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The Role of Clot Structure and Mechanics on Hemodynamics and Pharmacology
No full textHemostatic clots have a core/shell hierarchy comprised of a P-selectin positive core surrounded by a P-selectin negative shell. A new human blood microfluidic assay utilizing a 2-stage assay was developed to interrogate core/shell mechanics. By first perfusing whole blood over a collagen/TF surface and then swapping out the blood for buffer, we were able to pause thrombus growth at a specific point in time. The shear rate was then drastically increased to interrogate platelet-platelet interactions. We found that thrombin inhibition, but not fibrin, led to greater erosion of the thrombus, and that the core region of the thrombus was stable with or without the presence of fibrin. Next, we tested the effects of ADP or TxA2 inhibitors on thrombus growth and stability. We found that inhibiting TxA2 production did not affect platelet deposition, but the platelets that did attach to the clot were more likely to erode after being subjected to shear. Both P2Y1 and P2Y12 antagonism led to decreased initial platelet deposition and more platelet erosion. P2Y12 signaling had the most significant effect on deposition and stability suggesting that it might have an amplification effect on other signaling pathways. We demonstrated a new method to examine thrombus strength and stability and showed the effect of thrombin on core size along with the importance of secondary agonists on stability in the shell region. We used an 8-channel microfluidic device to examine the efficacy of ex vivo apixaban on platelet and fibrin deposition in neonates with CHD. This patient population was shown to have significantly more activity blood after surgery. We found that apixaban drastically lowers coagulation activity in neonatal blood before and after surgery and significantly prolongs occlusion time to a greater extent than adults. We also demonstrated that andexanet alfa reverses the inhibitory effect of apixaban in both neonates and adults. These results demonstrated that microfluidics is a useful way to examine pharmacological effects, especially in a population where only small quantities of blood can be drawn
Breve y Eficaz: Exemplum and Pedagogy in Iberian Didactic Literature (1169-1611)
No full textThe idea of literature as a set of ethical examples for readers to imitate is a familiar justification for the arts in the classical and medieval eras. Nothing better encapsulates this application of storytelling than the “exemplum,” brief narratives with a moral lesson. Through these short historical or fictitious tales, various preachers, tutors, and counselors sought to shape the religious, political, and ethical decisions of audiences. Some of the most iconic works of medieval and renaissance Iberian literature are cast as collections of exemplary tales, such as Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor, Juan Ruiz’s Libro de buen amor, and Cervantes’ Novelas ejemplares. However, the exemplary function of texts has not been explored for the full range of its pedagogical possibility. I argue that in premodern contexts, there is an epistemological “way of example” that coexists in subordination to a “way of reason” or “way of logic” that philosophy, theology, and science have consistently favored. The Iberian didactic texts that appear here all demonstrate an epistemology of exemplum that enables readers to encounter the world through imitation. The Islamic philosopher Averroes predicates poetry itself on the movement of the soul towards and away from models of virtue and vice. Juan Ruiz mocks this ethical poetic, but uses his Libro de buen amor as an aesthetic example that invites participation and emulation of his verse technique. The Mallorcan philosopher and preacher Ramon Llull uses exempla as a way to understand the universe as one great analogy. The Castilian nobleman Juan Manuel resorts to his own life experience as a source of archetypal value and encourages us to do the same, while the seventeenth-century lexicographer Covarrubias encourages us to look toward the natural world for a source of ethical models
Marriage and Family in India
No full textThis dissertation studies two important dimensions of family life in contemporary India, marriage partner selection and female seclusion, using three different data sources: 48 interviews with the middle-class in New Delhi, panel survey data from the India Human Development Survey, and survey data from the Center for the Advanced Study of India Delhi National Capital Region Survey. The first half of this dissertation sheds light on attitudes towards and the processes involved in arranged marriage among the urban middle class. The young people interviewed approach marriage decision-making with marital pragmatism, framing their choices in terms of risks, uncertainties, and costs. Most describe arranged marriage as the safer option due to the support that these relationships receive from parents. Despite a strong preference for arranged marriage, interviews revealed significant hybridization between arranged and self-choice or “love” marriage. Couples in arranged marriages often engaged in courtship during their engagement. Furthermore, new survey data suggests that many families are willing to call off a wedding if the betrothed find themselves to be incompatible during their engagement, revealing the family’s prioritization of choice and compatibility for the couple. The second half of this dissertation examines patterns of female seclusion and attitudes towards women’s careers. Analysis of panel data shows that women from households which became wealthier reported increased restrictions on their physical mobility and greater odds of practicing head-covering or purdah. These findings suggest that the upwardly mobile may be using female seclusion as a way to signal household status. Dual earner professional couples in India challenge male breadwinner norms through their division of labor. Men who married working women mostly report that they were actively searching for an employed wife on the marriage market because of the financial security that a second income could provide. In addition, to some respondents, dual earning was believed to help facilitate a companionate marriage. This dissertation highlights the role of family, economic precarity, risk, and social norms in shaping marriage and family life in India
Towards an Empirically-based Model of Age-graded Behaviour: Trac(ing) linguistic malleability across the entire adult life-span
Get PDFPrevious panel research has provided individual evidence for aspects of the U-shaped pattern, but these studies typically rely on sampling the same speaker at two points in time, usually in close proximity. As a result, our knowledge about the patterning of age-graded variables across the entire adult life-span is limited. What is needed, thus, is a data-set that captures ongoing linguistic malleability in the individual speaker across all “life experiences that give age meaning” (Eckert 1997:167). Our study is the first to add real time evidence across the lifespan as a whole on an age-graded variable. We present the results of a novel dynamic data-set that allows us to model speakers’ linguistic choices between ages 19 and 78. We illustrate the age-graded patterns in our data and draw attention to the complex, socially niched ways in which speakers react to age-specific expectations
Collation Model for Ms. Codex 729: [Libellus super electionibus faciendis et earum ordinandis].
