Review of Kanach, S., & Nelson, P. (Eds.). (2024). Meta-Xenakis: New Perspectives on Iannis Xenakis’s Life, Work, and Legacies. Open Book Publishers. https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0390.pdf

19th Century Values and 21st Century Technology in the Centennial Year.

Celebrating 100 years of publishing discovery in physiology 1908 – 2008

Maximizing range of motion of reverse total shoulder arthroplasty using design optimization techniques

Protein engineering, the process by which novel proteins with desired properties are developed, has grown by leaps and bounds since the first examples of protein mutagenesis were described over three decades ago. In the last 30 years, protein engineers have successfully created a wide range of proteins tailored to specific industrial, medical, and research applications. Yet challenges remain that prevent the engineering of complex protein functions on demand. With the aim of creating a forum for the protein engineering community, the inaugural Protein Engineering Canada Conference was held on June 20–22, 2014, in Ottawa, Canada. Over the course of the 2-day conference, 115 protein scientists from over 30 institutions representing 5 countries shared ideas, networked with colleagues, and learned about exciting new research covering a broad array of topics such as enzyme engineering, computational protein design, X-ray crystallography, protein NMR, molecular modeling, and protein evolution. This special issue highlights the breadth of research that was covered during the Protein Engineering Canada Conference by including previously unpublished research articles submitted by speakers as well as some selections that were submitted directly to Protein Science.

Poe in Richmond: Celebrating the Poe Museum’s Centennial

Garments with the ability to provide kinesthetic force-feedback on-demand can augment human capabilities in a non-obtrusive way, enabling numerous applications in VR haptics, motion assistance, and robotic control. However, designing such garments is a complex, and often manual task, particularly when the goal is to resist multiple motions with a single design. In this work, we propose a computational pipeline for designing connecting structures between active components - one of the central challenges in this context. We focus on electrostatic (ES) clutches that are compliant in their passive state while strongly resisting elongation when activated. Our method automatically computes optimized connecting structures that efficiently resist a range of pre-defined body motions on demand. We propose a novel dual-objective optimization approach to simultaneously maximize the resistance to motion when clutches are active, while minimizing resistance when inactive. We demonstrate our method on a set of problems involving different body sites and a range of motions. We further fabricate and evaluate a subset of our automatically created designs against manually created baselines using mechanical testing and in a VR pointing study.

How have female musicians been represented in art through history? Which media have been favoured for these representations? These two questions are currently of pivotal interest to researchers in the field of musical iconography. Little attention has however been paid to more unusual representations (including the ingenuously improbable), such as those that are irreverent in terms of medium or style. Often ignored by the academic community because they are perceived as ‘lesser’ art-forms, these representations can enjoy enormous popularity and wide, even mass, exposure. Amalia Rodrigues (1920–1999) was an artist who was the subject of this kind of representation. In the centenary year of her birth, this article aims to map some improbable representations of the fado singer during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and to analyse their iconography and iconology. Sugar packets, street walls and metro stations all exhibit Amalia and seek to express her essence, her emotion and her song.

One of the most important modern works in Christian social thought, Walter Rauschenbusch's seminal volume had long been out of print. In the centenary year it has been reissued both in a photographic reproduction of the 1907 original and in an edited commentary. In the latter, seven high-profile writers respond at the conclusion of a chapter (or chapters) in the original text with four-to-six page commentaries that demonstrate the relevance of Rauschenbusch's arguments for Christians today. In an afterword, philosopher Richard Rorty laments that Christians in the long run failed to take hold of the social vision that the author had set forth and this left them unable to avert the catastrophes that so marked the twentieth century. The son of August Rauschenbusch, a noteworthy figure in his own right, Walter was born in the United States in 1861 but educated in Germany. He returned to study at the University...

enteenth century, science played an important role in motivating explorations. The British and French science academies were important driving forces behind the largest of the eighteenth-century expeditions. In the nineteenth century, scientific exploration was becoming the principal goal of exploration, with the voyages of Beagle and Challenger as prime examples. The last of the primarily geographic explorers were pressing toward the North and South poles, the last of the earth’s uncharted territories, as the twentieth century began. In the twentieth century, we moved beyond our own planet and went to the moon. On the way, we saw the earth from space for the first time, blue and inviting, alone in the black immensity of space. In the decades that followed, we flew in and above the earth’s atmosphere, photographed the entire land surface, probed the deepest ocean trenches, charted the ocean’s currents, mapped the entire ocean floor by satellite, and studied the movements of the earth’s core. Everywhere we looked we found life, even in and below hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean. Our spacecraft went to all the planets in the solar system but one. With the help of modern technology, we can visit any point on the earth. Nowhere on the earth’s surface is there a virgin place, unvisited, uninspected. As the twenty-first century begins, the very nature of exploration is being transformed. We are now more closely, deeply observing our world and the changes being wrought in our midst. Humans have always modified their environment to better suit their needs. But over the last half century, such alterations have assumed global proportions. As a result, our advanced civilization is spending more and more of its time and treasure coping with the unintended by-products of its activities—air and water pollution, ecosystem decline, biological invasions, chemical contamination, and radiation. Humans now appropriate more than half the fresh water circulating in the hydrological cycle and fix more nitrogen than nature itself does. Air pollution has gone global and is changing the climate. The escape of chlorine and bromine compounds into the stratosphere created an Antarctic ozone hole. Industrial activity brought Scripps Institution of Oceanography shares its centennial year with innovators who changed the twentieth century and our ability to navigate it; the founding of the Ford Motor Company and the first flight of the Wright brothers in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, also occurred in 1903. Automobiles and airplanes have dramatically evolved over 100 years, and Scripps science is much different today than it was in the summer of 1903, when William E. Ritter and a handful of his students began studying marine life in San Diego Bay. Scripps quickly became a multidisciplinary institution, researching and teaching all of the subjects pertinent to the oceans—physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. Scripps had few formal curricular—or geographical—constraints inhibiting research initiatives, and studies soon extended to such areas as volcanology, seismology, atmospheric science, and climate science. Today, Scripps is more like an earth science research center than a traditional ocean institution. Its foundation of twentieth-century achievements has positioned Scripps to meet the even more profound interdisciplinary challenges of the twenty-first century. Indeed, Scripps, at 100, is at a turning point. Our established competence in ocean and earth science is the principal asset we can invest in the future—though this principal asset is at risk, as Scripps faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That alone will force change, but there is a more profound reason for change. The earth itself changed profoundly in the last century, and ocean and earth science are changing in response. So to ask where Scripps is going, we must ask where science has been and where it is going.

Upon entering the Newark Museum's reinstallation of its Arts of Global Africa collection, visitors are immediately greeted with Yinka Shonibare's spectacular Lady Walking a Tightrope (2006; Fig. 1). The life-size, headless female figure balances precariously on a rope stretching diagonally across a corner space. Lady Walking a Tightrope is positioned high—above eye-level, as any tightrope walker would be—and captures the immediate attention and the upward gaze of visitors as they enter the gallery. Shonibare's Lady is dressed in the artist's signature Dutch wax fabric, and the heavy layers of the brightly colored textile surely make her task—walking across the tightrope—even more challenging. Indeed, the figure's left hand grips a fistful of the dress, pulling it up so as not to trip as she balances with her right arm stretched backwards.Positioned just to the right of Shonibare's work is a second remarkable sculpture: Man with Bicycle, a Yoruba carving. The man has paused momentarily with his bicycle, while en route to market, carrying and balancing significantly high and heavy load of goods on his head.These paired works open the exhibition with the connected themes of careful balance and purposeful, forward movement. Together they speak to the daunting challenge faced by a curator who is tasked with presenting a vision for the Global Arts of Africa with only fifty-four objects (selected from the vast permanent collection of nearly 6,000 works) and arranging those objects to fit into a mere 1,500 square-foot space (reduced from the originally proposed 8,400 square-foot plan).The installation, curated by Christa Clarke, is conceptually rich and visually compelling, in spite of these constraints. As the museum's first dedicated curator of the Arts of Global Africa, Clarke's keen and creative vision has shaped this exhibition. Nearly ten years in the making and the result of fifteen years of dedicated collecting and curatorial work, it also reflects the collective input of an advisory team of distinguished curators, educators, and academics as well as others who worked with Clarke in the department. Several temporary curatorial positions were funded by a multiyear grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for which Clarke served as project director since 2011. The grant also supported research on the collection and the publication of the first-ever African art collections catalogue. A Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities provided additional funding toward the reinstallation of the galleries in a new and renovated space. Today the Newark Museum holds one of the most diverse and vital collections of contemporary African art in the world.Arts of Global Africa opened on December 8, 2017, the centennial year of the Newark's African art collection. The reinstallation was a key piece of the Newark Museum's larger revitalization project, during which its African art collection moved to its new location: a prominent space with greater visibility just off the busy main lobby and on the first floor of the museum. Odili Donald Odita's magnificent mural Gateway (Fig. 2), a site-specific work commissioned by Clarke for the occasion, surrounds the Museum's central lobby and visitor center. Odita's mural is positioned along the upper register of the walls, calling attention to the exhibit and helping to draw visitors into the space. Visually, Odita's bright, multicolored work elevates the central museum space and underscores the importance of African art at the Newark Museum.The span of exhibited works encompasses historical pieces like an embroidery fragment from eighteenth century Azemmour, Morocco, to more recent photographs by Seydou Keita, Samuel Fosso, and Lalla Essaydi. The exhibition includes a range of media from across the continent and diaspora: a carved wood Bamana headdress from early twentieth century Mali; a painted Ethiopian triptych depicting a Christian Madonna and Child (late sixteenth–early seventeenth century); and a glass flask, shaped like a pomegranate, from ancient Egypt (twelfth century BCE).The exhibit uses the Newark collection to tell a story of the extent to which African and African diasporic artists have contributed to world visual culture and creative expression.The exhibition revolves around five organizational themes that effectively guide both the visitor's thinking and movement through the space:The collection occupies three spacious, well-lit, connected rooms; concise and clearly written labels provide focus. In the smaller entrance space, the introductory theme, “What is African Art?” cites Chimamanda Adichie's “The Danger of a Single Story,” underscoring diversity and difference in Africa's creative arts. The Nigerian author and feminist's words also signal the presence of black women as subjects and as makers—a key strength of this exhibition and of the Newark's permanent collection as a whole.One highlight is the magnificent Epa/Elefon headdress with warrior (Orangun) (ca. 1920s), a towering sculpture in the middle of the central gallery (Fig. 3). This complex, intricately carved work by Nigerian artist Bamgboye of Odo Owa anchors the room visually. The headdress is surrounded by works that connect to the next three exhibition themes: “The Cultured Body” explores imagery related to the human body, its presentation and adornment. “Art and Leadership” speaks to political or royal leadership, including an assemblage of stunning gold Asante regalia, three “seats of power,” and a factory-printed textile featuring an identifiable political leader, Nelson Mandela.In “Spirituality and Belief,” Osi Audu's absorbing Outer and Inner Head (2002) is paired with a beautifully crafted Yoruba house for the head (ile ori). These objects complement each other visually as they amplify each other's meaning. Audu's abstract diptych presents the artist's philosophical understanding of the head as a container, an idea drawn from Yoruba beliefs about human consciousness. This reflection on the head is likewise communicated in the mixed media ile ori. The label includes a quote from Audu that explains these concepts to the viewer. This example also points to a strength of this exhibition: contemporary artists are exhibited alongside historical works in juxtapositions that draw out or illicit new meanings.“Arts of Global Africa in the 21st Century” occupies the exhibition's third and final room, visually dominated by a stunning sculptural piece by Simone Leigh. Untitled (2017; Fig. 4) consists of dozens of massive handmade ceramic cowrie shells. Enlarged, abstracted, and gathered together, these cowries hang from the ceiling, exerting a tremendous physical presence that is simultaneously beautiful and threatening. Viewed from below, they take on a slightly menacing quality.It is worth mentioning that while Leigh's artistic career has experienced a meteoric rise in recent months with accolades from The New York Times, Guggenheim Museum's Hugo Boss prize, and a High Line sculptural commission, the piece here was Leigh's very first museum commission. Clarke commissioned it in 2015, underscoring the strength of her curatorial vision and foresight, her ability to identify artistic talent in promising artists.Along with the Epa/Elefon headdress, Leigh's work prompts a conversation with the works that surround it, including El Anatsui's Many Came Back (2005) and a pair of photographs by Ayana Jackson: Etta and Aina from the series Dear Sarah (2016).Jackson's work uncovers and explores the life histories of black women through photographic means (Fig. 5). She tells the tragic story of Sarah Bonetta Forbes, a nineteenth century Yoruba woman who was born into a royal family but then kidnapped and enslaved. Eventually Forbes was presented as a “gift” to Queen Victoria by King Ghezo of Dahomey. In this moving series of portraits Jackson uses her own body to reclaim and retell Forbes's story. The artist transforms herself to take on the various roles experienced by Forbes. Jackson renames Forbes in various photographic iterations. Etta shows Sarah dressed in expensive fabric and sitting in a formal, seated pose, taking on the pose of a royal figure. In the opposing image Jackson renames Sarah as Aina, here dressed entirely in white, with arms raised in an angelic pose, as if floating in air or on water.A 360-page collections catalogue accompanies the exhibition and features over 100 high-quality color images. The book, edited by Clarke, features several lengthy scholarly essays by both Clarke and leading scholars in the field, as well as 100 shorter catalogue entries by 45 contributing authors.

Clark Atlanta University (CAU) and the School of Social Work have been amazingly resilient in managing the effects of historic obstacles confronting historically black colleges and universities. The School enters its centennial year as one of the three professional schools of CAU and it awards the BSW, MSW, and PhD social work degrees. Paradoxically, the status of a segment of the black community in Atlanta is much the same as it was at time of the School’s founding, thus creating opportunities for the School to reclaim its earlier status as the leading voice on social work practice in the black community.

Morphogenesis – “The Riddles of Form” in Twenty-First Century Science

Flexure joints allow motion by elastic deformation. This motion is very predictable due to the absence of friction, wear and backlash, in contrast to the motion of roller and slider bearings. This makes flexure joints suitable for guiding motion in precision mechanisms. Disadvantages of flexure joints are the limited range of motion due to stress limits in the deforming elements and the fact that the support stiffness and load bearing capacity decrease drastically during deformation. This makes the design of flexure joints challenging. The deforming elements in flexure joints for a large range of motion are flexures. A flexure is typically a quite long, wide, thin strip that allows considerable bending and torsion, while supporting load in the other directions. Multiple flexures can be com-bined to design a flexure joint for motion in specific intended directions, e.g. a flex-ure-based revolute joint or a ball joint. A flexure mechanism generally contains multi-ple flexure joints and can therefore consist of hundreds of flexures. The efficient sim-ulation of these complex mechanisms is crucial in the early design phase and for real time control. History shows that flexures can be modelled efficiently using beam elements. However, this is not always sufficiently efficient and accurate and it limits the design freedom. This thesis presents four improvements. The evaluation of early design concepts typically requires the computation of de-formed configurations of a flexure mechanism, e.g. to obtain the maximum stress. Computation of such large deformations is time consuming, because the deformation has to be applied in multiple steps. Each of these steps has to be solved iteratively in order to ensure convergence of the computation. In this thesis, a new method is pre-sented to efficiently obtain an approximation of the deformed configuration, by using insights about the kinematics of flexure mechanisms. Optionally, this approximation can be used as a starting point for the computation of the configuration with full accu-racy, omitting the need to apply the deformation in multiple steps. Computing the ap-proximation is up to 21 times faster than a conventional method, keeping errors in resulting stress and stiffness below one percent. The maximum stress is generally one of the most important restrictions in the evalua-tion of flexure-based designs, but it can typically be computed the least accurate. Stress in beam elements is derived from internal stress resultants, which are the forces acting on the cross-section of the beam. This thesis evaluates different methods of obtaining these stress resultants. It is shown that the stress resultants relating to bend-ing, shear and axial deformation can be obtained most accurately based on equilibri-um. For torsion, an accurate solution was obtained using the Vlasov torsion theory. Furthermore, the classic stress computation has been refined for beams with typical flexure dimensions. This is accomplished by adding terms to account for two large deformation effects, namely anticlastic curvature and Wagner torque. Also local stresses around the clamping of the flexures were considered. These refinements de-crease the error in the maximum stress by about 50%. The use of beam elements with constant cross-section limits the design freedom. This thesis presents a formulation for beam elements with a varying cross-section, to allow for the analysis of non-prismatic flexures. Design optimizations of several flexure joints shows that this extra design freedom can result in significantly better flexure joints. Flexure joints contain parts which connect the flexures to each other. Although these so-called frame parts are intended to be very stiff, their compliance can significantly decrease the overall support stiffness of the flexure joints, reducing the performance. An accurate evaluation of the performance requires the stiffness of the frame parts to be modelled. However, frame parts typically have complex shapes, such that they can barely be modelled using beam elements. This thesis formulates a superelement by which complex shaped parts can be modelled efficiently. Examples show that flexure joints can be modelled efficiently and accurately by using the superelement to model frame parts and using beam elements to model the flexures. Very complex flexure-based mechanisms can be analysed more efficiently and more accurately by using the methods and elements that are introduced in this thesis,. This may help the development of new flexure mechanisms, increasing the potential for using flexure mechanisms in practice.

We propose pouch motors, a new family of printable soft actuators integrated with computational design. The pouch motor consists of one or more inflatable gas-tight bladders made of sheet materials. This printable actuator is designed and fabricated in a planar fashion. It allows both easy prototyping and mass fabrication of affordable robotic systems. We provide theoretical models of the actuators compared with the experimental data. The measured maximum stroke and tension of the linear pouch motor are up to 28% and 100 N, respectively. The measured maximum range of motion and torque of the angular pouch motor are up to 80° and 0.2 N, respectively. We also develop an algorithm that automatically generates the patterns of the pouches and their fluidic channels. A custom-built fabrication machine streamlines the automated process from design to fabrication. We demonstrate a computer-generated life-sized hand that can hold a foam ball and perform gestures with 12 pouch motors, which can be fabricated in 15 min.

Nanotechnology and synthetic biology currently constitute one of the most innovative, interdisciplinary fields of research, poised to radically transform society in the 21st century. This paper concerns the synthetic design of ribonucleic acid molecules, using our recent algorithm, RNAiFold, which can determine all RNA sequences whose minimum free energy secondary structure is a user-specified target structure. Using RNAiFold, we design ten cis-cleaving hammerhead ribozymes, all of which are shown to be functional by a cleavage assay. We additionally use RNAiFold to design a functional cis-cleaving hammerhead as a modular unit of a synthetic larger RNA. Analysis of kinetics on this small set of hammerheads suggests that cleavage rate of computationally designed ribozymes may be correlated with positional entropy, ensemble defect, structural flexibility/rigidity and related measures. Artificial ribozymes have been designed in the past either manually or by SELEX (Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment); however, this appears to be the first purely computational design and experimental validation of novel functional ribozymes. RNAiFold is available at http://bioinformatics.bc.edu/clotelab/RNAiFold/.