Understanding the Impact of Fluid Viscosity on the Growth and Conjugation of Antimicrobial Resistant Donors and Recipients Pairs

To combat the spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), it is vital to link the behavior of donor and recipient bacteria in dynamic environments to horizontal gene transfer (HGT) potential- specifically, conjugation the primary means of spread of AMR genes. However, HGT is poorly understood under dynamic conditions, such as those in the gut of humans and animals. Most experiments are done under static conditions at viscosities similar to water, but these methods do not accurately represent the higher gut viscosities or movement. Hence, a next step to increase understanding of conjugation is with experiments using generic donor and recipient pairs at different viscosities. Accordingly, it is necessary to establish the relationship between viscosity and bacterial growth in these experiments, for which our hypothesis is that the rate of bacterial growth in fluids with higher viscosities will be lower due to water displacement. To test this hypothesis, experiments were designed to measure the number of donors, recipients and transconjugant bacteria using optical density. Varying concentrations of the thickeners agar and xanthan gum will be used to achieve different viscosity levels in the media. Media of thicknesses closer to that of bodily fluids, which are more alike to pancake syrup or batter, will be evaluated. Concentrations will be tracked at half hour intervals as a means to obtain data and to formulate a growth curve model. Some preliminary results indicate that our hypothesis has a good probability of being correct. Linear growth curve models were applied to the data for comparison purposes

Administrator's Perceptions of Student Success and its Impact on School and School Board Strategic Plans

Strategic planning is a contentious term that is used by many but understood by few. The words ‘strategic planning’ can mean a variety of differing purposes, processes, and outcomes. This study will draw upon literature in the field of educational strategic planning to propose a framework that can be used to analyze and sort strategic plans based on the underlying purposes, processes, and outcomes. The preliminary Mitchell Educational Strategic Planning Framework identifies educational strategic plans as either a rational plan or a futures plan, while accounting for the political climate in which the plan is created and carried out. This research study focuses on the creation and use of School Improvement Plans (SIPs) by one non-practicing elementary school principal in a southern-Ontario school board. The data is collected through a semi-structured interview, where the participant discusses his philosophy of education, how he uses SIPs to achieve his goals, and how his beliefs about student success and strategic planning differ from those of his supervisory officer. The data reveals a gap in the preliminary Framework. The participant was able to successfully use elements of both rational and futures planning when creating his SIPs. He identified that doing so was difficult, and requires a skill that few principals have. This ‘skill’, informed by data from this research and supplementary literature, has been defined as “the skill of alignment of school and non- school factors”. To incorporate this new information, the Mitchell Educational Strategic Planning Framework has been modified and updated. Future research will apply the Mitchell Educational Strategic Planning Framework to existing educational strategic plans. The skill of alignment will also be further investigated

The Claremont Autism Center

The Claremont Autism Center is a 23 minute documentary on the strengths and benefits the Center brings to Claremont McKenna students, as well as children and families from the Inland Empire that deal with Autism on a daily basis

Remote sensing of spatio-temporal relationships between the partitioned absorption coefficients of phytoplankton cells and mineral particles and euphotic zone depths in a partially mixed shelf sea

AbstractAbsorption coefficients for mineral particles and phytoplankton cells in the 488nm waveband, aMSS(488) and aCHL(488), and euphotic zone depths, z1%PAR, were determined for the Irish Sea and St. George's Channel from 8years of MODIS remote sensing reflectance observations. The results are presented as composite maps of the entire region for the months of January, April, July and October and as time series averaged over 2week intervals for three selected locations representing different mixing regimes. Annual cycles in aMSS(488) were observed in most areas, with maximum values occurring in winter when increased vertical mixing brought fine sediments to the surface. Euphotic depths were strongly influenced by aMSS(488) cycles, but sharp reductions were superimposed wherever phytoplankton blooms occurred. A key hydrographic feature of this region is the formation of a front in St. George's Channel between mixed and seasonally stratified water bodies. On the mixed side of the front, single peaks in aCHL(488) were observed in summer when the euphotic zone was at its deepest. On the stratified side, double peaks in aCHL(488) occurred in spring and autumn while low summer values of aCHL(488) coincided with high values of z1%PAR. The remote sensing evidence indicates, therefore, that phytoplankton growth (as reflected by net accumulation at the surface) in summer was limited by light availability in mixed waters, and nutrient availability in the stratified region. We conclude that observations of spatio-temporal patterns in phytoplankton and mineral particle absorption coefficients and euphotic depths derived from ocean colour sensors can provide insights into the processes determining the depth of penetration of solar radiation, and also the factors limiting near-surface primary production, in optically complex and spatially heterogeneous shelf seas

