Despite the success of modern medicine in treating infections, infectious diseases remain a major source of morbidity and mortality worldwide. The evolution of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria means that new innovations in therapeutics must be pursued to combat this emerging threat. A novel approach is to utilize the anti-infective properties of endogenous host defense peptides by creating smaller synthetic peptides with enhanced protective activities. Some of these peptides directly kill bacteria and many display varied immunomodulatory activities, enhancing the host innate immune response to more effectively clear an infection. Here I examined the efficacy of several synthetic peptides in a murine model of invasive bacterial infection, induced by the Gram positive bacterium Staphylococcus aureus. Several peptides were able to significantly reduce peritoneal bacterial load in vivo by up to 4-logs relative to the controls, either through direct antibacterial killing or immunomodulatory activity. The latter class was studied in more detail; in particular, the peptides IDR-1 and 1002 displayed significant immunomodulatory effects in vivo. Both peptides were able to significantly induce the proinflammatory chemokines MCP-1, RANTES and KC, as well as increased recruitment of neutrophils and monocytes to the site of infection. These effects were not dependent on live bacteria, as heat inactivated S. aureus was also able to induce chemokines and cell migration. Mice that had been depleted of macrophages did not respond to peptide treatment, indicating that macrophages are an important effector cells through which immunomodulatory peptides counter infections. These results suggest that synthetic peptides have the potential to become a viable treatment option for bacterial infections. / Science, Faculty of / Microbiology and Immunology, Department of / Graduate

A Kingdom Jack’d is a satirical verse-play based on William Shakespeare’s Henry IV dramas. It opens in 1399 England, following the deposal of Richard II and what should have been the coronation of Henry IV. Instead, political machinations have thrust the clownish rogue John “Jack” Falstaff to the throne. With his band of cutthroats running court and the Lancasters reduced to mere rebels, Britain descends into chaos. The country’s only hope lies with Shakespeare’s literary creation Doll Tearsheet and his other peripheral, disempowered female characters. At play’s end, peace is gained with Falstaff’s flight into exile and the dismantling of patriarchal order.

Research on vicarious reinforcement has answered many questions but whether vicarious reinforcement increases the likelihood that an observer will imitate a model, a social learning theory would predict, or sets the occasion for the observer to perform an alternate response, as a discriminative stimulus interpretation of vicarious reinforcement suggests, seems to depend on (1) the setting, (2) procedure, and (3) reinforcers used. In an effort to better understand the function of vicarious reinforcement, while controlling for subjects; histories and using tangible reinforcers, 47 preschool children participated in two experiments that (1) provided an experimental history of responding on several levers, (2) provided differential reinforcement on the levers during training, and (3) assessed the effects of observing a model respond on a lever and receive tokens. In Experiment I, 18 subjects who were trained to respond on three levers responded during an extinction period and then observed either an adult model respond on a fourth, novel lever or observed a control procedure. Only subjects who observed the model receive tokens responded on the same lever as the model during an additional extinction period. The extinction period was procedurally defined and relatively short in duration. The results of Experiment I supported social learning theory; however, imitation effects were short lived. Another experiment was conducted to evaluate more fully the extinction of the modeled behavior found in Experiment I. In Experiment II, 29 subjects who were trained to respond on three levers responded during an extinction period and then observed an adult model in one of four modeling conditions. The subjects in this experiment were exposed to the model lever during training and had an extensive history of never being reinforced on the modeled lever. Only some of the subjects who observed the model receive tokens responded on the model lever and only for a short period of time. The results of this experiment illustrated the importance of the reinforcement history of the observer and supported previous studied which found an extinction effect for vicarious reinforcement. Taken together, these experiments illustrate the limits of social learning theory because imitation effects were short lived and suggest certain procedures that will enhance the use of vicarious reinforcement in applied setting.

