The Wilson Loop in Yang-Mills Theory in the General Axial Gauge

We test the unified-gauge formalism by computing a Wilson loop in Yang-Mills theory to one-loop order. The unified-gauge formalism is characterized by the abritrary, but fixed, four-vector $N_\mu$, which collectively represents the light-cone gauge $(N^2 = 0)$, the temporal gauge $(N^2 > 0)$, the pure axial gauge $(N^2 < 0)$ and the planar gauge $(N^2 < 0)$. A novel feature of the calculation is the use of distinct sets of vectors, $\{ n_{\mu}, n_{\mu}^{\ast} \}$ and $\{N_{\mu}, N_{\mu}^{\ast}\}$, for the path and for the gauge-fixing constraint, respectively. The answer for the Wilson loop is independent of $N_{\mu}$, and agrees numerically with the result obtained in the Feymman gauge.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

A Pedagogy of Process: Using Arts Based Research With Community Development Co-Researchers to Explore Campus Community Dialogue

This thesis will outline how I employed an arts informed participatory research process with four women members of the Southend family resource centre in Wexford town. The primary context for this research was the introduction of a module in community based learning on the BA (hons) in Art at the Wexford Campus of I.T. Carlow combined with a desire to participate more actively in the community sector outside the campus. The choice of an arts based methodology was to capture knowledge in a multifaceted way, to give depth to the many meanings of individual experiences and finally to suggest a living form of enquiry. In chapter 2, I survey what I see as the primary theoretical foundations of literature on arts based research and build a conceptual bridge between critical pedagogy, dialogical aesthetics and post-structuralist hermeneutics. Chapter 3 looks in detail at recent scholarship related to arts based research as a tool for educational research. A focus for this study has been to try and gather as much knowledge about visual arts based collaborative/participatory approaches in action research based educational practices and community development practices. In chapter 4 I show how I have considered, navigated, analysed and reported on the research artifacts and conversations with my co participants from the Southend Family Resource Centre. In this study, I found that making images with the team was a very good way of allowing all of us operate at the same level of the research process. Chapter 5 concludes the study with observations on arts based research and the presentation of an action plan for future collaboration and conversations. Overall I found this arts based research process was collaborative and creative as opposed to inquisitive, pressurised, and univocal. I believe the evidence presented recommends that this process can develop as an interpretative and qualitative approach for educational research beyond the confines of the campus

Modeling connectivity in landscape genetics: applications, optimization and assessing uncertainty

Connectivity modeling and corridor identification are an essential part of landscape genetics and important tools for the future of conservation biology. The previous decade has shown a steadily increasing interest and rise in publications in landscape genetics. This enthusiasm has led to advances in the methods and theoretical background of the field; however, there remain important, yet unresolved, challenges. Many of these are related to validation and uncertainty testing for resistance surfaces (hypotheses of connectivity). These fundamental issues need to be addressed before landscape genetics can gain the full recognition of a scientific discipline such as population genetics or landscape ecology. The results herein not only describe the application of traditional landscape genetic techniques to empirical data, but also explore two new major approaches to improving connectivity modeling and corridor identification. In the first new approach, general theory is advanced using resistant kernel modeling by assessing a wide range of potential resistance surfaces to broadly model species distribution, connectivity, and response to habitat fragmentation and loss. Resistant kernel models allow generality across several species based on abiotic (human footprint) and life-history traits (dispersal ability and population size) for the entire Western United States. The second approach is to introduce a genetic algorithm for optimizing the process of resistance map fitting to empirical data. Optimization has three benefits. The first is removing the potential bias of expert opinion. The second is making possible multimethod evaluations of model uncertainty using different statistical tests, genetic distance metrics, and connectivity models. Lastly, optimization allows one to compare a large number of models enabling sensitivity analysis testing (e.g. leave-one-out populations, loci, or individuals). Together optimization and sensitivity analysis provide better, and more consistent, identification of landscape corridors and illustrate where models fail due to sensitivity to noisy genetic data. Described herein is a more rigorous framework of resistance map fitting and testing to help alleviate drawing faulty inferences in landscape genetic studies

Development of a Constructivist Model for Teacher Inservice.

