Francis Bacon and the practice of painting

This article addresses the question about why painting continues to be relevant in our contemporary cultural climate. A key reason can be located in the means by which the material of paint can be utilized, manipulated, and perceived through entire sensory and bodily mechanisms. As the practice of Francis Bacon (1909–1992) demonstrates, it is within the elusive behaviour and handling of pigment that the full transformative potential of painting can be released. In fact it can activate a whole field of sensory responses on the part of painter and viewer. The painter can manipulate the material to achieve a variety of effects but needs also to acknowledge how the material can potentially assume an independent life of its own, an almost unruly character. The strength and enduring quality of painting which links modern to postmodern practice, lies in its potential to utilise the painter's tacit skills as well as releasing the inherent and ‘unruly’ qualities of the pigment. The potential of painting practice lies within the orbit of the individual painter who can recognize implicitly how to let the paint ‘work’ according to the needs of the image being constructed

Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) Patient Education Brochure Research Proposal

ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION: Clinics within the Grady Health System (GHS) have been recently recognized as Patient Centered Medical Homes (PCMH) by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA). This creates a new standard of care for GHS, its clinics, and the surrounding neighborhood; but, the standard of care and features of the PCMH may not be fully understood or appreciated by GHS patients. Like many other municipal hospitals, the patient population of GHS tends to be lower in literacy and numeracy skills, on average, than the national population. Thus, communicating important PCMH standards and features to the GHS patient population can be challenging. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this project is to design a patient education brochure tailored to the needs and values of Grady PCMH patients to help them understand and navigate the Grady PCMH. This research proposal aims to provide information on PCMH standard and features in an easily understood brochure to individuals, for distribution to the local communities and patients that GHS serves. The proposed research will evaluate at what level of literacy and numeracy patients might better comprehend the new PCMH standards and what format of communication materials will assist patients in better navigating the health system, health education, and ultimately improving their health. It is important for this patient education brochure to be sensitive to the needs and values of the populations that Grady serves to better inform and motivate their patients of the benefits of the PCMH. APPROACH: The proposed research will collect quantitative and qualitative data from a convenience sample of approximately 100 GHS adult patients who present for care at GHS and who consent to participate in a face-to-face interview. Patients will view a proposed brochure and be asked questions about its format, acceptability, and ease of understanding. Validated measures of health-related literacy and numeracy will be collected. Analyses will focus on overall acceptance and understanding of the proposed PCMH brochure and the associations of literacy and numeracy with acceptance and understanding. IMPLICATIONS FOR POLICY AND PRACTICE: It is important for a patient brochure describing the benefits of a PCMH to be understood by the patients who are the intended beneficiaries of a PCMH. Improved awareness of PCMH standards and features will presumably help to ultimately improve patient navigation of the PCMH and ultimately their health behaviors and outcomes

Organosolv pretreatment of Sitka spruce wood: conversion of hemicelluloses to ethyl glycosides

A range of organosolv pretreatments, using ethanol:water mixtures with dilute sulphuric acid, were applied to Sitka spruce sawdust with the aim of generating useful co-products as well as improving saccharification yield. The most efficient of the pretreatment conditions, resulting in subsequent saccharification yields of up to 86%, converted a large part of the hemicellulose sugars to their ethyl glycosides as identified by GC/MS. These conditions also reduced conversion of pentoses to furfural, the ethyl glycosides being more stable to dehydration than the parent pentoses. Through comparison with the behaviour of model compounds under the same reaction conditions it was shown that the anomeric composition of the products was consistent with a predominant transglycosylation reaction mechanism, rather than hydrolysis followed by glycosylation. The ethyl glycosides have potential as intermediates in the sustainable production of high-value chemicals

Possible High-Redshift, Low-Luminosity AGN Activity in the Hubble Deep Field

In the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), twelve candidate sources of high-redshift (z > 3.5) AGN activity have been identified. The color selection criteria were established by passing spectra of selected quasars and Seyfert galaxies (appropriately redshifted and modified for "Lyman forest" absorption), as well as stars, observed normal and starburst galaxies, and galaxy models for various redshifts through the filters used for the HDF observations. The actual identification of AGN candidates also involved convolving a Laplacian-of-Gaussian filter with the HDF images, thereby removing relatively flat galactic backgrounds and leaving only the point-like components in the centers. Along with positions and colors, estimated redshifts and absolute magnitudes are reported, with the candidates falling toward the faint end of the AGN luminosity function. One candidate has been previously observed spectroscopically, with a measured redshift of 4.02. The number of sources reported here is consistent with a simple extrapolation of the observed quasar luminosity function to magnitude 30 in B_Johnson. Implications for ionization of the intergalactic medium and for gravitational lensing are discussed.Comment: 10 pages LaTex plus 2 separate files (Table 1 which is a two-page landscape LaTex file; and Figure 6 which is a large (0.7 MB) non-encapsulated postscript file). Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journa

