Showing 401 - 410 of 583 Items
The Scars of War: The Demonic Mother as a Conduit for Expressing Victimization, Collective Guilt, and Forgiveness in Postwar Japanese Film, 1949-1964
Date: 2017-05-01
Creator: Sophia Walker
Access: Open access
- Contemporary American viewers are familiar with the vengeful and terrifying ghost women of recent J-Horror films such as Ringu (Nakata Hideo, 1998) and Ju-On (Shimizu Takashi, 2002). Yet in Japanese theater and literature, the threatening ghost woman has a long history, beginning with the neglected Lady Rokujo in Lady Murasaki’s 11th century novel The Tale of Genji, who possesses and kills her rivals. Throughout history, the Japanese ghost mother is hideous and pitiful, worthy of fear as well as sympathy, traits that authors and filmmakers across the centuries have exploited. This project puts together four films that have never before been discussed together -- Kinoshita Keisuke's Shinsaku Yotsuya Kaidan (1949), Nakagawa Nobuo's Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (1959) Mizoguchi Kenji's Ugetsu (1953), and Shindo Kaneto's Onibaba (1964) -- and discusses them as four different iterations of the demonic mother motif, presented as a projection of the Japanese collective’s postwar uncertainty over both the memory of suffering during World War II and the question of personal culpability.
Modeling Coupled Disease-Behavior Dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 Using Influence Networks
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Juliana C. Taube
Access: Open access
- SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has caused significant human morbidity and mortality since its emergence in late 2019. Not only have over three million people died, but humans have been forced to change their behavior in a variety of ways, including limiting their contacts, social distancing, and wearing masks. Early infectious disease models, like the classical SIR model by Kermack and McKendrick, do not account for differing contact structures and behavior. More recent work has demonstrated that contact structures and behavior can considerably impact disease dynamics. We construct a coupled disease-behavior dynamical model for SARS-CoV-2 by incorporating heterogeneous contact structures and decisions about masking. We use a contact network with household, work, and friend interactions to capture the variation in contact patterns. We allow decisions about masking to occur at a different time scale from disease spread which dramatically changes the masking dynamics. Drawing from the field of game theory, we construct an individual decision-making process that relies on perceived risk of infection, social influence, and individual resistance to masking. Through simulation, we find that social influence prevents masking, while perceived risk largely drives individuals to mask. Underlying contact structure also affects the number of people who mask. This model serves as a starting point for future work which could explore the relative importance of social influence and perceived risk in human decision-making.
The Congressional Database: Designing a Web Application Using an HCI Approach
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Liam R. Juskevice
Access: Open access
- The activities of the United States Senate are a topic of interest for researchers and concerned members of the public alike. Websites such as GovTrack and Congress.gov allow people to research specific bills among many other offerings. However, they have significant weaknesses regarding their ease of use and the way they organize and store data. The Congressional Database Project aims to provide an intuitive user experience navigating government data while storing the data in a consistent database. We approach this project from an HCI perspective in order to determine the best ways to improve the user experience. We have conducted a qualitative user study to test the effectiveness of our design and identify potential areas of improvement. This paper provides an in-depth overview of the design of the Congressional Database on the front end and back end. It then explains the methodology of our user study and discusses the implications of its findings.
Genetic Analysis of Adhesion Protein ELMO3 in Arabidopsis thaliana
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Garrison Asper
Access: Open access
- The Extracellular Matrix (ECM) between plant cells is vital for structure, development, and intercellular adhesion. A pectin rich layer in between cells, the middle lamella, is largely responsible for regulating the adhesive properties of adjacent plant cells. Homogalacturonan (HG) pectin, the most common, is synthesized in the Golgi and secreted into the ECM where it undergoes calcium crosslinking, increasing its adhesive properties. Mutations in proteins essential for HG synthesis can reveal a severe adhesion defective phenotype, where the hypocotyls of dark grown Arabidopsis exhibit cell sloughing, curling, and general disorganization. A family of five ELMO proteins are suspected to act as scaffolds for pectin biosynthesis enzymes. ELMO1 and ELMO4 mutants exhibit an adhesion deficient phenotype, and a double mutant provides evidence of redundancy in function between ELMO1 and ELMO2. ELMO1-GFP co-immunoprecipitated with enzymes required for HG synthesis indicating its role as a scaffold protein. Double mutants of the other ELMO homologues were created to determine if they exhibit functional redundancy, and ELMO1 and ELMO3 appear partially redundant. A gene deletion of ELMO3 was also created using the CRSPR/Cas9 system, resulting in two distinct elmo3 deletion alleles, which were phenotypically identical to the original elmo3-/- mutant. All adhesion defective phenotypes can be partially suppressed by altering the osmoticum and hence turgor that provides pressure on adhesive cells. Lastly, ELMO3-GFP was localized to the Golgi, the site of pectin biosynthesis, further supporting a common role of the ELMOs in pectin biosynthesis.
Hot Boy Summer? Analyzing Managerial Reactions to Season-long Fluctuating Player Performance In Major League Baseball
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: John Rodgers Hood
Access: Open access
- This paper suggests numerical weights that a Major League Baseball (MLB) manager may use when comparing player performance across multiple past performance periods to predict future performance. By the end of the MLB regular season, current season performance becomes more predictive than prior season performance for pitchers but not hitters. After estimating weights for different past time periods of performance, this paper compares the weights with how managers value performance in high-stakes situations across these same time periods. I find that MLB managers overreact to recent performance by both hitters and pitchers in postseason settings.
