Influenza virus is an enveloped virus with a negative sense single strand RNA. The viral surface is characterized by two surface glycoproteins, hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA)(Chen et al., 2007; Samuel, 2010). The HA subunit is responsible for the attachment of the virus to the host cell by binding to the sialic acid receptors. Influenza virus infection, occurring in the endosome of the host cell is a fusion dependent process (Daniels et al., 1983). Low pH inside the endosome facilitates the fusion process by triggering a major conformational change of HA. This conformational change exposes the fusion initiation region of the protein subsequently releasing a hydrophobic fusion peptide (which is otherwise buried inside the protein core). This hydrophobic peptide slips into the host cell membrane resulting in HA transiently being a part of the viral and cell membrane. The HA pulls the two membranes together, thus completing the fusion process and forming a clear passage for the release of the viral genetic material into the cytoplasm (Stevens et al., 2004; Ramalho-Santos and Pedroso De Lima, 1999; Carr and Kim, 1993). A 16 amino acid peptide sequence (Flufirvitide-3) derived from the fusion initiation region of the HA protein has shown effective inhibition of influenza virus infection. Plaque inhibition assays and animal studies show high efficacy of the peptide against the virus. However, the mechanism of action of this peptide is still unclear. We have extensively studied the ability of FF-3 to interact with and affect purified HA, pure lipid bilayers and whole viruses. Taken together, the results suggest a novel mechanism of action. / acase@tulane.edu

Our overall research goal is focused on the development of a malaria transmission-blocking vaccine (TBV). The antigenic target, Pfs48/45 protein, is expressed on Plasmodium gametocytes, which are stages responsible for establishing parasite infection in the mosquito vector. The epitopes recognized by functional antibodies targeting Pfs48/45 are disulfide-bond (S-S) constrained, conformational epitopes. As Pfs48/45 protein has not been crystallized, precise location of the S-S bonds and the topology of epitopes are unknown. It has been shown previously that the ability to reduce S-S in antigens can greatly influence the epitopes presented by antigen-presenting cells (APCs) and thus influence induction of effective immune responses. Gamma-interferon-inducible lysosomal thiol reductase (GILT) is an enzyme expressed in APCs that mediates reduction of S-S bonds contained within antigens, for subsequent display of peptides on MHC molecules. Using non-reduced (NR) and reduced/alkylated (RA) Pfs48/45 antigens, we sought to investigate the role of GILT on induction of protective immunity. We hypothesized that the ability to reduce S-S bonds in Pfs48/45 will impact the generation of T cell epitopes, and thus influence helper T cell responses required for B cell stimulation and production of protective antibody. We conducted immunogenicity studies in wild type (WT) and GILT-/- (KO) mice using the two structural forms of Pfs48/45 and analyzed immune responses to full length Pfs48/45, five overlapping fragments and 39 overlapping peptides. Results indicated that generation of Pfs48/45 antibodies is not significantly impacted by the availability of GILT, however there was uniquely Th2-biased T and B cell responses in the KO mice, and a contrasting Th1 bias in WT mice. Results also revealed possible effects of GILT on induction of long-lived plasma cells and memory B cells responsible for resting and antigen-recall responses to Pfs48/45. Data presented also shows reduced immunogenicity of the RA Pfs48/45 antigen and immune responses differed in magnitude and specificity between male and female animals. Overall, we aimed to gain a better understanding of the immunological mechanisms critical to generate protective and lasting immunity against Pfs48/45. These and future studies will contribute significantly to our understanding of antigenic features of Pfs48/45 important for use as a TBV. / acase@tulane.edu

Within the field of mathematics teacher education, mathematics graduate students have recently become subjects of investigation. While research in this area tends to focus on future schoolteachers, little has been done to examine prospective university teachers of mathematics and their understanding of its teaching and learning. As a result, the experiences of mathematics graduate students and the development of their teaching practices are not well understood. Almost seventy-five percent of mathematics PhDs will become professors at post-secondary institutions dedicated to undergraduate education. Since much of their careers will be spent in the classroom, attending to the manner in which mathematics graduate students develop their teaching practices is important in understanding how they are shaped for their future profession. The purpose of this research project was to uncover issues and difficulties that arise as mathematics graduate students develop their views of their possible future roles as university teachers of mathematics. Over a six-month period, conversations were held with six mathematics graduate students exploring their experiences of and perspectives on mathematics teaching. Using hermeneutic inquiry and thematic analysis, the conversations were analysed and interpreted with attention to themes and experiences that had the potential to influence the graduate students ideas about and approaches to the task of teaching. This dissertation also attends to notions of identity for mathematics graduate students, in particular their emerging identities as mathematicians and what being a mathematician in the world means to them, as well as their identities as future post-secondary teachers of mathematics. The structures and expectations of behaviour within their department of mathematics had implications for how the participants formed their identities as mathematicians and mathematics teachers. Lave and Wengers notion of legitimate peripheral participation is explored with regard to the meta-themes that came through the analysis. These meta-themes are: replication where university mathematics teacher identity and classroom practices became a process of replication; resignation the research participants felt resigned to one particular way of being in mathematics and of mathematics teaching; and despondence the participants were beginning to lose their excitement about becoming post-secondary teachers of mathematics.

