Esta dissertação tem como questão central as noções de beleza feminina corporal da infância feminina Kaingang moradora da cidade. A investigação foi realizada com dezesseis meninas com idades entre quatro e doze anos residentes em uma comunidade indígena localizada no bairro Lomba do Pinheiro em Porto Alegre. A pesquisa se desenvolveu entre os anos de 2009 e 2011 e buscou investigar, analisar e discutir em que medida as representações de beleza dos corpos femininos veiculadas nos meios de comunicação funcionam como pedagogias visuais e afetam as noções de beleza corporal feminina das meninas Kaingang. Procurou ainda compreender como essas meninas Kaingang absorvem as práticas de embelezamento e da cultura da cidade ao se relacionarem em diferentes territórios urbanos. Foram analisados aspectos corporais relacionados aos marcadores de gênero, classe social, raça e cor como construções históricas, sociais e culturais. A pesquisa de campo de cunho participante foi embasada em aportes da etnografia e em referenciais teóricos dos Estudos da Infância, Estudos Culturais e da Cultura Visual. As análises foram qualitativas nas quais foram cruzados os dados gerados a partir dos dizeres, desenhos e registros fotográficos das meninas Kaingang. Os resultados demonstraram que as meninas Kaingang da cidade possuem preocupações com a aparência de seus corpos que influenciam em suas feminilidades. Pela forma de lidarem com suas peles e cabelos, suas maneiras de vestir e se comportar as análises denotaram que suas valorações quanto ao que consideram ser belo e feio nos corpos femininos são absorvidas por meio das pedagogias culturais e visuais. A investigação explicitou ainda, que as meninas Kaingang sofrem influências dos ambientes territoriais nos quais circulam. Os meios midiáticos ou mesmo sociais e culturais da cidade reverberam nos valores que atribuem à beleza dos corpos femininos e, consequentemente, em suas identidades femininas infantis. / The main objective of this dissertation is clarifying notions of urban Kaingang female children‟s bodily beauty. The investigation was conducted with sixteen four- and twelve-year-old girls living in an Indigenous community at Lomba do Pinheiro in Porto Alegre (RS). The research was developed between 2009 and 2011 and sought to investigate, analyse and discuss how representations for female bodies‟ beauty provided in the media work as visual pedagogies and act on notions of Kaingang girls‟ bodily beauty. It has also sought to understand how these Kaingang girls receive cosmetic practices and the city culture as they live in different urban territories. Bodily aspects concerning gender, class, race, and colour markers were analysed. The participating field research was drawn on ethnographic issues and theoretical referential for Child Studies, Cultural Studies and Visual Culture. Analyses were qualitative and data from Kaingang girls‟ statements, drawings and photographic shots were cross-referenced. The results demonstrated that Kaingang girls are concerned about how their bodies look like, which affect their femininity. In tune to the way they treat their skin and hair, the way they dress and behave, analyses noted that the value of what they regard as beautiful and ugly in female bodies are received through cultural and visual pedagogies. The investigation has also shown that the environment act on Kaingang girls. The city media, society and culture act on values ascribed to female bodily beauty and so their female child identities.

In my art practice, collecting materials from personally significant locations has become a way to subtly reconnect people with places, nature, natural materials and processes. I produce well-made objects, with the end goal of allowing the viewer to feel and interact with traditional forms of beauty through craft, which is increasingly rare in our mechanized world. Raw materials are a direct link to nature and earth, a link which people in general can benefit from in essential ways. The processes of collecting and using naturally occurring materials to form links between objects and places resembles human relationships, and the connections between places, things, and people set the stage for the performance of beauty.

Cancer is the second most common cause of death in the United States. It is a complex disease with environmental, genetic, and lifestyle factors influencing the likelihood of getting cancer and the development of any resulting tumor. Understanding the genetics of cancer is integral to developing novel patient-specific treatments. However, due to complexity, hundreds to thousands of tumors are required for sufficient power to identify the network of relationships among these genes. Animal models of cancer are commonly used to reduce cost and to control experimental variables allowing for more specific hypothesis testing. The Sleeping Beauty transposon mutagenesis system can be used to model cancer in mice. While the Sleeping Beauty mutagenesis system is an important tool in understanding cancer, it has specific computational needs. Experiments need to be analyzed in a fast, unbiased, and efficient manner. A computational method must also accurately model the system allowing for validation and interpretation. Here I present an updated Integration Analysis System and use this system to validate the assumptions present in forward genetic screens of cancer using the Sleeping Beauty. This system allows for rapid identification of cancer genes, but does not directly aid in understanding the relationship between the genes. Given the complexity of cancer, understanding the relationship between cancer genes is very difficult. I have created a connectedness network utilizing the STRING database to better derive an understanding of cancer genes. STRING is a database of known and predicted protein-protein interactions. The connectedness between pairs of genes is calculated using a network reliability metric. This database allows for increased power to detect known pathways when compared to STRING alone. Combining this connectivity network with the set of cancer genes identified by the Integration Analysis System is a strategy for rapid and efficient interpretation of the genetic results.

