VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Polarity Control in Migrating Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells: N-cadherin Localization and Function
Keywords: Vascular Biology
Polarity
N-cadherin
Restenosis
Migration

Vascular endothelial cell loss initiates directional migration of medial smooth muscle cells into the arterial intima contributing to in-stent restenosis, atherosclerosis and coronary arterial by-pass graft failure. N-cadherin is a cell-cell adhesion molecule that mediates the interaction between vascular endothelial cells and the innermost smooth muscle cells to stabilize the arterial wall. Upon injury, I reasoned that relocalization of N-cadherin on the inner most smooth muscle cells to the posterior-lateral borders stimulates cell polarization to enable directional migration. Using an in vitro scratch-wound model to stimulate cell polarity and locally remove cell-cell contacts at one pole of smooth muscle cells, I found that N-cadherin localization provides signaling cues via a Cdc42/GSK pathway that promote polarized reorganization of the cytoskeleton and directional cell migration. I also found that N-cadherin was important to functions of lamellipodia at the anterior of migrating cells. In lamellipodia, actin polymerization drives protrusion of the leading edge and coincident, but more posterior, actin depolymerization results in retrograde flow of actin and associated plasma membrane structures. Using live cell imaging, I found that clusters of N-cadherin-GFP repeatedly accumulated at the leading edge specifically at the neck of large pinocytotic vesicles called macropinosomes that were internalized and transported away from the leading edge. This localization is consistent with a role for N-cadherin in closure and scission of vesicles during macropinocytosis. These are the first studies to examine polarity in migrating vascular smooth muscle cells, and advance our understanding concerning cell-cell adhesions in controlling directional cell migration. My results suggest that N-cadherin may serve as a viable target for the treatment of arterial stenosis that would limit smooth muscle cell migration and stabilize the arterial wall. Furthermore, I report on a novel localization and function of N-cadherin in the biogenesis of macropinosomes in the lamellipodia that contribute to cell protrusion.
Space-time Coded Modulation Design in Slow Fading
Keywords: MIM0
wireless communications
group detection
BICM
coded modulation
LDPC
irregular convolutional codes
unitary precoding

This dissertation examines multi-antenna transceiver design over flat-fading wireless channels. Bit Interleaved Coded Modulation (BICM) and MultiLevel Coded Modulation (MLCM) transmitter structures are considered, as well as the used of an optional spatial precoder under slow and quasi-static fading conditions. At the receiver, MultiStage Decoder (MSD) and Iterative Detection and Decoding (IDD) strategies are applied. Precoder, mapper and subcode designs are optimized for different receiver structures over the different antenna and fading scenarios. Under slow and quasi-static channel conditions, fade resistant multi-antenna transmission is achieved through a combination of linear spatial precoding and non-linear multi-dimensional mapping. A time-varying random unitary precoder is proposed, with significant performance gains over spatial interleaving. The fade resistant properties of multidimensional random mapping are also analyzed. For MLCM architectures, a group random labelling strategy is proposed for large antenna systems. The use of complexity constrained receivers in BICM and MLCM transmissions is explored. Two multi-antenna detectors are proposed based on a group detection strategy, whose complexity can be adjusted through the group size parameter. These detectors show performance gains over the the Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE)detector in spatially multiplexed systems having an excess number of transmitter antennas. A class of irregular convolutional codes is proposed for use in BICM transmissions. An irregular convolutional code is formed by encoding fractions of bits with different puncture patterns and mother codes of different memory. The code profile is designed with the aid of extrinsic information transfer charts, based on the channel and mapping function characteristics. In multi-antenna applications, these codes outperform convolutional turbo codes under independent and quasi-static fading conditions. For finite length transmissions, MLCM-MSD performance is affected by the mapping function. Labelling schemes such as set partitioning and multidimensional random labelling generate a large spread of subcode rates. A class of generalized Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes is proposed, to improve low-rate subcode performance. For MLCM-MSD transmissions, the proposed generalized LDPC codes outperform conventional LDPC code construction over a wide range of channels and design rates.
Theodore Stanton: An American Editor, Syndicator, and Literary Agent in Paris, 1880-1920
Keywords: book history
Emile Zola
bibliography
literary agency
print culture