Multifractal analysis of measures arising from random substitutions

Funding: AM was supported by EPSRC DTP and the University of Birmingham. AR was supported by EPSRC Grant EP/V520123/1 and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.We study regularity properties of frequency measures arising from random substitutions, which are a generalisation of (deterministic) substitutions where the substituted image of each letter is chosen independently from a fixed finite set. In particular, for a natural class of such measures, we derive a closed-form analytic formula for the Lq -spectrum and prove that the multifractal formalism holds. This provides an interesting new class of measures satisfying the multifractal formalism. More generally, we establish results concerning the Lq -spectrum of a broad class of frequency measures. We introduce a new notion called the inflation word Lq -spectrum of a random substitution and show that this coincides with the Lq -spectrum of the corresponding frequency measure for all q ≥ 0. As an application, we obtain closed-form formulas under separation conditions and recover known results for topological and measure theoretic entropy.Peer reviewe

Thermal Transport Study on Actinide Oxides using Phonon Density of States Calculation

The thermophysical properties of nuclear fuels being developed in generation IV nuclear reactors are still being widely examined since the reactor’s operating performance is strongly correlated to the thermal transport properties of the fuel source. In this research, phonon density of states (DOS) are estimated for uranium dioxide (UO2), thorium dioxide (ThO2), and plutonium dioxide (PuO2) as these are all significant representations of the actinide oxide family. The crystalline structures of these fuels are altered to contain point defects in the form of primary atom vacancies, oxygen vacancies, and uranium substitution. Primary atom and oxygen vacancies involve a set percentage (0.1%, 0.5%, 1%, 2%, and 5%) of atoms being removed from the lattice structure of each fuel, while the uranium substitution in ThO2 and PuO2 replaces a set percentage of primary atoms with uranium-238 atoms. Phonon DOS are plotted using molecular dynamics simulations and the Fourier transform of the velocity autocorrelation function of atoms. The results show that phonon DOS is altered greatly by the presence of any form of vacancy defects; a significant change in DOS is observed in low frequency regime (~20 meV) where most of important energy carriers (phonons) are activated, and this explains the significant reduction in thermal conductivity in nuclear fuels by vacancy defects. Also, it is found that the change in phonon DOS by oxygen vacancies is smaller than that by primary atom vacancies, supporting our previous results that showed that the thermal conductivity is reduced by primary atom vacancies more than by oxygen vacancies. The most interesting observation is made on nuclear fuels with uranium substitution that shows very little variance in phonon DOS; the very small decrease in the thermal conductivities of PuO2 and ThO2 by uranium substitution results from their minimal alteration to lattice vibration

A Study of Single Pulses in the Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey

We reprocessed the Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey, searching for single pulses out to a DM of 5000 pc cm$^{-3}$ with widths of up to one second. We recorded single pulses from 264 known pulsars and 14 Rotating Radio Transients. We produced amplitude distributions for each pulsar which we fit with log-normal distributions, power-law tails, and a power-law function divided by an exponential function, finding that some pulsars show a deviation from a log-normal distribution in the form of an excess of high-energy pulses. We found that a function consisting of a power-law divided by an exponential fit the distributions of most pulsars better than either log-normal or power-law functions. For pulsars that were detected in a periodicity search, we computed the ratio of their single-pulse signal-to-noise ratios to their signal-to-noise ratios from a Fourier transform and looked for correlations between this ratio and physical parameters of the pulsars. The only correlation found is the expected relationship between this ratio and the spin period. Fitting log-normal distributions to the amplitudes of pulses from RRATs showed similar behaviour for most RRATs. Here, however, there seem to be two distinct distributions of pulses, with the lower-energy distribution being consistent with noise. Pulse-energy distributions for two of the RRATS processed were consistent with those found for normal pulsars, suggesting that pulsars and RRATs have a common emission mechanism, but other factors influence the specific emission properties of each source class.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in MNRA