Building in central Phnom Penh was built in 1963 as part of a modernist vision of social housing for artists and performers. Following the trauma of the Khmer Rouge, where the city was emptied and an estimated ninety percent of Cambodia’s artists were killed, the intervening Vietnamese-backed government sought to repopulate the building with an invitation to surviving artists to return. In recent years, largely due to government neglect, the building has fallen into disrepair and was demolished in June 2017. However, behind the fading facade and dilapidated infrastructure there was a complex community of over three thousand people including artists, musicians, community activists and everyday city dwellers. This research project archives and explores the role of recent media, art and creative community projects to document the everyday lives of the Building's inhabitants as both a means of resistance and to enable critical reflexivity among participants. The key question posed at the outset of development of the programs was “can localised creative art and media programs amplify the lived experience of a community and positively impact internal and external perception, identification and position?” To address this question a number of initiatives across a variety of mediums and media platforms were developed. This included development of the Aziza Film School, weekly art, photography, digital storytelling and community organising programs, events and exhibitions in the White Building showcasing creative works by residents for both internal and external audiences, partnership with local groups such as Sa Sa Art Projects who ran a gallery space and artist in residency program in the Building and fostering the development of the White Building Collective - a group of residents and students at the film school who have created high impact films, photography and online works including the Humans of Phnom Penh series. And in partnership with Sa Sa Art Projects the development of festivals, screenings and exhibitions showcasing the work of residents to the broader community and the creation of a community library and archive and the online archive of whitebuilding.org. Through this diverse range of initiatives, there was a desire to not only celebrate and document the living memory of this unique community, but to push back against government and property developers' interest in the site. The research documents how the dominant discursive acts of the more powerful can be challenged through the expression of the 'lived' and the elevation of everyday life. And that the very perception of the space and the sense of place was (re)produced through these interactions across these new and diverse mediascapes resulting in increased collective identification and action

On the cosmological domain wall problem for the minimally extended supersymmetric standard model

We study the cosmology of the Supersymmetric Standard Model augmented by a gauge singlet to solve the μ-problem and describe the evolution of the domain walls which are created during electroweak symmetry breaking due to the discrete symmetry in this model. The usual assumption that (gravitationally induced) non-renormalisable terms which explicitly break this symmetry may cause the walls to collapse on a cosmologically safe timescale, is reconsidered. Such terms are constrained by considerations of primordial nucleosynthesis, and also because (by not respecting the symmetry) they induce divergences which destabilise the hierarchy and reintroduce the μ-problem. We find that, even when the Kähler potential is ‘non-minimal’ (i.e. when the hidden sector couples directly to the visible), the model is either ruled out cosmologically or suffers from a naturalness problem

Improved image-based deformation measurement for geotechnical applications

This paper describes and benchmarks a new implementation of image-based deformation measurement for geotechnical applications. The updated approach combines a range of advances in image analysis algorithms and techniques best suited to geotechnical applications. Performance benchmarking of the new approach has used a series of artificial images subjected to prescribed spatially varying displacement fields. An improvement by at least a factor of 10 in measurement precision is achieved relative to the most commonly used particle image velocimetry (PIV) approach for all deformation modes, including rigid-body displacements, rotations, and strains (compressive and shear). Lastly, an example analysis of a centrifuge model test is used to demonstrate the capabilities of the new approach. The strain field generated by penetration of a flat footing and an entrapped sand plug into an underlying clay layer is computed and compared for both the current and updated algorithms. This analysis demonstrates that the enhanced measurement precision improves the clarity of the interpretation. </jats:p

A Trial of a 7-Valent Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine in HIV-Infected Adults.

