Urban Encounters

Public art installations are increasingly being created and used to open up new lines of inquiry into the socialities of urban public space. As cities strive to be indexed as culturally dynamic and ‘creative’, the stakes of artistic production in public space are raised ever higher. Yet there has been little rigorous research into how the interactions between art and the public actually play out in the urban social context. This interdisciplinary colloquium brings together artists and researchers to explore how artworks in diverse media and genres can shape the urban public – the patterned and unpredictable encounters, events, and flows of city life – and, conversely, how the urban public can shape artistic production. We ask: -What forms are artistic engagements with the city taking, and how do they influence the city’s people and places? -How does the urban public encounter art in the city, and how do these encounters affect the structure and content of the work? -What kinds of urban publics are generated through art? -How can we investigate and interpret encounters between art and the public in urban spaces

Experiential Learning in Soil Science: Evaluating Soil Quality in South Wollo, Ethiopia

This study abroad program provided an opportunity to enhance the international experience and research skills of University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) students within a multidisciplinary team’s research-education goal on improving food security in Ethiopia. The experiential study component of the project included preparatory sessions during the Fall 2015 Semester at the UNL followed by a four- to five-week fieldwork experience in Ethiopia. Teams from the UNL and an Ethiopian university participated in survey data collection and field soil evaluations from farms in the Gerado area of South Wollo, Ethiopia. Having students interact with farmers increased student self-confidence and enhanced their leadership skills. Soil fertility evaluation provided the opportunity for students to apply soil health concepts in a practical setting, thus giving them a fuller understanding of these commonly challenging concepts. Throughout the study experience in Ethiopia, two UNL students wrote reflective journal entries each day and participated in daily wrap-ups. Students also gave permission to staff at Wollo University and to fellow students and faculty at the UNL. In addition they completed a final paper integrating the journal material and the experiential research work in Ethiopia. Students experienced cultural immersion while participating in this ongoing research project

Assessing health risks from multiple environmental stressors: Moving from G×E to I×E.

Research on disease causation often attempts to isolate the effects of individual factors, including individual genes or environmental factors. This reductionist approach has generated many discoveries, but misses important interactive and cumulative effects that may help explain the broad range of variability in disease occurrence observed across studies and individuals. A disease rarely results from a single factor, and instead results from a broader combination of factors, characterized here as intrinsic (I) and extrinsic (E) factors. Intrinsic vulnerability or resilience emanates from a variety of both fixed and shifting biological factors including genetic traits, while extrinsic factors comprise all biologically-relevant external stressors encountered across the lifespan. The I×E concept incorporates the multi-factorial and dynamic nature of health and disease and provides a unified, conceptual basis for integrating results from multiple areas of research, including genomics, G×E, developmental origins of health and disease, and the exposome. We describe the utility of the I×E concept to better understand and characterize the cumulative impact of multiple extrinsic and intrinsic factors on individual and population health. New research methods increasingly facilitate the measurement of multifactorial and interactive effects in epidemiological and toxicological studies. Tiered or indicator-based approaches can guide the selection of potentially relevant I and E factors for study and quantification, and exposomics methods may eventually produce results that can be used to generate a response function over the life course. Quantitative data on I×E interactive effects should generate a better understanding of the variability in human response to environmental factors. The proposed I×E concept highlights the role for broader study design in order to identify extrinsic and intrinsic factors amenable to interventions at the individual and population levels in order to enhance resilience, reduce vulnerability and improve health

Adjuvant therapy with minocycline for schizophrenia (The MINOS Trial): study protocol for a double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial

Background: Schizophrenia is understood to be a heterogeneous brain condition with overlapping symptom dimensions. The negative symptom dimension, with its protean cognitive manifestations, responds poorly to treatment, which can be a particular challenge in countries where clozapine therapy is not available. Preliminary data indicate that minocycline may be beneficial adjunct in the treatment of schizophrenia: positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms. In this study we aim to assess the efficacy of adjunctive minocycline to alleviate symptoms of schizophrenia in patients who have failed to respond to a therapeutic trial of antipsychotic medications. Methods: The study is a parallel group, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial. Participants will be adults (aged 18 years and above) with first episode or relapse episode of schizophrenia of under 5 years’ duration. Patients who failed to show adequate therapeutic response to at least one antipsychotic medication given for a minimum of 4 weeks will be recruited from a psychiatry hospital in Addis Ababa and a psychiatry clinic in Butajira, Ethiopia. A total of 150 participants (75 in each arm) will be required to detect a five-point mean difference between the intervention arms adjusting for baseline symptom severity, at 90% power and 95% confidence. Patients in the intervention arm will receive minocycline (200 mg/day orally) added on to the regular antipsychotic medications participants are already on. Those in the placebo arm will receive an inactive compound identical in physical appearance to minocycline. Intervention will be offered for 12 weeks. Diagnosis will be established using the operational criteria for research (OPCRIT). Primary outcome measure will be a change in symptom severity measured using the positive and the negative syndrome scale for schizophrenia (PANSS). Secondary outcome measures will include changes in severity of negative symptoms, proportion achieving remission, and level of functioning. Whether changes are maintained post intervention will also be measured (PANSS). Key assessment for the primary outcome will be conducted at the end of trial (week 12). One post-intervention assessment will be conducted 4 weeks after the end of intervention (week 16) to determine sustainability of change. Trial registration Clinicaltrials.gov identifier: NCT01809158

