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11. Tez Dergisi - Liberalizme Karşı Marksizm | The Journal of Thesis Eleven – Marxism Against Liberalism.
No full texthttps://scholarworks.smith.edu/gov_books/1011/thumbnail.jp
The Development of a Parent Report Instrument of Early Communication and Language Skills of Infants and Toddlers in Mainland China
Get PDFThis study was designed to produce a new parent-report measure, the Diagnostic Receptive Expressive Assessment of Mandarin-Infant Toddler Assessment of Communication and Language (DREAM-IT) in order to provide norms for the developmental skills of children aged 0–36 months in four areas: expressive language, receptive language, cognitive play and social skills
The Poet and the Historian: On Julian Gewirtz’s “Your Face My Flag” and “Never Turn Back”
No full textWill Populations of Macroinvertebrate Functional Feeding Groups Survive Precipitation Changes?
Get PDFClimate change is a pervasive issue that has the potential to have detrimental effects on many freshwater organisms and their habitats. Fluctuations in precipitation, changes in temperature, and other long-term shifts in weather patterns are just a few examples of the ways in which climate change is impacting the world around us (“What is Climate Change?” n.d.). The Mill River in Northampton, Massachusetts is an ideal location to measure some of these impacts on macroinvertebrates in various functional feeding groups. Macroinvertebrates are small organisms that lack an internal skeletal system, and their functional feeding groups refer to “the type of food resource that a particular species utilizes” (Stumpf et al. 2009.). A study by Kim et al. (2017) studied the effects of rainfall intensity on macroinvertebrates in a mountain stream in Korea, where summer monsoons occur frequently. After collecting data for three days, it was found that the rainfall’s intensity (more than frequency) affected the species richness and abundance of the macroinvertebrates inhabiting the stream (Kim et al. 2017). Their existence is essential in being able to understand the ecology of aquatic ecosystems, so understanding how precipitation impacts their population size is important in beginning to understand the effect of climate change on these spaces (Hauer and Resh 2017). In our study, we will specifically explore the question, “How does precipitation affect the abundance of different functional feeding groups in Mill River?
Differentiating Between Us & Them: Reduced In-Group Bias as a Novel Mechanism Linking Childhood Violence Exposure with Internalizing Psychopathology
Get PDFStrong in-group bonds, facilitated by implicit favoritism for in-group members (i.e., in-group bias), promote mental health across development. Yet, we know little about how the development of in-group bias is shaped by early-life experiences. Childhood violence exposure is known to alter social information processing biases. Violence exposure may also influence social categorization processes, including in-group biases, in ways that influence risk for psychopathology. We examined associations of childhood violence exposure with psychopathology and behavioral and neural indices of implicit and explicit bias for novel groups in children followed longitudinally across three time points from age 5 to 10 years old (n = 101 at baseline; n = 58 at wave 3). To instantiate in-group and out-group affiliations, youths underwent a minimal group assignment induction procedure, in which they were randomly assigned to one of two groups. Youth were told that members of their assigned group shared common interests (in-group) and members of the other group did not (out-group). In pre-registered analyses, violence exposure was associated with lower implicit in-group bias, which in turn was associated prospectively with higher internalizing symptoms and mediated the longitudinal association between violence exposure and internalizing symptoms. During an fMRI task examining neural responses while classifying in-group and out-group members, violence-exposed children did not exhibit the negative functional coupling between vmPFC and amygdala to in-group vs. out-group members that was observed in children without violence exposure. Reduced implicit in-group bias may represent a novel mechanism linking violence exposure with the development of internalizing symptoms
OpenASAP: An Affordable 3D Printed Atmospheric Solids Analysis Probe (ASAP) Mass Spectrometry System for Direct Analysis of Solid and Liquid Samples
Get PDFAtmospheric Solids Analysis Probe (ASAP) mass spectrometry is a versatile technique allowing direct sampling of solid and liquid samples, but its adoption is limited due to the high cost of commercial ASAP systems. To address this, we present OpenASAP, an open-source ASAP system for mass spectrometers that can be fabricated for $20 or less using 3D-printing. Our design is readily adaptable to instruments from different manufacturers and can be produced with a variety of additive manufacturing techniques on consumer-grade 3D-printers. The probe allows for rapid sampling of solid and liquid samples without sample preparation, making it useful for high throughput screening, investigating spatial localization and function of analytes in biological samples, and incorporating mass spectrometry in instructional settings. We demonstrate its effectiveness by obtaining mass spectra of three natural product standards at levels as low as 10 ng/ml in liquid samples, and detecting these metabolites in microbial cultures that are difficult to analyze due to complex sample matrices or analyte properties. Furthermore, we demonstrate direct sampling of thin layer chromatography (TLC) spots of these cultures
Creating Meaningful Connections with the Electr eating Meaningful Connections with the Electron Transport Chain Beyond a Virtual Classroom
Get PDFAt the center of feminist pedagogy is community. Creating community within the classroom and between the class and local communities increases student engagement and access to knowledge. Communities can be a source of solidarity and further decenter authority in the classroom, empowering students, teachers, and the surrounding community to be co-learners. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, remote teaching posed challenges to student engagement. Here, I describe an assignment used to build an inclusive community of co-learners within a virtual biochemistry class and our local communities. Oxidative phosphorylation is a cellular process used to create energy that depends on the electron transport chain, a series of electron-transfer reactions that can be challenging for students to learn. To help remote students understand the electron transport chain, I designed an assignment for students to 1) learn about electron transport and its connection to oxidative phosphorylation through reenactment and 2) teach classmates and nonscientists within their local communities about this essential process. Through reenactment, students created meaningful connections with this cellular process while educating other nonscientists, extending the virtual classroom into our local communities. Notably, this assignment can be used in in-person teaching and applied to other metabolic pathways to facilitate an intuitive understanding of the biochemical process
