Creating Art and Artists: Late Nineteenth-Century American Artists\u27 Studios

This dissertation examines the studios of American painters and sculptors working in the cosmopolitan era of the late nineteenth century. Between the Philadelphia Centennial and World War I, most makers of fine art worked in studios furnished with old furniture, personal mementos, historic relics and superbly-crafted objets d\u27art, all rich in evocative associations. In these spaces artists made art, taught art, sold art, entertained friends and patrons, and kept house. These studios were often opened to the public, they were featured in newspaper and journal articles, and they appeared in paintings and novels, making them quasi-public places. Born out of the era\u27s impulse towards aestheticist endeavors, the studios were a deliberate attempt to create beauty for its own sake; thus they are termed aestheticizing studios in this dissertation. The dissertation has a dual thesis: that aestheticizing studios enabled artists to create their public personae and to create their art. The dissertation is composed of six chapters, and an introduction and conclusion. The introduction surveys prior scholarship and discusses methodology. A chronological and stylistic survey of the phenomenon of aestheticizing studios is presented. Two chapters detail the contents of studios and the activities that took place in them. A fourth chapter analyzes texts and images that portrayed aestheticizing studios, as well as the messages and motivations embedded in them. Together, the studios themselves and the diverse media in which they were portrayed forged multifaceted public personae for American artists; these separate facets are examined individually in a fifth chapter. The sixth chapter demonstrate the direct catalytic influence of aestheticizing studios on their inhabitants by presenting close readings of studios and works of art created in them. The conclusion places the patterns observed in studios within a larger cultural framework. While the dissertation discusses the artwork, writings, and lives of several hundred American artists and authors, the work of William Merritt Chase, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Francis Davis Millet and Frederic Edwin Church receive particular emphasis

Spectral decomposition of Bell's operators for qubits

The spectral decomposition is given for the N-qubit Bell operators with two observables per qubit. It is found that the eigenstates (when non-degenerate) are N-qubit GHZ states even for those operators that do not allow the maximal violation of the corresponding inequality. We present two applications of this analysis. In particular, we discuss the existence of pure entangled states that do not violate any Mermin-Klyshko inequality for $N\geq 3$.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure

From Cooperative Scans to Predictive Buffer Management

In analytical applications, database systems often need to sustain workloads with multiple concurrent scans hitting the same table. The Cooperative Scans (CScans) framework, which introduces an Active Buffer Manager (ABM) component into the database architecture, has been the most effective and elaborate response to this problem, and was initially developed in the X100 research prototype. We now report on the the experiences of integrating Cooperative Scans into its industrial-strength successor, the Vectorwise database product. During this implementation we invented a simpler optimization of concurrent scan buffer management, called Predictive Buffer Management (PBM). PBM is based on the observation that in a workload with long-running scans, the buffer manager has quite a bit of information on the workload in the immediate future, such that an approximation of the ideal OPT algorithm becomes feasible. In the evaluation on both synthetic benchmarks as well as a TPC-H throughput run we compare the benefits of naive buffer management (LRU) versus CScans, PBM and OPT; showing that PBM achieves benefits close to Cooperative Scans, while incurring much lower architectural impact.Comment: VLDB201

Pay One, Get Hundreds for Free: Reducing Cloud Costs through Shared Query Execution

Cloud-based data analysis is nowadays common practice because of the lower system management overhead as well as the pay-as-you-go pricing model. The pricing model, however, is not always suitable for query processing as heavy use results in high costs. For example, in query-as-a-service systems, where users are charged per processed byte, collections of queries accessing the same data frequently can become expensive. The problem is compounded by the limited options for the user to optimize query execution when using declarative interfaces such as SQL. In this paper, we show how, without modifying existing systems and without the involvement of the cloud provider, it is possible to significantly reduce the overhead, and hence the cost, of query-as-a-service systems. Our approach is based on query rewriting so that multiple concurrent queries are combined into a single query. Our experiments show the aggregated amount of work done by the shared execution is smaller than in a query-at-a-time approach. Since queries are charged per byte processed, the cost of executing a group of queries is often the same as executing a single one of them. As an example, we demonstrate how the shared execution of the TPC-H benchmark is up to 100x and 16x cheaper in Amazon Athena and Google BigQuery than using a query-at-a-time approach while achieving a higher throughput