COLD GASS, an IRAM legacy survey of molecular gas in massive galaxies: I. Relations between H2, HI, stellar content and structural properties

We are conducting COLD GASS, a legacy survey for molecular gas in nearby galaxies. Using the IRAM 30m telescope, we measure the CO(1-0) line in a sample of ~350 nearby (D=100-200 Mpc), massive galaxies (log(M*/Msun)>10.0). The sample is selected purely according to stellar mass, and therefore provides an unbiased view of molecular gas in these systems. By combining the IRAM data with SDSS photometry and spectroscopy, GALEX imaging and high-quality Arecibo HI data, we investigate the partition of condensed baryons between stars, atomic gas and molecular gas in 0.1-10L* galaxies. In this paper, we present CO luminosities and molecular hydrogen masses for the first 222 galaxies. The overall CO detection rate is 54%, but our survey also uncovers the existence of sharp thresholds in galaxy structural parameters such as stellar mass surface density and concentration index, below which all galaxies have a measurable cold gas component but above which the detection rate of the CO line drops suddenly. The mean molecular gas fraction MH2/M* of the CO detections is 0.066+/-0.039, and this fraction does not depend on stellar mass, but is a strong function of NUV-r colour. Through stacking, we set a firm upper limit of MH2/M*=0.0016+/-0.0005 for red galaxies with NUV-r>5.0. The average molecular-to-atomic hydrogen ratio in present-day galaxies is 0.3, with significant scatter from one galaxy to the next. The existence of strong detection thresholds in both the HI and CO lines suggests that "quenching" processes have occurred in these systems. Intriguingly, atomic gas strongly dominates in the minority of galaxies with significant cold gas that lie above these thresholds. This suggests that some re-accretion of gas may still be possible following the quenching event.Comment: Accepted for publications in MNRAS. 32 pages, 25 figure

COLD GASS, an IRAM Legacy Survey of Molecular Gas in Massive Galaxies: II. The non-universality of the Molecular Gas Depletion Timescale

We study the relation between molecular gas and star formation in a volume-limited sample of 222 galaxies from the COLD GASS survey, with measurements of the CO(1-0) line from the IRAM 30m telescope. The galaxies are at redshifts 0.025<z<0.05 and have stellar masses in the range 10.0<log(M*/Msun)<11.5. The IRAM measurements are complemented by deep Arecibo HI observations and homogeneous SDSS and GALEX photometry. A reference sample that includes both UV and far-IR data is used to calibrate our estimates of star formation rates from the seven optical/UV bands. The mean molecular gas depletion timescale, tdep(H2), for all the galaxies in our sample is 1 Gyr, however tdep(H2) increases by a factor of 6 from a value of ~0.5 Gyr for galaxies with stellar masses of 10^10 Msun to ~3 Gyr for galaxies with masses of a few times 10^11 Msun. In contrast, the atomic gas depletion timescale remains contant at a value of around 3 Gyr. This implies that in high mass galaxies, molecular and atomic gas depletion timescales are comparable, but in low mass galaxies, molecular gas is being consumed much more quickly than atomic gas. The strongest dependences of tdep(H2) are on the stellar mass of the galaxy (parameterized as log tdep(H2)= (0.36+/-0.07)(log M* - 10.70)+(9.03+/-0.99)), and on the specific star formation rate. A single tdep(H2) versus sSFR relation is able to fit both "normal" star-forming galaxies in our COLD GASS sample, as well as more extreme starburst galaxies (LIRGs and ULIRGs), which have tdep(H2) < 10^8 yr. Normal galaxies at z=1-2 are displaced with respect to the local galaxy population in the tdep(H2) versus sSFR plane and have molecular gas depletion times that are a factor of 3-5 times longer at a given value of sSFR due to their significantly larger gas fractions.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 19 pages, 11 figure