Polycyclic Kidney Disease-AP Biology assignment

Polycyclic Kidney Disease is commonly called as PKD or PCKD and caused by a mistake in the DNA, the basic code of genetics in the body. Basic symptoms of PKD include multiple cysts growing in the kidneys which resemble a small circular ball filled with watery fluid. The cysts in kidney vary in size from pinhead to a radius of 2cm. As disease gets more progressed, each cyst gets bigger and bigger, making kidneys very large. The phenotype appearance of Polycyclic Kidney Disease is Kidneys looking like as if they have numerous small balls stuck together in it. Patients can have dangerously high blood pressure (hypertension), pain in the back or sides, blood in the urine (hematuria), continuous infections in urinary tract, kidney stones and heart valve abnormalities. They also have a high possibility of abnormal bulging (aneurysm) in a large blood vessel called the aorta or in ones at the base of the brain. In short words, PKD is a life-threatening disease. There are generally two types of this disease: Autosomal Dominant Polycyclic Kidney Disease (ADPKD) and Autosomal Recessive Polycyclic Kidney Disease (ARPKD). As it can be inferred from the names of these diseases, individuals with one mutant copy of the gene (PKD1 or PKD2) develop ADPKD and individuals with both copies of the mutated gene develop ARPKD. The occurrence of ADPKD is 1 to 2:1,000 live births and the occurrence of ARPKD is 1:20,000 live births. In fact, Polycyclic Kidney Disease is the most widespread life-threatening genetic disease, affecting about 12.5 million people in the world.

Mutations in the PKD1, PKD2, and PKHD1 genes cause polycystic kidney disease. Mutations in either the PKD1 or PKD2 gene can cause Autosomal Dominant Polycystic Kidney Disease (ADPKD). These genes provide instructions for making proteins, but their   functions are not yet fully understood. Researchers believe that they are involved in transmitting chemical signals from outside the cell to the cell's nucleus. In normal circumstances, proteins work together to promote normal kidney development, organization, and function. Mutations in the PKD1 or PKD2 gene lead to the formation of thousands of cysts, which disturbs proper functions of the kidneys. People with mutations in the PKD2 gene, especially women, typically have a less severe form of the disease than people with PKD1 mutations. The signs and symptoms including a malfunction of kidney tend to appear later in people having a PKD2 mutation.

Mutations in the PKHD1 gene cause Autosomal Recessive Polycystic Kidney Disease (ARPKD). Same as the genes mentioned above, PKHD1 gene provides instructions for generating proteins whose exact function is also not known. Scientists have not found how mutations in the PKHD1 gene lead to the symptoms of polycystic kidney disease.

In the website http://pkdb.mayo.edu/cgi-bin/mutations.cgi, there is a mutation database for Autosomal Dominant Polycystic Kidney Disease (ADPKD). Here, we can find mutation types of each gene causing ADPKD: PKD1 and PKD2. In the case of PKD1, the most common mutation types are frameshift, IVS silent and synonymous. It is also shown that in all cases of frameshift, the clinical significance is ‘definitely pathogenic’; whereas in all cases of IVS silent and synonymous, the clinical significance is ‘likely neutral’. For PKD2, the most common mutation types are frameshift and nonsense. Both types of mutation lead to ‘definitely pathogenic’ clinical significance. It can be concluded that frameshift is the most common type of mutation causing Autosomal Dominant Polycyclic Kidney Disease and it leads to detrimental result.

From the basic concepts that I learned from AP Biology class, insertions and deletions, which are additions or losses of nucleotides in a gene, cause frameshift mutation that generate a serious malfunction. Nonsense is also one of the examples in which serious abnormalities occur. Regarding this in mind, we can easily understand that frameshift and nonsense, which is the most common mutation types of PKD2, lead to ‘definitely pathogenic’ result. On the other hand, we can find out that IVS silent, which is a lower category of silent, generates ‘likely neutral’ result. Considering that silent has no effect on amino acid sequence, the ‘likely neutral’ result of IVS silent is also understandable.

<References>

http://www.kidney.org.uk/Medical-Info/kidney-disease/pckd.html

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/nephrology/pkd.html

http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/polycystic-kidney-disease

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/polycystic-kidney-disease/DS00245

http://pkdb.mayo.edu/cgi-bin/mutations.cgi

Owl CIty-Assignment for my art class

     Among different courses I take in this school, art class, which is taught by Mr. Ahn (Sangjun Ahn) is definitely one of the most awaited classes. In previous semester, we learned some basic Photoshop skills that we can utilize for editing our pictures. Students acquired how to use several Photoshop features by actually applying them to photos we took individually. Although our art class can be seen as somewhat floopy and loose without any feelings of burden, it is really wasting our time if we do not pay attention or just do other things by laptop in the class.