Isolation of high quality lignin as a by-product from ammonia percolation pretreatment of poplar wood

A two-step process combining percolation-mode ammonia pretreatment of poplar sawdust with mild organosolv purification of the extracted lignin produced high quality, high purity lignin in up to 31% yield and 50% recovery. The uncondensed fraction of the isolated lignin was up to 34%, close to that the native lignin (40%). Less lignin was recovered after pretreatment in batch mode, apparently due to condensation during the longer residence time of the solubilised lignin at elevated temperature. The lignin recovery was directly correlated with its molecular weight and its nitrogen content. Low nitrogen incorporation, observed at high ammonia concentration, may be explained by limited homolytic cleavage of -O-4 bonds. Ammonia concentrations from 15% to 25% (w/w) gave similar results in terms of lignin structure, yield and recovery

Searching For Phenotypes Of Sepsis: An Application Of Machine Learning To Electronic Health Records

SEARCHING FOR PHENOTYPES OF SEPSIS: AN APPLICATION OF MACHINE LEARNING TO ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS. Michael J. Boyle (Sponsored by R. Andrew Taylor). Department of Emergency Medicine, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT. Sepsis has historically been categorized into discrete subsets based on expert consensus-driven definitions, but there is evidence to suggest it would be better described as a continuum. The goal of this study was to perform an exhaustive search for distinct phenotypes of sepsis using various unsupervised machine learning techniques applied to the electronic health record (EHR) data of 41,843 Yale New Haven Health System emergency department patients with infection between 2013 and 2016. Specifically, the aims were to develop an autoencoder to reduce the high-dimensional EHR data to a latent representation amenable to clustering, and then to search for and assess the quality of clusters within that representation using various clustering methods (partitional, hierarchical, and density-based) and standard evaluation metrics. Autoencoder training was performed by minimizing the mean squared error of the reconstruction. With this exhaustive search, no convincing consistent clusters were found. Various clustering patterns were produced by the different methods but all had poor quality metrics, while evaluation metrics meant to find the ideal number of clusters did not agree on a consistent number but seemed to suggest fewer than two clusters. Inspection of one promising arrangement with eight clusters did not reveal a statistically significant difference in admission rate. While it is impossible to prove a negative, these results suggest there are not distinct phenotypic clusters of sepsis

Studies on Agriculturally Important Plant Metabolites

This thesis deals mainly with the carbohydrate metabolism of plants, and in particular with that of bracken and of potatoes. Four main projects are described: a) An investigation into the seasonal and other variations in carbohydrate levels in bracken rhizomes, which is relevant to the behaviour of herbicides in the plant and to its ability to withstand herbicide treatment. b) Examination of the glycolipid and phospholipid composition of bracken, initially to determine whether any glycolipids which could act as intermediates in polysaccharide biosynthesis might be present. None were found, but the results have implications for the composition of plastid membranes and the turnover of carbohydrates in photosynthetic tissue. c) A parallel investigation on carbohydrates and lipids in potato tubers during low-temperature storage, with a twofold objective: firstly to investigate the mechanism of low-temperature sweetening and the role of membrane lipids therein, and secondly to compare commonly-grown varieties in their tendency to accumulate sugars at low temperatures. d) The partial characterisation of a complex mucilaginous polysaccharide found in bracken. The significance of the results for carbohydrate metabolism in bracken and other plants; the storage of potatoes for processing; and bracken eradication techniques is discussed, and some observations on the ecology of bracken and its effects on the soil are presented in two appendices

Structure of native cellulose microfibrils, the starting point for nanocellulose manufacture

There is an emerging consensus that higher plants synthesize cellulose microfibrils that initially comprise 18 chains. However, the mean number of chains per microfibril in situ is usually greater than 18, sometimes much greater. Microfibrils from woody tissues of conifers, grasses and dicotyledonous plants, and from organs like cotton hairs, all differ in detailed structure and mean diameter. Diameters increase further when aggregated microfibrils are isolated. Because surface chains differ, the tensile properties of the cellulose may be augmented by increasing microfibril diameter. Association of microfibrils with anionic polysaccharides in primary cell walls and mucilages leads to in vivo mechanisms of disaggregation that may be relevant to the preparation of nanofibrillar cellulose products. For the preparation of nanocrystalline celluloses, the key issue is the nature and axial spacing of disordered domains at which axial scission can be initiated. These disordered domains do not, as has often been suggested, take the form of large blocks occupying much of the length of the microfibril. They are more likely to be located at chain ends or at places where the microfibril has been mechanically damaged, but their structure and the reasons for their sensitivity to acid hydrolysis need better characterization