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Penn Library\u27s LJS 419 - Herbal (Video Orientation)
No full texthttps://repository.upenn.edu/sims_video/1173/thumbnail.jp
Penn Library\u27s LJS 427 - [Books II-V of al-Qānūn fī al-ṭibb]. (Video Orientation)
No full texthttps://repository.upenn.edu/sims_video/1175/thumbnail.jp
Social Impact Centers at Elite Business Schools: Preparing Students for Innovation in Emerging Economies
No full textSocial innovation refers to a novel way of addressing societal and environmental issues by leveraging the private sector’s expertise and ways of working to make a positive impact on the world’s “wicked”—complex, interconnected—problems. Business schools have historically had a tenuous relationship with social impact, especially in emerging economies, where the work of elite institutions has been both lauded and called into question. Power dynamics, cultural differences, and lack of familiarity with the local context have sometimes detracted from elite business school students’ well-intentioned aims—or created negative externalities and consequences. Based on a conceptual framework around pedagogy that incorporated business models, mindsets, and modes of instruction, interviews were conducted at six social impact centers in elite business schools. The findings suggest that such centers are moving away from a focus on business models toward a focus on mindsets. Instead of encouraging students to create standalone ventures, a practice known as social entrepreneurship, they are moving students toward an awareness of systems and what can drive change within them. Also, rather than emphasizing knowledge transfer by “parachuting in,” students are being taught to engage in a collaborative exchange with partners in emerging economies. This is the first study to look at the pedagogy of social impact at elite business schools with respect to emerging economies
Evaluating the Effect of Title I Funds on Resource Equity: A Case Study
No full textFunding plays an integral role in ensuring students have access to resources and services in public schools. Schools receive funding from local, state, private, and federal funds. Together, these financial sources contribute to and comprise the total revenue available to fund resources and services in schools. In the United States, the inequitable allocation of public-school funding results in variability among students’ access to resources and services in school and the communities within which they reside. Title I, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, titled Improving the Academic Achievement of The Disadvantaged, intends to increase access to resources and services for students whose economic circumstances are associated with educational disadvantage. Through a case study of three school districts, this research examines how Title I funding builds on the existing resources and services paid for by districts. This research evaluates the intradistrict and interdistrict variability of students’ access to services and resources. In doing so, it evaluates how Title I affects resource equity within and among the three districts
Testing by Dualization
No full textSoftware engineering requires rigorous testing to guarantee the product\u27s quality. Semantic testing of functional correctness is challenged by nondeterminism in behavior, which makes testers difficult to write and reason about. This thesis presents a language-based technique for testing interactive systems. I propose a theory for specifying and validating nondeterministic behaviors, with guaranteed soundness and correctness. I then apply the theory to testing practices, and show how to derive specifications into interactive tester programs. I also introduce a language design for producing test inputs that can effectively detect and reproduce invalid behaviors. I evaluate the methodology by specifying and testing real-world systems such as web servers and file synchronizers, demonstrating the derived testers\u27 ability to find disagreements between the specification and the implementation
Servant Leader Attributes and Motivation in Veteran-Serving Organizations
