Analysis of Business Capstone Consulting Report: Willamette Valley Vineyards, Inc

My capstone course consisted of a group consulting report on conceptualizing a business, analyzing the internal and external factors, and implementing potential strategies for said business. There are four milestones that my team, Palmetto Consultants, completed over the course of the semester, delegating out the tasks and tools needed to conclude our report. Our team performed very much like a high-functioning business, as we utilized a written contract and interchanged specific roles for each milestone. Before starting on each section of the report, we planned and recorded the work each team member was responsible for and adhered to these plans as stated in our team contract. Our analyses went smoothly, and we were able to cohesively work together, eliminating any negative obstacles we faced. This thesis will comprise the analyses that I completed individually, reflecting on the achievements and challenges I faced throughout each milestone

Influence of the charge carrier tunneling processes on the recombination dynamics in single lateral quantum dot molecules

We report on the charge carrier dynamics in single lateral quantum dot molecules and the effect of an applied electric field on the molecular states. Controllable electron tunneling manifests itself in a deviation from the typical excitonic decay behavior which is strongly influenced by the tuning electric field and inter-molecular Coulomb energies. A rate equation model is developed to gain more insight into the charge transfer and tunneling mechanisms. Non-resonant (phonon-mediated) electron tunneling which changes the molecular exciton character from direct to indirect, and vice versa, is found to be the dominant tunable decay mechanism of excitons besides radiative recombination.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Polarization fine-structure and enhanced single-photon emission of self-assembled lateral InGaAs quantum dot molecules embedded in a planar micro-cavity

Single lateral InGaAs quantum dot molecules have been embedded in a planar micro-cavity in order to increase the luminescence extraction efficiency. Using a combination of metal-organic vapor phase and molecular beam epitaxy samples could be produced that exhibit a 30 times enhanced single-photon emission rate. We also show that the single-photon emission is fully switchable between two different molecular excitonic recombination energies by applying a lateral electric field. Furthermore, the presence of a polarization fine-structure splitting of the molecular neutral excitonic states is reported which leads to two polarization-split classically correlated biexciton exciton cascades. The fine-structure splitting is found to be on the order of 10 micro-eV.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures; the following article has been submitted to Journal of Applied Physics (29th ICPS - invited paper); after it is published, it will be found at http://jap.aip.org

RSPCA and the criminology of social control

This paper contributes to a rethinking of animal abuse control and animal welfare protection in criminology, specifically, and in the social sciences more broadly. We do this, first, through a broad mapping of the institutional control complex around animal abuse in contemporary Britain. Second, we focus on the institutional strategies and practices, past and present, of the main agency of animal protection, and the policing thereof, in this society, namely the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). In looking back to this charity’s growth since the first decades of the nineteenth century at the time of the birth of modern industrial capitalism and also to its current rationale and practices as a late-modern, corporate organisation, we explore the seeming paradox of a private body taking a lead on the regulation and prosecution of illegalities associated with animal-human relationships. Finally, the ideology and strategy of the RSPCA are explored in the context of the often visceral and culturally influential ‘morality war’ associated with proponents, respectively, of animal rights (‘abolition’) and ‘anthropic’ welfare proponents (‘regulation’ and ‘protection’)

Forest elephant movement and habitat use in a tropical forest-grassland mosaic in Gabon

Poaching of forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) for ivory has decimated their populations in Central Africa. Studying elephant movement can provide insight into habitat and resource use to reveal where, when, and why they move and guide conservation efforts. We fitted 17 forest elephants with global positioning system (GPS) collars in 2015 and 2016 in the tropical forest-grassland mosaic of the Wonga Wongué Presidential Reserve (WW), Gabon. Using the location data, we quantified movement distances, home ranges, and habitat use to examine the environmental drivers of elephant movements and predict where elephants occur spatially and temporally. Forest elephants, on average, traveled 2,840 km annually and had home ranges of 713 km2, with males covering significantly larger home ranges than females. Forest elephants demonstrated both daily and seasonal movement patterns. Daily, they moved between forest and grassland at dawn and dusk. Seasonally, they spent proportionally more time in grassland than forest during the short-wet season when grasses recruit. Forest elephants also traveled faster during the short-wet season when fruit availability was greatest, likely reflecting long, direct movements to preferred fruiting tree species. Forest elephants tended to select areas with high tree and shrub density that afford cover and browse. When villages occurred in their home ranges elephants spent a disproportionate amount of time near them, particularly in the dry season, probably for access to agricultural crops and preferred habitat. Given the importance of the grassland habitat for elephants, maintenance of the forest-grassland matrix is a conservation priority in WW. Law enforcement, outreach, and education should focus on areas of potential human-elephant conflict near villages along the borders of the reserve. GPS-tracking should be extended into multi-use areas in the peripheries of protected areas to evaluate the effects of human disturbance on elephant movements and to maintain connectivity among elephant populations in Gabon

An Observational Study Assessing Immediate Complete Versus Delayed Complete Revascularisation in Patients with Multi-Vessel Disease Undergoing Primary Percutaneous Coronary Intervention.

