This paper examines the characteristics of The Best American Short Stories and the personalities reponsible for this series. More specifically, the goal of the paper is to add intelligence to the general store of knowledge in the area of the American short story, first, by demonstrating through statistics, biographical data and a summation of critical opinion the salient characteristics of the series; second, by giving statistical-analytical data relative to the periodicals furnishing the selections; third, by presenting statistical-biographical characteristics of the authors contributing to the series; and fourth, by making a biographical examination of the important personalities intimately associated with the series. / Typescript. / "August, 1957." / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Robert G. Clapp, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-56).

Cloud-based collaborative editors enable real-time document processing via remote connections. Their common application is to allow Internet users to collaboratively work on their documents stored in the cloud, even if these users are physically a world apart. However, this convenience comes at a cost in terms of user privacy. Hence, the growth of popularity of cloud computing application stipulates the growth in importance of cloud security. A major concern with the cloud is who has access to user data. In order to address this issue, various third-party services offer encryption mechanisms for protection of the user data in the case of insider attacks or data leakage. However, these services often only encrypt data-at-rest, leaving the data which is being processed potentially vulnerable. The purpose of this study is to propose a prototype software system that encrypts collaboratively edited data in real-time, preserving the user experience similar to that of, e.g., Google Docs.

As a result of drastically improved machine translation quality in recent years, machine translation followed by manual post-editing is currently a trend in the language industry that is slowly but surely replacing manual translation from scratch. In this thesis, the applicability of machine translation to product descriptions of clothing items is studied. The focus lies on determining whether automatic post-editing is a viable approach for improving baseline translations when new training data becomes available and finding out if there is an existing quality estimation system that could reliably assign quality scores to machine translated texts. It is shown that machine translation is a promising approach for the target domain with the majority of systems experimented with being able to generate translations that on average are of almost publishable quality according to the human evaluation carried out, meaning that only light post-editing is needed before the translations can be published. Automatic post-editing is shown to be able to improve the worst baseline translations but struggles with improving the overall translation quality due to its tendency to overcorrect good translations. Nevertheless, one of the trained post-editing systems is still rated higher than the baseline by human evaluators. A new finding is that training a post-editing model on more data using worse translations leads to better performance compared to training on less but higher-quality data. None of the quality estimation systems experimented with shows a strong correlation with human evaluation results which is why it is suggested not to provide the confidence scores of the baseline model to the human evaluators responsible for correcting and approving translations. The main contributions of this work are showing that the target domain of product descriptions is suitable for integrating machine translation into the translation workflow, proposing an approach for that translation workflow that is more automated than the current one as well as the finding that it is better to use more data and poorer translations compared to less data and higher-quality translations when training an automatic post-editing system.

No description available.

Die Rolle von Connexinen und Gap Junction-vermittelter Kommunikation in pluripotenten Stammzellen sowie der frühen Embryonalentwicklung sind bis heute nicht vollständig aufgeklärt. Mutationen in humanen Connexinen verursachen eine Vielzahl von Krankheiten. Connexin-defiziente iPS Zellen stellen eine gute Basis für die Erforschung der Rolle von Connexinen während der Embryonalentwicklung und bei der Krankheitsentstehung dar. Das Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit war es, das CRISPR/Cas9-System in pluripotenten Stammzellen erfolgreich anzuwenden und ein Protokoll zur Erstellung verschiedener Cx43-Defektmutanten zu entwerfen. Nach der Etablierung der CRSIPR/Cas9-Methode in HEK293T-Zellen konnte in der vorliegenden Arbeit darüber hinaus erfolgreich eine Cx43-Defizienz in FSiPS-Zellen erzeugt werden. Weiterhin wurden mehrere Cx43-Mutanten geschaffen und initial auf Pluripotenzmarker und ihr Differenzierungspotential untersucht. Diese Arbeit bildet die Basis für weitere Untersuchungen des Cx43 in iPS-Zellklonen und davon abgeleiteten Zelltypen sowie artifiziellen 3D-Gewebekulturen. Darüber hinaus bildet sie die Grundlage für die Bildung weiterer Connexin-Defektmutanten sowie von iPS-Zellen mit krankheitsrelevanten Mutationen. / The roles of connexins and gap junction-mediated communication in pluripotent stem cells and early embryonic development have not been fully elucidated to date. Mutations in human connexins cause a variety of diseases. Connexin-deficient iPS cells provide a good basis for studying the role of connexins during embryonic development and in disease development. The aim of the present work was to successfully apply the CRISPR/Cas9 system in pluripotent stem cells and to design a protocol to generate different Cx43 defective mutants. Furthermore, after establishing the CRSIPR/Cas9 method in HEK293T cells, a Cx43 deficiency in FSiPS cells was successfully generated. Furthermore, several Cx43 mutants were created and initially screened for pluripotency markers and their differentiation potential. This work forms the basis for further studies of Cx43 in iPS cell clones and derived cell types as well as artificial 3D tissue cultures. Furthermore, it forms the basis for the generation of further connexin defect mutants as well as iPS cells with disease-relevant mutations.

The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the most successful collaborative web projects. It is based on an open editing model, which allows everyone to edit the articles directly in the web browser. As a result of the open concept undesirable contributions like vandalism cannot be ruled out. These contributions reduce the article quality temporarily, consume system resources and cause effort for correcting. To address these problems, this paper introduces an approach for automatic editing rights management in Wikipedia that assigns editing rights according to the reputation of the author and the quality of the article to be edited. This analysis shows that this approach reduces undesirable contributions significantly while valuable contributions are nearly unaffected.

No description available.

The discovery and development of clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats and CRISPR-associated proteins (CRISPR-Cas) systems have revolutionized targeted genomic medicine. In my thesis, we discuss our efforts to improve and optimize various CRISPR-Cas systems for therapeutic genome editing applications. In part one, we propose that aberrant splice site disruption could be a simple and efficient strategy for treating some mutations associated with β-thalassemia. Specifically, we show that disruption of common mutant alleles in the HBB gene by Cas9 and Cas12a results in restoration of normal β-globin splicing, functional expression of HBB, and improved quality of erythroid maturation in edited β-thalassemia patient CD34+ hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells. In part two, we demonstrate that optimization of the nuclear localization signal (NLS) sequence framework is an effective method to improve the mutagenesis frequencies of Cas12a nuclease. In particular, the 3xNLS-NLP-cMyc-cMyc framework improves genome editing in mammalian and primary cells, relative to previous Cas12a NLS frameworks. We show that our NLS optimization approach can be applied to various Cas12a orthologs resulting in high editing activity without sacrificing the high intrinsic specificity of Cas12a nucleases. Furthermore, we demonstrate that NLS-optimized enAspCas12a can efficiently disrupt the ATF4-binding motif at the +55 enhancer of BCL11A, which may serve as an alternative therapeutic strategy for β-hemoglobinopathies. In part three, we develop and characterize fusion enhanced base editor (feBE) systems, which are fusions of base editors to our Cas9-programmable DNA binding domain (pDBD) and Cas9-Cas9 platforms. We report that our feBEs are more active than previously described base editor platforms at canonical and noncanonical PAMs. Furthermore, we show that feBEs can selectively edit a therapeutically relevant target site, CCR5, with minimal editing at a highly homologous off-target site. Taken together, my thesis research aimed to engineer CRISPR-Cas tools to improve their efficiency and specificity for therapeutic genome editing applications.

Clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats and CRISPR-associated proteins (CRISPR-Cas) constitute a bacterial and archaeal adaptive immune system. The ongoing arms race between prokaryotic hosts and their invaders such as phages led to the emergence of anti-CRISPR proteins as countermeasures against the potent antiviral defense. Since the first examples of anti-CRISPRs were shown in a subset of CRISPR-Cas systems, we endeavored to uncover these naturally-occurring inhibitors that inactivate different types of CRISPR-Cas systems. In the first part of my thesis, we have identified and characterized Type II anti-CRISPR proteins that inactivate several Cas9 orthologs. We share mechanistic insights into anti-CRISPR inhibition and show evidence of its potential utility as an off-switch for Cas9-mediated mammalian genome editing. Although the RNA programmability of Cas9 enables facile genetic manipulation with great potential for biotechnology and therapeutics, limitations and safety issues remain. The advent of anti-CRISPR proteins presents opportunities to exploit the inhibitors to exert temporal, conditional, or spatial control over CRISPR. In the second part of my thesis, we demonstrate that anti-CRISPR proteins can serve as useful tools for Cas9 genome editing. In particular, we have demonstrated that anti-CRISPRs are effective as genome editing off-switches in the tissues of adult mammals, and we further engineered anti-CRISPR proteins to achieve tissue-specific editing in vivo. Taken together, my thesis research aimed to mine for natural anti-CRISPR protein inhibitors and repurpose these proteins to complement current Cas9 technologies in basic and clinical research.

Mian Mohammad Sharif's Muslim Thought: Its Origin and Achievements was first published in 1951 in Lahore, Pakistan. Discussing the most important facts about the origin and the evolution of Islamic science and philosophy, it points out historical connections between the Islamic and Western civilizations in fields of literature, philosophy, science and law. It makes the case that the Western civilization owes its progress in science and philosophy to the medieval Islamic world. The importance of the book arises from the fact that its author was one of the pioneers of philosophical study in Pakistan, and from the fact that it is a short, lucid and comprehensive introduction to the field. This thesis has produced a standardized text of Muslim Thought: it has edited the book for mistakes, typing errors and factual revisions; it has included a detailed bibliography of the sources that existed before 1951 or the post-1951 sources that provide credence to the historical references in the book; it includes a glossary of those names, places and words that may not be clear to all the readers and that are not self-explanatory within the context of the book. The thesis is accompanied by an Introduction that contributes new facts about Sharif's scholarly works and discusses the significance of this edition by placing it within the history of editorial work done in South Asia.