A Temperature-Monitoring Vaginal Ring for Measuring Adherence

Background

Product adherence is a pivotal issue in the development of effective vaginal microbicides to reduce sexual transmission of HIV. To date, the six Phase III studies of vaginal gel products have relied primarily on self-reporting of adherence. Accurate and reliable methods for monitoring user adherence to microbicide-releasing vaginal rings have yet to be established.

Methods

A silicone elastomer vaginal ring prototype containing an embedded, miniature temperature logger has been developed and tested in vitro and in cynomolgus macaques for its potential to continuously monitor environmental temperature and accurately determine episodes of ring insertion and removal.

Results

In vitro studies demonstrated that DST nano-T temperature loggers encapsulated in medical grade silicone elastomer were able to accurately and continuously measure environmental temperature. The devices responded quickly to temperature changes despite being embedded in different thickness of silicone elastomer. Prototype vaginal rings measured higher temperatures compared with a subcutaneously implanted device, showed high sensitivity to diurnal fluctuations in vaginal temperature, and accurately detected periods of ring removal when tested in macaques.

Conclusions

Vaginal rings containing embedded temperature loggers may be useful in the assessment of product adherence in late-stage clinical trials.

Portraying Human Dignity

I consider whether Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) in his painting Las Meninas has conveyed several aspects of the idea of human dignity in ways that not only echo some aspects of contemporary philosophical and legal analysis, but transcend them, bringing into our understanding aspects of dignity, and the controversy surrounding it, that otherwise might be underestimated.

Interchange of entire communities: microbial community coalescence

Microbial communities are enigmatically diverse. We propose a novel view of processes likely affecting microbial assemblages, which could be viewed as the Great American Interchange en miniature: the wholesale exchange among microbial communities resulting from moving pieces of the environment containing entire assemblages. Incidental evidence for such ‘community coalescence’ is accumulating, but such processes are rarely studied, likely because of the absence of suitable terminology or a conceptual framework. We provide the nucleus for such a conceptual foundation for the study of community coalescence, examining factors shaping these events, links to bodies of ecological theory, and we suggest modeling approaches for understanding coalescent communities. We argue for the systematic study of community coalescence because of important functional and applied consequences.

Modulating mythology in a post-traumatic era: Murals and re-imaging in Northern Ireland.

Arguably the most ancient of the social media, wall paintings have been a persistent vehicle of cultural meaning management. The dynamics of myth markets are reflected in the sectarian murals of Northern Ireland. In this paper, we draw from consumer research literature on mythology and street art to explore the continuous revision of these wallscapes that seeks to address the enduring contradictions of civic ideology in contested political space. In particular, we focus on the use of classical, historical and pop-cultural mythologies to transform private space into public place. We examine the decommissioning of murals occurring in the wake of the Peace Accords, and speculate on the implications of the creation of a shared mythology for the future of mural painting and the state.

Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices

Mixed Messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive, and contextual terms.

Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed Messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems, and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing, and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.

Voir Hitler en peinture

Voir Hitler en peinture / On Seeing a painting of Hitler
The article “Voir Hitler en peinture” (literally “On Seeing a painting of Hitler”) focuses on a painting by Oliver Jeffers entitled “Ginger Hitler”. This article suggests that, whatever Jeffers’ intent and inspiration were, his painting “defamiliarizes” Hitler (V. Shklovsky) and forces us to look at him afresh. For decades, Hitler has been demonised and dehumanised; yet, however unsettling this may be, he was human. As Professor Richard Evans, a leading expert in the history of Nazism, put it recently: “Viewing Hitler as a human being, which he undoubtedly was, is more challenging to our understanding, surely, than simply writing him off as a cartoon villain” (The Guardian, 30/04/2015).

Werner Büttner and the Melodic Tactics of Subversive Affirmation: an Introduction

An introduction to the work and practice of Werner Büttner included in Werner Büttner: Coincidence in Splendour, a retrospective monograph on the artist's painting practice from the late 1970s to present. In this shorter text, Slyce contextualises Büttner's practice amongst his contemporary German painters with which he worked and operated alongside.

Intimate Ecologies: An exploration of the languages of contemporary exhibitions and making in museums and related cultural spaces in the UK

Intimate Ecologies considers the practice of exhibition-making over the past decade in formal museum and gallery spaces and its relationship to creating a concept of craft in contemporary Britain. Different forms of expression found in traditions of still life painting, film and moving image, poetic text and performance are examined to highlight the complex layers of language at play in exhibitions and within a concept of craft. The thesis presents arguments for understanding the value of embodied material knowledge to aesthetic experience in exhibitions, across a spectrum of human expression. These are supported by reference to exhibition case studies, critical and theoretical works from fields including social anthropology, architecture, art and design history and literary criticism and a range of individual, original works of art. Intimate Ecologies concludes that the museum exhibition, as a creative medium for understanding objects, becomes enriched by close study of material practice, and embodied knowledge that draws on a concept of craft. In turn a concept of craft is refreshed by the makers’ participation in shifting patterns of exhibition-making in cultural spaces that allow the layers of language embedded in complex objects to be experienced from different perspectives. Both art-making and the experience of objects are intimate, and infinitely varied: a vibrant ecology of exhibition-making gives space to this diversity.

Painterly rendering using human vision

Painterly rendering has been linked to computer vision, but we propose to link it to human vision because perception and painting are two processes that are interwoven. Recent progress in developing computational models allows to establish this link. We show that completely automatic rendering can be obtained by applying four image representations in the visual system: (1) colour constancy can be used to correct colours, (2) coarse background brightness in combination with colour coding in cytochrome-oxidase blobs can be used to create a background with a big brush, (3) the multi-scale line and edge representation provides a very natural way to render fi ner brush strokes, and (4) the multi-scale keypoint representation serves to create saliency maps for Focus-of-Attention, and FoA can be used to render important structures. Basic processes are described, renderings are shown, and important ideas for future research are discussed.

Fine arts edutainment: the amateur painter

A new scheme for painterly rendering (NPR) has been developed. This scheme is based on visual perception, in particular themulti-scale line/edge representation in the visual cortex. The Amateur Painter (TAP) is the user interface on top of the rendering scheme. It allows to (semi)automatically create paintings from photographs, with different types of brush strokes and colour manipulations. In contrast to similar painting tools, TAP has a set of menus that reflects the procedure followed by a normal painter. In addition, menus and options have been designed such that they are very intuitive, avoiding a jungle of sub-menus with options from image processing that children and laymen do not understand. Our goal is to create a tool that is extremely easy to use, with the possibility that the user becomes interested in painting techniques, styles, and fine arts in general.

Integrated multi-scale architecture of the cortex with application to computer vision

Tese de dout., Engenharia Electrónica e de Computadores, Faculdade de Ciência e Tecnologia, Universidade do Algarve, 2007

Encontros com a pintura : modos de criar, modos de conhecer

Relatório da Prática de Ensino Supervisionada, Mestrado em Ensino de Artes Visuais, Universidade de Lisboa, 2011

A interacção entre a sala de aula e o museu como estratégia de envolvimento na aprendizagem

Relatório da prática de ensino supervisionada, Mestrado em Ensino de Artes Visuais, Universidade de Lisboa, 2011

A iconografia de Santa Maria Madalena em Portugal até ao Concílio de Trento

Tese de mestrado Arte, Património e Teoria do Restauro, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2012

Vox Dei:metáfora(s) da espiritualidade

Tese de doutoramento, Belas-Artes (Pintura), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Belas-Artes, 2014