Molecular engineering of mechanophore activity for stress-responsive polymeric materials

© The Royal Society of Chemistry.Force reactive functional groups, or mechanophores, have emerged as the basis of a potential strategy for sensing and countering stress-induced material failure. The general utility of this strategy is limited, however, because the levels of mechanophore activation in the bulk are typically low and observed only under large, typically irreversible strains. Strategies that enhance activation are therefore quite useful. Molecular-level design principles by which to engineer enhanced mechanophore activity are reviewed, with an emphasis on quantitative structure-activity studies determined for a family of gem-dihalocyclopropane mechanophores. This journal is

Computational Journalism: from Answering Question to Questioning Answers and Raising Good Questions

Our media is saturated with claims of ``facts'' made from data. Database research has in the past focused on how to answer queries, but has not devoted much attention to discerning more subtle qualities of the resulting claims, e.g., is a claim ``cherry-picking''? This paper proposes a Query Response Surface (QRS) based framework that models claims based on structured data as parameterized queries. A key insight is that we can learn a lot about a claim by perturbing its parameters and seeing how its conclusion changes. This framework lets us formulate and tackle practical fact-checking tasks --- reverse-engineering vague claims, and countering questionable claims --- as computational problems. Within the QRS based framework, we take one step further, and propose a problem along with efficient algorithms for finding high-quality claims of a given form from data, i.e. raising good questions, in the first place. This is achieved to using a limited number of high-valued claims to represent high-valued regions of the QRS. Besides the general purpose high-quality claim finding problem, lead-finding can be tailored towards specific claim quality measures, also defined within the QRS framework. An example of uniqueness-based lead-finding is presented for ``one-of-the-few'' claims, landing in interpretable high-quality claims, and an adjustable mechanism for ranking objects, e.g. NBA players, based on what claims can be made for them. Finally, we study the use of visualization as a powerful way of conveying results of a large number of claims. An efficient two stage sampling algorithm is proposed for generating input of 2d scatter plot with heatmap, evalutaing a limited amount of data, while preserving the two essential visual features, namely outliers and clusters. For all the problems, we present real-world examples and experiments that demonstrate the power of our model, efficiency of our algorithms, and usefulness of their results.

Black Femininity through the White Speculum: The Implications of Medicosocialism and the Disproportionate Regulation of Black Women’s Reproductive Autonomy

At the crux of health disparities for women of color lies a history of maltreatment based on racial difference from their white counterparts. It is their non-whiteness that limits their access to the ideologies of “woman” and “femininity” within dominant culture. As the result of this difference, the impact of the birth control movement varied among women based on race. This project explores how the ideology attributed to the black female body limited black women’s access to “womanhood” within dominant culture, and analyzes the manners in which their reproductive autonomy was compromised as the result of changes to that ideology through time. This project operates under the hypothesis that black women’s access to certain aspects of femininity such as domesticity and motherhood reflected their roles in slave society, that black women’s reproductive value was based on the value of black children within slave culture, and that both of these factors dictated the manner in which their reproductive autonomy was managed by health professionals. Black people’s worth as a free labor force within dominant culture diminished when the Reconstruction Amendments were added to the constitution and slavery was deemed unconstitutional—resulting in the paradigmatic shift from the promotion of black fertility to its recession. America’s transition to the medicosocial regulation of black fertility through Eugenics, the role of the black elite in the movement, and the negative impact of this agenda on the reproductive autonomy of black women from low socioeconomic backgrounds are enlisted as support. The paper goes on to draw connections between post-slavery ideology of black femininity and modern-day medicosocial occurrences within clinical settings in order to advocate for increased bias training for medical professionals as a means of combating current health disparities. It concludes with the possibility that this improvement in medical training could persuade people of color to seek out medical intervention at earlier stages of illness and obtain regular check-ups by actively countering physicians’ past transgressions against them.