Theodore Stanton’s career as a literary middleman exemplifies several of the intermediary professions in book and periodical publishing that were being created and tested in the late nineteenth century in response to expanded publishing opportunities in France, Great Britain, the United States, and Canada. The need for professional middlemen between writers and publishers developed differently in each country, thus their roles and activities, the literary agent’s in particular, varied according to regional demands. Different interpretations of intellectual property in copyright laws determined the balance of power between creators and producers of texts. In turn, writers’ relative ability to control copyrights shaped the middleman’s field of endeavour. The range of professional middleman specializations is described. A case study of some American publications of Émile Zola’s novels shows the legal and logistical difficulties of transatlantic publishing in practice. In chapter 3, Stanton’s beginnings as an American newspaper correspondent in Paris precede his middleman role as editor of the European Correspondent, a weekly galley-proof service printed in English in Paris and syndicated to American newspaper editors. Stanton’s work as a European sub-editor of the North American Review and other magazines is detailed in chapter 4. As the Paris representative of Harper & Brothers from 1899, Stanton presented previously unpublished writings of Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, and others to American readers, also co-operating with French publishers. Case studies portray the challenges and successes of a middleman position within a large, complex enterprise. In chapter 5, a more independent Stanton arranges the simultaneous, posthumous publication of the memoirs of Eugénie, ex-Empress of France, by D. Appleton and Company in New York and London, and in four European translations. Count Maurice Fleury compiled and authored the two-volume work, which was not published in France. The manuscript took a circuitous path to publication through Stanton’s efforts to ensure authenticity, maintain exclusivity, and protect copyright. Methodological approaches of correspondence editing, bibliography, and textual criticism reveal both the processes and the results of Stanton’s mediation and illuminate how the participation of literary middlemen shaped the way French culture was received and understood in North America.
A Regulatory Theory of Cortical Organization and its Applications to Robotics
Keywords: Evolutionary Robotics
Neural Networks
Developmental systems
Gene regulation
Space Robotics
Multiagent systems

Fundamental aspects of biologically-inspired regulatory mechanisms are considered in a robotics context, using artificial neural-network control systems . Regulatory mechanisms are used to control expression of genes, adaptation of form and behavior in organisms. Traditional neural network control architectures assume networks of neurons are fixed and are interconnected by wires. However, these architectures tend to be specified by a designer and are faced with several limitations that reduce scalability and tractability for tasks with larger search spaces. Traditional methods used to overcome these limitations with fixed network topologies are to provide more supervision by a designer. More supervision as shown does not guarantee improvement during training particularly when making incorrect assumptions for little known task domains. Biological organisms often do not require such external intervention (more supervision) and have self-organized through adaptation. Artificial neural tissues (ANT) addresses limitations with current neural-network architectures by modeling both wired interactions between neurons and wireless interactions through use of chemical diffusion fields. An evolutionary (Darwinian) selection process is used to ‘breed’ ANT controllers for a task at hand and the framework facilitates emergence of creative solutions since only a system goal function and a generic set of basis behaviours need be defined. Regulatory mechanisms are formed dynamically within ANT through superpositioning of chemical diffusion fields from multiple sources and are used to select neuronal groups. Regulation drives competition and cooperation among neuronal groups and results in areas of specialization forming within the tissue. These regulatory mechanisms are also shown to increase tractability without requiring more supervision using a new statistical theory developed to predict performance characteristics of fixed network topologies. Simulations also confirm the significance of regulatory mechanisms in solving certain tasks found intractable for fixed network topologies. The framework also shows general improvement in training performance against existing fixed-topology neural network controllers for several robotic and control tasks. ANT controllers evolved in a low-fidelity simulation environment have been demonstrated for a number of tasks on hardware using groups of mobile robots and have given insight into self-organizing system. Evidence of sparse activity and use of decentralized, distributed functionality within ANT controller solutions are found consistent with observations from neurobiology.
"Before Our Eyes: Les mots, non les choses. Jean-Luc Godard's "Ici et ailleurs" (1970-74) and "Notre musique" (2004)"
Keywords: Jean-Luc Godard
Palestine Question
Aesthetics and Globalization
Politics of Representation
Notre musique (2004)
Ethics of Visibility
Ici et ailleurs (1970-74)
Film Theory

Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin made in 1970 a “political film politically” about the Palestinian Revolution, Jusqu’à la victoire, which remained unfinished. Under the framework of their audio-visual research project, Sonimage, Godard edited the Palestinian footage with Anne-Marie Miéville. Working through the collapse of the revolutionary project, imaging the Palestinian resistance became a matter of the restitution of speech to the absent and to the dead Palestinians – to whom, as Godard laments self-critically in the film, they had not listened to. Godard’s and Miéville’s compass for action was reconfigured as “audiovisual journalism,” addressing the changing conditions in political engagement, challenging the mediatization of mediation prompted by the Leftist utopian belief in the emancipatory potential of the media. The hegemonic discourse circulating within Leftist intellectual culture abandoned the iconic referent of “The Revolution,” which became the fatal harbinger of totalitarianism. Since then, Third World subjects have been figured as terrorists or victims who are incapable of determining themselves politically, or to “develop” economically. Such a turn has given leeway to new models of engagement and emancipation that account for the real of reality, embedded in the non-discourse of rights or counter-memory, while beckoning for a politics of infinite restitution. Godard returned to the Palestine Question thirty years later in Notre musique, by stopping-over in post-war Sarajevo, a place where it became possible for Godard to host a gathering of the Trojan poets and storytellers of sorts. Reconciliation and rehabilitation are the reverse-shot of a world of violent ethnic strife evidencing the futility of the politization of forgiveness. By way of a montage, Godard vouches for the mobilization of the powers of the false in order to save the real. The beautiful becomes necessary to “cover” memories of catastrophe. The aesthetico-political task is the regulation of the distance between the viewer and the screen. The conditions are the belief in images, faith and the desire to see as our links to the world. Within the pervasiveness of the hyperreal and culture, which Godard equates to ruins, the exiles and vanquished call for the exception, which is art.
Limits of Comparativism? Writings from Peru and India through a Postcolonial Lens
Keywords: Postcolonial Theory, Hybridity, Nativism
Peru, India

This thesis examines the premises postulated by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin and Homi K. Bhabha within Postcolonial theory. The theorists suggest that these strategies can be applied to the entire literary production emerging from the erstwhile European colonies in Asia and Latin America; hence the aim of this project is to test the validity of their claim. Given the vastnesss of the theory, the scope of this study has been confined to the analysis of hybridity, Nativism, and mimicry. Critical works by Benita Parry, Walter Mignolo, Neil Lazarus, and others, have been taken into consideration. José María Arguedas (1911-1969), Arundhati Roy (1963-) and Geetanjali Shree (1957-), writing in Spanish, English and Hindi, respectively, were chosen to represent Peru and India. The Hindi novel was included to address the lack of adequate research in the field of vernacular literature within Postcolonial studies, as most of the critics have concentrated on texts written in the former colonizers’ languages. Language and culture have been the cornerstones of this theory hence they form an important part of my analysis. The dissertation foregrounds the relation between Spanish, English and the vernaculars in the text-nations crafted by Arguedas, and Roy. Their narratives indicate that the vernacular melds with the colonizer’s language to form a hybrid tongue, but the manner in which hybridity is constructed depends on the geo-political character of each society. The role of Hindi, its relation to English and Urdu, as well as the invention of its Sanskritized version during the colonial period, is examined in Shree’s narrative and her work is particularly insightful in this regard, as hybridity and Nativism are portrayed very differently in her novel. In this way my thesis demonstrates the difficulty of carrying out a comparative analysis of the entire literary corpus emerging from the erstwhile European colonies based solely on their shared colonial experience.
Structural Characterization and Interactions of the CFTR Regulatory Region
Keywords: disordered proteins
CFTR

The intrinsically disordered nonphosphorylated and phosphorylated R region of CFTR and its interactions with NBD1 and SLC26A3 STAS have been characterized at residue-specific resolution, primarily using NMR. Limited chemical shift dispersion indicates that the R region is intrinsically disordered in solution and that no global folding event occurs upon phosphorylation. Chemical shifts of backbone nuclei and sidechain carbons were assigned. SSP values indicate that phosphorylation acts as a structural switch, with a reduction in helical propensity in multiple nonphosphorylated R region segments. Free nonphosphorylated and phosphorylated R region were characterized using a variety of structural probes. Fast timescale motion indicates the presence of structural contacts in many R region segments. Hydrodynamic radii are intermediate to those expected for fully folded or denatured proteins, with the phosphorylated R region being slightly more compact. The nonphosphorylated R region was further characterized, including measurements of molecular dimensions, N-H bond vector orientation and inter-residue distances from 6 spin label sites. Using these parameters as input to the program ENSEMBLE enabled calculation of a representative pool of nonphosphorylated R region conformations, indicating the presence of transient contacts that could not be directly discerned from the input data. Examining labeled R region with the addition of unlabeled NBD1 provided evidence that multiple segments of nonphosphorylated R region bind and are released from NBD1 with varying affinities in a highly dynamic equilibrium. Phosphorylation relieves these interactions, with the exception of limited R region interactions near S768 when NBD1 is ATP-bound. Largely similar nonphosphorylated R region residues bind both ATP-bound ΔF508 and wild-type NBD1. Addition of unlabeled R region to labeled ATP-bound NBD1 caused spectral changes indicative of a direct interaction with more than one surface or conformational changes within NBD1 that are transmitted from one binding surface to other surface(s). Binding of unlabeled SLC26A3 STAS domain to labeled phosphorylated R region was also monitored and indicated that similar R region segments bind NBD1 and STAS, suggesting a direct competition between these two domains for binding. A model is proposed where the R region acts as a regulatory hub, integrating interactions with a variety of partners to regulate channel function.
Face Motor Cortex Neuroplasticity Associated with Alterations in the Oral Environment of the Adult Rat
Keywords: 0317
0567
0719