No description available.

published_or_final_version / Environmental Management / Master / Master of Science in Environmental Management

This study examines the expression and patterns of alternate history in nineteenth-century Britain and France. “Alternate history” refers to the presentation of events that did not happen in order to consider historical trajectories that might have been and the consequent displacements of present and future. The central chapters of this thesis correspond to the three fields of writing in which these texts are clustered: in narratives of undefeated and resurgent Napoleons, which I trace from the rival journalistic claims made about Napoleon and his historical significance; in accounts that re-imagine the transition from antiquity to modernity, for example by delaying the passage of Christianity from the Middle East to western Europe; and, as part of the plurality-of-worlds debate, in the popular-astronomical imagination of variant versions of human history upon other planets. Three patterns of alternate history are discernible: the romantic-utopian, the critical-reflexive and the linear-chronological. I attach to these patterns the figures of the garden, the map and the dial. These models do not correspond to the three temporal fields of the recent, antique and planetary past, and there is not a straightforward development of these patterns or modes across the nineteenth century; they rather represent a spectrum of purposes for the fictional alteration of the past which occur at various moments and contexts in the century. Alternate history in this period has never been the subject of in-depth analysis. The approach of this study will not absorb such transformations of history into a tradition of futurist writing, as some critics have done. Maintaining alternate history’s distinctness from futurism makes it possible to avoid framing the texts as precursors to science fiction’s historical anticipations. This study will argue that alternate history should instead be recognised as a category of writing that is aware of and concerned with the way that history is written and received, in particular with history’s interactions with other literary forms and the relationships between writing history and other disciplinary fields. More broadly, alternate history should be interpreted in the context of the often described formation of History as a positivist discipline by the late nineteenth century; but far from indicating a steady progression toward scientific historiography, alternate-historical texts reflect upon that transformation and its consequences in other literary fields (journalism, political theory, popular Astronomy, the romance novel) in the century whose “great obsession” is said to have been history.

The main purpose of this qualitative research was to discover the effects of problem-based learning on a fifth grade language arts classroom. The secondary purpose was to examine how receptive fifth grade students were to a new way of learning. In this descriptive study, a group of nine students created an alternate reality game as part of a problem-based learning module. The instructional design of the study included three weeks for students to design and construct their games and one week to play, receive feedback and revise based on feedback. Through reflective blogs, semi-structured interviews, video recordings, and observations, data was collected to analyze. Over a period of five months, the data was coded and arranged into categories. The categories merged into themes. The results and findings revealed the impact collaborative groups have on design and enjoyment. Self-regulation skills were found to be lacking in most of the students, intrinsic motivation increased for some students while others developed positive outcomes beyond the scope of this study.