Get PDFTwo unbound quires from a work dealing with a section of canon law, with Mandagot\u27s own gloss on his work and some details relating to the church at Toulouse, where the author was provost for a time.https://repository.upenn.edu/sims_models/1113/thumbnail.jp
The Geometry Of Capillary And Constant Mean Curvature Surfaces
Get PDFConstant mean curvature (CMC) surfaces are critical points of the area functional for variations that preserve the volume of the region enclosed by the surface. Capillary surfaces are defined in a similar way, but instead of the area functional, one considers a functional that is the sum of the surface area with a boundary term. Both of these types of surfaces arise in nature as the interface between a liquid and air. The index of a CMC or a capillary surface is an integer that measures how far the surface is from minimizing the functional. In this thesis, we explore the relationship between the index and the geometry of capillary and CMC surfaces.We begin by showing that the index together with the area bound the genus of compact CMC surfaces embedded in a compact 3-manifold. We also show that in the case where the surface is not minimal and the 3-manifold has finite fundamental group, the index and the mean curvature are sufficient to bound the genus. Then we move on to study capillary surfaces immersed in 3-manifolds. Amongst other results, we describe the conformal structure of noncompact capillary surfaces with finite index, one consequence of this description is that the only noncompact capillary surface immersed in a half-space with acute contact angle and zero index is the half-plane
Be(com)ing Language (student) Teachers In A Tesol Practicum
No full textDuring teacher education, student teachers work towards becoming teachers; they are socialized into the ways of talking, acting, and thinking that “teachers” do. The practicum experience represents a unique period when student teachers are both becoming teachers and, in the classrooms where they work, being teachers. This study explored this hybrid process of be(com)ing by examining the interplay between language student teachers’ socialization and identity formation within and across the contexts of a TESOL Practicum semester. I theorized images of language teachers and language teaching as a way of looking at the sets of ideas about what it means to be and act as teachers, and I traced how these emerged in relation to specific activities and in student teachers’ talk across multiple practicum contexts. Drawing on ethnographic, discourse analytic, and collaborative inquiry methods, this study closely examined the experiences of eight focal student teacher participants.I show how student teachers storied their experiences of becoming language teachers by drawing on various past experiences and aligning these with the images of teachers they themselves were trying to be(come). Next, I provide an analysis of three images of language teachers/language teaching that emerged as salient to the student teachers during their practicum, describing how they sought to be creative, to utilize TESOL pedagogical methods, and to be student-centered teachers. I discuss the tensions that student teachers had to negotiate as they made sense of themselves in relation to each of these images. Finally, I demonstrate how talking about the activity of a teaching demonstration surfaced not simply methodological choices, but also questions and transformations of student teachers’ identities. Ultimately, I argue for a practicum—and (language) teacher education program— centered on issues of identity and committed to raising student teachers’ critical awareness of the underlying images of teachers and teaching that drive both their practice and the practice of (language) teacher education
Like A Snake In Difficult Mountains: A Historical And Archaeological Analysis Of The Character And Origin Of The Iron Age Kingdom Of Musasir
Get PDFSmall polities of marginal borderland regions in the Near East were often pushed and pulled by their far larger neighbors’ political and economic spheres, forced to adapt to their social and environmental situation to thrive and maintain independence. The kingdom of Muṣaṣir, the home to the chief Urartian deity, Ḫaldi, lay in one of these frontier zones in the rugged mountains of northeast Iraq. Despite the significance of the kingdom’s temple for the Urartian kings’ religious ideology, the steep peaks and narrow flatlands of Muṣaṣir’s environs were ill-suited to substantial occupation. In order to locate Muṣaṣir and better understand the settlement behaviors of ancient occupation in the Sidekan subdistrict of Erbil, Iraq, the Rowanduz Archaeological Program (RAP) commenced a series of excavations and a survey in 2013. Excavation of the rural homestead of Gund-i Topzawa provided a dataset to investigate the reasons for settlement in this marginal environment. Synchronizing archaeological data to the Middle Iron Age (1050-550 BCE) Neo-Assyrian campaign texts and illustrations led to broader research questions exploring the factors driving the region’s chronologically limited sedentary occupation and the impact coopting a religious system has on the