No description available.

No description available.

Thesis: S.M. in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 83-104). / This research analyzes the battle of frames in the controversy surrounding rolezinhos- flashmobs organized by low-income youth in Brazilian shopping malls. To analyze the framing of these events, a corpus of 4,523 online articles was compiled. These articles, published between December 7th, 2013, and February 23 rd, 2014, were investigated using Media Cloud-the system for large scale content analysis developed by the Berkman Center at Harvard and the MIT Center for Civic Media. Data from Facebook indicated which articles received more attention on the social network. A framing analysis was performed to describe the conflicting frames in the debate. The 60 most popular texts--those that attracted 55% of the social media attention in the corpus-were content analyzed. They served as an input for a hierarchical cluster analysis algorithm that grouped articles with similar frame elements. The result of the cluster analysis led to the identification of three frames: one that criminalized rolezinhos or at least tried to discourage them (arrastdo frame), another that acquitted the youth and blamed police, government, State, or society for discriminating poor citizens (apartheid frame), and a third frame that criticized both conservatives and progressives for using the controversy to push their particular agendas (middle ground frame). After finding the keywords that singled out each frame, natural language processing methods helped to describe the genesis and evolution of those frames in the overall corpus as well as the framing strategies of the main actors. / by Alexandre A. Goncalves. / S.M. in Comparative Media Studies

Thesis: S.M. in Comparative Media Studies and Writing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "September 2016." / Includes bibliographical references (pages 93-105). / This thesis considers the ways in which digital game mechanics (interactive inputs) contribute to games' worldbuilding. In particular, this work is concerned with the replication and reinforcement of problematic gender roles through game mechanics that express positive ("warm") interactions between characters, namely healing, protection, and building relationships. The method used has been adapted from structural analysis via literary theory, as informed by game studies, media studies methodologies, and feminist epistemologies. Game mechanics are analyzed both across and within primary texts (consisting of Japanese-developed games from the action and role-playing genres) in relation to characters' representation. Through this analysis, I found that characters who are women and girls are often associated with physical weakness, nature-based magic, and nurturing (or absent) personalities, whereas characters who are men and boys often protect women through physical combat, heal through medical means, and keep an emotional distance from others. Relationships built through game mechanics rely on one-sided agency and potential that renders lovers and friends as characters who exist to support the player character in achieving the primary goals of the game. Through these findings, I conclude that even warm interactions in games carry negative, even potentially violent and oppressive, representations and that there is thusly a need for design interventions on the mechanical level to mitigate violence in game worlds and the reinforcement of negative real world stereotypes. / by Kyrie Eleison Hartsough Caldwell. / S.M. in Comparative Media Studies and Writing

Thesis: S.M. in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, 2009. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 119-125). / Cultural theorists such as Henry Jenkins¹, Lawrence Lessig², Yochai Benkler³ , Robert Hassan⁴, and Manuel Castells⁵, have written extensively on the role of network communications technologies in reconfiguring contemporary culture. While the penetration of the "information society" is now widespread in U.S. culture⁶, not everyone is an equal participant⁷7. As an extreme case in point, the American prison population, currently at 2.3 million⁸, is institutionally excluded from equal participation in the information society and its network economies⁹ attributed by some scholars as due to the prison's historical logic of highly regulated communication flows¹⁰ Some theorists of network culture argue that one quality of network cultures is their tendency to be all-embracing: their connectivity has a compounding effect that encourages networks to become ever more dense¹¹ . Hassan calls this permeation of networks into culture the "network effect¹²," a compelling social pressure to participate more deeply in the information society. This network effect can be used as a theoretical lens for looking at prisons within society. An analysis of the debates surrounding correctional policy reveals the social forces both internal and external to the prison system pressuring prisons to adopt more liberal networked communication and attendant technologies. This juncture between isolation and networks is the central problematic nexus in contemporary debates about the role of prisons in society, their function and modes of operation. The prison has been historically defined in terms of communication-by the regulation and governance of it-and any attempt to understand or reform the prison must proceed from a communicative, as well as punitive, framework. / by Jason Willis Krider Rockwood. / S.M. in Comparative Media Studies