     During this 2nd semester, Mr. Ahn gave us two assignments; the first one was to create parody piece on Rene Magritte’s ‘The Human Condition’ (La Condition Humaine) and the second one, whose deadline was actually yesterday, was to create an album cover of a music artist. So…when Mr. Ahn announced this in the class, I started to think…’whose album cover should I make?? MIKA, Simple Plan, Owl City…all my favourite artists or groups slided through my brain. Hmm…Who should I choose??? During this moment, I was listening to music in my iPhone MP3’s ‘Pop’ list. Suddenly, one of my favorite music, Owl City’s ‘Hot Air Balloon’ turned on, and I was decided. I decided to make an album cover of Owl City, one of my favourite American Pop artists.

     As we all know, an album cover of artists should portray them inside, showing some characteristics of their music. So, what about Owl City? One of the biggest characteristics of his songs is his unique voice and poetic lyrics. His voice is quite soft, and it is well harmonized with such a wonderful lyrics. For example, in the song ‘Hot Air Balloon’ there is a part where it says ‘We wrote a prelude to our own fairy tale/ and bout a parachute/ at a church rummage sale/ and with a mean sewing machine and miles of thread/ we sewed the day above L.A. in navy and red’. Actually, all other songs of Owl City have just these kinds of great lyrics. One should definitely listen to them since it’s a bit indescribable. Also, in most songs, Owl City uses autotune, which is commonly used to give a special vocal effect. Especially in K-POPs, a lot of artists use autotune to snap their voice in the middle of the song; it is quite annoying when autotunes are used too much for this purpose. However, Owl City’s music is completely different. He uses autotune in a way that does not disturb the flow of his voice. Again, it is harmonized well with his own voice, creating a sentimental or ‘dreamlike’ effect. So you can basically get how Owl City’s music are like…but don’t forget to listen to them!

     In order to convey these styles of Owl City, I started to wonder. First, I choosed to use a photo of sky with some clouds as a background image. I actually took some new pictures, but one that I found most adequate was one that I took during last summer vacation. I cut my photos to make it into a square shape and changed its overall tone by using basic features of Photoshop. Then, as you can see from my piece, I inserted a word ‘OWL CITY’. This was actually where I spent most of the time with. Especially, I was struggling with which font to use, but no single fonts in Photoshop pleased me, so I decided to download some nice fonts from internet sites. (If you go to some sites such as www.fontspace.com, you can find tons of fabulous fonts!). After finishing my work with letters, I wanted to decorate my pictures with airplanes (specifically paper airplanes haha), so guess what I’ve done! I’ve just put three paper-airplanes-looking shape. Then, I decorated my cover with a star-shaped brush tools by dotting them on the piece. I guess this assignment is the best among what I’ve done during a year of my art class. How do you think? Well, I am quite satisfied about having completed my album cover successfully! 

20 years later...

Date: 18 July 2031
Weather: very sunny, mild and charming

     After several days of rain, sunshine is finally here! This morning, I woke up in a pleasant summer breeze of Geneva with my 7’o clock alarm. Summer days are so wonderful here. Crystal-blue lake, soft sunshine and vibrant streets…All these make my life in Geneva so magnificent! Well, compared to hot and humid summer days of Baltimore which I had to bear with during my university days in Johns Hopkins, living in Geneva is always delightful!

Today was such a busy day. I had to give an important presentation about new kinds of rare diseases raging in West Africa in front of other staffs in our WHO committee. Since I entered WHO headquarters in Geneva, I have worked in the committee researching rare diseases in the 3^rd world. Last year, several staffs of our committee went to African countries such as Guinea and Nigeria in order to carry out important project. Today, I had to present the progress of our project, so I was quite a bit nervous in the morning.

After arriving at my workplace, WHO headquarter, I prepared and got ready for 2 hours of presentation. At 10 in the morning, as it was all planned, all other people came and I started my presentation with coworkers. I indeed was a bit nervous, worrying what would happen if I do not successfully present my valuable results. After presentation, there was a Q&A session. It was such a hard job to manage answering to all the sharp questions…phew! Thinking of last past days that I stayed up all night, I felt somewhat relieved when this huge task was over. In fact, our presentation turned out to be very successful! During lunch, the chair of our committee praised me for such a sincere work. How great!

