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- All Subjects: Culture
- Creators: School of International Letters and Cultures
- Creators: College of Integrative Sciences and Arts
For the Love of the Game is a 15-minute documentary highlighting what the culture of soccer is like in Spain. Filmed completely in Valencia, Spain, this short film shows the actual atmosphere of everyday soccer. People of all ages and backgrounds give depth into what it's like to grow up in Spain with and fall in love with the game.
As Clifford Geertz describes it, culture is comprised of the social structures of which we attach significance to that ultimately gives our lives meaning. In the case of Taiwan, a 20th century democratic revolution, coupled with the introduction of modernism into Taiwanese literature, attaches significance to feelings of nostalgia, the importance of memories, and the struggle to find one's personal identity in a rapidly changing environment. This essay explores these themes under the guise of Bai Xian-Yong's "Taipei People" and Zhu Tian-Xin's "The Old Capital." Despite being written nearly forty years apart, these two books use modernist storytelling to directly challenge each other's idea of the Taiwanese collective consciousness, which greatly contributes to the narration of the formation of Taiwanese culture post-1949. What emerges from a tumultuous 20th century is an assured, independent Taiwanese culture that both accepts foreign influence and also expresses a distinct personality.
Protein and gene circuit level synthetic bioengineering can require years to develop a single target. Phage assisted continuous evolution (PACE) is a powerful new tool for rapidly engineering new genes and proteins, but the method requires an automated cell culture system, making it inaccessible to non industrial research programs. Complex protein functions, like specific binding, require similarly dynamic PACE selection that can be alternatively induced or suppressed, with heat labile chemicals like tetracycline. Selection conditions must be controlled continuously over days, with adjustments made every few minutes. To make PACE experiments accessible to the broader community, we designed dedicated cell culture hardware and integrated optogenetically controlled plasmids. The low cost and open source platform allows a user to conduct PACE with continuous monitoring and precise control of evolution using light.