Maintenance of hematopoiesis depends upon rare hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), which can persist over an organism’s lifetime. It is conceivable that they must maintain a high degree of genetic stability; otherwise recurring exposure to genotoxins and accumulation of genetic changes could result in genomic instability and malignancy or cell death. We have focused on the response of HSCs and primitive hematopoietic cells to highly toxic DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs). Using assays to detect break rejoining and kinetics of early DSB response foci, we determined that non-cycling human HSC-containing cells display delayed break rejoining kinetics and persistent γH2AX and 53BP1 foci compared to cycling counterparts, more differentiated hematopoietic cells and human primary fibroblasts. In contrast, when stimulated to cycle, these HSC-containing cells are quite efficient at repairing breaks and resolving foci. These data suggest that the DNA damage response may be unusually prolonged in non-cycling primitive hematopoietic cells.

Maintenance of hematopoiesis depends upon rare hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), which can persist over an organism’s lifetime. It is conceivable that they must maintain a high degree of genetic stability; otherwise recurring exposure to genotoxins and accumulation of genetic changes could result in genomic instability and malignancy or cell death. We have focused on the response of HSCs and primitive hematopoietic cells to highly toxic DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs). Using assays to detect break rejoining and kinetics of early DSB response foci, we determined that non-cycling human HSC-containing cells display delayed break rejoining kinetics and persistent γH2AX and 53BP1 foci compared to cycling counterparts, more differentiated hematopoietic cells and human primary fibroblasts. In contrast, when stimulated to cycle, these HSC-containing cells are quite efficient at repairing breaks and resolving foci. These data suggest that the DNA damage response may be unusually prolonged in non-cycling primitive hematopoietic cells.

La présente recherche est une étude ethnographique d'une danse de rue hip-hop appelée «breaking» (communément appelée «breakdance») à Montréal dans ses divers contextes et occurrences. En particulier, elle vise à déterminer les changements esthétiques et socio-culturels qui se manifestent lorsque le contexte social ou vernaculaire du «breaking» est reconfiguré en oeuvre de danse contemporaine. Un examen historique de la forme de danse encadre l'exploration du «breaking» dans quatre contextes précis: le «freestyle cypher,» le «battle» organisé, la mise en vedette «freestyle» et le spectacle de danse contemporaine. Le transfert ou le glissement de contexte de la danse se décline en plusieurs niveaux: les participants (qui), l'esthétique et la forme (quoi), le lieu (où), la relation au temps (quand) et la raison d'être (pourquoi). Ces cinq catégories d'examen sont empruntées de la Theory and Methods for an Anthropological Study of Dance de l'anthropologue de danse américaine Joann Kealiinohomoku. La compréhension du transfert de la danse en divers contextes est inspirée par des modèles théoriques d'études en danses folkloriques. Le «freestyle cypher» reflète le contexte original participatif de la danse folklorique, souvent désignée comme première manifestation de danse. Les contextes subséquents suivent approximativement les trois principes de théâtralisation adaptés par le folkloriste canadien Andrij Nahachewsky lui-même inspiré du folkloriste ukrainien Kim Vasylenko. Selon ces principes, différents niveaux ou approches d'adaptation de la danse folklorique au théâtre sont appliqués à la danse d'origine. Le dernier principe rejoint l'approche de chorégraphes en danse contemporaine qui fusionnent le vocabulaire et l'esthétique du «breakdance» avec ceux de la danse contemporaine et du ballet. Ce processus est démontré dans une recherche sur le travail de deux compagnies de danse montréalaises, Rubberbandance Group sous la direction de Victor Quijada et Solid State Breakdance Collective sous la direction d'un groupe de chorégraphes-interprètes féminines. Les ramifications socio-culturelles d'un tel transfert sont complexes, surtout dans le milieu des arts de la scène. Le glissement, notamment d'un art populaire ou d'une danse vernaculaire, au «High Art» sous-tend une reconnaissance et un soutien institutionnels. Les divisions de la reconnaissance et le soutien se font souvent selon les ethnies. Néanmoins, les formes de danse non-occidentales réussissent, depuis quelques années, à infiltrer la danse contemporaine. Le «breaking», bien qu'elle soit une forme de danse née en Occident, illustre cela. Elle a été créée par de jeunes noirs et hispanophones du Bronx, un quartier défavorisé de New York, avant d'être largement assimilée par de jeunes Canadiens d'origines ethniques semblables, aussi issus de milieux défavorisés. Le travail de Rubberbandance Groupe et celui de Solid State Breakdance Collective questionnent les hiérarchies et se jouent des catégories. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Breaking (b-boying/b-girling), Danse vernaculaire Africaine Américaine, Danse contemporaine, Danse de représentation, Danse de participation, Appropriation, Hip hop.