Engineering Fn3 Protein-Drug Conjugates for Targeted Cancer Therapy
No full textAlthough cancer has been researched for decades with the hopes of finding a cure, there are currently only a few targeted cancer therapeutics that are approved for routine clinical use. Cancer is a devastating disease that can rapidly metastasize without early detection and treatment. There is a critical unmet need for precision medicine which allows patients to receive treatment based on the molecular characteristics of their disease. The benefits of molecular targeting include higher efficacy rates and fewer side effects for patients. While there are antibody therapeutics used as targeting agents, their complex structure and high production costs limit their applications for various diseases. Antibodies have long circulation times in the human body, are poor molecular imaging agents, and have diffusion limitations where they often do not reach the center of a dense tumor. Non-antibody protein scaffolds have a high potential for solving these issues due to their smaller size, range of possible modifications, and lower production costs. Fibronectin type III (Fn3) proteins, specifically, are desirable imaging and targeting agents because of their ability to clear from non-targeted tissues rapidly while accumulating in the tumor. The motivation for this research is to develop a protein-drug conjugate targeted for cancer cells using an Fn3 scaffold. Past students in the Moore Lab have engineered Fn3 proteins that have a high binding affinity to mesothelin (MSLN) and induce apoptosis of MSLN-positive tumor cells. MSLN is a cell surface protein that is highly expressed in cancerous tissues compared to normal tissues and correlates with poor prognosis. When MSLN interacts with tumor cell surface biomarker MUC16, there is an increase in metastasis. The goals of this thesis were to utilize thiol chemistries to conjugate a maleimide fluorophore to engineered Fn3 proteins as a model for protein-drug conjugates and establish a spheroid model system for in vitro characterization of such conjugates. A cysteine-containing tag (cys-tag) was added to the C-terminus of the Fn3 protein to ensure MSLN binding, mediated by loops proximal to the N-terminus, was unaffected. The cys-tag sequence was added to various generations of Fn3 proteins using recombinant DNA technology. Transformations into two E. coli strains were performed to generate high-quality plasmid DNA and for high-yield protein expression. After large-scale protein purification and lyophilization, concentrated proteins were reacted with Alexa Fluor 488 (AF488) to confirm thiol reactivity. Flow cytometry assays and immunohistochemistry staining of triple-negative breast cancer cell line, HCC1806, confirmed MSLN expression and successful generation of spheroids. Future work will include trafficking assays to visualize the internalization of potential anti-MSLN Fn3 molecules
Self-supervised Learning for Ancient Syriac Handwriting Style Identification
No full textThis thesis presents a series of methods of representation learning for ancient Syriac manuscripts style identification. Our research started with grapheme-based method that reduces the dimension of the images with a codebook trained by k-means clustering and then moved to traditional supervised learning with fine-tuning the pre-trained VGG model. We then explored with contrastive representation learning framework with our dataset and found its applicability in handwriting-based images. Furthermore, we proposed a new self-supervised style content separation model that extracts the style information and uses them to classify the manuscripts. Our model performs well in the document identification task and shows strong potential in manuscript dating. Our work provides insight into utilizing self-supervised learning to find a representation space where manuscripts sharing similar styles would cluster while those in different styles would be away from each other
Phasic and Repetitive Self-Touch Differ in Hemodynamic Response in the Prefrontal Cortex–An fNIRS Study
Get PDFIntroduction: Each individual touches the own body several 100 times a day. While some researchers propose a self-regulatory function of self-touch, others report that self-touching increases nervousness. This controversy appears to be caused by the fact that researchers did not define the kind of self-touch they examined and actually, referred to different types of self-touch. Thus, kinematically defining different types of self-touch, such as phasic (discrete), repetitive, and irregular, and exploring the neural correlates of the different types will provide insight into the neuropsychological function of self-touching behavior. Methods: To this aim, we assessed hemodynamic responses in prefrontal brain areas using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and behavioral responses with NEUROGES®. Fifty-two participants were recorded during three specific kinematically types of self-touch (phasic, irregular, repetitive) that were to be performed on command. The recently developed toolbox Satori was used for the visualization of neuronal processes. Results: Behaviorally, the participants did not perform irregular self-touch reliably. Neurally, the comparison of phasic, irregular and repetitive self-touch revealed different activation patterns. Repetitive self-touch is associated with stronger hemodynamic responses in the left Orbitofrontal Cortex and the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex than phasic self-touch. Discussion: These brain areas have been reported to be associated with self-regulatory processes. Furthermore, irregular self-touch appears to be primarily generated by implicit neural control. Thus, by distinguishing kinematically different types of self-touch, our findings shed light on the controverse discussion on the neuropsychological function of self-touch