Aesthetic and Ethical Criticism in Herodas' Mimiamboi

This paper examines Herodas' interest in aesthetic and ethical criticism throughout his mimiamboi. This serious concern with such elevated topics is appropriate, and perhaps even expected, given Herodas' clear effort in the eighth mimiamb to locate his new genre of poetry within the iambic tradition in general, and the Hipponactean strain of iambos in particular. Analysis of the fourth, sixth, seventh, and eighth mimes demonstrates a keen awareness of the poet's craft, poetic techniques, and contemporary aesthetic values. While playing the role of aesthetic critic, Herodas promotes an ideal reader of his poetry, and instructs this reader in how best to contemplate his poems. The first, third, and fifth mimes all show an interest in pronouncing statements dealing with ethical behavior and elevated philosophical concerns. As an ethical critic, Herodas does not issue clear statements establishing or promoting proper ethical conduct, but foregrounds topics of great general interest to a wide Hellenistic audience. Ultimately it shall become evident that Herodas' poetry concerns itself with the same elite, intellectual issues that proved of interest to his contemporaries

Contact lens survey: The use of contact lenses for the treatment of astigmatism

A nationwide survey was conducted on a broad population of vision care practitioners with the goal of determining current contact lens practice in the area of astigmatism, and, for the purpose of providing this information for educational institutions, industry, and contact lens practitioners. Surveys were sent via US mail and E-mail to optometrists, ophthalmologists, and certified ophthalmic technicians in all fifty states. Some of the data was analyzed based on practice mode, some on years in practice, and some on total responses. Overall, there was a broad range of responses of the amount of corneal cylinder required to fit toric RGP\u27s. However, for soft torics there was a narrower range of responses. It was found that more experienced practitioners preferred to design their own toric RGP\u27s. Professional school was the main source of learning to fit toric RGP\u27s with the exception of practitioners with more than ten years of experience who utilized other sources of education more frequently. Volume of contact lenses prescribed varied more for soft sphere and soft torics than for RGP\u27s. For high corneal and high residual cylinder soft toric lenses were preferred. Younger practitioners feel more of a need for more information on fitting toric RGP\u27s

A Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulator for Software Development for a Mars Airplane

Draper Laboratory recently developed a Hardware-In-The-Loop Simulator (HILSIM) to provide a simulation of the Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Survey (ARES) airplane executing a mission in the Martian environment. The HILSIM was used to support risk mitigation activities under the Planetary Airplane Risk Reduction (PARR) program. PARR supported NASA Langley Research Center's (LaRC) ARES proposal efforts for the Mars Scout 2011 opportunity. The HILSIM software was a successful integration of two simulation frameworks, Draper's CSIM and NASA LaRC's Langley Standard Real-Time Simulation in C++ (LaSRS++)

A Functional Genomic Yeast Screen to Identify Pathogenic Bacterial Proteins

Many bacterial pathogens promote infection and cause disease by directly injecting into host cells proteins that manipulate eukaryotic cellular processes. Identification of these translocated proteins is essential to understanding pathogenesis. Yet, their identification remains limited. This, in part, is due to their general sequence uniqueness, which confounds homology-based identification by comparative genomic methods. In addition, their absence often does not result in phenotypes in virulence assays limiting functional genetic screens. Translocated proteins have been observed to confer toxic phenotypes when expressed in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This observation suggests that yeast growth inhibition can be used as an indicator of protein translocation in functional genomic screens. However, limited information is available regarding the behavior of non-translocated proteins in yeast. We developed a semi-automated quantitative assay to monitor the growth of hundreds of yeast strains in parallel. We observed that expression of half of the 19 Shigella translocated proteins tested but almost none of the 20 non-translocated Shigella proteins nor ∼1,000 Francisella tularensis proteins significantly inhibited yeast growth. Not only does this study establish that yeast growth inhibition is a sensitive and specific indicator of translocated proteins, but we also identified a new substrate of the Shigella type III secretion system (TTSS), IpaJ, previously missed by other experimental approaches. In those cases where the mechanisms of action of the translocated proteins are known, significant yeast growth inhibition correlated with the targeting of conserved cellular processes. By providing positive rather than negative indication of activity our assay complements existing approaches for identification of translocated proteins. In addition, because this assay only requires genomic DNA it is particularly valuable for studying pathogens that are difficult to genetically manipulate or dangerous to culture

A multi-phenotypic imaging screen to identify bacterial effectors by exogenous expression in a HeLa cell line

We present a high-content screen (HCS) for the simultaneous analysis of multiple phenotypes in HeLa cells expressing an autophagy reporter (mcherry-LC3) and one of 209 GFP-fused proteins from the Crohn’s Disease (CD)-associated bacterium, Adherent Invasive E. coli (AIEC) strain LF82. Using automated confocal microscopy and image analysis (CellProfiler), we localised GFP fusions within cells, and monitored their effects upon autophagy (an important innate cellular defence mechanism), cellular and nuclear morphology, and the actin cytoskeleton. This data will provide an atlas for the localisation of 209 AIEC proteins within human cells, as well as a dataset to analyse their effects upon many aspects of host cell morphology. We also describe an open-source, automated, image-analysis workflow to identify bacterial effectors and their roles via the perturbations induced in reporter cell lines when candidate effectors are exogenously expressed

Developing a Measure of Moral Judgment in Music Education

Teaching music is a moral activity. Music educators require well-developed moral judgment to adjudicate the various aspects of their jobs that have moral dimensions. The purpose of this study was to develop a reliable and valid measure of moral judgment for use in music education settings. Modeled after the Defining Issues Test (DIT), a measure of cognitive moral development with established reliability and validity, the Music Education Professional Ethics (MEPE) test was developed according to the systematic process followed by Chaar (2007) in designing a moral judgment measure for pharmacy practice. Moral dilemmas were drawn from music education casebooks and practitioner journals, and MEPE items and subscales were validated for content by a panel of four music education professors who referenced dilemmas rated by seventeen expert music educators as being frequently encountered and most difficult to resolve. The MEPE was administered to undergraduate music education majors (n = 121) at sixteen NASM accredited four-year universities (11 public, 5 private). Participants were asked to rate the importance of ethical considerations written at different levels of moral judgment development as defined by Kohlberg (1981). Responses to the MEPE exhibited good internal consistency, with reliability coefficients of .85, .84, and .84 for its three subscales. There were no significant gender differences for participant ratings of preconventional, conventional and postconventional considerations corresponding to each of the six dilemmas. For the photocopying and sacred music dilemmas, however, there were significant class standing differences with upperclassmen operating at lower levels of moral judgment than underclassmen. For the dilemma that involved a music teacher discovering a broken instrument, participants who would not punish the entire class had significantly higher moral judgment scores. Overall, there were no significant differences in P scores (a composite weighted ranking score traditionally used in moral judgment research) by either gender or class standing. P scores for undergraduate music education majors were comparable to those reported for college students and other pre-professionals in related research. Thesis directed by Professor James R. Austin