Investigating the effect of Fuc-O-NAP on the glycosylation of Helicobacter pylori Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Panhasith Ung
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Mathematical Modeling of the American Lobster Cardiac Muscle Cell: An Investigation of Calcium Ion Permeability and Force of Contractions
Date: 2014-05-01
Creator: Lauren A Skerritt
Access: Open access
- In the American lobster (Homarus americanus), neurogenic stimulation of the heart drives fluxes of calcium (Ca2+) into the cytoplasm of a muscle cell resulting in heart muscle contraction. The heartbeat is completed by the active transport of calcium out of the cytoplasm into extracellular and intracellular spaces. An increase in the frequency of calcium release is expected to increase amplitude and duration of muscle contraction. This makes sense because an increase in cytoplasmic calcium should increase the activation of the muscle contractile elements (actin and myosin). Since calcium cycling is a reaction-diffusion process, the extent to which calcium mediates contraction amplitude and frequency will depend on the specific diffusion relationships of calcium in this system. Despite the importance of understanding this relationship, it is difficult to obtain experimental information on the dynamics of cytoplasmic calcium. Thus, we developed a mathematical diffusion model of the myofibril (muscle cell) to simulate calcium cycling in the lobster cardiac muscle cell. The amplitude and duration of the force curves produced by the model empirically mirrored that of the experimental data over a range of calcium diffusion coefficients (1-16), nerve stimulation durations (1/6-1/3 of a contraction period), and frequencies (40-80 Hz). The characteristics that alter the response of the lobster cardiac muscle system are stimulation duration (i.e., burst duration), burst frequency, and the rate of calcium diffusion into the cell’s cytoplasm. For this reason, we developed protocols that allow parameters representing these characteristics in the calcium-force model to be determined from isolated whole muscle experiments on lobster hearts (Phillips et al., 2004). These parameters are used to predict variability in lobster heart muscle function consistent with data recorded in experiments. Within the physiological range of nerve stimulation parameters (burst duration and cycle period), calcium increased the cell’s force output for increased burst duration. For example, increased duration of stimulation increased the muscle contraction period and vice versa. In terms of diffusion, a slower rate of calcium diffusion out of the sarcoplasmic reticulum decreased both the calcium level and the contraction duration of the cell. Finally, changes in stimulation frequency did not produce changes in contraction amplitude and duration. When considered in conjunction with experimental stimulations using lobster heart muscle cells, these data illustrate the prominent role for calcium diffusion in governing contraction-relaxation cycles in lobster hearts.
Role of Polycomb group proteins in regulation of eyes absent gene expression in Drosophila melanogaster This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2027-05-16
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Joanne Du
Access: Embargoed
Self-Censorsh** in the Classroom This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2027-05-14
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Sarah Greenberg
Access: Embargoed
Characterization of expression of Sema1a variants in high-plasticity areas of the Gryllus bimaculatus nervous system
Date: 2018-05-01
Creator: Sara Spicer
Access: Open access
- The well-conserved semaphorin family of guidance molecules is known to play multiple complex roles in directing the growth and orientation of dendrites and axons within the developing invertebrate central and peripheral nervous system. Additionally, the expression of select semaphorins is maintained within some highly plastic areas of the adult central nervous system, such as the mushroom bodies, where they are associated with guidance of newly-born neurons as well as with synapse formation and modification. Within the cricket species Gryllus bimaculatus, deafferentation of the prothoracic ganglia and subsequent dendritic rearrangement of the auditory interneurons is associated with fluctuations in the expression of transmembrane Sema1a and diffusible Sema2a. Here, we characterize the expression of two different variants of Gryllus Sema1a, termed Horch Sema1a and Extavour Sema1a, in tissues associated with both developmental neuronal guidance and adult structural plasticity: the embryonic limb buds, the mushroom bodies of the brain, and the non-deafferented adult prothoracic ganglion. Although we were unable to visualize the expression of Extavour Sema1a in any tissue, we demonstrate via phylogenetic analysis that both Sema1a variants have homologs in species across the Insecta class, suggesting that Extavour SEMA1a is a conserved protein sequence. We observe no expression of Horch Sema1a in the embryonic limb bud, and suspect that Extavour Sema1a, which has a high pairwise identity with Schistocerca Sema1a, could be facilitating guidance of the tibial pioneer neuron growth in the limb bud, along with Sema2a. In the adult brain, we observe a colocalization of Horch Sema1a and Sema2a in the mushroom bodies and in a vertical stripe across the calyx, which may be indicative of interactions between Horch SEMA1a and SEMA2a in maintaining synaptic plasticity and guiding newly-born Kenyon cells. We also report a colocalization of Horch Sema1a and Sema2a in the anterior and posterior of the prothoracic ganglia on the ventral side, in the region of auditory interneuron cell bodies, suggesting the possibility that auditory interneurons may express both Horch Sema1a and Sema2a, which could interact with each other or with Plexin receptors to regulate dendrite morphology at the midline.