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Advocate, Spring 2018, Vol. 29, No. 3-4, Advocate

The Advocate

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Editorial:

- Revolution and CUNY: Remembering the 1969 Fight for Open Admissions. Bhargav Rani (p. 3)

Features:

- The Power and Political Potentials of Images. Zehra Husain (p. 8)

- Ethnography as Espionage: An Interview with Katherine Verdery. Nicholas Glastonbury (p. 14)

- Neoliberal Fictions. Nandini Ramachandran (p. 27)

Debate:

- Settler Marxism and the Murdered and Missing Revolutionary Actors. Sean M. Kennedy (p. 38)

Technology and Politics:

- Unmasking Musk: Envisioning HyperCapitalist Futures. Hillary Donnell (p. 44)

- Salami Tacticals: Little Nukes — No Big Deal? Clifford D. Conner (p. 58)

CUNY Life:

- The Campaign …

Advocate, Spring 2018, Vol. 29, No. 1-2, Advocate

The Advocate

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Editorial:

- On Being Late. Nandini Ramachandran (p. 3)

Features:

- Imperialism and Class Struggle in Chagos and Mauritius. Gordon Barnes (p. 8)

- The Streets Tell What the Press Hides: Disaster Capitalism in Puerto Rico. Maria Heyaca (p. 20)

- Moral Depravity, Discontent and Socialism: The Politics of the Urban Revolution. Harry Blain (p. 35)

- Neoliberalizing Childhood and Education: WeWork’s “Entrepreneurial” Schools. Hillary Donnell (p. 46)

CUNY Life:

- CUNY-Wide Conference in Defense of Immigrants Held at Grad Center. CUNY Internationalist Marxist Club (p. 52)

- A New Era. CUNY Struggle (p. 58)

- Accessing …

Evidence: Photographic Image, Fact, Document Syllabus, Ellen Handy

Open Educational Resources

Syllabus for an interdiscilpinary undergraduate course on Photography and Evidence.

Diy Science Sims, James Hedberg

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Mathematics In Contemporary Society - Chapter 4 (Spring 2018), Patrick J. Wallach

Open Educational Resources

Mathematics in Contemporary Society is the textbook that corresponds to MA-321, the course of the same name. The course is designed to provide students with mathematical ideas and methods found in the social sciences, the arts, and in business. Topics will include fundamentals of statistics, scatterplots, graphics in the media, problem solving strategies, dimensional analysis, mathematics in music and art, and mathematical modeling. EXCEL is used to explore real world applications.

Patterns Of Interactive System Use By Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops Truncatus), Stephanie Bousseau

Theses and Dissertations

In the 1970s through the 1990s, artificial languages and codes were being used as a window into understanding different species’ cognitive abilities and to afford them choice and control in captive environments. In a study by Reiss and McCowan (1993), two young captive born male bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) and their mothers were given an underwater interactive system that afforded them some degree of choice and control in obtaining specific contingencies. The dolphins’ use of specific visual elements presented via on a 3 x 3 key matrix resulted in the production of computer generated whistles followed by the …

"Your Father’S Interests”: The Business Of Kinship In A Trans-Mediterranean Jewish Merchant Family, 1776–1790, Francesca Bregoli

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Genetic Basis Of Larval Crystal Cell Quantity Variation In The Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel (Dgrp), Brian Tang

Student Theses and Dissertations

Crystal cells are one of three requisite hemocytes that take part in fighting infection and wound healing in Drosophila melanogaster (common fruit flies). The developmental genetics of crystal cell formation is only beginning to be discovered. To address this question, we performed a Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) on larval crystal cell number from 78 isolines of the Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel (DGRP) collection. The DGRP consists of naturally caught fruit flies that are inbred to near homozygosity with completely sequenced genomes. By placing the wandering third instar larvae under heatshock, a process that induces the melanization of crystal cells, …

Social Banishment And The Us “Criminal Alien”: Norms Of Violence And Repression In The Deportation Regime, David C. Brotherton

Publications and Research

I interpret data from an ongoing participant observation study of deportation hearings in the North-East United States using two analytical themes: (i) the emergence of the deportation regime and its mechanisms of structural violence, and (ii) the norms of violence in the spaces of the deportation regime. By deportation regime I am referring to the institutional systems and practices created under the emergence of an exceptional security state and the discrete and not so discrete apparatuses and rituals employed to discipline the minds and bodies of documented and undocumented immigrant labor and the collateral consequences that result. Whereas structural violence …

