How to boost creativity in academe (essay)

I'm going to teach the same class and write the same paper for the rest of my career. I realized this about six years ago, as a tenure-track assistant professor. It was a morbid insight, considering I was just getting into the grove of the academic lifestyle, defined by a 60 percent teaching, 40 percent research contract. The thought first came to me in a moment of teaching burnout. As lecturers, we know that the prep involved with teaching a class for the first time means exponentially more work. But if we continue to teach that class and claim it as “ours,” we can ease up. We can cover the same material and grade the same papers year after year. I’d already reached the fifth repetition of a course that I’d developed during my Ph.D. days. I was bored but didn’t feel the incentive to shake things up. I was overworked -- why add to my labor

Accelerometers can measure total and activity-specific energy expenditures in free-ranging marine mammals only if linked to time-activity budgets

Peer reviewedPostprin

Looking for “interesting people”

Mobile dating applications play a prominent role in Chinese gay men’s social lives. Based on in-depth interviews with 21 participants, this study explores how urban gay singles in China develop social relationships on dating apps. It reveals that relationship development is often driven by casual conversations, which are not motivated by clear pragmatic purposes. Casual conversations tend to unfold around common hobbies or experiences, serving as a source of sociability, or satisfaction in socializing itself. In contrast to casual conversations, two forms of conversations are deemed highly instrumental and undesirable: one is the sex-oriented conversation aimed at immediate sexual encounters; the other is the interrogative conversation in which people ask private questions in a nonreciprocal and rigid way. Besides craving sociability, users “relationalize” casual sex by perceiving it as a form of social connection and endowing it with the potential to foster a relationship. This is also reflected in users’ preference for sexual partners with whom they can hold a conversation. Users also exploit the affordances of different media platforms and capture the relationship potential by platform switching. They switch to the mainstream media platform WeChat for mor

An Introduction to the DB Relational Database Management System

This paper is an introductory guide to using the Db programs to maintain and query a relational database on the UNIX operating system. In the past decade. increasing interest has been shown in the development of relational database management systems. Db is an attempt to incorporate a flexible and powerful relational database system within the user environment presented by the UNIX operating system. The family of Db programs is useful for maintaining a database of information that is updated infrequently. A retrieval command to Db is phrased in a language based on the Relational Algebra. These programs are written in portable C and are currently implemented on a PDP-11/70 and a VAX-11/7BO

Non-Abelian Tensor Multiplet Equations from Twistor Space

We establish a Penrose-Ward transform yielding a bijection between holomorphic principal 2-bundles over a twistor space and non-Abelian self-dual tensor fields on six-dimensional flat space-time. Extending the twistor space to supertwistor space, we derive sets of manifestly N=(1,0) and N=(2,0) supersymmetric non-Abelian constraint equations containing the tensor multiplet. We also demonstrate how this construction leads to constraint equations for non-Abelian supersymmetric self-dual strings.Comment: v3: 23 pages, revised version published in Commun. Math. Phy

Targeting Neutrophilic Inflammation using Polymersome-Mediated Cellular Delivery

Neutrophils are key effector cells in inflammation and play an important role in neutralizing invading pathogens. During inflammation resolution, neutrophils undergo apoptosis before they are removed by macrophages, but if apoptosis is delayed, neutrophils can cause extensive tissue damage and chronic disease. Promotion of neutrophil apoptosis is a potential therapeutic approach for treating persistent inflammation, yet neutrophils have proven difficult cells to manipulate experimentally. In this study, we deliver therapeutic compounds to neutrophils using biocompatible, nanometer-sized synthetic vesicles, or polymersomes, which are internalized by binding to scavenger receptors and subsequently escape the early endosome through a pH-triggered disassembly mechanism. This allows polymersomes to deliver molecules into the cell cytosol of neutrophils without causing cellular activation. After optimizing polymersome size, we show that polymersomes can deliver the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor (R)-roscovitine into human neutrophils to promote apoptosis in vitro. Finally, using a transgenic zebrafish model, we show that encapsulated (R)-roscovitine can speed up inflammation resolution in vivo more efficiently than the free drug. These results show that polymersomes are effective intracellular carriers for drug delivery into neutrophils. This has important consequences for the study of neutrophil biology and the development of neutrophil-targeted therapeutics

A note on brain actuated spelling with the Berlin brain-computer interface

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are systems capable of decoding neural activity in real time, thereby allowing a computer application to be directly controlled by the brain. Since the characteristics of such direct brain-tocomputer interaction are limited in several aspects, one major challenge in BCI research is intelligent front-end design. Here we present the mental text entry application ‘Hex-o-Spell’ which incorporates principles of Human-Computer Interaction research into BCI feedback design. The system utilises the high visual display bandwidth to help compensate for the extremely limited control bandwidth which operates with only two mental states, where the timing of the state changes encodes most of the information. The display is visually appealing, and control is robust. The effectiveness and robustness of the interface was demonstrated at the CeBIT 2006 (world’s largest IT fair) where two subjects operated the mental text entry system at a speed of up to 7.6 char/min