Gynecological cancers present a tremendous disease burden worldwide. Endometrial cancer, the most common gynecological malignancy, is predominantly a disease of deranged glandular function. The mechanisms by which known environmental risk factors influence the mutational profile of endometrial cancer are poorly understood. Non-HPV vulvar cancer, on the other hand, is a very rare gynecological malignancy of vulvar squamous cells with little known about its pathogenesis. Surgical resection of vulvar cancer is associated with high post-surgical morbidity. Pivotal to improving treatment and outcomes for patients with gynecological cancers is an understanding of the molecular drivers unique to each tumor type. To inform our understanding of endometrial gland regulation, I began my investigations with an assessment of normal endometrial adenogenesis in vivo and present the first evidence implicating the necessity of Sox17 in endometrial gland development. My data suggest Sox17 mediates adenogenesis via a non-cell autonomous mechanism from within the stromal compartment of the endometrium. I then interrogated the contribution of SOX17 to dysregulated glandular function in Type I endometrial adenocarcinoma in vitro. My findings reveal an oncogenic role of SOX17 in the Ishikawa Type 1 endometrial cancer cell line, with homozygous loss of SOX17 impairing cellular proliferation, blunting the cancer phenotype of these cells. The majority of cancers, including gynecological cancers, develop from the accumulation of genetic mutations that occur sporadically in cells over time. The complexity and heterogeneity of solid tumors, however, renders the identification of mutations responsible for driving tumorigenesis difficult. The Sleeping Beauty (SB) insertional mutagenesis system can be used to streamline sporadic tumor formation and driver mutation identification. I present results from an initial attempt to develop an SB model of endometrial cancer and discuss ways in which the SB system can be harnessed to evaluate tumorigenesis in a variety of tissue types and microenvironmental contexts. Finally, I present an SB model of metastatic vulvar cancer. Primary tumors from this model resulted in the identification of 76 novel candidate drivers of vulvar cancer, with the ubiquitin-specific peptidase, Usp9x, the most commonly disrupted gene in our screen. I show data suggesting that differential expression of Usp9x isoforms may underlie Usp9x-mediated tumorigenesis and preliminary data demonstrating the relevance of USP9X to human vulvar cancer. Taken as a whole, these data contribute to our scientific understanding of gynecological tissue homeostasis and cancers, lay the foundation for the development of an SB model of endometrial cancer, and describe the first reported model system for studying HPV-naive vulvar cancer in vivo.

The paper aims to examine the nature of the relationship between beauty and the city. I examined this relationship by first providing a summary of relevant philosophers and their thoughts concerning aesthetics. Second, I compared their thoughts to my own creating my own abstract framework. Third, I implemented my abstract framework through the lens of architecture. This art form is the most organic to study the relationship of beauty within the city because it merges elements characteristic of one’s being like political discourse with the longing for some type of excitement or stimulation which might transfigure one’s self to a higher understanding, something that can only be achieved by experiencing beauty. In other words, buildings and the spaces around them drive the way in which humans interact with each other and their surroundings. I found that the beautiful is desirable and at a point becomes essential to a person’s happiness. To achieve a sense of beauty within the city, the ruling class must possess practical wisdom. A type of knowledge that allows them to pursue the appropriate and promote a kind of creativity that not only respects tradition but also aims to unveil some new form of experience.

Objective: This study investigates the application of aesthetic principles to designed objects with which we interact, specifically looking at the impact of perceived function of the objects on perceptions of visual appeal. Background: Previous studies have demonstrated that a product’s judged beauty or visual appeal is related to perceptions of its usability. Arguments have been put forward for both directions of causality leading to “what is beautiful is usable” and “what is usable is beautiful” hypotheses. Explanations for the relationship between usability and beauty judgments include stereotype effects, ecological explanations, and cognitive processing viewpoints. The current studies contribute to this debate by manipulating usability and aesthetic principles independently to determine whether well-established aesthetic principles are contingent on perceived function. Method: 248 participants were recruited for two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants viewed sixteen illustrations that varied in ways that frequently increase the beauty of objects (i.e., basic principles such as symmetry, balanced massing, curvature, and prototypicality) and rated their degree of visual appeal. In Experiment 2, participants rated the appeal of the same stimuli as in Experiment 1 but were primed by instructions describing the illustrations as either alternative designs for microwave control panels or designs of building façades. Results: Strong support for the aesthetic principles of symmetry and spatial massing, but not curvature, were found in both experiments. Participants generally preferred stimuli that were symmetrical and evenly massed (i.e., "balanced"). Additionally, the manipulation of a functional prime significantly interacted with several aesthetic principles that relate to the match between the supplied prime and the prototypicality of the stimulus for the primed class of objects. Conclusions: Aesthetic principles of symmetry and spatial massing can be considered very potent ways to influence a user’s degree of perceived visual appeal that are resistant to specific use cases or situations. Other principles, such as curvature preferences, seem to be limited by the prototypicality of curvature for a primed class of objects. So when considering whether “what is beautiful is usable” or “what is usable is beautiful," the results from the current study demonstrate that it may be more appropriate to say "what is familiar is beautiful."