local polity and its appropriators.This study publishes the ceramic typology, stratigraphic, and architectural findings from the excavations of Gund-i Topzawa and Sidekan Bank, as well as the collected pottery and occupation qualities of surveyed sites in the Sidekan subdistrict (2014-2016). The pottery sequence, structural characteristics, and settlement patterns added to the understanding of the chronological sequence of the northern Zagros Mountains and further confirmed the locational specificity of Muṣaṣir with the Ḫaldi temple’s likely location at Mudjesir. Modeling the Iron Age populace’s ecological adaptations to environmental, social, and political stimuli indicate the interaction of cultural and technology factors first spurred Sidekan’s sedentary occupation in the Late Bronze Age, and the later cooption of Ḫaldi by the Urartian kings led to the area’s subsequent stagnation and contraction as the god’s appropriators declined
Observational Data With A Continuous Exposure: Study Design And Outcome Analysis
Get PDFSubclassification and matching are often used in empirical studies to adjust for observed covariates; however, they are largely restricted to relatively simple study designs with a binary exposure and less developed for designs with a continuous exposure. This thesis contains three papers discussing aspects of study design and outcome analysis with a continuous exposure. The first paper presents a new full match methodology for data with a continuous exposure that achieves good subclass homogeneity, preservation of all study units, dose separation when desired, and control over the size of subclasses. There are two types of empirical studies where matching with a continuous exposure could be useful: studies with a continuous treatment dose and studies with a continuous instrumental variable (IV). The second paper analyzes social mobility data during the COVID-19 pandemic using non-bipartite matching, and proposes a simple randomization test for a structured dose-response relationship. We rejected a primary analysis null hypothesis that stated the social distancing from April 27, 2020, to June 28, 2020, had no effect on the COVID-19-related death toll from June 29, 2020, to August 2, 2020 (p-value \u3c 0.001), and found that it took more reduction in mobility to prevent exponential growth in case numbers for non-rural counties compared to rural counties. The third paper studies how to embed retrospective observational data into a cluster-randomized encouragement experiment using non-bipartite matching, and the associated statistical inference problems. Both the first and third papers are motivated by health outcomes research concerning the effect of intraoperative TEE monitoring during CABG surgery on patients\u27 post-surgery clinical outcomes
The New Girls’ Clubs: Candidate Training Programs And The Women Changing The Face Of U.s. Politics
No full textHow does women’s political leadership training advance gender parity in public office? This project takes an ethnographic approach involving extensive participant observation and interviews to analyze and compare Republican and Democratic practitioners’ strategies and understandings of how to propel women into leadership. I use a discourse analytic framework to study candidate training programs as part of complex networks of political action and examine constructions of women’s leadership to explore broad questions about gender and power. What does it mean to lead as a woman? Interlocutors’ attitudes illuminate how entrenched sociocultural norms come to bear and at the same time become reimagined at this time of rapid social change in understandings of women’s place in U.S. politics. How do training programs and aspiring women candidates go about the transformational process of developing leadership qualities, in light of the gender ideologies and political party cultural values surrounding them? I find that partisan differences in ideological orientations to gender and leadership run contrary to what may be expected based on historical partisan commitments to the gender binary, indicating how advocates’ gender ideologies cannot be assumed based on their political ideologies. While rightwing gender-related political movements have tended to mobilize around understandings of the distinctive values of masculine and feminine in the past, leftwing groups today mobilize around gender difference and the perceived benefits of feminine leadership while simultaneously navigating the growing movement to break down sex and gender binarism. Considering political representation as a semiotic process allows for an investigation of democratic representation and electability as linked to semiotic representation, and reflective of surrounding sociocultural norms and ideologies. I intend for this dissertation to have both scholarly value and practical utility for advocates working to broaden democratic participation. I find that longer-term, cohort-based candidate training programs have the potential to build powerful social networks that serve as avenues for fundraising and mentorship and can help mitigate some external barriers to candidacy, a function that has been overlooked by other scholars