Thesis: S.M. in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / Keywords: documentary, interactive, live, liveness, ephemerality, interactivity, theater, performance, television, televisuality, database, data, live data, real time Abstract: The field of documentary is undergoing a transformation as it collides with digital technologies. A new arena of Interactive Documentary production is thriving, and critics and scholars are taking note. Within this field, there is less attention to new opportunities and new theoretical challenges for live practices within the documentary sphere. This thesis argues for a fuller conceptualization of Live Documentary practice. First, it questions the current state of assumptions about documentary, as a form related to the 'document,' as a particularly film-leaning form, and as a lasting and historicizing form of discourse. Next, it examines the historical underpinnings of two forms of live documentary practice and exemplar projects of each: Live Performance Documentary and Live Subject Documentary. The former is situated in the media category of live theater and performance, and the second, the author will argue, is an instantiation of television in its earliest configuration as a device for two-way audio-visual communications and not just unidirectional broadcasting. The study concludes by positing a third medium-specific form of live documentary native to the computer, the Live Data Documentary. This final, more speculative form is defined by drawing on the meanings of 'liveness' examined in the previous chapters and the history of real time computing to generate a suggested framing for computer-native live documentary practice. / by Julie Fischer. / S.M. in Comparative Media Studies

O sistema brasileiro de avaliação de programas de pós-graduação vem evoluindo desde 1976, sendo considerado como um dos mais eficientes do mundo. Este sistema tem se mostrado essencial para a formação de recursos humanos de alto nível e para o desenvolvimento efetivo da ciência e tecnologia no País, pois, por meio de seus critérios e indicadores, ele permite avaliar a qualidade dos programas e apontar as áreas que o Estado deseja desenvolver. Este trabalho tem por objetivo propor contribuições à gestão dos programas de pós-graduação stricto sensu em Administração do Brasil, com base nos sistemas de avaliação de pós-graduação norte-americano e brasileiro. Para tanto, procedeu-se uma pesquisa em oito programas: quatro nos Estados Unidos, credenciados pela Association to Advance Collegiate School of Business (AACSB), e quatro no Brasil, reconhecidos e recomendados pela Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES). O método de pesquisa foi o estudo de casos múltiplos, baseado nos trabalhos de Eisenhardt (1989) e Yin (2003). A análise de dados seguiu as técnicas de agrupamento e de cluster sugeridas por Miles e Huberman (1994). Os principais resultados indicam diferenças na concepção e no uso dos sistemas pelos programas brasileiros e americanos. Por exemplo, nos Estados Unidos, os programas utilizam o sistema para assegurar o cumprimento da própria missão e atender a um padrão mínimo de qualidade. No Brasil, entretanto, os programas investem no aprimoramento da produção intelectual (qualidade e quantidade), na formação de alunos e na inserção social para cumprir com as exigências do sistema e obter maior nota. Contudo, propõe-se um o modelo de gestão que - além de atender aos requisitos do sistema de avaliação da CAPES - leve em consideração a realidade do programa e demais elementos importantes para seu contínuo aprimoramento, dentre eles, o plano estratégico, que abrange a missão e a visão; o egresso e as estratégias de acesso a recursos para melhor atender a seus stakeholders. / The Brazilian evaluation (or accreditation) system of graduate programs has been evolving since 1976 and it is considered as one of the most efficient in the world. This system has been shown to be essential for the formation of high-level human resources for the effective development of science and technology in the country. By means of its criteria and quality indicators, the newer system is capable of evaluating the quality of programs and to point to the areas that the State desires to develop. The goal of this research is to propose possible extensions to the current system to manage graduate programs in business field in Brazil, by comparing USA and Brazilian evaluation systems. This research was conducted in eight business school programs: four programs in the USA that are accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate School of Business (AACSB) and four Brazilian programs recognized by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES). The method used was multiple case study analyses based on the work of Eisenhard (1989) and Yin (2003). For the analysis, we followed the cluster techniques of Miles and Huberman (1994). The results point to the conceptual difference in the use of evaluation systems among program in the USA and Brazil. For example, in the USA, programs use the system to assure that mission and minimum quality standards are met. In Brazil the evaluation system is used as a guide to increase and maintain the programs\' overall evaluations. Further, in Brazil, the system is used to focus on areas of improvement in the quality and the quantity of intellectual production, students\' rates or performance, and social development to achieve the stated goals of the programs and to increase the evaluate score. However, the model of management proposed in this study is intended to reach the requirements of CAPES evaluate system, but also to considerate the program reality and the other important elements for the program\'s continuous improvement. Among the suggestions are: a Strategic Plan, that encloses the mission and the vision of each program. Also, inclusion of the alumni (former students), and the strategies to develop and access financial resources to attend the various needs of the stakeholders.