No full textServant leadership is a construct of leadership that identifies characteristics of the effective and empathic leader across multiple organizational contexts (Boezeman & Ellemers, 2014; Ebener & O’Connell, 2010; Schneider & George, 2011; Winston & Fields, 2015) and will serve as the foundational theory for this research. The concept of the servant leader can be traced to biblical times (Akuchie, 1993), but it was not until Greenleaf’s (1970) essay, “The Servant as Leader,” that the philosophy started to take on contemporary significance within academic context. According to Greenleaf (1970), a servant leader is both (a) a leader who aspires to serve and then is ‘called’ into leadership and (b) a leader who focuses on the needs of individuals as well as the needs of the organization. Greenleaf (2002) also describes the servant leader as being on an introspective lifelong journey, the attributes of which manifest themselves in the work life of the individual. The leader is not defined by name or title, but instead by the behavior and characteristics of a person whose primary motivation is to serve others first (Sendjaya & Sarros, 2002). These characteristics and behaviors are the organizing principles that define a servant leader and serve as the framework for models of servant leadership in an organizational context. Significant empirical studies of servant leadership did not appear in academic literature until 2004 and have since garnered increasing interest from researchers (Barbuto & Wheeler, 2006; Bozeman & Ellemers, 2014; Focht & Ponton, 2015; Parris & Peachy, 2013; Patterson, 2003; Phillips & Phillips, 2010; Sendjaya & Sarros, 2002; Spears, 2004; Winston & Fields, 2015). The label “servant leader” has been the focal topic of many studies, but there is still significantly more to explore in terms of assessing both servant leader effectiveness and servant leader importance to organizations, specifically nonprofits and their volunteers. This is the contextual backdrop for a qualitative exploration into how servant leadership attributes, behaviors, and interactions influence the motivation of nonprofit volunteers.Keywords: servant leader, motivation, followership, volunteer, behavioral approach, transformational leadership, emotional intelligenc
BLIMP1 and NR4A3 Transcription Factors Reciprocally Regulate Antitumor Car T-Cell Stemness and Exhaustion
No full textChimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cells have not induced meaningful clinical responses in solid tumor indications. Loss of T-cell stemness, poor expansion capacity and exhaustion during prolonged tumor antigen exposure are major causes of CAR T-cell therapeutic resistance. scRNA-sequencing analysis of CAR T-cells from a first-in-human trial in metastatic prostate cancer identified two distinct and independently validated cell states associated with antitumor potency or lack of efficacy. Low levels of the PRDM1 gene encoding the BLIMP1 transcription factor defined highly potent TCF7+CD8+ CAR T-cells, while enrichment of TIM3+CD8+ T-cells with elevated PRDM1 expression predicted poor outcome. PRDM1 single knockout promoted TCF7-dependent CAR T-cell stemness and proliferation resulting in marginally enhanced leukemia control. However, in the setting of PRDM1 deficiency, a negative epigenetic feedback program of NFAT-driven T-cell dysfunction characterized by compensatory upregulation of NR4A3 and multiple other genes encoding exhaustion-related transcription factors hampered effector function in solid tumors. PRDM1 and NR4A3 combined ablation skewed CAR T-cell phenotypes away from TIM3+CD8+ and toward TCF7+CD8+ to counter exhaustion of tumor-infiltrating CAR T-cells and improve in vivo antitumor responses, effects that were not achieved with BLIMP1 or NR4A3 single disruption alone. These data reveal a novel molecular targeting strategy to enrich stem-like CAR T-cells resistant to exhaustion and underscore dual inhibition of PRDM1/NR4A3 expression or activity as a promising approach to advance adoptive cell immuno-oncotherapy
Nebulous Figures: A Cultural History of an American Riotocracy, 1848-1929
No full textIn the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx outlines a collective grouping of nebulous figures who exist outside the wage relation and remain merely specters upon the terrain of bourgeois political economy, lives only recognized during the working hours of the production process. This project explores how cultural representations of these nebulous figures during the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America evince a social desire to abolish the form of wage labor itself, a political modality articulated by Herman Melville in his 1854 novella The Encantadas as a Riotocracy. Rather than looking to depictions of work, this project focuses upon elucidating how portrayals of those on the outsides and undersides of wage labor reveal a robust critical capacity for conceptualizing the rejection of work within capitalism as a form of communistic poiesis, a fundamentally creative act of collective worldmaking. Chapter I demonstrates how idleness disrupts the spatio-temporal rhythm of capitalism’s workday and argues that it signals a revolutionary desire for free time. Chapter II turns to the tramp as a nebulous figure who both constructs a commons upon the private property of capital’s commodity flows and crafts a collectivist aesthetic grounded in riotocratic aims. Chapter III examines American realist and naturalist novels at the fin de siècle, positing that the literary depictions of nebulous figures