Neuroplastic changes in motor representations within the primary motor cortex (M1) have been described after peripheral manipulations and implicated in motor learning and adaptation processes. It is unclear whether dental manipulations, which may result in altered oral sensorimotor functions, are associated with analogous changes within face-M1. This project applied intracortical microstimulation (ICMS) and recordings of evoked muscle electromyographic (EMG) activity to test if changes occur in the ICMS-defined motor representations of tongue-protrusion (genioglossus, GG) and jaw-opening (anterior-digastric, AD) muscles within face-M1 and adjacent face primary somatosensory cortex (face-S1) following trimming or extraction of the rat’s right mandibular incisor, or a change in diet consistency. ICMS mapping was carried out in anaesthetised adult male rats. Consistent with previous findings, AD and GG had extensive motor representations showing considerable overlap in naïve and sham control rats. AD and GG motor representations were also found within face-S1. Left and right AD (LAD, RAD) had significantly larger representations with shorter onset latency of ICMS-evoked EMG responses within contralateral face-M1. A change in diet consistency for 2-3 weeks was not associated with significant changes in AD and GG motor representations within face-M1. Compared to control rats, iii incisor trimming out of occlusion for a period of 1 week resulted, 1 day later, in a significantly longer GG onset latency in ipsilateral than in contralateral face-M1; 1 week later, despite a regain of normal occlusion, GG and GG/AD overlapping representations were significantly larger and the centre of gravity (at AP 4.0) was significantly deeper in contralateral than in ipsilateral face-M1. Incisor extraction was associated, 1 week later, with significantly larger RAD and RAD/GG overlapping representations and a lateral shift of LAD and RAD centre of gravity. Extraction also induced significant changes in AD and GG motor representations within the contralateral face-S1. These novel findings indicate that face-M1 can undergo neuroplastic changes in association with intraoral manipulations and also suggest similar neuroplastic capabilities for face-S1 motor outputs. These findings contribute to our understanding of the role of face-M1 and face-S1 in sensorimotor adaptations to an altered oral state and provide the basis for several future studies.
La science politique d'Aristote : L'architecture de l'action
Keywords: Aristotle
political science
action
nature
teleology
best regime
virtue
prudence
philosophy

This dissertation is an examination of Aristotle’s political science. The first part begins by comparing the Aristotelian conception of the human being as a political animal with subsequent conceptions, notably in the political thought of Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. This comparative analysis shows that human nature is increasingly conceived as apolitical, a major consequence of which is a rejection of the Aristotelian conception of logos (speech, reason) as a natural capacity for reasoning about justice and injustice. It is then demonstrated that modern political science rejects Aristotle’s argument that there is a good for human beings as such which is constitutive of their end (telos), in the same way that modern science abandoned Aristotelian natural teleology. While contemporary currents of political thought, including neo-Aristotelianism, republicanism and communitarianism, make use of certain elements of Aristotle’s thought, they largely fail to recover the critical notions of action and nature. Having cleared major obstacles that bar our access to Aristotle’s political science, the dissertation moves, in the second part, to a textual analysis of the Politics, which, it is argued, constitutes not a work fractured between its “realistic” and “idealistic” parts, but a unified inquiry into both defective political regimes and the best regime, the guiding question of which is: how to render human beings good. The analysis begins by a consideration of the naturalness of the city and examines the various ways in which the notion of “nature” is used by Aristotle. It is then argued that, according to Aristotle’s presentation, political life is the fulfillment of human nature insofar as it represents the possibility of an ethical and moral life. Accordingly, political science, and legislative or “architectonic” science in particular, is to be devoted to moral education. Aristotle is critical of an education that neglects the virtues necessary for leisure in favour of military virtues alone, while acknowledging that cities must be prepared for war. Through an examination of the legislative science and political prudence, it is shown that Aristotle’s political science is capable of providing action with a moral orientation, without having recourse to metaphysical cosmology.