An Investigation Of Predictors Of Self-Efficacy To Cope With Stress And Implications For Health Education Practice, Asrat G. Amnie

Publications and Research

ABSTRACT

Background: We investigated predictors of self-efficacy to cope with stress in diverse popula- tions with stressful life experiences. We also examined the association between predictors of coping self-efficacy and the different copying strategies adapted by study participants. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between sociodemo- graphic variables and individuals’ self-efficacy to cope with stress resulting from exposure to adverse life experiences. Methods: A total of 233 adult U.S. residents aged 18 years or above were recruited in a self-administered questionnaire survey study. Results: Regression results showed that male gender, older age, being non-white, not …

Predicting Serious Rare Adverse Reactions Of Novel Chemicals, Aleksandar Poleksic, Lei Xie

Publications and Research

Motivation: Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are one of the main causes of death and a major financial burden on the world's economy. Due to the limitations of the animal model, computational prediction of serious and rare ADRs is invaluable. However, current state-of-the-art computational methods do not yield significantly better predictions of rare ADRs than random guessing.

Results: We present a novel method, based on the theory of 'compressed sensing' (CS), which can accurately predict serious side-effects of candidate and market drugs. Not only is our method able to infer new chemical-ADR associations using existing noisy, biased and incomplete databases, but …

Maternal Choline Supplementation During Normal Murine Pregnancy Alters The Placental Epigenome: Results Of An Exploratory Study, Sze Ting (Cecilia) Kwan, Julia H. King, Jennifer K. Grenier, Jian Yan, Xinyin Jiang, Mark S. Roberson, Marie A. Caudill

Publications and Research

The placental epigenome regulates processes that affect placental and fetal development, and could be mediating some of the reported effects of maternal choline supplementation (MCS) on placental vascular development and nutrient delivery. As an extension of work previously conducted in pregnant mice, the current study sought to explore the effects of MCS on various epigenetic markers in the placenta. RNA and DNA were extracted from placentas collected on embryonic day 15.5 from pregnant mice fed a 1X or 4X choline diet, and were subjected to genome-wide sequencing procedures or mass-spectrometry-based assays to examine placental imprinted gene expression, DNA methylation patterns, …

The Ticker, March 26, 2018

The Ticker

The Ticker is the student newspaper of Baruch College. It has been published continuously since 1932, when the Baruch College campus was the School of Business and Civic Administration of the City College of New York.

The Ticker, March 19, 2018

The Ticker

The Ticker is the student newspaper of Baruch College. It has been published continuously since 1932, when the Baruch College campus was the School of Business and Civic Administration of the City College of New York.

Manipulation Of Ploidy In Caenorhabditis Elegans, Erlyana K. Clarke, Katherine A. Rivera Gomez, Zaki Mustachi, Mikaela C. Murph, Mara Schvarzstein

Advanced Science Research Center

Mechanisms that involve whole genome polyploidy play important roles in development and evolution; also, an abnormal generation of tetraploid cells has been associated with both the progression of cancer and the development of drug resistance. Until now, it has not been feasible to easily manipulate the ploidy of a multicellular animal without generating mostly sterile progeny. Presented here is a simple and rapid protocol for generating tetraploid Caenorhabditis elegans animals from any diploid strain. This method allows the user to create a bias in chromosome segregation during meiosis, ultimately increasing ploidy in C. elegans. This strategy relies on the transient …

The Ticker, March 12, 2018

The Ticker

The Ticker is the student newspaper of Baruch College. It has been published continuously since 1932, when the Baruch College campus was the School of Business and Civic Administration of the City College of New York.

Market Integration Predicts Human Gut Microbiome Attributes Across A Gradient Of Economic Development, Keaton Stagaman, Tara J. Cepon-Robins, Melissa A. Liebert, Theresa E. Gildner, Samuel S. Urlacher, Felicia C. Madimenos, Karen Guillemin, J. Josh Snodgrass, Lawrence S. Sugiyama, Brendan J. M. Bohannan

Publications and Research

Economic development is marked by dramatic increases in the incidence of microbiome-associated diseases, such as autoimmune diseases and metabolic syndromes, but the lifestyle changes that drive alterations in the human microbiome are not known. We measured market integration as a proxy for economically related lifestyle attributes, such as ownership of specific market goods that index degree of market integration and components of traditional and nontraditional (more modern) house structure and infrastructure, and profiled the fecal microbiomes of 213 participants from a contiguous, indigenous Ecuadorian population. Despite relatively modest differences in lifestyle across the population, greater economic development correlated with significantly …

A Computational Assessment Of Target Engagement In The Treatment Of Auditory Hallucinations With Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation, Won Hee Lee, Nigel I. Kennedy, Marom Bikson, Sophia Frangou

Publications and Research

We use auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) to illustrate the challenges in defining and assessing target engagement in the context of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) for psychiatric disorders. We defined the target network as the cluster of regions of interest (ROIs) that are consistently implicated in AVH based on the conjunction of multimodal meta-analytic neuroimaging data. These were prescribed in the New York Head (a population derived model) and head models of four single individuals. We appraised two potential measures of target engagement, tDCS-induced peak electric field strength and tDCS-modulated volume defined as the percentage of the volume of the …

The Ticker, February 20, 2018

The Ticker

The Ticker is the student newspaper of Baruch College. It has been published continuously since 1932, when the Baruch College campus was the School of Business and Civic Administration of the City College of New York.

The New Federal Budget And Higher Ed, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

The Roman Empire was one of the largest and most powerful regimes in human history, despite its many faults. Most historians will agree that the causes of why that empire fell were a combination of factors including, but not limited to, the invasion by the Barbarians from the north, the loss of traditional values, and military overspending.

Last week I reported in this column on how a fiscal shutdown of the federal government would affect higher education. Now that a two-year budget has passed, allowing the government to run until late March, we have a better idea of what is …

Spatial Relationship Between Bone Formation And Mechanical Stimulus Within Cortical Bone: Combining 3d Fluorochrome Mapping And Poroelastic Finite Element Modelling, Alessandra Carriero, A. F. Pereira, A. J. Wilson, S. Castagno, B. Javaheri, A. A. Pitsillides, M. Marenzana, S. J. Shefelbine

Publications and Research

Bone is a dynamic tissue and adapts its architecture in response to biological and mechanical factors. Here we investigate how cortical bone formation is spatially controlled by the local mechanical environment in the murine tibia axial loading model (C57BL/6). We obtained 3D locations of new bone formation by performing ‘slice and view’3D fluorochrome mapping of the entire bone and compared these sites with the regions of high fluid velocity or strain energy density estimated using a finite element model, validated with ex-vivo bone surface strain map acquired ex-vivo using digital image correlation. For the comparison, 2D maps of the average …

To Do Or Not To Do: Dopamine, Affordability And The Economics Of Opportunity, Jeff A. Beeler, Devry Mourra

Publications and Research

Five years ago, we introduced the thrift hypothesis of dopamine (DA), suggesting that the primary role of DA in adaptive behavior is regulating behavioral energy expenditure to match the prevailing economic conditions of the environment. Here we elaborate that hypothesis with several new ideas. First, we introduce the concept of affordability, suggesting that costs must necessarily be evaluated with respect to the availability of resources to the organism, which computes a value not only for the potential reward opportunity, but also the value of resources expended. Placing both costs and benefits within the context of the larger economy in which …

Retinal Progenitor Cells Release Extracellular Vesicles Containing Developmental Transcription Factors, Microrna And Membrane Proteins, Jing Zhou, Alberto Benito-Martin, Jason Mighty, Lynne Chang, Shima Ghoroghi, Hao Wu, Madeline Wong, Sara Guariglia, Petr Baranov, Michael Young, Rajendra Ghardbaran, Mark Emerson, Milica Tesic Mark, Henrik Molina, M. Valeria Canto-Solar, Hector Peinado Selgas, Stephen Redenti

Publications and Research

A range of cell types, including embryonic stem cells, neurons and astrocytes have been shown to release extracellular vesicles (EVs) containing molecular cargo. Across cell types, EVs facilitate transfer of mRNA, microRNA and proteins between cells. Here we describe the release kinetics and content of EVs from mouse retinal progenitor cells (mRPCs). Interestingly, mRPC derived EVs contain mRNA, miRNA and proteins associated with multipotency and retinal development. Transcripts enclosed in mRPC EVs, include the transcription factors Pax6, Hes1, and Sox2, a mitotic chromosome stabilizer Ki67, and the neural intermediate filaments Nestin and GFAP. Proteomic analysis of EV content revealed retinogenic …

Teaching Occupational Outlook Handbook For Students In Career Development: A Lesson Plan, Junli Diao

Open Educational Resources

This lesson plan is designed for a 60-minute information literacy class to teach students who are taking SD110 (Student Development 110) at York College, City University of New York. The goal of this class is to facilitate SD110 students to effectively engage themselves in finding and evaluating information regarding career and vocational development.

Neonatal Stimulation Of Pkc Epsilon Signaling Normalizes Fragile X-Associated Deficits In Pvn Oxytocin Expression And Later-Life Social And Anxiety Behavior, Alexandra E. Marsillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Fragile X Syndrome (FXS) is an inherited developmental disorder characterized by disturbances in emotional and social behavior. Our studies have revealed suppressed hippocampal PKCε expression in Fmr1 knockout (KO) mice, the leading model of FXS. To compensate for this deficiency, we stimulated PKCε in neonatal KO mice by administering a selective PKCε activator, dicyclopropyl-linoleic acid (DCP-LA), and studied its effect on ventral hippocampal neurons and a proximal target of the ventral hippocampus, the hypothalamus, which regulates social and emotional behavior. We observed that at postnatal day 18 (P18), vehicle-treated KO mice displayed increased surface localization of the 3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolepropionic acid (AMPA) …

The Way We Dream Now: History, Theory, And Lgbtq Memoir In America, Megan Paslawski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines American memoirs written after 2000 by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer authors with an eye to how the recent institutionalization of queer theory and the open production of LGBTQ histories affect these writers’ conceptions of their lives, aspirations, and cultures. I argue that these memoirs, sometimes consciously, find themselves struggling with what are also competing ideas within queer theory about the queerness of futurity even as they turn to the past of queer/trans literature and history to bolster their senses of possible identities and communities. This often has the effect of positioning contemporary LGBTQ writers as …

Collaborative Appearance-Based Place Recognition And Improving Place Recognition Using Detection Of Dynamic Objects, Juan Pablo Munoz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation makes contributions to the problem of Long-Term Appearance-Based Place Recognition. We present a framework for place recognition in a collaborative scheme and a method to reduce the impact of dynamic objects on place representations. We demonstrate our findings using a state-of-the-art place recognition approach.

We begin in Part I by describing the general problem of place recognition and its importance in applications where accurate localization is crucial. We discuss feature detection and description and also explain the functioning of several place recognition frameworks.

In Part II, we present a novel framework for collaboration between agents from a pure …

Discovery And Development Of A Three-Component Oxidopyrylium Cycloaddition And Its Application Towards Alpha-Hydroxytropolone Synthesis, Michael P. D'Erasmo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Historically, natural products have provided unique research opportunities and challenges for organic synthesis, chemical biology, and medicinal chemistry due to their molecular complexity and effects on physiological systems. The total synthesis of natural products has not only produced novel reaction methods and strategies capable of efficiently generating complex structural motifs but also granted access to sufficient quantities of otherwise scarce natural product material for clinical evaluation. These synthetic efforts have facilitated the formation of a transdisciplinary partnership between chemistry, biology, and medicine that has been paramount in elucidating the chemical and pharmaceutical utility of natural products. Chapter I of this …

Female Autistic Perspectives: Limits In Diagnosis And Understanding, Alexandra Helmers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder has increased dramatically within the last two decades, with males being diagnosed, on average, four to five times more than females. Although researchers in the medical community have searched for a biological explanation for this discrepancy, no definitive cause has been found. I argue that our understanding of autism is primarily a social and cultural construction, in addition to a diagnosable medical disorder. The gender disparity in diagnosis reflects cultural narratives surrounding social interaction and the widespread belief in two distinct gender roles. Furthermore, narratives surrounding the topic of autism tend to unintentionally highlight …

“For Us, By Us": The Boondocks, Black Agency, And Black Spatial Reclamation In Comics, Luana Horry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper will construct a literary analysis of The Boondocks comic collections—syndicated from 1999-2006—that will demonstrate Aaron McGruder’s use of the theoretical concept of Black agency, as it relates to literature, birthed from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and the contemporary #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement. Not existing in a vacuum, Aaron McGruder’s comic strip is an important result of and reaction to Black literary thought produced during the 1920s and 1960s movements. Furthermore, The Boondocks is a precursor to the publishing industry’s #WeNeedDiverseBooks countermovement. The connecting thread between each distinctive movement and McGruder’s work …