Call & response - Fall 2010

Call & Response is the newsletter of the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission, whose mission is to identify and promote the preservation of historic sites, structures, buildings, and culture of the African American experience in South Carolina. This is volume V, number 3 and includes a message from the chair, list of board members, preservation project profile, news from the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, annual meeting information, and events calendar.

Call & response - Spring/Summer 2010

Call & Response is the newsletter of the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission, whose mission is to identify and promote the preservation of historic sites, structures, buildings, and culture of the African American experience in South Carolina. This is volume V, number 2 and includes a message from the chair, list of board members, preservation project profile, news from the South Carolina Department of Archives and History and events calendar.

Call & response - Winter 2010

Call & Response is the newsletter of the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission, whose mission is to identify and promote the preservation of historic sites, structures, buildings, and culture of the African American experience in South Carolina. This is volume V, number 1 and includes a message from the chair, list of board members, preservation project profile, news from the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, annual meeting information, and events calendar.

Call & response - 2011

Call & Response is the newsletter of the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission, whose mission is to identify and promote the preservation of historic sites, structures, buildings, and culture of the African American experience in South Carolina. This is volume VI and includes a message from the chair, list of board members, preservation project profile, news from the South Carolina Department of Archives and History and events calendar.

Contributos para o estudo da pintura mural na arquitectura palatina lisboeta entre o tardo-barroco e o neoclassicismo, 1775-C. 1820

Tese de mestrado, Arte, Património e Teoria do Restauro, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2011

Gullah

The bulletin is an examination of the Gullah dialect, including historical background and pronunciation aids.

Crossing the Border

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2013

The Impact of R10-Hydroxywarfarin on CYP2C9-Mediated S-Warfarin Metabolism

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2014

Representations of Portugal in Herman Hesse

The aim of my research is to answer the question: How is Portugal seen by non-Portuguese fictionists? The main reason why I chose this research line is the following: Portuguese essayists like Eduardo Lourenço and José Gil (2005) focus their attention on the image or representation of Portugal as conceived by the Portuguese; indeed there is a tendency in Portuguese cultural studies (and, to a certain extent, also in Portuguese philosophical studies) to focus on studying the so-called ‗portugalidade‘ (portugueseness), i.e., the essence of being Portuguese. In my view, the problem with the studies I have been referring to is that everything is self-referential, and if ‗portugueseness‘ is an issue, then it might be useful, when dealing with it, to separate subject from object of observation. That is the reason why we, in the CEI (Centro de Estudos Interculturais), decided to start this research line, which is an inversion in the current tendency of the studies about ‗portugueseness‘: instead of studying the image or representation of Portugal by the Portuguese, my task is to study the image or representation of Portugal by the non-Portuguese, in this case, in non-Portuguese fiction. For the present paper I selected three writers of the 20th century: the German Hermann Hesse and the North-Americans Philip Roth and Paul Auster

Obama's law : analysis of a breakthrough law on healthcare access and lessons for the Portuguese health system management

ABSTRACT - The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act shook the foundations of the US health system, offering all Americans access to health care by changing the way the health insurance industry works. As President Obama signed the Act on 23 March 2010, he said that it stood for “the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care”. Unlike the U.S., the Article 64 of the Portuguese Constitution provides, since 1976, the right to universal access to health care. However, facing a severe economic crisis, Portugal has, under the supervision of the Troika, a tight schedule to implement measures to improve the efficiency of the National Health Service. Both countries are therefore despite their different situation, in a conjuncture of reform and the use of new health management measures. The present work, using a qualitative research methodology examines the Affordable Care Act in order to describe its principles and enforcement mechanisms. In order to describe the reality in Portugal, the Portuguese health system and the measures imposed by Troika are also analyzed. The intention of this entire analysis is not only to disclose the innovative U.S. law, but to find some innovative measures that could serve health management in Portugal. Essentially we identified the Exchanges and Wellness Programs, described throughout this work, leaving also the idea of the possibility of using them in the Portuguese national health system.

The History of Rome in Painting

There are many paths to reach Rome, immense field open to the eye through the centuries and days, where the presence of the story is haunting. All the artists came to Rome: Italians of various Italian and also French, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, English and Americans. These painters whose works tell its long history for having lived in the glare of light forever are the Roman pantheon of arts: what are all the anonymous authors of the frescoes of ancient Rome and medieval, but Fabriano, Cimabue , Giotto, Botticelli, Raphael, Giulio Romano, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Guido Reni, Guercino, Titian, Vasari, Velasquez, Le Nain, Poussin, Zuccari, Van Wittel, Eckersberg, Giraudet, David, Panini, Hubert Robert, Reynolds, Fuseli, Ingres, Sargent, Caffi, Vernet, Turner, Corot, Caffi, De Chirico, etc..

Novel loci for adiponectin levels and their influence on type 2 diabetes and metabolic traits: a multi-ethnic meta-analysis of 45,891 individuals.

