Monuments, Movements, & Memory: The Visual and Spatial Implications of the Shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church

This paper focuses on the dichotomous relationship of race relations and visual culture in the American South, with a particular focus on the shooting of nine black Americans at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015 by Caucasian South Carolinian Dylann Roof. Prior to the shooting, Roof posted images of himself posed in front of various Confederate landmarks in South Carolina to online social media platforms. Using these images as evidence, I contend that Roof’s racist motivation for the crime was, in part, fostered by the surrounding environment that memorializes fallen Confederate soldiers as heroes of a lost cause. This commemoration takes the form of monuments, historical landmarks, and urban geographical markers. Mother Emanuel AME Church is itself a landmark, one that represents the history and resilience of black religion in the United States and stands as an important testament to this history in the physical cityscape of Charleston. I argue that the images of Roof in front of Confederate landmarks and the role of the church as a landmark incited a response from Black Lives Matter activists that engaged many similar spaces, including the tagging of “Black Lives Matter” in spray paint on several Confederate statues. As Dylann Roof currently stands trial for hate crimes and obstruction of religion, amongst other charges, this paper is particularly pertinent today. It makes explicit the connection between symbolic urban landscapes and modern day civil rights movements while challenging the one-sided commemoration of the Confederacy throughout the American South, which has traditionally exalted the Confederacy and excluded the voices of black Americans

A multivariate analysis on non-nucleoside HIV-1 reverse transcriptase inhibitors and resistance induced by mutation

This paper describes the use of multivariate statistical procedure PCA as a tool to explore the inhibitory activity of classes of NNRTIs against HIV-1 viruses (wild type and more frequent mutants, Y181C, V106A, K103N, L100I) and against RT enzyme. The analysis of correlations between biological activity and molecular descriptors or similarity indexes allowed a reliable classification of the fifty five derivatives considered in this study. The best results were obtained in the case of L100I and K103N mutants for which the higher number of assignments was found when the principal components derived from the descriptors were used. On this basis this statistical approach is proposed as a reliable method for the prediction of the activity of NNRTIs, for which the data against mutant strains have not been reported

Postpartum Mastitis and Community-acquired Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

This single-center, case-control study documents a relative increase in methicillin resistance among 48 cases of Staphylococcus aureus–associated postpartum mastitis during 1998–2005. Of 21 cases with methicillin resistance, 17 (81%) occurred in 2005. Twenty (95%) isolates contained the Staphylococcus cassette chromosome mec type IV gene; this suggests that the increase is due to community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus