Grand Scheme Research Articles

Comprehensive Review on India’s Growth in Renewable Energy Technologies in Comparison With Other Prominent Renewable Energy Based Countries

Abstract Renewable energy will be the irrefutable future of mankind, where fulfilling fuel needs is concerned and its non-renewable predecessors were by definition, destined to short-lived in the grand scheme of things. Debating this issue is equivalent to flogging a dead horse, so now what is left is to optimize the utilization of these resources. This research work first reviews India’s technological advancements in the renewable energy field in recent decades. Simultaneously, it is going to be compared with the rate of other country’s work in the same field. The goal of this study is to identify the specific renewable methods of electricity generation where India is significantly trailing behind and that requires a redirection of the country’s efforts. A focus is given not only to the technological aspects of the various renewable energies but also to the obstacles faced while using them. And the policies to overcome those obstacles are also discussed. Other than China, India is the only other nation with a population exceeding 1.3 billion mark and the nation with the highest population density at a rather astonishing 382 humans/km2. India also has a population growth rate of 1.10%, compared with China’s 0.39%. Its current energy consumption model may prove unsustainable and will soon need to convert to renewable energy sources for basic survival.

Mastering the Nile? Confidence and Anxiety in D. S. George’s Photographs of the First Aswan Dam, 1899–1912

Abstract The first Aswan Dam was built at the dawn of the twentieth century and celebrated as a triumph of imperial engineering. Five years after its completion, workers returned to extend the dam. Photographer D. S. George recorded both the building and extension projects for the Egyptian Public Works Department in a series of images that give a unique insight into the place of engineering in the imperial imagination. The dam was built at the same time as Britain was seeking to secure its domination of the Nile Valley, having recently seized control of Sudan. Mastering the river’s water was vital to expanding agriculture in Egypt, a central plank of British policy in the region. Representations of the dam speak to a larger history of empire and power in northeast Africa. This article examines the tension between bombastic confidence and nagging anxiety in the ideologies of empire. Drawing together water, engineering, and environmental histories, it explores the connections between attempts to control the politics of the Nile Valley and efforts to harness its waters. The key themes found in the albums—nature, technology, work, and conservation—will be used as lenses through which to scrutinize the peculiar form of modernity that engineers attempted to forge on the world’s longest river. This analysis reveals that imperial officials sought total mastery of the environment but that the difficulties faced in realizing such grand schemes also generated persistent anxieties and so helps us understand the fears that accompanied the ambitions of imperial modernity.

In the Grand Scheme of Things: Identifying Reproducible Microbial Signatures in Dietary Intervention Studies

Nutrition research is plagued by the reproducibility crisis. Reconciling nutrition studies involving microbiome data presents a modern challenge for researchers. In this issue of Cell Host & Microbe, Bisanz et al., 2019 demonstrate a comprehensive methodology for meta-analysis of microbiome sequence data from high-fat-diet intervention studies.

All-Climate Battery Technology for Electric Vehicles: Inching Closer to the Mainstream Adoption of Automated Driving

The year 2017 was when electric vehicles (EVs) came of age. EV sales, according to Macquarie Bank, climbed from 740,000 vehicles in 2016 to 1.1 million, an increase of 51%. In terms of market shares, EVs accounted for 1.7% of new car sales in 2017, up from 1.1% in 2016. Although still small in the grand scheme of things, the growth rate was exceptional. All market movers are now taking EVs seriously, as evidenced by a flurry of announcements last year about the plans of major automakers for the EV market. Should these plans come to fruition, we are foreseeing roughly 400 models and 25 million sales of EVs by 2025.

A First-Year ILL Librarian’s Experience with the Human Element

Interlibrary loan is a service that involves the borrowing and lending of items between libraries. What also underscores this service is the human communication exchanges had with patrons and ILL staff via emails, phone calls, notes, etc. to ensure that items are correctly processed in a timely manner. This article is written from the perspective of a first-year ILL librarian highlighting the position from the one thing that is known but may get overlooked in the grand scheme of daily transactions: the human element.

Using social network analysis to model palliative care

Palliative and end-of-life care are special types of healthcare that focus on improving the quality of life of patients who are living with life-threatening illness or nearing their end of life. The primary goal here is to provide various support services to help the patients to maintain an active life and dignity. Assuming there are cost and resource limitations for delivering care within the system, where each care provider can support a limited number of patients, the problem can be defined as finding a set of suitable care providers with a minimum overall cost to match the needs of the maximum number of patients.In the grand scheme, the whole care system can be seen as a social network consisting of patients and care providers. This representation provides an opportunity to apply social network analysis techniques to enhance the topology of the system and improve its efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel computational agent-based model to address this problem by extending the agent's capabilities using the benefits of the social network. We assume that each patient agent can cover its disabilities and perform its desired tasks through collaboration with other agents. The primary objective is to optimize a dynamic, personalized care pathway system that will support palliative care within a community eco-system. Testing the ability of the system to match social support agents with personal preferences, needs, and capabilities is the second goal of this research work. In addition, we are going to measure the impact of the system on perceived quality of life, social connectedness, caregiver burden, and care satisfaction. The performance and functionality of our proposed model have been evaluated using various synthetic and a real palliative networks. The results demonstrate a significant reduction in the operational costs and enhancement of the service quality.

Poverty Pimping: The Exoneration and Shift of Prosecution from Jane Doe to Johns

It has been said that pimping is not easy, but the author contests that antiquated anecdote. Pimping is easy when the criminal justice system criminalizes exploited women who prostitute while allowing pimps and “johns” to elude penal sanctions. Society looks at prostitution and deduces the profession as a mere choice among other palatable opportunities. Prostitution falls under the umbrella of vice crimes, which are considered crimes with no victims. However, society fails to recognize the socioeconomic factors that victimize everyday women. Factors such as the increase in female heads of household, the twenty-percent income wage gap for women, gender biases, and women traditionally majoring in courses of study that do not yield high incomes create a perfect storm that is conducive for women to turn profits by turning themselves out. This author proposes to eradicate the institution of prostitution by having the criminal justice system penalize the exploiters rather than the exploited and engaging in a real dialogue that addresses the issues plaguing women who prostitute. Society would be remised to continually turn a blind eye and an upward nose to the women who are wrongly stigmatized for engaging in prostitution. Prostitution, for many, is not a scheme to get rich. It is a mere means of survival. Hunger in the eyes of a mother’s child will push her to the limits and spark innovations that lead down a path of societal deviations. No one needs an extensive resume or strict hours of availability to prostitute. Unfortunately, the corner is one of the few employment opportunities that is always hiring and ready to take full advantage of society’s most vulnerable. Some advocate to regulate the business of prostitution as a solution to cure some of the ills involved. The system fails to recognize a victim because the objective eyes of the law only see an unlawful contract for sex. The only victims that are recognized in the grand scheme of the prostitution vice crime are morality and public health. Nonetheless, an in-depth analysis of the social forces that contribute to women leading in the business of selling sex for survival is necessary to have society rethink its position on prostitution.

The role of pairing an anesthesiology rotation with the general surgery clerkship: positive impact on surgical and perioperative education.

BackgroundThe use of an anesthesiology rotation in the realm of surgical education is not very well studied. Several studies show the importance of an anesthesiology rotation in the grand scheme of undergraduate medical education. However, its importance in perioperative medicine and surgical education is not very well understood. This study attempts to look at this relationship and determine whether or not a temporal relationship between this anesthesiology rotation and a surgical rotation is important.MethodsI used an online survey tool to survey medical students who took the anesthesiology rotation (required rotation) in 2014 and 2015 (when rotation was coupled to surgical rotation) and compared those data to the data of students who took the rotation in 2016 (when the rotation was not coupled to surgery). I asked several questions looking at the importance of the anesthesiology rotation to surgical education and to perioperative medicine.ResultsHaving a required anesthesiology rotation appears to add value to the general surgery rotation in undergraduate medical education. Furthermore, when this rotation is paired with the general surgery rotation, it appears that the students learn more about perioperative medicine than when the rotation is paired with other “advanced” rotation.ConclusionThe pairing of anesthesiology with a general surgery rotation does indeed improve the perioperative medicine education and knowledge of students. Students appreciate having a week of anesthesiology with the surgical rotation, and they note that it adds value to the general surgery rotation.

The first Filipino City Beautiful plans

ABSTRACTNarratives of the City Beautiful in the Philippines have a tendency to adhere to a particular historiographical form: they commence with the early years of American colonial rule and Daniel Burnham’s grand schemes of 1905 for Manila and Baguio, then they provide reference to William E. Parsons’ city plans for Cebu and Zamboanga before fleetingly noting Juan Arellano’s Capitol complexes or his 1930 Iloilo Plan. To bring such historical accounts to a conclusion characteristically discussion of the Commonwealth Era (1935–1942, 1945–1946), and the development of Quezon City, are presented. Yet these histories of city planning in the Philippines during the American colonial period (1898–1946) essentially offer no detailed insight into the projects composed by Filipinos. Questions that include ‘How many plans did Filipinos compose?’, ‘Who designed them?’, and ‘What was their form?’ are consequently left unanswered.

How to stop North Korea’s nuclear ambition: failed diplomacy and future options

ABSTRACTThere are two kinds of hostilities on the Korean Peninsula: hostility between the U.S. and North Korea; hostility between the two Koreas. The nature of North Korea’s nuclear crisis is a mixture of those two hostilities. The crisis was exacerbated by misinterpretation and wishful thinking regarding its intentions. Another reason for North Korea’s nuclear crisis is the failure of the international community to speak with one voice on how to resolve it. Every country is different in its threat perceptions, national interests, and strategic calculations. In the grand scheme of things, however, the North Korea problem seems to be a strategic conflict between the U.S. and China. South Korea’s internal friction prevented any policy from being implemented effectively.It is not only unfair but unrealistic to handle the two hostilities separately. Any efforts to denuclearize North Korea should not undermine the security of South Korea. For example, the withdrawal of the U.S. forces from the Korean peninsula may be even worse for peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula than a nuclear North Korea, if it keeps the current political system and there is no fundamental change in inter-Korean relations.Like the front and rear wheels in an automobile, the U.S.–North Korean dialogue and inter-Korean dialogue began to operate as two driving forces for a breakthrough in the nuclear crisis. The wheels should be aligned with a strong U.S.–R.O.K. alliance. Then a multilateral format like the Six-Party Talks can resume for a sustainable peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.

Mothers and Sons

Mothers and Sons Devin O'Shea (bio) Vanishing Acts Jaimee Wriston Colbert Fomite Press www.fomitepress.com/Vanishing_Act.html 322 Pages; Print, $15.95 Jaimee Wriston Colbert's third novel, Vanishing Acts, is a fragmented mother and son story which focuses on Gwen Johnson's runaway child, Buddy Johnson. The novel is set in Hawaii, and our prologue opens with Jody Johnson vanishing into the sea with his surfboard, meeting a tragic end and leaving Gwen's mother, Madge Johnson, to raise their daughter on her own. Flash forward to Gwen's son, Buddy. In a sexually charged, high school adolescence fervor, Buddy and his aspiring model girlfriend, Marnie, jump on a plane and island hop. They are running away from home, and Marnie. Meanwhile, Gwen slides into alcoholism while tending to her dying mother, whose memories, humanity, and sense of time are deteriorating. Colbert's theme in this book is disappearances. The topic is well covered—mostly at the expense of plot and character development. Houdini, pickpockets, vanishing surfers, ghosts, and quantum physics all take up large sections of this three-hundred page experimental novel. Drugs and dreams are common in the lives of both Buddy and Gwen. This way, the author builds a slippery relationship with what's real, and what's not. But, the main culprit the novel's elusiveness is a very active, omniscient, narrator who frequently speaks in the present tense, and gives large portions of the book the feeling of a dictated hallucination. At one point the narrator implores, "There's order to this madness." And, occasionally, there is. The narrator's voice is used to purpose. However, there are many sections when this voice has an extremely tin ear. For example, this voice often speaks rhetorically: "The upshot? He's screwed," which is followed in a new paragraph by, "Here's how that goes: …" Rhetorical questions like, "The way it played out?" abound. This tactic is patronizing. Colbert is essentially asking the question that the reader should be asking themselves. It's a shortcut to advancing the action. It's telling instead of showing. Ideally, when Colbert's narrator asks, "Does Buddy have a home?" the reader would have been keeping score, and was wondering the same thing themselves. The third person narrator with a little personality can be a powerful tool, but it becomes overkill when we add in all the other experimental flourishes Colbert deploys. Between moving back and forth between the present and the late 1960s, the fragmented points of view, and a wide cast of characters to keep track of, Colbert keeps the reader at a considerable distance with few payoffs to keep the momentum going. Albeit, there is a plan. This book is meant to reward the very diligent reader. Vanishing Acts is a riddle, but the characters along the way also make it difficult to care about the answer. Gwen, Buddy's mother, is the relatable one. Gwen is concerned for her son and the cruelty of the world. She's the voice of reason in chaos, while Buddy, on the other hand, has two chaotic desires—one local and one macro. In the grand scheme, he wants to obsessively study insects. When our narrator is speaking Buddy's thoughts, there are some beautiful, information rich, side mentions of beetles, and spiders, and Hawaiian entomological bits. On a local teenage boy level, Buddy desperately wants to make love to his girlfriend, and thus they can become a real couple. We spend a too-long first act of the book dwelling on Buddy's pining for Marnie who refuses to have sex with him. The book revolves primarily around Buddy and this runaway girlfriend. We all know that Buddy is on a sexually quixotic quest to have sex with Marnie. We know this because Marnie is drawn as a cruel and narcissistic young woman. Marnie uses her body to get around the rules. The first time we meet her, she is showing her cleavage to a police officer in order to get out of a ticket. A little later, this is an example of how she talks to Buddy, "'Whatever. Like you're lost in...

The Realities of 'Reality' - Part I: It All Starts from Within

If this year was the year 202018, meaning 200,000 years from now and I was writing about reality, where would I begin? What would be the basis that I would use for my arguments? Would I still be able to talk about philosophy, psychology, art, mathematics, chemistry, physics and quantum mechanics? Would I be able to talk about the brain and the mind the same way I do today? Would I be able to speculate about life and death? Would these topics still be relevant in the grand scheme of things? 200,000 years from now, would it still be necessary to speculate about reality anyway? Although the answers to such questions can be either ‘may be’ or ‘may be not’, one thing is certain: 200,000 years from now, humans, if we’re still around, will be different, so different that the disparity will be similar to an insect’s egg and the final stage of its metamorphosis: an imago, the larva and pupa stages being in between. Well, in terms of reality, when the first Homo Sapiens emerged 200,000 years ago, he had no idea what reality would be like today in 2018. His reality was limited to trying to survive in a harsh environment. He had to first learn how to make fire, gather, then grown his own food and hunt just to survive. Say our species is still around 200,000 years from now, what we are capable of in 2018, compared to what we will be capable of then is comparable to the first humans’ reality 200,000 years ago. The fact is, humans’ reality is not constant. It’s variable, fluid… This series looks at reality in different angles. It goes back and forth in time to explain the versatility of reality. Through the topics that I will discuss, I will attempt to explain why Man is still puzzled by reality after 200,000 years of existence.

Music

Music Myron Gray KEY WORDS music, song, print, notation, score, music sheet, sound, performance, orality, literacy, materiality, “Hail Columbia”, Benjamin Carr, “President’s March”, Philip Phile In the study of early America, sound is an impossible object. Performance per se is irrecoverable, so when speaking of music as a category of early American material text, we necessarily speak of writing and print. In this regard music is not special. Like any other past event, it’s gone. Whatever we might learn from descriptions and transcriptions of sounding music, there remains an unbridgeable gap between early American musical performance and its verbal and music-notational documentation. The following account of the premiere of the popular Federalist anthem “Hail Columbia” at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre on April 25, 1798, for instance, offers an impression of a sonic event: Never was any thing received with applause so hearty and so universal. The Song was sung at the end of the comedy, as mentioned in bills; it was called for again at the end of the pantomime, and again after all the performances were over, and encored every time. At every repetition it was received with additional enthusiasm, ’till, towards the last, a great part of the audience, pit, box, and gallery, actually joined in the chorus.—It was very pleasing to observe, that the last stanza received particular marks of approbation. Every one was closed with long and loud clappings and huzzas, but no sooner were the words, “Behold the Chief who now commands,” pronounced, than the house shook to its very centre; the song and the whole [band] were drowned in the enthusiastic peals of applause, and were obliged to stop and begin again and again, in order to gain a hearing.1 Similarly, the Philadelphia music publisher Benjamin Carr’s arrangement of “Hail Columbia” for voice and keyboard represents one iteration of the song’s melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic content (figure 1). Neither document, however, relates the actual sonic phenomenon of a performance. What were the [End Page 714] amplitude and timbre of the instrument(s) and voice(s)? Where were they positioned? What were the acoustic properties of the hall or room? What were the temperature and humidity? What other objects and materials occupied the space? These and other obscure conditions shape irretrievable sound. As a result, for purposes of textual analysis before the advent of sound recording in the late nineteenth century, music cannot be sound.2 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Philip Phile and Joseph Hopkinson, “The favorite new Federal Song” (“Hail Columbia”) (Philadelphia: Carr, 1798), 1. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society. [End Page 715] It is perhaps due to the irreversible loss of historical musical performance, however, that a misguided notion of the relationship between notated and sounding music persists. We want scores to offer portals into bygone worlds of musical sonority, so the prevailing wisdom on musical notation is that it mediates sound. No less esteemed a musicologist than Kate van Orden has argued that scores have a “performative nature.” Building on the work of Roger Chartier, which aims to blur distinctions between the textual world of print and the performative realm of orality, she insists that “musical texts presume a musical performance.”3 In this view sound frames notation. Scores are tools that rescue invisible, ephemeral music from oblivion, rendering it as a visible and static arrangement of signs to be decoded when sound is remade. It could hardly be otherwise when Western music history begins with the systematic writing of medieval Christian chant. At its inception notation is for sound, a means of transmission. But not only does orality precede and subsume literacy in the grand scheme of music history, the primacy of performance is reinforced whenever someone uses notation to transcribe sound or plays or sings from a musical score. Confusing matters further, the seeming intangibility of sound has invited thinkers since Plato to identify music with the metaphysical. The transience and emotional force of music lend it a certain mystique, and so there is a tradition of speculation that music touches a world otherwise inaccessible to human consciousness.4 One consequence of the supposed kinship of...

The Foundational Tenets of Johannes Althusius' Constitutionalism

In his Politica: Politics Methodically set Forth and Illustrated with Sacred and Profane Examples published in 1603 Johannes Althusius' sets out his grand scheme of republican federalism. Soon, however, the final establishment of the territorial state and the paradigm of statism relegated grand federalism to the distant margins of constitutional theory.
 Statism as concisely enunciated in this article, recognises only two entities namely the state as a centralised power apparatus and the abstract individual on whom a statist identity in the image of the state is enforced. Statism dispenses with communities.
 Statism has been playing out on a continuum, with the statist-individualism on the one and statist-collectivism on the opposite extreme. Statist-individualism seeks to fend off the risks of supreme political power with strategies for the protection of individual rights. In contrast, statist-collectivism dispenses with the subtleties of statist-individualism and is distinctively more blatant in forging a homogeneous statist nation.
 In the face of the rise of claims of communities, the emergence of communitarian thinking and increased evidence of the receding territorial state, new - post statist - constitutional thinking is gathering strength. This has unleashed considerable interest in alternative thinking such as that of Althusius.
 Althusius’ grand federalism should be viewed, however, within the context of his broader constitutional thinking, which on close analysis, is constituted by four interlinked aspects namely: piety, justice and community; covenant (or contract); supremacy of the commonwealth and of the law; and political authority and public office. These tenets are the main focus of the present discussion.
 There is no room for a blanket transplantation of Althusian thinking into modern constitutional theory. However, it does provide a valuable source of communitarian theory for contemporary constitutional law. It brings to light that (individual) identity, morality, and a happy life and individual rights can only be conceived of within the framework of communities. Moreover, Althusius’ convictions on (shared) popular sovereignty, in contrast to undivided (statist) sovereignty and his views on public office provided the framework for constitutionalism and limited government which could arguably improve on that of contemporary statist constitutionalism.
 

Fitting tissue chips and microphysiological systems into the grand scheme of medicine, biology, pharmacology, and toxicology.

Microphysiological systems (MPS), which include engineered organoids (EOs), single organ/tissue chips (TCs), and multiple organs interconnected to create miniature in vitro models of human physiological systems, are rapidly becoming effective tools for drug development and the mechanistic understanding of tissue physiology and pathophysiology. The second MPS thematic issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine comprises 15 articles by scientists and engineers from the National Institutes of Health, the IQ Consortium, the Food and Drug Administration, and Environmental Protection Agency, an MPS company, and academia. Topics include the progress, challenges, and future of organs-on-chips, dissemination of TCs into Pharma, children's health protection, liver zonation, liver chips and their coupling to interconnected systems, gastrointestinal MPS, maturation of immature cardiomyocytes in a heart-on-a-chip, coculture of multiple cell types in a human skin construct, use of synthetic hydrogels to create EOs that form neural tissue models, the blood-brain barrier-on-a-chip, MPS models of coupled female reproductive organs, coupling MPS devices to create a body-on-a-chip, and the use of a microformulator to recapitulate endocrine circadian rhythms. While MPS hardware has been relatively stable since the last MPS thematic issue, there have been significant advances in cell sourcing, with increased reliance on human-induced pluripotent stem cells, and in characterization of the genetic and functional cell state in MPS bioreactors. There is growing appreciation of the need to minimize perfusate-to-cell-volume ratios and respect physiological scaling of coupled TCs. Questions asked by drug developers are followed by an analysis of the potential value, costs, and needs of Pharma. Of highest value and lowest switching costs may be the development of MPS disease models to aid in the discovery of disease mechanisms; novel compounds including probes, leads, and clinical candidates; and mechanism of action of drug candidates. Impact statement Microphysiological systems (MPS), which include engineered organoids and both individual and coupled organs-on-chips and tissue chips, are a rapidly growing topic of research that addresses the known limitations of conventional cellular monoculture on flat plastic - a well-perfected set of techniques that produces reliable, statistically significant results that may not adequately represent human biology and disease. As reviewed in this article and the others in this thematic issue, MPS research has made notable progress in the past three years in both cell sourcing and characterization. As the field matures, currently identified challenges are being addressed, and new ones are being recognized. Building upon investments by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and Environmental Protection Agency of more than $200 million since 2012 and sizable corporate spending, academic and commercial players in the MPS community are demonstrating their ability to meet the translational challenges required to apply MPS technologies to accelerate drug development and advance toxicology.

Gospodarka jako zinstytucjonalizowany proces. Instytucjonalizm Karla Polanyiego i jego etyczne konsekwencje

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Understanding What Makes a Person Unique: A Multipronged Approach

Broadly, there are two different characters within everybody: the person you think you are, meaning the way you view yourself, and the person people think you are or the way they view you. The concept of self-identity applies to the first case, while social identity applies to the second. But I don't think either of the two can be used to describe uniqueness because we use the way we see ourselves for comparison purposes. On the other hand, people also use the way they see us for comparison purposes. Uniqueness is what makes you unique in the grand scheme of things. Uniqueness stems from the impact that the powerful factors of the environment have on you as a human being and from your biology, more specifically from the structure of your genetic makeup, which is unique in the world, as I will explain later. If uniqueness was to take the shape of a simple equation, it would give something like this: Uniqueness = Biology Environment. Your nature is the biological package – physical and non-physical characteristics you’re born with. Within non-physical characteristics, it’s important to distinguish between those that we can’t see with the naked eye – cells, DNA, HLA, etc. – and those traits responsible for certain behaviors – loving, friendly, short-tempered, selfish, altruist, etc. – although it’s possible to pinpoint the genes responsible for them. Every time you look in the mirror, what you see is a product of both your parents. They both contributed to your appearance. Say you look more like one of your parents than the other or exactly like one of them and has no physical traits whatsoever from the other. But how about your temperament? The union of the male and female gametes may lead to the inheritance of prevalent or dominant genes responsible for physical traits from one of the parents, but it may also beget an individual with totally different physical traits resembling neither of the parents. That assures the diversity of our species. Same goes for non-physical characteristics, meaning those that the eyes can’t see.

Abstract 1710: Providing confidence around computational tissue analysis using heterogeneity assessments

Abstract Background: Though the techniques to interrogate the appearance of a biomarker in tissue sections have greatly advanced, there are limitations as to how representative an analysis of a tissue section is compared to the entire diseased tissue. Depending on the heterogeneous expression level of a biomarker, tissue sampling can result in different interpretations of the biomarker’s appearance, and hence could potentially lead to a false therapeutic intervention. Hypothesis: Digital image analysis has demonstrated tremendous value in quantifying many features related to biomarker distribution and expression in biological tissues. The information can be collected for various indications and biomarkers and a phenotypic signature can be established that describes a biomarker representation across indications. Moreover, the assessment of new samples can be compared to the established phenotypic signature and a confidence score applied in support to the determined endpoint. Approach: For a proof of concept, 6 prostate cancer samples were processed and a single section was collected after every 100microns. A total of 7 sections per sample were stained for the lymphocyte marker CD3, and the number of positive target cells were determined in the tumor and tumor microenvironment using tissue Image Analysis (tIA™). To assess how indicative the evaluation of a single tissue section would be for the entire tumor, the heterogeneity level was determined on the section level as well as by random grid analysis on each individual section. Both criteria were utilized to define an indication and biomarker specific confidence interval and heterogeneity score. Conclusion: The combination of IHC and tIA is a powerful tool to convert complex data into meaningful interpretations. tIA is also a capable tool to catalogue valuable information about the biomarker’s expression pattern across different disease stages and hence could be used to evaluate how representative a single biomarker evaluation is in the grand scheme. Ultimately, we demonstrated a technique that can be applied to any biomarker and would assist in guiding therapeutic decisions. Citation Format: Carsten Schnatwinkel, Daniel Rudmann, Famke Aeffner, Jasmeet Bajwa, Natalie Hutnick, Michael Sharp, Gerry Chu, JD Alvarez. Providing confidence around computational tissue analysis using heterogeneity assessments [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2017; 2017 Apr 1-5; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2017;77(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 1710. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2017-1710

Sex Workers in Comics and Graphic Novels

Prostitutes, or sex workers as they are often referred to nowadays, are usually marginalized and generally depicted in a negative light in comics and graphic novels. Most frequently, a stereotypical image of female sex workers as victims of society from a patriarchal viewpoint is perpetuated. Violence against prostitutes is often the central theme for graphic novels, like in From Hell (1989) by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. Characters that are, or used to be, prostitutes are almost exclusively victimized or vilified. Even powerful, authoritative, and independent women, like most from the Sin City series (1991-2000) of graphic novels by Frank Miller, are, in the grand scheme of things, at the mercy of more powerful male figures. In 2011 the Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown tried to counter this prevalent misogynist depiction of prostitutes in his graphic novel Paying For It. The autobiographical story centers on him as a “John”, a client of sex workers, for several years, and explains his experiences with escorts. My paper will focus on the depiction of prostitutes in Chester Brown’s Paying For It (2011) and will compare various comics and graphic novels also featuring sex workers with the book. I will show that Paying For It (2011), although partly flawed, is an important work for the portrayal of prostitutes in comics, and a valuable contribution in the debate about the decriminalization of sex work.

An Afropolitan 2017 update

ABSTRACTIt has been over a decade since the publication of Taiye Selasi's essay “Bye Bye Babar” (2005) that viralized the term Afropolitan, engendering a controversy over its pros and cons. Yet the debate over the Afropolitan/Afropolitanism must resolve itself to art that is reflective and valid of the individual and his/her work at large, how transferable it is to the human experience and how it responds to where Africa's future fits into the grand scheme of things: “One must decide what comprises ‘African culture’ beyond pepper soup and filial piety” (Selasi, “Bye Bye Babar”). It must be remembered that Taiye Selasi's goal was to define a group of writers who reside in various capitals and whose works give a broader sense of who and what an African writer is.