Circulating levels of adiponectin, a hormone produced predominantly by adipocytes, are highly heritable and are inversely associated with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2D) and other metabolic traits. We conducted a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies in 39,883 individuals of European ancestry to identify genes associated with metabolic disease. We identified 8 novel loci associated with adiponectin levels and confirmed 2 previously reported loci (P = 4.5×10(-8)-1.2×10(-43)). Using a novel method to combine data across ethnicities (N = 4,232 African Americans, N = 1,776 Asians, and N = 29,347 Europeans), we identified two additional novel loci. Expression analyses of 436 human adipocyte samples revealed that mRNA levels of 18 genes at candidate regions were associated with adiponectin concentrations after accounting for multiple testing (p<3×10(-4)). We next developed a multi-SNP genotypic risk score to test the association of adiponectin decreasing risk alleles on metabolic traits and diseases using consortia-level meta-analytic data. This risk score was associated with increased risk of T2D (p = 4.3×10(-3), n = 22,044), increased triglycerides (p = 2.6×10(-14), n = 93,440), increased waist-to-hip ratio (p = 1.8×10(-5), n = 77,167), increased glucose two hours post oral glucose tolerance testing (p = 4.4×10(-3), n = 15,234), increased fasting insulin (p = 0.015, n = 48,238), but with lower in HDL-cholesterol concentrations (p = 4.5×10(-13), n = 96,748) and decreased BMI (p = 1.4×10(-4), n = 121,335). These findings identify novel genetic determinants of adiponectin levels, which, taken together, influence risk of T2D and markers of insulin resistance.

CUBN is a gene locus for albuminuria.

Identification of genetic risk factors for albuminuria may alter strategies for early prevention of CKD progression, particularly among patients with diabetes. Little is known about the influence of common genetic variants on albuminuria in both general and diabetic populations. We performed a meta-analysis of data from 63,153 individuals of European ancestry with genotype information from genome-wide association studies (CKDGen Consortium) and from a large candidate gene study (CARe Consortium) to identify susceptibility loci for the quantitative trait urinary albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR) and the clinical diagnosis microalbuminuria. We identified an association between a missense variant (I2984V) in the CUBN gene, which encodes cubilin, and both UACR (P = 1.1 × 10(-11)) and microalbuminuria (P = 0.001). We observed similar associations among 6981 African Americans in the CARe Consortium. The associations between this variant and both UACR and microalbuminuria were significant in individuals of European ancestry regardless of diabetes status. Finally, this variant associated with a 41% increased risk for the development of persistent microalbuminuria during 20 years of follow-up among 1304 participants with type 1 diabetes in the prospective DCCT/EDIC Study. In summary, we identified a missense CUBN variant that associates with levels of albuminuria in both the general population and in individuals with diabetes.

BAFF binds to the tumor necrosis factor receptor-like molecule B cell maturation antigen and is important for maintaining the peripheral B cell population.

The tumor necrosis factor (TNF) family member B cell activating factor (BAFF) binds B cells and enhances B cell receptor-triggered proliferation. We find that B cell maturation antigen (BCMA), a predicted member of the TNF receptor family expressed primarily in mature B cells, is a receptor for BAFF. Although BCMA was previously localized to the Golgi apparatus, BCMA was found to be expressed on the surface of transfected cells and tonsillar B cells. A soluble form of BCMA, which inhibited the binding of BAFF to a B cell line, induced a dramatic decrease in the number of peripheral B cells when administered in vivo. Moreover, culturing splenic cells in the presence of BAFF increased survival of a percentage of the B cells. These results are consistent with a role for BAFF in maintaining homeostasis of the B cell population.

Quest/ion of Identities in African American Feminist Postmodern Drama: A Study of Selected Plays by Suzan-Lori Parks

Innovative and unconventional, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks belongs to the continuum of African American playwrights who have contributed to the quest/ion – the quest for and question – of identities for African Americans. Her plays are sites in which the quest/ion of identities for African Americans is pursued, raised and enacted. She makes use of both page and stage to emphasize the exigency of reshaping African Americans’ identities through questioning the dominant ideologies and metanarratives, delegitimizing some of the prevailing stereotypes imposed on them, drawing out the complicity of the media in perpetuating racism, evoking slavery, lynching and their aftereffects, rehistoricizing African American history, catalyzing reflections on the various intersections of sex, race, class and gender orientations, and proffering alternative perspectives to help readers think more critically about issues facing African Americans. In my dissertation, I approach three plays by Parks – The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), Venus (1996) and Fucking A (2000) – from the standpoints of postmodern drama and African American feminism with a focus on the terrains that reflect the quest/ion of identities for African Americans, especially African American women. I argue that postmodern drama and African American feminism provide the ground for Parks to promote the development of a political agenda in order to call into question a number of dominant ideologies and metanarratives with regard to African Americans and draw upon the roles of those metanarratives as a powerful apparatus of racial and sexual oppressions. I also explore how Parks engages with postmodern drama and African American feminism to incorporate her own mininarratives in the dominant discourses. I argue that Parks in these plays uses postmodern drama and African American feminism to encourage reflections on intersectionality in order to reveal the concerns of African Americans, particularly African American women. Her plays challenge the dominant order of hierarchy and patriarchy, while in some cases urging unity and solidarity between African American men and women by showing how unity and solidarity can help them confront race, class and gender oppressions. Furthermore, I discuss how the utilization of postmodern techniques and devices helps Parks to transform the conventional features of playwriting, to create incredulity toward the dominant systems of oppression and to incorporate her mininarratives within the context of dominant discourses.