An unhealthy reliance on vision alone, fed by pervasive, doctored, hyperreal imagery in the mass media, suppresses a more balanced use of other senses, reinforcing superficial beauty standards. Trapped by an uncritical preference for the visually “perfect” and harmonious, people increasingly seek to remove physical attributes they consider “imperfect,” without first considering how these “imperfections” benefit and distinguish them as unique individuals. This thesis addresses superficial beauty standards by shifting focus from singularly visual experience to a more nuanced sensory aesthetic that also considers haptic qualities. Through a combination of research writing and targeted making, my work examines society’s understanding of flaws and imperfections by strategically embedding natural qualities of texture and randomness—blemishes—into ceramics, a medium treated as analogous to human skin. The resulting tools and objects, designed to support a healthy, ritualized daily skincare routine, examine beauty through the lens of wabi-sabi—the philosophy of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world. Approximately one fifth of deaths in the western industrial nations are caused by cancer. Every year several hundreds of thousands of new patients are diagnosed with cancer and several thousands die of cancer. Scientists have been conducting research from different angles for effective prevention, diagnosis and cure of Cancer. Ever since the genetic basis of cancer has been demonstrated, a race has been ignited globally in the scientific community to identify potential oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. The genetics of the tumors are complex in nature where combinations of loss of function mutations in tumor suppressor genes and gain of function mutations in oncogenes cause cancers. The identification of these genes is extremely important to devise effective therapies to treat cancer. Insertional mutagenesis systems such as sleeping beauty provide an elegant way to identify genes involved in cancers. More and more researchers are adopting the Sleeping Beauty system for their insertional mutagenesis experiments to identify potential cancer causing genes. Given next generation sequence technologies and the vast amount of data they generate requires novel bioinformatics techniques to process, analyze and meaningfully interpret the data. The goal of this project is to develop a publicly available system for researchers worldwide to analyze the sequence data resulting from insertional mutagenesis experiments. This system will identify and annotate all the insertion sites resulting from the sequencing of the experiment. It will also identify the Common Insertion sites (CIS) and genes with Common Insertion Sites (gCIS). The Common Insertion Sites being the regions in the genome that are targeted more often than by chance. The whole system is accessible as a web application for use by researchers worldwide performing insertional mutagenesis experiments.

The popularity of cosmetic surgery in the U.S. has increased dramatically over the last ten years - particularly for women, who make up the largest group of cosmetic surgery consumers. Cosmetic surgery can include relatively simple procedures such as permanent hair removal or Botox to more complicated procedures like breast augmentations and face-lifts. The rise in popularity of cosmetic surgery exalts only one kind of beauty and excludes many women from ever attaining this ideal, so while women may feel empowered, surgery acts as a form of assimilation, because the act of cosmetic surgery reifies an exclusionary beauty norm. With cosmetic surgery, this hegemonic ideal is becoming more attainable, and in the process, some women modify their individual identities, which I argue are shaped by such things as ethnicity, age, body shape, wrinkles, etc., and instead tend to become one homogenized group. I also argue that cosmetic surgery is a form of colonization of the body because most people who do fit with what is perceived as normal and beautiful experience pressure to assimilate. The body becomes colonized (via surgery) much as a country does in the sense that the colonizing group otherizes the colonized, and deems their way of life, or culture, as abhorrent and in need of assimilation to the dominant groups way of life. The colonizers (creators of the beauty myth) seek to modify womens identities in order to suit the beauty ideal. The modification of identity is a possibility because some of the most common procedures such as rhinoplasty, eyelid surgery, and Botox, seek to eliminate, or downplay, ethnic, or age associated traits in exchange for traits that adhere to the beauty ideal. External markers such as an ethnic nose, or even wrinkles, help define women and link them to their cultural origins or individual identity. Society has deemed such markers, particularly for women, as unacceptable because they are not in line with the U.S.'s beauty ideal, therefore, cosmetic surgery, and the inevitable the move towards monoculturalism threatens women's identities.

Scholars have proved negative effects of social network sites on women’s body image caused by social comparison processes. However, only a few studies have examined the effects of Instagram on women’s appearance satisfaction and no selfies were taken into consideration in regard to that issue. The purpose of this research was to examine the social comparison theory through the lens of Instagram selfies and determine the effects of selfies on women’s appearance satisfaction. In-depth interviews with 26 female millennials, ages 18 to 32, reveal the re-defined standard of an ideal body image, shifting away from being skinny to becoming fit, affected by the exposure to celebrities and models’ selfies on Instagram. Though some of the participants admitted to having a positive body image, none of the interviewees reported a complete satisfaction with their bodies. Results indicated that although female millennials do look up to celebrities to define their ideal body, they experience equally intense negative feelings after the comparison to selfies of attractive friends. Most importantly, interviews have demonstrated that the number of likes and comments are as important to female millennials as the aesthetics of the selfie. Likes and comments on own selfie play a significant role in the construction of her body image, acting as a sign of validation from the society, and, thus, significantly affecting her self-esteem and perception of her own beauty.