Long distance entanglement swapping with photons from separated sources

We report the first experimental realization of entanglement swapping over large distances in optical fibers. Two photons separated by more than two km of optical fibers are entangled, although they never directly interacted. We use two pairs of time-bin entangled qubits created in spatially separated sources and carried by photons at telecommunication wavelengths. A partial Bell state measurement is performed with one photon from each pair which projects the two remaining photons, formerly independent onto an entangled state. A visibility high enough to violate a Bell inequality is reported, after both photons have each travelled through 1.1 km of optical fiber.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, submitte

Investigating the Regulatory Circuitry of Protein Kinases and Proteases in Apoptosis

Apoptosis is a tightly regulated cellular process essential for normal development and tissue homeostasis. Perturbations to apoptotic signaling underscores numerous pathogenic processes emphasizing the importance of apoptotic regulation. During apoptosis, caspases orchestrate cellular degradation through proteolytic cleavage of key structural and enzymatic proteins. In a different manner, protein kinases regulate apoptosis by catalyzing the post-translational phosphorylation of substrate proteins to facilitate either pro- or anti-apoptotic signal transduction pathways. Emerging paradigms have indicated that bidirectional crosstalk between protein kinases and caspases serves to globally fine-tune the equilibrium between signals directing cell survival and cell death. In this regard, identifying points of intersection between the apoptotic phosphoproteome and degradome is valuable considering both enzyme families are targeted for therapeutic intervention in a variety of pathologies. In this thesis, we employed diverse strategies to study the amplitude of phosphorylation and proteolysis in apoptotic cells. First, using a bioinformatics approach, we revealed that a considerable proportion of the human kinome and phosphatome is degraded in response to various apoptotic stimuli across distinct cell types. As a logical extension, we used quantitative proteomics strategies to explore both the apoptotic kinome and phosphoproteome of HeLa cells treated with doxorubicin. Using these strategies, we observed distinct variations within the kinome and extensive hypo- and hyper-phosphorylation of numerous phosphosites. In parallel, we investigated the complementary apoptotic degradome by applying a quantitative N-terminomics approach where we identified a number of previously validated protease cleavage products and indexed numerous novel neo-N-termini. Finally, to expand the biochemical toolbox for defining the spatial and temporal evolution of kinase–caspase networks, we investigated the impact of serine and phosphoserine determinants within caspase cleavage motifs and developed a number of prospective FRET biosensors to monitor the relationship between protein kinase CK2 phosphorylation and caspase-mediated proteolysis. Collectively, using complementary strategies, we investigated the functional relationship between post-translational phosphorylation and proteolysis and provided insight into bidirectional communication between protein kinases and proteases during apoptosis

Photon-bunching measurement after 2x25km of standard optical fibers

To show the feasibility of a long distance partial Bell-State measurement, a Hong-Ou-Mandel experiment with coherent photons is reported. Pairs of degenerate photons at telecom wavelength are created by parametric down conversion in a periodically poled lithium niobate waveguide. The photon pairs are separated in a beam-splitter and transmitted via two fibers of 25km. The wave-packets are relatively delayed and recombined on a second beam-splitter, forming a large Mach-Zehnder interferometer. Coincidence counts between the photons at the two output modes are registered. The main challenge consists in the trade-off between low count rates due to narrow filtering and length fluctuations of the 25km long arms during the measurement. For balanced paths a Hong-Ou-Mandel dip with a visibility of 47.3% is observed, which is close to the maximal theoretical value of 50% developed here. This proves the practicability of a long distance Bell state measurement with two independent sources, as e.g. required in an entanglement swapping configuration in the scale of tens of km.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure