Path to effortlessness: Mauricio Fuks' pedagogical perspectives on the art of violin playing

For Mauricio Fuks, Rudy Professor of Violin at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, effortlessness in violin playing has more implications than mere technical facility. It is the aesthetic ideal and the essence of the finest artisanship that may lead to true artistic freedom in playing. The concept of effortlessness in Professor Fuks’ teaching practice involves the paradoxical project of making an effort to play effortlessly, to obtain a degree of violin mastery in which playing is full of intensity and free of needless tension, and to achieve the technical virtuosity as nonchalance or Sprezzatura, an essential foundation in one’s endeavor to reach the highest level of artistry. His meticulous yet plainly elucidated instructions on the physiology of violin playing and its relationship to the mental process not only eradicate any hindrance to attaining technical effortlessness but also reveal the path to self-discovery and artistic identity. My project in this document is to describe how Professor Fuks’ teaching brings this technical and aesthetical ideal about

Institutional Assessment of Health Research Capacity in Uzbekistan : Research Productivity, Organizational Capacity and Research use in Policy

Health research continues to be an important policy instrument in improving population’s health and building a more resilient health system. As developing countries are unable to meet their national health-research needs, many foreign aid actors have concentrated on improving health research system (HRS) of low-income countries since 1990s. While there is growing interest, there is a gap in the literatures in understanding health research system in the framework of institutions and its actors in a developing country context, which affects the knowledge production and research performance. In light of this argument, the thesis focuses on Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan was ranked as one of the lowest health research producers in the world in 2016. This raises the following question: Has post-soviet political and economic transition brought changes to health research system in Uzbekistan? If so, what was the outcome of change from these reform pressures? To answer this question, this thesis combines elements of neo-institutional theories to analyze the processes of institutional modification in health research system over the past twenty years in Uzbekistan. The results from both quantitative and qualitative analysis revealed that the slow progress in any institutional change in the health sector was due to path dependent traits dating back to more than 60 years of Soviet science management. Basic incentive structures or forced regulatory reforms, which reinforce path-dependent behavior, often failed to create significant change in Uzbek health research performance. Further analysis revealed that causes of (under)performance in Uzbek health research system are complex and deeply rooted, reaching beyond the current circumstances and resources. The institutionalist approach proved useful in understanding transformations in post-soviet countries taking into account the particularities of local/national research institutions

Biomedical Nanocrystal Agents: Design, Synthesis, and Applications

In these days, nanomaterials are applied in a variety of biomedical applications including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), cell imaging, drug delivery, and cell separation. Most MRI contrast agents affect the longitudinal relaxation time (T1) and transverse relaxation time (T2) of water protons in the tissue and result in increased positive or negative contrast. Here, we report the optimization of r1 (1/T1) or r2 (1/T2) relaxivity dynamics with diameter controlled gadolinium oxide nanocrystals (2~22 nm) and iron based magnetic nanocrystals (4 ~33 nm). The r1 and r2 MR relaxivity values of hydrated nanocrystals were optimized and examined depending on their core diameter, surface coating, and compositions; the high r1 value of gadolinium oxide was 40-60 S-1mM-1, which is 10-15 fold higher than that of commercial Gd (III) chelates (4.3~4.6 S-1mM-1). Moreover, in vitro toxicological studies revealed that polymer coated nanocrystals suspensions had no significant effect on human dermal fibroblast (HDF) cells even at high concentration. Towards multimodal imaging or multifunctional ability, we developed the iron oxide/QDs complexes, which consist of cores of iron oxide that act as nucleation sites for fluorescent QDs. The choice of variable QDs helped to visualize and remove large iron oxide materials in a magnetic separation. Additionally, diluted materials concentrated on the magnet could be fluorescently detected even at very low concentration. The designed MRI or multifunctional nanomaterials will give great and powerful uses in biomedical applications

Occluded Person Re-Identification via Relational Adaptive Feature Correction Learning

Occluded person re-identification (Re-ID) in images captured by multiple cameras is challenging because the target person is occluded by pedestrians or objects, especially in crowded scenes. In addition to the processes performed during holistic person Re-ID, occluded person Re-ID involves the removal of obstacles and the detection of partially visible body parts. Most existing methods utilize the off-the-shelf pose or parsing networks as pseudo labels, which are prone to error. To address these issues, we propose a novel Occlusion Correction Network (OCNet) that corrects features through relational-weight learning and obtains diverse and representative features without using external networks. In addition, we present a simple concept of a center feature in order to provide an intuitive solution to pedestrian occlusion scenarios. Furthermore, we suggest the idea of Separation Loss (SL) for focusing on different parts between global features and part features. We conduct extensive experiments on five challenging benchmark datasets for occluded and holistic Re-ID tasks to demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance to state-of-the-art methods especially on occluded scene.Comment: ICASSP 202

Post-mortem re-cloning of a transgenic red fluorescent protein dog

Recently, the world's first transgenic dogs were produced by somatic cell nuclear transfer. However, cellular senescence is a major limiting factor for producing more advanced transgenic dogs. To overcome this obstacle, we rejuvenated transgenic cells using a re-cloning technique. Fibroblasts from post-mortem red fluorescent protein (RFP) dog were reconstructed with in vivo matured oocytes and transferred into 10 surrogate dogs. One puppy was produced and confirmed as a re-cloned dog. Although the puppy was lost during birth, we successfully established a rejuvenated fibroblast cell line from this animal. The cell line was found to stably express RFP and is ready for additional genetic modification

Brain computed tomography angiography in postcardiac arrest patients and neurologic outcome

Objective This study aimed to analyze intracranial vessels using brain computed tomography angiography (CTA) and scoring systems to diagnose brain death and predict poor neurologic outcomes of postcardiac arrest patients. Methods Initial brain CTA images of postcardiac arrest patients were analyzed using scoring systems to determine a lack of opacification and diagnose brain death. The primary outcome was poor neurologic outcome, which was defined as cerebral performance category score 3 to 5. The frequency, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and area under receiver operating characteristic curve for the lack of opacification of each vessel and for each scoring system used to predict poor neurologic outcomes were determined. Results Patients with poor neurologic outcomes lacked opacification of the intracranial vessels, most commonly in the vein of Galen, both internal cerebral veins, and the mid cerebral artery (M4). The 7-score results (P=0.04) and 10-score results were significantly different (P=0.04) between outcome groups, with an area under receiver operating characteristic of 0.61 (range, 0.48 to 0.72). The lack of opacification of each intracranial vessel and all scoring systems exhibited high specificity (100%) and positive predictive values (100%) for predicting poor neurologic outcomes. Conclusion Lack of opacification of vessels on brain CTA exhibited high specificity for predicting poor neurologic outcomes of patients after cardiac arrest

Sonodegradation of amitriptyline and ibuprofen in the presence of Ti3C2Tx MXene

This study, which investigated the sonodegradation of selected pharmaceutical active compounds (PhACs) (amitriptyline (AMT) and ibuprofen (IBP)) with MXene, was carried out in an aqueous solution. To investigate the practicality of the degradation process, the experiments were conducted in various water quality conditions, including pH, temperature, natural organic matter, and ionic strength. Based on the experimental results, the produced hydrogen peroxide, which could be a representative of the produced OH radicals, was a vital factor that affected the degradation performance of both PhACs. To confirm the importance of OH radicals, the effect of a OH radical promoter (H2O2) and scavenger (t-BuOH) was also studied. In addition, the synergism between ultrasonication (US) and MXene was evaluated with the rate constants of US only, MXene only, and a US/MXene combined system. Mineralization of the PhACs was also investigated, and removal of AMT was higher than that of IBP, which could be attributed to the physicochemical properties of the compounds and enhanced adsorption by the well-dispersed MXene. Overall, utilization of MXene by means of ultrasonication could enhance the removal performance of PhACs in water

Pilot study on a rewarming rate of 0.15°C/hr versus 0.25°C/hr and outcomes in post cardiac arrest patients

Objective Cerebral hemodynamic and metabolic changes may occur during the rewarming phase of targeted temperature management in post cardiac arrest patients. Yet, studies on different rewarming rates and patient outcomes are limited. This study aimed to investigate post cardiac arrest patients who were rewarmed with different rewarming rates after 24 hours of hypothermia and the association of these rates to the neurologic outcomes. Methods This study retrospectively investigated post cardiac arrest patients treated with targeted temperature management and rewarmed with rewarming rates of 0.15°C/hr and 0.25°C/hr. The association of the rewarming rate with poor neurologic outcomes (cerebral performance category score, 3 to 5) was investigated. Results A total of 71 patients were analyzed (0.15°C/hr, n=36; 0.25°C/hr, n=35). In the comparison between 0.15°C/hr and 0.25°C/hr, the poor neurologic outcome did not significantly differ (24 [66.7%] vs. 25 [71.4%], respectively; P=0.66). In the multivariate analysis, the rewarming rate of 0.15°C/hr was not associated with the 1-month neurologic outcome improvement (odds ratio, 0.54; 95% confidence interval, 0.16 to 1.69; P=0.28). Conclusion The rewarming rates of 0.15°C/hr and 0.25°C/hr were not associated with the neurologic outcome difference in post cardiac arrest patients