For the Greater Glory of Whom? A Perspective on Occupy SLU

Dr. Stefan Bradley is Associate Professor of History and of African American Studies at Saint Louis University (SLU). As of fall 2017, he will be chair of the Department of African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University. During the events of Occupy SLU, he was director of SLU’s African American Studies Program. Bradley is an expert in the influence of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, with focus on the role that black college students have played in shaping post-WWII American society. Among his students, he is known for cura personalis. The day after Michael Brown was killed in August 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, a student called him to report that another student had been injured in a demonstration. Bradley spent the next weeks and months in active solidarity with his students — helping them speak with the media and mentoring those who had taken to the streets to protest. He served in a similar role during the events of Occupy SLU, helping the protestors channel their anger over injustices into actions, and ensuring that SLU’s Black Student Alliance was involved in the agreement between protestors and the administration that ended the week-long occupation of SLU. He also was among the handful of black faculty who advised the SLU president, Dr. Fred Pestello, as he discerned how to respond to the occupation. Bradley’s perspective calls us to not whitewash the past, to not forget the unofficial history surrounding Occupy SLU, to remember the tension and chaos of the week-long occupation, to keep the community of protestors and their concerns always at the center of the narrative. He also cautions us against complacency as we move into the future. He reminds us that the work of justice is hard and that we must not lose sight of its urgency

Disentangling family life and hair pulling:Trichotillomania and relatedness

Trichotillomania (hair pulling) remains a relatively unknown form of bodyfocused repetitive behavior (BFRB). Sufferers tend to conceal both the action and its effects from others because of stigmatization, which is strong in both public and domestic spheres. Negative responses from close family members can add significantly to the suffering. Based on fieldwork in the United Kingdom and United States, we explore how hair pulling troubles ties even among close family members. We show why ethnographic methods reveal impacts of hair pulling that structured assessments do not yet capture and argue for a more nuanced study of BFRBs through anthropologies of relatedness

Observing geometry effects on a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-based water vapor tomography solved by least squares and by compressive sensing

In this work, the effect of the observing geometry on the tomographic reconstruction quality of both a regularized least squares (LSQ) approach and a compressive sensing (CS) approach for water vapor tomography is compared based on synthetic Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) slant wet delay (SWD) estimates. In this context, the term “observing geometry” mainly refers to the number of GNSS sites situated within a specific study area subdivided into a certain number of volumetric pixels (voxels) and to the number of signal directions available at each GNSS site. The novelties of this research are (1) the comparison of the observing geometry\u27s effects on the tomographic reconstruction accuracy when using LSQ or CS for the solution of the tomographic system and (2) the investigation of the effect of the signal directions\u27 variability on the tomographic reconstruction. The tomographic reconstruction is performed based on synthetic SWD data sets generated, for many samples of various observing geometry settings, based on wet refractivity information from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. The validation of the achieved results focuses on a comparison of the refractivity estimates with the input WRF refractivities. The results show that the recommendation of Champollion et al. (2004) to discretize the analyzed study area into voxels with horizontal sizes comparable to the mean GNSS intersite distance represents a good rule of thumb for both LSQ- and CS-based tomography solutions. In addition, this research shows that CS needs a variety of at least 15 signal directions per site in order to estimate the refractivity field more accurately and more precisely than LSQ. Therefore, the use of CS is particularly recommended for water vapor tomography applications for which a high number of multi-GNSS SWD estimates are available

German Aid from a Partner Perspective: Experience-based Perceptions from AidData's 2014 Reform Efforts Survey

Despite a large body of literature on foreign aid effectiveness and significant international policy debate on the same topic, there is little consensus about how best to measure and compare the policy influence of international development organizations. In 2014, a group of researchers from AidData at the College of William & Mary conducted a first of its kind survey, involving more than 6,500 development policymakers and practitioners across 126 low-income and middle-income countries. The 2014 Reform Efforts Survey asked in-country policymakers and practitioners to draw upon their firsthand experiences and observations to evaluate the influence of international development organizations across 23 different policy domains. This survey provides rich, micro-level data for researchers who wish to study nearly 100 international development organizations from a partner-country perspective. In this joint study, AidData and DEval make use of this rich source of data to test a number of hypotheses about the comparative strengths and weaknesses of Germany’s development cooperation, and to identify the factors that enable and constrain German development agencies in their efforts to influence the reform processes of partner countries

Estimation of Epipolar Geometry via the Radon Transform

One of the key problems in computer vision is the recovery of epipolar geometry constraints between different camera views. The majority of existing techniques rely on point correspondences, which are typically perturbed by mismatches and noise, hence limiting the accuracy of these techniques. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel approach that estimates epipolar geometry constraints based on a statistical model in the Radon domain. The method requires no correspondences, explicit constraints on the data or assumptions regarding the scene structure. Results are presented on both synthetic and real data that show the method's robustness to noise and outliers

High-density P300 enhancers control cell state transitions.

BACKGROUND: Transcriptional enhancers are frequently bound by a set of transcription factors that collaborate to activate lineage-specific gene expression. Recently, it was appreciated that a subset of enhancers comprise extended clusters dubbed stretch- or super-enhancers (SEs). These SEs are located near key cell identity genes, and enriched for non-coding genetic variations associated with disease. Previously, SEs have been defined as having the highest density of Med1, Brd4 or H3K27ac by ChIP-seq. The histone acetyltransferase P300 has been used as a marker of enhancers, but little is known about its binding to SEs. RESULTS: We establish that P300 marks a similar SE repertoire in embryonic stem cells as previously reported using Med1 and H3K27ac. We also exemplify a role for SEs in mouse T helper cell fate decision. Similarly, upon activation of macrophages by bacterial endotoxin, we found that many SE-associated genes encode inflammatory proteins that are strongly up-regulated. These SEs arise from small, low-density enhancers in unstimulated macrophages. We also identified expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) in human monocytes that lie within such SEs. In macrophages and Th17 cells, inflammatory SEs can be perturbed either genetically or pharmacologically thus revealing new avenues to target inflammation. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings support the notion that P300-marked SEs can help identify key nodes of transcriptional control during cell fate decisions. The SE landscape changes drastically during cell differentiation and cell activation. As these processes are crucial in immune responses, SEs may be useful in revealing novel targets for treating inflammatory diseases