therein continually evade and exceed these genres’ attempts at representational totality. Chapter IV analyzes a variety of formal representational strategies which each attempt to tie life on the outskirts of the wage to a revelation of material reality. The conclusion looks to the political afterlife of the riotocracy from the 1930s to the present. In tracing a political economic theorizing from below, this study identifies these nebulous figures and their riotocratic political desire as thoroughly embedded within nineteenth- and twentieth-century American cultural production and concludes that the anti-work utopianism of those on the margins of wage labor manifests in the assembly of improvisatory commons rooted in a restaging of value
Hygiene and Daily Life in Republican China, 1911—1945
No full textThis dissertation reveals how acceptable, clean, responsible behaviours were defined through overlapping, transnational networks of both medical professionals and laypeople, and how the proliferation of these developments featured in the everyday lives of Chinese in the early twentieth century. Responding to previous studies of public health in Republican China on the central government\u27s institutions, the project instead explores aspects of daily life and public opinion from grassroots actors, highlighting myriad nuanced lived experiences and the inherent value that ordinary Chinese placed on health and social responsibility. Chinese society in the early twentieth century was cosmopolitan in its outlook and influenced by internationally-circulating ideas of health, wellness, and innovative progress; even small, rural communities exercised local autonomy to institute hygiene education campaigns, leading to innovative collaborations between international organizations and local leaders. The first chapter is an extended case study of the province of Shanxi between 1918 and 1928, and an intervention into previous scholarship which assumes that effective public health was impossible before the establishment of national infrastructure in 1928. Beginning with plague control in early 1918, Shanxi leveraged global-local partnerships into opportunities for the development of localized public health campaigns. Hygiene initiatives gained popularity precisely because reformists carefully addressed local concerns, and because the public recognized the tangible benefits to their daily lives. The themes apparent in the first chapter are then explored at length. Each following chapter focuses on a specific communal space in which new expectations of hygienic behaviour were formed. The chapters are focused on the School , Kitchen , Home , and Public Streets . At each site, the maturation of hygiene teaching and practice was driven by, and indeed made possible by, individuals at the local level, even when they mirrored national developments. Together, the chapters are a comprehensive exploration of idiosyncratic hygiene improvement developments and their participants, elevating lived experience and local agency along the way. Moreover, the dissertation asserts China\u27s establishment as an important, proven participant in the global organizations for the advancement of public health
Rapid, Site-Specific Labeling of ‘Off-the-Shelf’ and Native Serum Autoantibodies with T Cell-Redirecting Domains
No full textGenerating new bispecific antibodies typically requires extensive engineering and cloning. New technologies such as made-to-order genes, advanced expression systems, and high efficiency cloning have simplified and accelerated this process. However, the timeline to create new bispecific antibodies is in the order of months, the resulting yield can be low, and adequate functionality is not guaranteed.Here, we developed a simple method to produce bispecific antibodies by site-specifically and covalently attaching a T cell redirecting domain to any off-the-shelf, human Immunoglobulin G (IgG). Our method excludes antibody engineering, cloning or prior knowledge of the antibody sequence, and the bispecifics are created in two hours. We demonstrated the applicability by assessing in vitro cytolysis of bispecific antibodies made using three FDA-approved monoclonal antibodies.We also show the ability to create personalized T cell redirecting autoantibodies (TRAAbs) by labeling native antibodies isolated from tumor-bearing mice, including two syngeneic murine models. TRAAbs were found to induce anti-tumor effects in vitro and in vivo. TRAAbs were also found to preferentially bind tumor over healthy tissue, highlighting a window for safe therapy. The use of autoantibodies to direct the tumor targeting of bispecific antibodies represents a new paradigm in personalized medicine that eliminates the need to identify tumor biomarkers and can potentially overcome tumor antigen loss, which commonly results from mono-targeted immunotherapies