Background: More than half of the patients undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) for ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) have multi-vessel coronary artery disease. This is associated with worse outcomes compared with single vessel disease. Whilst evidence now exists to support complete revascularisation for bystander disease the optimal timing is still debated. This study aimed to compare clinical outcomes in patients with STEMI and multi-vessel disease who underwent complete revascularisation as inpatients in comparison to patients who had staged PCI as early outpatients. Methods and results: We conducted an observational cohort study consisting of 1522 patients who underwent primary PCI with multi-vessel disease from 2012 to 2019. Exclusions included patients with cardiogenic shock and previous CABG. Patients were split into 2 groups depending on whether they had complete revascularisation performed as inpatients or as staged PCI at later outpatient dates. The primary outcome of this study was major adverse cardiac events (consisting of myocardial infarction, target vessel revascularisation and all-cause mortality).834 (54.8%) patients underwent complete inpatient revascularisation and 688 patients (45.2%) had outpatient PCI (median 43 days post discharge). Of the inpatient group, 652 patients (78.2%) underwent complete revascularisation during the index procedure whilst 182 (21.8%) patients underwent inpatient bystander PCI in a second procedure. Overall, there were no significant differences between the groups with regards to their baseline or procedural characteristics. Over the follow-up period there was no significant difference in MACE between the cohorts (P = .62), which persisted after multivariate adjustment (HR 1.21 [95% CI 0.72-1.96]). Furthermore, in propensity-matched analysis there was no significant difference in outcome between the groups (HR: 0.86 95% CI: 0.75-1.25). Conclusions: Our study demonstrated that the timing of bystander PCI after STEMI did not appear to have an effect on cardiovascular outcomes. We suggest that patients with multi-vessel disease can potentially be discharged promptly and undergo early outpatient bystander PCI. This could significantly reduce length of stay in hospital

Towards deterministically controlled InGaAs/GaAs lateral quantum dot molecules

We report on the fabrication, detailed characterization and modeling of lateral InGaAs quantum dot molecules (QDMs) embedded in a GaAs matrix and we discuss strategies to fully control their spatial configuration and electronic properties. The three-dimensional morphology of encapsulated QDMs was revealed by selective wet chemical etching of the GaAs top capping layer and subsequent imaging by atomic force microscopy (AFM). The AFM investigation showed that different overgrowth procedures have a profound consequence on the QDM height and shape. QDMs partially capped and annealed in situ for micro- photoluminescence spectroscopy consist of shallow but well-defined quantum dots (QDs) in contrast to misleading results usually provided by surface morphology measurements when they are buried by a thin GaAs layer. This uncapping approach is crucial for determining the QDM structural parameters, which are required for modeling the system. A single-band effective-mass approximation is employed to calculate the confined electron and heavy-hole energy levels, taking the geometry and structural information extracted from the uncapping experiments as inputs. The calculated transition energy of the single QDM shows good agreement with the experimentally observed values. By decreasing the edge-to-edge distance between the two QDs within a QDM, a splitting of the electron (hole) wavefunction into symmetric and antisymmetric states is observed, indicating the presence of lateral coupling. Site control of such lateral QDMs obtained by growth on a pre-patterned substrate, combined with a technology to fabricate gate structures at well-defined positions with respect to the QDMs, could lead to deterministically controlled devices based on QDMs. © IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft

The ying and yang of idebenone: Not too little, not too much - cell death in NQO1 deficient cells and the mouse retina

Idebenone has recently been investigated as a drug therapy for Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON), a rare genetic mitochondrial disease that causes rapid and progressive bilateral vision loss. Although several studies have shown that idebenone can promote vision recovery in patients with LHON, the evidence for the efficacy of idebenone is still limited. Idebenone failed to demonstrate superiority over placebo in the primary end-points of the only published randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. There appears to be a patient-specific response to idebenone with high variability in therapeutic outcomes. A recent study suggested that the cytosolic enzyme NAD(P)H: quinone acceptor oxidoreductase (NQO1) is the major enzyme involved in the activation of idebenone, and the beneficial effects of idebenone are dependent on the expression of NQO1. Here, we confirm the NQO1-dependent activity of idebenone, but we also show, for the first time, that the cytotoxicity of idebenone is linked to cellular expression of NQO1. Upon idebenone administration, cells deficient in NQO1 show a marked decrease in viability in comparison to NQO1 expressing cells, with idebenone causing ROS production and deleterious effects on ATP levels and cell viability. In addition, our data highlights that only cells expressing NQO1 can significantly activate idebenone, indicating that other proposed metabolic activation pathways, such as complex II and glycerol-3-phosphate dehydrogenase, do not play a significant role in idebenone activation. Furthermore, we provide evidence of idebenone-induced toxicity in the retina ex-vivo, which can be explained by the variation of NQO1 expression between different cell types in the mouse retina. Idebenone mediated cell rescue in the rotenone ex vivo model also indicated that this drug has a narrow therapeutic window. These findings will help to guide the development of future therapies and drug delivery strategies including intra-ocular administration. The specific dependence of idebenone activity on NQO1 may also explain the variation in patient outcomes in clinical trials