Prologemena to an Future Rhetoric of Shadows, Shades and Silhouettes

In this essay, following the implications of prolegomena (Greek: to say before ), i describe what a rhetoric constructed of textual shadows (the word shadow in a text) would look like. Specifically, what would be the various motives and rhetorical intentions, for a writer (of all genres) to employ the word shadow or a member of its semantic family

SWIFT, COMEDY, EVIDENTIALITY

Examines the relationship between the comedy of Swift\u27s A Tale of a Tub, the role of the speaker and satire on modern literature. The point made is that speaker reliability depends directly on the sources of evidence h/s presents. To clarify what this entails the author uses the linguistic notion of evidentiality

Shots in the Dark: The Presence of Absence in Imaginative Literature (IW)

Western metaphysics and IW can be described as a search for first presences, not absences. With the exception of philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Aristotle, writers like Lord Rochester (John Wilmot), Jonathan Swift and Philip Larkin, no one, to my knowledge, has taken absence as a first and consequently as also a last. This essay is a modest attempt to open the door, if only a crack, for investigations into the metaphysics and meaning of absence as a means of creating, and understanding an interesting IW—from the perspective of the presence of absence as first and as last

The impact of residence hall construction type on student engagement

College and university student housing has changed dramatically since the opening of Harvard College in 1636. Despite these changes, student housing professionals are still tasked with engaging their students. This can sometimes be difficult depending on outside forces such as the physical structure of a building. The purpose of this study was to determine what physical aspects of a residence hall do students and undergraduate live-in student staff value in terms of engaging their students and building a community. For this study focus groups were conducted for student and staff of traditional residence halls and public-private partnership residence halls. Common themes were that ample community space, such as larger lounges, a community kitchen, and amenities in study rooms were valued by staff and students in order to feel engaged in the community. This study will be beneficial for departments who are looking to develop new residence halls on their college campuses, while still engaging their students

The Creativity and Aging Study: The Impact of Professionally Conducted Cultural Programs on Older Adults

Executive Summary In 2001, the National Endowment for the Arts developed a cooperative agreement with The George Washington University to conduct a multisite national study with the aim of measuring the impact of professionally conducted community based cultural programs on the general health, mental health, and social activities of older persons, age 65 and older. Referred to as the Creativity and Aging Study, the project’s formal title is “The Impact of Professionally Conducted Cultural Programs on Older Adults”. No previous study of this nature using an experimental design and a control group had been carried out. The study takes place in three different sites across the country—the metro Washington, DC area; Brooklyn; and San Francisco. Each site involves two groups—(1) the Intervention Group, comprised of older individuals involved in a weekly participatory art program, and (2) those involved in a Control Group, comprised of individuals involved in their ongoing activities as usual. Each site recruited at least 100 older persons—50 participants in the Intervention Group and Control Group alike. The overall study has had 300 participants—150 in the Intervention Groups, 150 in the Control Groups. The average age in all three sites, Intervention and Control Groups alike, was approximately 80 years of age, The age range has been 65-103 years. Approximately 30 percent of the participants reflect racial and ethnic minorities. The groups were very well matched in level of functioning at the start of study, with very similar physical health, mental health, and level of activity profiles. They were all interviewed three times by research assistants—(1) at the start of the study to establish a baseline; (2) a year later; and finally (3) two years after the baseline assessment. Results reveal strikingly positive differences in the intervention group (those involved in intensive participatory art programs) as compared to a control group not involved in intensive cultural programs. Compared to the Control Group, those involved in the weekly participatory art programs, at the one and two year follow-up assessments, reported: (A) better health, fewer doctor visits, and less medication usage; (B) more positive responses on the mental health measures; (C) more involvement in overall activities. Since the study has collected so much rich data, analyses—especially secondary data analyses—are expected to go on throughout 2007. There is considerable interest on the parts of graduate students to assist in the analyses of the secondary data. In conclusion, these results point to powerful positive intervention effects of these community-based art programs run by professional artists. They point to true health promotion and disease prevention effects. In that they also show stabilization and actual increase in community-based activities in general among those in the cultural programs, they reveal a positive impact on maintaining independence and on reducing dependency. This latter point demonstrates that these community-based cultural programs for older adults appear to be reducing risk factors that drive the need for long-term care

Prioritizing human cancer microRNAs based on genes’ functional consistency between microRNA and cancer

The identification of human cancer-related microRNAs (miRNAs) is important for cancer biology research. Although several identification methods have achieved remarkable success, they have overlooked the functional information associated with miRNAs. We present a computational framework that can be used to prioritize human cancer miRNAs by measuring the association between cancer and miRNAs based on the functional consistency score (FCS) of the miRNA target genes and the cancer-related genes. This approach proved successful in identifying the validated cancer miRNAs for 11 common human cancers with area under ROC curve (AUC) ranging from 71.15% to 96.36%. The FCS method had a significant advantage over miRNA differential expression analysis when identifying cancer-related miRNAs with a fine regulatory mechanism, such as miR-27a in colorectal cancer. Furthermore, a case study examining thyroid cancer showed that the FCS method can uncover novel cancer-related miRNAs such as miR-27a/b, which were showed significantly upregulated in thyroid cancer samples by qRT-PCR analysis. Our method can be used on a web-based server, CMP (cancer miRNA prioritization) and is freely accessible at http://bioinfo.hrbmu.edu.cn/CMP. This time- and cost-effective computational framework can be a valuable complement to experimental studies and can assist with future studies of miRNA involvement in the pathogenesis of cancers

word~river literary review (2011)

wordriver is a literary journal dedicated to the poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction of adjuncts and part-time instructors teaching in our universities, colleges, and community colleges. Our premier issue was published in Spring 2009. We are always looking for work that demonstrates the creativity and craft of adjunct/part-time instructors in English and other disciplines. We reserve first publication rights and onetime anthology publication rights for all work published. We define adjunct instructors as anyone teaching part-time or full-time under a semester or yearly contract, nationwide and in any discipline. Graduate students teaching under part-time contracts during the summer or who have used up their teaching assistant time and are teaching with adjunct contracts for the remainder of their graduate program also are eligible.https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/word_river/1001/thumbnail.jp

Genetic effects on gene expression across human tissues

Characterization of the molecular function of the human genome and its variation across individuals is essential for identifying the cellular mechanisms that underlie human genetic traits and diseases. The Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project aims to characterize variation in gene expression levels across individuals and diverse tissues of the human body, many of which are not easily accessible. Here we describe genetic effects on gene expression levels across 44 human tissues. We find that local genetic variation affects gene expression levels for the majority of genes, and we further identify inter-chromosomal genetic effects for 93 genes and 112 loci. On the basis of the identified genetic effects, we characterize patterns of tissue specificity, compare local and distal effects, and evaluate the functional properties of the genetic effects. We also demonstrate that multi-tissue, multi-individual data can be used to identify genes and pathways affected by human disease-associated variation, enabling a mechanistic interpretation of gene regulation and the genetic basis of diseas