Race in Romance: Racialized Femininity and Intimacy between Asian Female and non-Asian male

The film “Racing Romance” is a study of Asian female and non-Asian male intimacy. The film is based on an understanding that intimacy, desire and love are critical parts of one’s self-identification, while these desires are inevitably influenced by the historical and social contexts of race to varying degrees. There has been a limited academic interest in the female agency of Asian women in interracial intimacy. Too often, interracial marriages and relationships are simply celebrated as part of multiculturalism or anti-racism, without getting proper attention to the subtleties of racial and gendered dynamics that influence both members of the relationship. This film is dedicated to providing platform for Asian women to talk about their experiences and the construction of their identities, while interrogating the gendered and racialized strategies they employ in response to existing stereotypes. The film adopts stylistic features of essay film and reflexive cinema, emphasizing the transparency of relationship between the film and the viewers. Through its content and form, “Racing Romance” attempts to connect the audience through shared Asian womanhood

Online home appliance control using EEG-Based brain-computer interfaces

Brain???computer interfaces (BCIs) allow patients with paralysis to control external devices by mental commands. Recent advances in home automation and the Internet of things may extend the horizon of BCI applications into daily living environments at home. In this study, we developed an online BCI based on scalp electroencephalography (EEG) to control home appliances. The BCI users controlled TV channels, a digital door-lock system, and an electric light system in an unshielded environment. The BCI was designed to harness P300 andN200 components of event-related potentials (ERPs). On average, the BCI users could control TV channels with an accuracy of 83.0% ?? 17.9%, the digital door-lock with 78.7% ?? 16.2% accuracy, and the light with 80.0% ?? 15.6% accuracy, respectively. Our study demonstrates a feasibility to control multiple home appliances using EEG-based BCIs

Clinical Observation Reflections from Students in an Interdisciplinary Palliative Care Course

The purpose of this study was to gain insight into how a brief clinical observation encounter contributed to students’ experiences in an interdisciplinary palliative care course. This course was required of all graduate nursing students and was available as an elective for medical and other healthcare professions students at a healthcare sciences university. The students were required to spend approximately 8 to 12 hours attending interdisciplinary team meetings or accompanying a team on rounds and patient visits. The students’ summary narratives of their observation experience were analyzed in this qualitative study that focused on six categories of feedback: (1) patients’ and families’ reactions, (2) communication issues with patients and families, (3) how the palliative care team speaks with the patient and family, (4) communication within the interdisciplinary team, (5) students’ reflections, and (6) students’ suffering. This study demonstrated that a clinical observation activity can be a valuable introduction to palliative care principles for healthcare students in an interdisciplinary course. Students benefited from gaining insight into family/practitioner communications regarding difficult issues, interdisciplinary roles and cooperation, and application of palliative care principles to clinical practice. Further research is required to identify appropriate interventions to deal with student distress resulting from such early career clinical encounters

Crystal structure of human endothelial overexpressed lipopolysaccharide-associated factor 1

학위논문 (석사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 약학대학 약학과, 2017. 8. 한병우.Endothelial-overexpressed LPS-associated factor 1 (EOLA1) is a novel gene discovered in an effort to identify genes expressed in endothelial cells by activation of lipopolysaccharide. Previous study demonstrates that knocking down EOLA1 stimulated interleukin-6 (IL6) and apoptosis in the treatment of LPS in human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC). Analysis of the sequence of EOLA1, revealed that it has ASCH (activating signal cointegrator-1 homology) domain containing a unique β-barrel fold similar to pseudouridine synthase and archaeosine transglycosylase (PUA) domain. Because PUA domain is an ancient RNA binding domain, both ASCH and PUA domain appear to have arisen from a common RNA binding precursor. Here, I report the crystal structure of EOLA1 at 1.7 Å resolution by single wavelength anomalous dispersion (SAD) method using selenomethionine derivative crystals to solve the phasing problem. I demonstrated that EOLA1 could bind with RNA through gel mobility shift assay. Based on these results, I propose that EOLA1 is a RNA binding domain and would play regulatory roles in transcription or in protection of HUVEC injury with inflammation.I.Introduction 1 II.Materials and Methods 4 1. Materials 4 2. Methods 4 2.1. Cloning 4 2.2. Overexpression 5 2.3. Purification 5 2.4. Crystallization 6 2.5. X-ray data collection and structure determination 6 2.6. Electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA) 7 III. Results and Discussion 8 1. Cloning 8 2. Overexpression and purification 8 3. Crystallization 16 4. X-ray data collection and structure determination 17 5. Electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA) 19 6. Overall structure of EOLA1 21 7. Structure analysis 22 IV. References 27 V. Acknowledgement 30 Abstract in korean 31Maste