This thesis develops a legal theory reflecting the insights of feminism and environmental philosophy. I argue that human beings are not ontologically separate, but embedded in webs of relationality with natural others. My primary purposes are to 1) delineate ways in which institutions of modernity (such as law and science) have precipitated ecosocial crisis through the attempt to dialectically enforce mastery and control over nature and women; and 2) explore alternate political forms and ontologies which challenge the classical liberalist view of the (human) individual as a radically isolated, discrete, autonomous being. My overarching theme is that law functions as a narrative that can both hinder and enhance the promotion of ecological ideas, and how ecofeminism can contribute to transformative projects of environmental philosophy and feminist law.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:30:57Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2011-07-27Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T21:01:41Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 quini_cc_me_botib.pdf: 604874 bytes, checksum: 6395053c8e32771be0353a9c71b35966 (MD5) / O trato gastrintestinal (TGI) constitui um grupo de importantes atividades motoras, es-sencial à vida. Uma série de metodologias é empregada no estudo dessas atividades e das patologias a elas associadas. No entanto, estas técnicas são geralmente invasivas, requerem cirurgia, inserção do cateter, ou, para a construção de um modelo temporal destas funções, demandam o sacrifício de uma série de animais na obtenção dos dados necessários. A Biosusceptometria de Corrente Alternada (BAC) é uma técnica biomagnética de baixo custo, portá-til, não-invasiva, livre de radiação ionizante, que pode ser utilizada para avaliar as proprieda-des do TGI pelo monitoramento da posição e concentração de materiais ferromagnéticos, usa-dos como marcadores magnéticos. O objetivo desta dissertação foi, através de um sistema BAC associado a marcadores magnéticos, apresentar uma nova forma de analisar propriedades do trato gastrintestinal, co-mo o esvaziamento gástrico e tempo de trânsito gastrointestinal, de alimentos sólidos e líqui-dos em modelos animais de pequeno porte. Um sistema dedicado foi construído para analisar estas propriedades. A instrumenta-ção consiste em dois pares de bobinas, um de referência e outro para a detecção. Cada par é composto por uma bobina de excitação e uma detecção. Uma linha de base fixa separa os pa-res de detecção e referência, e funciona também como suporte para a instrumenta-ção. Também é importante ressaltar que as bobinas de detecção são dispostas em uma confi-guração gradiométrica. Seu princípio de funcionamento baseia-se em um transformador de fluxo magnético, que o par (excitação e detecção), localizado mais distante da amostra magnética funciona co-mo uma referência para o sistema. Assim, quando se aproxima um material magnético... / The gastrointestinal tract (GIT) motor activities constitute an important group, essen-tial to life. A series of methodologies is employed in the study of these activities and its asso-ciated pathologies. However, these techniques are generally invasive, require surgery, catheter insertion or, in the temporal model construction issue, require the sacrifice of a series of ani-mals to record the necessary data. The Biosusceptometry of Alternate Current (BAC) is a low cost biomagnetic technique, portable, non-invasive and radiation free, which can be used to evaluate GIT properties by monitoring position and concentration of ferromagnetic materials when used as magnetic markers. The objective of this dissertation was to present a new way to measure GIT properties like gastric emptying and gastrointestinal transit time of both solid and liquid food in small animal models, using the BAC system associated with magnetic markers. A dedicated biosusceptometry system was constructed to analyze these particular properties. The instrumentation is constituted of two coil pairs, one for reference and another for detection. Each pair consists of an excitation coil and a detection one. A fixed baseline separates the detection and reference pairs, and works also as support to the instrumentation. It is also important to point that the detection coils are arranged in a gradiometric connection. Its working principle is based on a magnetic flux transformer, which the pair (excita-tion and detection) located farther from the sample works as a reference. Thus, when ap-proaching a magnetic material to the sensor, the balance created between the two faces of the sensor will be broken. This imbalance can be measured, digitalized and acquired. The mag-netic tracer used in the liquid transit determination was a commercial... (Complete abstract, click electronic access below)

The study of measurement invariance in polytomous items that targets individual score levels is known as differential step functioning (DSF; Penfield, 2007, 2008). DSF methods provide specific information describing the manifestation of the invariance effect within particular score levels and therefore serve a diagnostic role in identifying the individual score levels involved in the item's invariance effect. The analysis of DSF requires the creation of a set of dichotomizations of the item response variable. There are two primary approaches for creating the set of dichotomizations to conduct a DSF analysis. The first approach, known as the adjacent categories approach, is consistent with the dichotomization scheme underlying the generalized partial credit model (GPCM; Muraki, 1992) and considers each pair of adjacent score levels while treating the other score levels as missing. The second approach, known as the cumulative approach, is consistent with the dichotomization scheme underlying the graded response model (GRM; Samejima, 1997) and includes data from every score level in each dichotomization. To date, there is limited research on how the cumulative and adjacent categories approaches compare within the context of DSF, particularly as applied to a real data set. The understanding of how the interpretation and practical outcomes may vary given these two approaches is also limited. The current study addressed these two issues. This study evaluated the results of a DSF analysis using both the adjacent categories and cumulative dichotomization schemes in order to determine if the two approaches yield similar results and interpretations of DSF. These approaches were applied to data from a polytomously scored alternate assessment administered to children with significant cognitive disabilities. The results of the DSF analyses revealed that the two approaches generally led to consistent results, particularly in the case where DSF effects were negligible. For steps where significant DSF was present, the two approaches generally guide analysts to the same location of the item. However, several aspects of the results rose questions about the use of the adjacent categories dichotomization scheme. First, there seemed to be a lack of independence of the adjacent categories method since large DSF effects at one step are often paired with large DSF effects in the opposite direction found in the previous step. Additionally, when a substantial DSF effect existed, it was more likely to be significant using the cumulative approach over the adjacent categories approach. This is likely due to the smaller standard errors that lead to greater stability of the cumulative approach. In sum, the results indicate that the cumulative approach is preferable over the adjacent categories approach when conducting a DSF analysis.