This paper presents the feasibility study of setting up the new potting tray production line based on the two alternatives: partly outsource a process in the production line or wholly make all processes in-house. Both the qualitative and quantitative approaches have been exploited to analyze and compare between the make or buy decision. Also the nature of business, particularly SMEs, in Thailand has been presented, in which it has certain characteristics that influence the business doing and decision, especially to the supply chain management. The literature relating to the forecasting techniques, outsourcing decision framework, inventory management, and investment analysis have been reviewed and applied with the empirical findings. As this production line has not yet been in place, monthly sales volumes are forecasted within the five years time frame. Based on the forecasted sales volume, simulations are implemented to distribute the probability and project a certain demand required for each month. The projected demand is used as a baseline to determine required safety stock of materials, inventory cost, time between production runs and resources utilization for each option. Finally, in the quantitative analysis, the five years forecasted sales volume is used as a framework and several decision making-techniques such as break-even analysis, cash flow and decision trees are employed to come up with the results in financial aspects.

Active safety systems for automobiles in the form of camera systems have evolved rapidly the last ten years, Autoliv Electronics in Linköping develops multiple such systems. In their development process there is a need for a Break out Box (BoB) to record and playback video and CAN data as if the camera system was used in an actual automobile. The aim of this thesis has been to develop a BoB for these camera systems. The work has been divided into three phases; identification of requirements, design of the BoB and implementation of a prototype. The project has addressed four known issues with the currently used BoB; bandwidth, modularity, synchronization and usability. The result is a new BoB which is based on an FPGA connecting to a PC over Gigabit Ethernet. The design is an extendible platform for multiple channels of video, CAN data, other serial data and future extensions. A prototype proves the design concept by successfully recording video for the Autoliv NightVision system onto a PC.

Since the introduction of CUSUM statistic by E.S. Page (1951), detection of change or a structural break in time series has gained significant interest as its applications span across various disciplines including economics, industrial applications, and environmental data sets. However, many of the early suggested statistics, such as CUSUM or MOSUM, lose their effectiveness when applied to time series data. Either the size or power of the test statistic gets distorted, especially for higher order autoregressive moving average processes. We use the test statistic from Gombay and Serban (2009) for detecting change in the mean of an autoregressive process and show how the application of sieve bootstrap to the time series data can improve the performance of our test to detect change. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by applying it to economic data sets.

<p>The genetic information necessary for the survival and propagation of a species is contained within a physical structure, DNA. However, this molecule is sensitive to damage arising from both exogenous and endogenous sources. DNA damage can prevent metabolic processes such as replication and transcription; thus, systems to bypass or repair DNA lesions are essential. One type of lesion in particular - the double strand break (DSB) - is extremely dangerous as inappropriate repair of DSBs can lead to deletions, mutations and rearrangements. Homologous recombination (HR) uses a template with sequence homology to the region near the DSB to restore the damaged molecule. However, this high-fidelity pathway can contribute to genome instability when recombination occurs between diverged substrates. To further our understanding of the regulation of HR during vegetative growth, we have used the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model system and a plasmid-based assay to model repair of a DSB. In the first part of this work, the molecular structures of noncrossover (NCO) and crossover (CO) products of recombination were examined. While the majority of NCOs had regions of heteroduplex DNA (hDNA) on one side of the gap in the repaired allele and no change to the donor allele, most COs had two tracts of hDNA. They were present on opposite sides of the gap, one in each allele. Our results suggest that the majority of NCOs are generated through synthesis-dependent strand annealing (SDSA), and COs are the result of constrained cleavage of a Holliday junction (HJ) intermediate. To clarify the mechanisms regulating NCO production, the effects of three DNA helicases - Mph1, Sgs1 and Srs2 - on the structures of NCO events were examined. All three helicases promote NCO formation by SDSA, but Sgs1 and Srs2 also assist in NCO formation arising from an HJ-containing intermediate, consistent with HJ-dissolution. To study how CO products are generated, we have investigated the contribution of the following candidate HJ resolvases to the structures of CO events: Mus81, Yen1 and Rad1. The results suggest that Rad1 is important to normal CO formation in this assay, but Mus81 and Yen1 are largely dispensable. Together, this work advances our knowledge of how the NCO versus CO outcome is determined during HR, expanding our understanding of how mitotic recombination is regulated.</p> / Dissertation

Thin-film niobium mechanically controlled break junctions and resistively shunted niobium mechanically-controlled break junctions were developed and successfully microfabricated. Using these devices, high-stability atomic size contacts were routinely produced and investigated both in the normal and superconducting states. Investigations of the two-level conductance fluctuations in the smallest contacts allowed the calculation of their specific atomic structure. Embedding resistive shunts close to the superconducting atomic-sized junctions affected the coherence of the electronic transport. Finally, point contact spectroscopy measurements provide evidence of the interaction of conduction electrons with the mechanical degrees of freedom of the atomic-size niobium contacts.