BACKGROUND: Streptococcus pneumoniae is a leading and serious coinfection in adults with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, particularly in Africa. Prevention of this disease by vaccination with the current 23-valent polysaccharide vaccine is suboptimal. Protein conjugate vaccines offer a further option for protection, but data on their clinical efficacy in adults are needed. METHODS: In this double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical efficacy trial, we studied the efficacy of a 7-valent conjugate pneumococcal vaccine in predominantly HIV-infected Malawian adolescents and adults who had recovered from documented invasive pneumococcal disease. Two doses of vaccine were given 4 weeks apart. The primary end point was a further episode of pneumococcal infection caused by vaccine serotypes or serotype 6A. RESULTS: From February 2003 through October 2007, we followed 496 patients (of whom 44% were male and 88% were HIV-seropositive) for 798 person-years of observation. There were 67 episodes of pneumococcal disease in 52 patients, all in the HIV-infected subgroup. In 24 patients, there were 19 episodes that were caused by vaccine serotypes and 5 episodes that were caused by the 6A serotype. Of these episodes, 5 occurred in the vaccine group and 19 in the placebo group, for a vaccine efficacy of 74% (95% confidence interval [CI], 30 to 90). There were 73 deaths from any cause in the vaccine group and 63 in the placebo group (hazard ratio in the vaccine group, 1.18; 95% CI, 0.84 to 1.66). The number of serious adverse events within 14 days after vaccination was significantly lower in the vaccine group than in the placebo group (3 vs. 17, P=0.002), and the number of minor adverse events was significantly higher in the vaccine group (41 vs. 13, P=0.003). CONCLUSIONS: The 7-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine protected HIV-infected adults from recurrent pneumococcal infection caused by vaccine serotypes or serotype 6A. (Current Controlled Trials number, ISRCTN54494731.) Copyright 2010 Massachusetts Medical Society

A MIQE-Compliant Real-Time PCR Assay for Aspergillus Detection

PMCID: PMC3393739This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

NuSTAR hard X-ray observation of a sub-A class solar flare

We report a NuSTAR observation of a solar microflare, SOL2015-09-01T04. Although it was too faint to be observed by the GOES X-ray Sensor, we estimate the event to be an A0.1 class flare in brightness. This microflare, with only 5 counts per second per detector observed by RHESSI, is fainter than any hard X-ray (HXR) flare in the existing literature. The microflare occurred during a solar pointing by the highly sensitive NuSTAR astrophysical observatory, which used its direct focusing optics to produce detailed HXR microflare spectra and images. The microflare exhibits HXR properties commonly observed in larger flares, including a fast rise and more gradual decay, earlier peak time with higher energy, spatial dimensions similar to the RHESSI microflares, and a high-energy excess beyond an isothermal spectral component during the impulsive phase. The microflare is small in emission measure, temperature, and energy, though not in physical size; observations are consistent with an origin via the interaction of at least two magnetic loops. We estimate the increase in thermal energy at the time of the microflare to be 2.4x10^27 ergs. The observation suggests that flares do indeed scale down to extremely small energies and retain what we customarily think of as "flarelike" properties.Comment: Status: Accepted by the Astrophysical Journal, 2017 July 1

A Holocene floodplain sequence from the Kirenga Valley, Lake Baikal region (Siberia), and its significance for molluscan and mammalian biogeography

The archaeological record in the Baikal region is characterised by a marked discontinuity separating different groups of hunter-gatherers within the Neolithic period. A range of sedimentary archives has been studied to investigate this issue and whether it had an environmental cause. Our focus has been on floodplain sequences from river valleys, which can augment other higher resolution records such as those from lakes. Here we report on the molluscs and small vertebrates recovered from a Holocene floodplain sequence at a remote locality (Krasniy Yar XI) in the Kirenga Valley, in the Lake Baikal region of eastern Siberia. The sequence lacked the necessary temporal resolution to adequately address this archaeological question, but it did provide a valuable radiocarbon-dated record of local floodplain pedogenesis, molluscs and vertebrates over the last ∼7000 cal yr BP. Aquatic molluscs are more frequent during the early part of the record but they become scarce in the upper levels, which are dominated by land snails, especially species of Vallonia. Other noteworthy species include Vertigo microsphaera, recently discovered living in the area, and the first fossil records of V. kushiorensis, V. chytryi, and V. genesioides from the Baikal region. An exceptional feature of the molluscan record was the relatively high frequency of sinistral specimens of Cochlicopa, which occurred in 12/18 samples with a mean frequency of 9.8% (38/385). The vertebrates included specimens of southern birch mouse Sicista subtilis, unknown living in this part of Siberia with the closest records some 400 km to the southwest. These data demonstrate marked faunal and distributional shifts within the Holocene, reflecting local and regional environmental changes through time