In this paper, we consider a model for teacher inservice that is informed by constructlvlsm. Initially, we consider the criteria for identifying conceptual change, briefly examine research on the roles which teachers engage in when implementing innovations, and describing different knowledge bases needed m usmg teaching approaches informed by constructivist referents. Secondly, we describe an inservice programme for science teachers in one high school, and thirdly show how a five-stage model to introduce teaching/learning approaches informed by constructivism was developed

Limited Maternal Gene Flow Amongst Elk in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem Revealed by Mitochondrial DNA

We quantified maternal patterns of population genetic structure to help understand gene flow among elk (Cervus elaphus) populations across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. We sequenced 596 base pairs of the mitochondrial (mt)DNA control region of 407 elk from nine populations. Our analysis revealed high mtDNA diversity within populations including 12 haplotypes per population on average, and a mean haplotype diversity (i.e., gene diversity) of 0.84. The FST from mtDNA was high (mean FST = 0.162; P = 0.0001) compared to FST for nuclear microsatellites data (FST = 0.006, P = 0.125), which suggested relatively low female movement among populations, perhaps due to female philopatry. Genetic distance (mtDNA pair-wise FST) was not significantly correlated with geographic (Euclidean) distance between populations (Mantel’s r = 0.274, P = 0.168). The lack of isolation-by-distance and large genetic distance between geographically close populations (&lt; 65 km) suggest that maternal gene flow is reduced by certain landscape features (e.g., large, non-forested valleys with roads), which is important for understanding and modeling landscape connectivity and related processes

Mitochondrial mRNA stability and polyadenylation during anoxia-induced quiescence in the brine shrimp Artemia franciscana

Polyadenylation of messenger RNA is known to be an important mechanism for regulating mRNA stability in a variety of systems, including bacteria, chloroplasts and plant mitochondria. By comparison, little is known about the role played by polyadenylation in animal mitochondrial gene expression. We have used embryos of the brine shrimp Artemia franciscana to test hypotheses regarding message stability and polyadenylation under conditions simulating anoxia-induced quiescence. In response to anoxia, these embryos undergo a profound and acute metabolic downregulation, characterized by a steep drop in intracellular pH (pHi) and ATP levels. Using dot blots of total mitochondrial RNA, we show that during in organello incubations both O 2 deprivation and acidic pH (pH 6.4) elicit increases in half-lives of selected mitochondrial transcripts on the order of five- to tenfold or more, relative to normoxic controls at pH 7.8. Polyadenylation of these transcripts was measured under the same incubation conditions using a reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR)-based assay. The results demonstrate that low pH and anoxia promote significant deadenylation of the stabilized transcripts in several cases, measured either as change over time in the amount of polyadenylation within a given size class of poly(A)+ tail, or as the total amount of polyadenylation at the endpoint of the incubation. This study is the first direct demonstration that for a metazoan mitochondrion, polyadenylation is associated with destabilized mRNA. This pattern has also been demonstrated in bacteria, chloroplasts and plant mitochondria and may indicate a conserved mechanism for regulating message half-life that differs from the paradigm for eukaryotic cytoplasm, where increased mRNA stability is associated with polyadenylation

Transcriptional initiation under conditions of anoxia-induced quiescence in mitochondria from Artemia franciscana embryos

In response to anoxia, embryos of the brine shrimp Artemia franciscana are able coordinately to downregulate metabolism to levels low enough to permit survival for several years at room temperature. In addition to dramatic decreases in free ATP levels and heat production, intracellular pH drops from 7.8 to 6.3 overnight. Use of isolated mitochondria to study transcriptional responses to anoxia offers several advantages: (1) the localized nature of transcript initiation, processing and degradation, all of which may be followed in organello; (2) the relatively simple cis- and trans-machinery involved and (3) the ability to provide relevant physiological treatments in vitro. In response to anoxic incubation of embryos in vivo for 4h followed by anoxic mitochondrial isolation and anoxic transcription assay at pH 6.4, a significant decrease in overall UTP incorporation (77%) was seen after 30min relative to normoxic, pH 7.9 controls. A less severe inhibition of transcription under anoxia (52%) was observed compared with controls when pH was raised to 7.9. Similarly, under normoxia, the incubation at low pH (6.4) reduced transcription by 59%. Ribonuclease protection assays showed that the contribution of in vitro initiation during the assay fell from 78% at pH 7.9 to approximately 32% at pH 6.4 under either normoxic or anoxic conditions. DNA footprinting of putative transcriptional promoters revealed proteins at regular intervals upstream of the 12S rRNA in the control region, which previously had been indirectly inferred to contain promoters for H-strand transcription. The area between 12030 and 12065 contains a sequence in the tRNAleu gene believed to bind the transcription termination factor mTERF or TERM, and we provide the first evidence that this sequence is protein-bound in A. franciscana. However, our hypothesis that initiation is reduced at low pH because of a change in DNA binding by mitochondrial transcription factors was not confirmed. We propose that regulation of initiation may be mediated by covalent modification or by protein-protein interactions not detected by footprinting