A recent outbreak of bird flu or avian influenza (AI), an especially highly pathogenic strain (HPAI) of H5N1, started in Hong Kong in January 2003 and caused 159 human deaths in Asia, Africa and Europe through early 2007. In addition, this outbreak resulted in millions of slaughtered birds and banned international trade of poultry meat in the infected countries. Such events harmed the poultry, tourism, and other related industries in the infected countries and changed the world poultry trade flow. Even in some uninfected countries, related industries were negatively affected. This study investigates the impact of bird flu outbreaks as manifested in financial markets within the US and Japan. The first essay explores how the avian influenza (AI) outbreaks impacted the security values of poultry-related firms. Using partial equilibrium analysis, this study infers that within a country AI outbreaks drop stock prices of poultry meat producers and raise stock prices of poultry food producers. Simultaneously, we infer that AI outbreaks in other poultry exporting countries raise stock prices of poultry meat producers and drop stock prices of poultry food producers. The empirical findings support our model results. Recent developments in time series method, directed graphs and search methods of cointegration rank are applied in this study. The second essay examines whether avian influenza outbreaks cause structural breaks in a model of their prices. It employs the dynamic programming algorithm and the reduced regression method for a cointegrated vector autoregressive (VAR) model to compute the break dates for the data sample. This research then compares the long run relation, and the short run relation and contemporaneous relation. The model estimations in these three sub-periods find these three sub-samples are significantly different. The breaks were caused by the invasion of Iraq on March 2003 and the 20 Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) induced ban of Canadian live cattle imports to the US on 03 March 2005, not by avian influenza outbreaks in early 2004. The third essay explores the effects of the avian influenza announcement in Japan on the prices of agricultural commodity futures contracts traded in Japan. Both the VAR model with asymmetric generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic (GARCH) terms and the event study methods were used to examine whether avian influenza outbreaks significantly affected these markets. Our findings point out that the avian influenza outbreak only impacted the egg futures contract. These three essays found that outbreaks of avian influenza have significant impact on poultry-related stock prices and futures markets. The examined impacts changed the movement of those financial equity prices in the short run, but not in the long run. Research showed investors and poultry-related producers still encounter huge financial risk and loss.

The recent financial and economic turmoil driven by housing market has led the economists to refocus on the issue about monetary policy and asset price, especially housing price. In this dissertation I investigate the various relationships between monetary policy and asset prices in U.S. economy through steady state Bayesian VAR (SS BVAR) and revised Taylor-typed interest rate rule (Forward-looking rule) based on Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) methodology. In chapter II, steady state Bayesian VAR (SS BVAR) methodology is introduced and multi step-ahead forecasts are executed. Upon usual squared error loss methodology the forecasting performances of SS BVAR are evaluated in comparison with standard BVAR and conventional VAR. Equal predictive ability tests following Giacomini and White (2006) verify that the SS BVAR is superior in forecasting power especially in long-horizons. In chapter III, identification issue involving housing sector is explored through two different ways: economic theory-based approach and algorithms of inductive causations. Despite the different approaches the housing sector’s specifications are somewhat similar. Impulse response analyses demonstrate that monetary shock to housing price is relatively smaller, less significant, and less lasting when compared to Choleski identification. Also historical decomposition and conditional forecast analyses indicate that the housing price shock itself is crucial in accounting the sharp increase and sudden drop of housing price since 2003. Upon the estimated evidences I conjecture that there are much uncertainty between monetary policy and housing price, recalling the consideration of institutional factors when trying to accounting housing sectors. In chapter IV, following Dupor and Conley (2004), I explore how Fed responds to stock price and inflation movements differently across high and low inflation sub-periods. Replicated linear estimation results of Dupor and Conley (2004)’s indicate that Fed raises its target interest rate responding to stock price gap with statistical significance. Linear estimation results, however, are not robust to small change of chosen breakpoint especially in inflation coefficient. So I construct nonlinear model as an alternative way to relax this problem and carry out test of structural change with the nonlinear framework. Consequently both nonlinearity and structural change matter in explanation of Fed’s behavior in this type of reaction function analysis. Given structural change, inflation coefficients movement shows that Fed has responded to expected inflation pressure nonlinearly across sub-period, while stock price gap coefficient shows explicit break around early ’90 in line with Dupor and Conley (2004)’s finding.