Effect of ProRoot MTA® and Biodentine® on osteoclastic differentiation and activity of mouse bone marrow macrophages

Objectives: This investigation aimed to assess the differentiation inhibitory effects of ProRoot MTA® (PMTA) and Biodentine® (BIOD) on osteoclasts originated from murine bone marrow macrophages (BMMs) and compare these effects with those of alendronate (ALD). Materials and Methods: Mouse BMMs were cultured to differentiate into osteoclasts with macrophage colonystimulating factor and receptor activator of NF-κB (RANKL), treated with lipopolysaccharide. After application with PMTA, BIOD, or ALD, cell toxicities were examined using WST-1 assay kit, and RANKL-induced osteoclast differentiation and activities were determined by resorption pit formation assay and tartrate-resistant acid phosphate (TRAP) staining. The mRNA levels of osteoclast activity-related genes were detected with quantitative real time polymerase chain reaction. Expressions of molecular signaling pathways were assessed by western blot. All data were statistically analyzed with one-way ANOVA and Tukey’s post-hoc test (p<0.05). Results: Mouse BMMs applied with PMTA, BIOD, or ALD showed highly reduced levels of TRAP-positive osteoclasts. The BIOD treated specimens suppressed mRNA expressions of cathepsin K, TRAP, and c-Fos. Nonetheless, it showed a lower effect than PMTA or ALD applications. Compared with ALD, PMTA and BIOD decreased RANKL-mediated phosphorylation of ERK1/2 and IκBα. Conclusions: PMTA and BIOD showed the inhibitory effect on osteoclast differentiation and activities similar to that of ALD through IκB phosphorylation and suppression of ERK signaling pathways

Improvement of P300-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces for Home Appliances Control by Data Balancing Techniques

The oddball paradigm used in P300-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) intrinsically poses the issue of data imbalance between target stimuli and nontarget stimuli. Data imbalance can cause overfitting problems and, consequently, poor classification performance. The purpose of this study is to improve BCI performance by solving this data imbalance problem with sampling techniques. The sampling techniques were applied to BCI data in 15 subjects controlling a door lock, 15 subjects an electric light, and 14 subjects a Bluetooth speaker. We explored two categories of sampling techniques: oversampling and undersampling. Oversampling techniques, including random oversampling, synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE), borderline-SMOTE, support vector machine (SVM) SMOTE, and adaptive synthetic sampling, were used to increase the number of samples for the class of target stimuli. Undersampling techniques, including random undersampling, neighborhood cleaning rule, Tomek's links, and weighted undersampling bagging, were used to reduce the class size of nontarget stimuli. The over- or undersampled data were classified by an SVM classifier. Overall, some oversampling techniques improved BCI performance while undersampling techniques often degraded performance. Particularly, using borderline-SMOTE yielded the highest accuracy (87.27%) and information transfer rate (8.82 bpm) across all three appliances. Moreover, borderline-SMOTE led to performance improvement, especially for poor performers. A further analysis showed that borderline-SMOTE improved SVM by generating more support vectors within the target class and enlarging margins. However, there was no difference in the accuracy between borderline-SMOTE and the method of applying the weighted regularization parameter of the SVM. Our results suggest that although oversampling improves performance of P300-based BCIs, it is not just the effect of the oversampling techniques, but rather the effect of solving the data imbalance problem