The Influence of Insulin-like Growth Factor Pathway Gene Polymorphisms on the Strength Training Response of Muscle Phenotypes in Older Adults

Strength training (ST) is considered an intervention of choice for the prevention and treatment of the adverse consequences of sarcopenia. Our group previously reported that the CA dinucleotide repeat polymorphism in the promoter region of the insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) gene influenced the muscle strength response to ST in Caucasians. Other studies have shown that the insulin-like growth factor binding protein-3 (IGFBP-3) is a modulator of IGF-1 in circulation and is present in skeletal muscle. The -202 polymorphism in the promoter region of the IGFBP3 gene has been shown to influence IGFBP-3 levels. In addition, there have been reports that IGF-1 and calcineurin are linked in a common pathway to induce skeletal muscle cell hypertrophy. A previous study has shown that an insertion/deletion (I/D) polymorphism in the gene encoding the regulatory subunit of calcineurin, calcineurin B, influences cardiac hypertrophy. To examine the influence of these IGF pathway gene polymorphisms on muscle mass and strength responses to ST, we studied 128 Caucasian and African American men and women before and after a 10-wk single-leg knee extension ST program. One repetition maximum strength (1 RM), muscle volume (MV), and muscle quality (MQ) were assessed at baseline and after 10 wk of ST. There was a significant combined gene effect, including both IGF1 main effect and IGF1 by calcineurin B (PPP3R1) gene by gene interaction effect, for change in strength with ST (P &lt; 0.01). There was also a significant combined gene effect for IGF1 on change in MQ (P &lt; 0.05). The gene by gene interaction of IGF1 and PPP3R1 by itself, approached significance for change in strength with ST (P = 0.07) and was right on the border of significance for change in MQ (P = 0.05). Moreover, PPP3R1 II homozygotes approached significance for a greater increase in MV with ST than PPP3R1 D-allele carriers (P = 0.06). There were no significant combined gene effect for PPP3R1 (i.e., PPP3R1 main effect combined with PPP3R1 by IGF1 interaction effect) for change in strength or MQ with ST. Also, there were no significant influences of the IGFBP3 polymorphism on muscle phenotypic responses to ST. These data extend our previous findings for IGF1 by indicating that IGF pathway gene polymorphisms may influence muscle phenotypic responses to ST in Caucasian and African American older men and women

Using Argument-based Science Inquiry to Improve Science Achievement for Students with Disabilities in Inclusive Classrooms

Students with disabilities have long lagged behind their non-disabled peers when it comes to science achievement. The increased emphasis on STEM related careers and the use of science in everyday life makes learning science content and concepts critical for all students especially for those with disabilities. As suggested by the National Resource Council (2012), more emphasis is being placed on being able to critically think about science concepts in and outside of the classroom. Additionally, the Next Generation Science Standards are asking teachers and students to better understand how science is connected to the everyday world through the use of inquiry-based methods. The manuscript focuses on the use of an structured argument-based inquiry approach to science instruction called the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH). The SWH approach has shown some initial success in improving science achievement for students with disabilities. The current study compares treatment and comparison groups of students with disabilities in the area of science achievement. Treatment group students were taught using the SWH approach, while the comparison groups were taught using traditional science teaching. The authors found that students in the SWH groups scored significantly better than the comparison groups on post-test science achievement scores. The authors also found stronger effect size results for SWH groups as well. Implications for teaching science to students with disabilities are discussed