Preparing for the presentation made me remind about past years I had spent in Johns Hopkins University. For my public health course, monthly presentation and term papers got me just CRAZY…but from a different standpoint, this course really helped me to deal with such works in my fields. These days, it is such a normal task to contact with regional headquarters of WHO around the world, make a report or carry out research. My tough university life at Johns Hopkins actually trained me to become a great staff in one of the world’s biggest international organization.

By the way, I’m now packing up for my business trip to Montréal. Tomorrow morning, I will depart for Montréal to visit Health Canada(Santé Canada) offices in Montréal and Ottawa. I also have to conduct some interview with local. In Montréal, I guess I have to carry out interviews in French…it might be hard but I’ve continued studying French and  currently living in a francophone city, Genève, I believe my French would be of no problem! Anyway, since it’s already 11pm and I have to wake up at 6 in the morning for the flight schedule, I have to go to bed. Hope my business trip to Canada works successfully!

TED-Lauren Zalaznick: The conscience of television

     We all acknowledge that human beings are highly social animals, even to the extent of making this statement somewhat banal. In other words, communication takes a huge role in people’s daily lives; we talk together, scan through internet news, get curious about other’s lives and go to facebook. Regardless of how we communicate, we interact with people everyday, whether consciously or unconsciously. Among all different means of communication, television is such an pivotal medium considering how much time ordinary people spend on watching television. This is probably why Lauren Zalaznick, a chairman of NBC Universal Media, decided to talk about its surprising and influencing characteristic: being consciousness.

     In her provocative speech, Lauren Zalaznick states that television has a conscience, the complex of ethical and moral principles that controls or inhibits the actions or thoughts of an individual. The underlying, and tenacious reason for this is that television directly reflects the moral, political, social and emotional need states of a nation, being used in the process of disseminating people’s entire value system (In this case the word ‘nation’ would refer to the United States). With tangible statistics and graphs that facilitate the understanding of her speech, she shows how TV had such a strong connection with its society for the past 50 years. For relevant example, in the graph showing a relationship between the employment rate of United States and the number of fantasy-related TV programs, the lines of two variables were shown to be parallel, implying people want more take-me-out-of-reality shows as their everyday life gets harsher.

     The significance of her presentation is that it elaborates TV is not just a stationary, indifferent, gray-colored and square-shaped box that people watch with potato chips grabbed in their hand; rather, it is alive, being a medium which plays a great role in helping interactions between actual society and people’s value system. TV program schedules do change in accordance with what people desire to watch; social-commentary shows were popular during 1970s where Vietnam wars and Nixon administration took place. People wanted more news and judgment-related programs than comedies after 2001 fall. These evidences clearly elaborate how TV maintains strong connections and shares interaction with society. 

     However, during the speech, I was curious and quite skeptical about one thing: Is conscience a characteristic which only television possesses among all different form of media? Aren’t all kinds of media have consciousness? In my opinion, other media such as internet or newspapers are all uniformly consciousness too; conscience is not something that only television has. There are tons of innumerable examples, but to exemplify very lucidly, we can take a look at newspapers during election period. Several pages are dedicated to deliver different information about candidates, voting results and people’s reaction. These are what people exactly want to know about during election period. Scrutinizing through the example, ‘conscience’ is a universal characteristic of all different kinds of media.

     Personally, I was profoundly impressed by the research study that Lauren Zalaznick carried out which prevented her concise speech from being abstract and tedious. She said “We went back 50 years to the 1960 television season. We surveyed the top-20 Neilson shows every year for 50 years, a thousand shows. We talked to over 3000 individuals aged 18 to 70 and we asked them how they felt emotionally.” What a nice research done! I appreciate the effort she had to put in order to complete this huge research. To sum up, all media, including television, is a conscious and animated passage which connects the whole society and its members.

Direction

This is a photo I took 1 year ago, when preparing for KMLA
It was took by my old, non-DSLR camera

Sometimes, I feel like I don't know where I'm heading for

It feels like my direction is lost...

but looking at this photo, I remember how I tried hard in order to come here

with such a straight objective

just like these rails in the photo above

A year has already passed

and during KMLA life, 

I had several moments where I got discouraged and lost my direction 

but from now on,

 I hope I can always have my direction straight and forward

1st reading journal on 'The Body'

     “So anyway, you want to go see it?”

      “We can find the body and report it! We’ll be on the news!”

     The excitement surrounds the boys. They gather together, and decide to begin a journey to search a dead body. This is what the beginning of the story ‘The Body’ is about, with some basic information about main characters, which are boys in this story. In fact, Teddie, Gordie and Chris all have different characteristics that individualize each of them. Teddie is depicted as somewhat weak and intellectually deficient in the story. During his childhood, he gets hit by his father several times, which eventually leads him to become deaf. Gordie is born in a ‘fucked-up family’, from very old parents who experience several miscarried pregnancies. He had a brother, but his brother eventually dies. Chris, a boy who had previously been suspended from school, also gets hit by his dad; he came from a bad family. All these three boys gather together and head for a site where Ray Browser was hit by a train.

     Reading this ‘intro’ part stimulated my innocence of childhood and evoked my memory. When I was in elementary school, I hanged out with my close friends almost everyday after school. We just laughed, forgot about returning to home, and searched for a place where we could play and have lots of fun. At first, I thought ‘Apt Pupil’ is more of a fun, but I believe this adventure story is also interesting enough. Adventures are always fun, and it will be great to follow how the story continues.

Review-Pentax k-r, a nice DSLR

     

     As being a member of “Through The Lens”, one and only photo club in our school, I always enjoyed taking pictures and doing Photoshop to make them look nice. But during couple months of the first semester, I had only used non-DSLR camera, since I did not have any DSLRs. I was wondering when I could buy that fancy, nice-looking DSLR, and in July, I finally bought one after careful consideration. It is “Pentax K-r”, and I want to show my opinion and review on this DSLR, also with how others think about this camera. Well, I’m neither a professional photographer nor a digital camera critic. This review is just based on my personal feelings, as an ordinary high school student who is interested in taking photos. So ENJOY!

1. Design (10/10)

     Many people would question whether design plays an important role in choosing a camera. Well, for me, design really is what I consider very important in choosing products such as cell phones or laptops, and there is no such exception for cameras. In fact, one of the biggest reason that I choosed this model is its stylish and noticeable colors and designs. Almost all DSLR cameras are in black. Nikon, Canon, Sony and etc… DSLR cameras of these brands are all black, offering no other color choice for customers. However, after taking a glance at the advertisement of ‘Pentax K-r’, I was just captivated by its white-colored body and compact design. In Korea, ‘Pentax k-r’ is offered in three colors; Black, white and pink. For me, a great fan of white-colored products, it seemed as a great decision to purchase this model. Plus, the body itself is much smaller to other DSLR models, being so attractive to those who are reluctant to use DSLR cameras due to their big body sizes. Overall, the design of ‘Pentax k-r’ is quite a bit revolutionary, and I definitely recommend this camera to customers who not only care about the features but also pay a close attention to the product’s design.

2. Basic Features-Hardware (8/10)

     Now, here comes the most fundamental and important criteria in deciding which camera to buy for most of the people. The biggest resolution of the image is 4288 x 2848, which is not outstanding but normal, compared to other models in the market. Also, it is possible to take videos by ‘Pentax K-r’, a function that some DSLR does not provide. One great advantage of this camera is its function to prevent ‘shaking hands’ (In Korean, it is ‘손떨림방지’, but I don’t get how to put it accurately in English haha) When taking photos, it is easy to have your hands shaking which makes the resulting photo blurry. Especially in the dark environment where the shutter speed is really slow, ‘shaking hands’ problem is quite annoying. However, the body of ‘Pentax K-r’ has a function of preventing ‘shaking hands’, helping photos to not become too blurry. Compared to other brands in which this function is not included in the body itself but need special lens, this is a great advantage! Above all, I would say that the overall functions are definitely above expectation, regarding its reasonable price!

3. Basic Features-photos (9/10)

     Here, I would like to talk more about the pictures. What I really notice about this camera is that the resulting pictures give a strong, full-of-color and vivid feeling that we do not necessarily need Photoshop processing after taking photos. The colors are definitely well-expressed, but I guess people who do not prefer strong colors could be unhappy with this. Beyond that, ‘Pentax k-r’ has a unique function called ‘Cross Processor’, which gives a change to image’s overall color tone. (Searching on Internet, this function is only provided by the brand ‘Pentax’) I think this function is quite useful to amateur users who want to give some special effect to the photo. Also for people who do not enjoy using Photoshop, these unique characteristics of ‘Pentax K-r’ can remove some burden of photo revision process.

(Can you get how the 'Cross Processor' works?)

4. Overall...

     I do like my DSLR, which has all these nice features...but in all cases drawbacks exist. For example, I sometimes feel that 'Pentax K-r' has too loud shutter sound. Still, If I were to give a score out of 10, I would give 9 to this DSLR model. Well, I hope you guys all have enjoyed my review and this can help you actually decide what DSLR to buy...haha