Essence and Cause: Making Something Be What It Is

Aristotle frequently describes essence as a “cause” or “explanation”, thus ascribing to essence some sort of causal or explanatory role. This explanatory role is often explicated by scholars in terms of essence “making the thing be what it is” or “making it the very thing that it is”. I argue that this is problematic, at least on the assumption that “making” expresses an explanatory relation, since it violates certain formal features of explanation. I then consider whether Aristotle is vulnerable to this problem by examining the explanatory role of essence in Posterior Analytics and Metaphysics Z 17

Detention Basin Condition Assessment Form (CAF)

The state of California requires local cities to periodically perform infrastructure evaluations. One of these evaluations is the assessment of a municipality’s stormwater infrastructure systems. These inspections determine the performance of a cities infrastructure and provide additional funding if needed. There are many types of stormwater structures that control the runoff water from either rainstorms, snowmelt, or any tropical storm. A detention basin is a fundamental part of a city’s stormwater infrastructure, typically basins are at the end of the line and catch all the stormwater from reaching natural rivers, lakes, and the ocean. The purpose of a catch basin is to naturally allow the water from the previous storm to percolate into the ground, replenishing the groundwater. BMPs are the best practices used by cities to manage their stormwater systems and are recognized and encouraged by the state of California. This document will improve the process of evaluating the BMPs allowing all municipalities in the state to record and report important information. The document will also expedite the process by providing an inclusive easy to execute the procedure to evaluate your stormwater systems. Creating a uniform document will allow the state of California to easily identify and diagnose areas of poor percolation and provide specific funding to areas in need

Legal Status Effects on Parent-Child Relationships and Parent Well-Being

Despite heightened levels of parenting stress and psychological distress experienced by many immigrant-origin families in the United States, little is known about the resiliency of Latinx families, particularly in today’s political climate. This research presents the results of a pilot study examining the effects of legal stressors on parent-child relationships and parent well-being in Latinx immigrant families. Taken from the Latinx Immigrant Family Stories and Strengths project, this mixed-methods study was informed by the integrative risk and resilience model for understanding the adaptation of immigrant-origin children and youth (Suarez-Orozco, Motti- Stefanidi, Marks, & Katsiaficas, 2018). The pilot included a sample of 30 adult parent participants with various legal statuses and migration experiences. Qualitatively, participants shared their experiences of legal vulnerability, fears or concerns of deportation, and coping mechanisms. Quantitatively, scores for parental stress, psychological distress, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, and resilience were collected. Following a, sequential explanatory design (Creswell et al., 2003), quantitative data were analyzed for relationships among study variables. A case-oriented research comparative strategy (Eckstein, 1975; Mahoney & Goertz, 2004; George & Bennett, 2005; Gerring, 2006) was then used to qualitatively examine the migration and resiliency experiences of the two cases with lowest and highest levels of resilience according to the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS; Smith et al., 2008) scores. Results suggest that, on average, parents experienced normal to high rates of parenting-related stress, low levels of psychological distress, moderate to severe symptoms of PTSD, and low to average levels of resiliency. Parents identifying as undocumented experienced higher rates of parental stress (r = 0.49, p\u3c.05) and psychological distress (r = 0.41, p\u3c.05) compared to their liminally legal and documented peers. Although the trauma experienced by many immigrant-origin parents in the study was markedly high, resilience was fostered and expressed, and was exemplified through our high-resilience case analysis. Participants’ stories expressed throughout this study spoke volumes about the complex and often times traumatic lived experiences that many foreign- born parents face. Implications for comprehensive, detailed, and longitudinal future research is discussed.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/gradposters/1106/thumbnail.jp

Nitrification-denitrification in WSP: a mechanism for permanent nitrogen removal in maturation ponds

A pilot-scale primary maturation pond was spiked with 15N-labelled ammonia (15NH4Cl) and 15N labelled nitrite (Na15NO2), in order to improve current understanding of the dynamics of inorganic nitrogen transformations and removal in WSP systems. Stable isotope analysis of δ15N showed that nitrification could be considered as an intermediate step in WSP, which is masked by simultaneous denitrification, under conditions of low algal activity. Molecular microbiology analysis showed that denitrification can be considered a feasible mechanism for permanent nitrogen removal in WSP, which may be supported either by ammonia-oxidising bacteria (AOB) or by methanotrophs, in addition to nitrite-oxidising bacteria (NOB). However, the relative supremacy of the denitrification process over other nitrogen removal mechanisms (e.g., biological uptake) depends upon phytoplanktonic activity

Intermingled basins in coupled Lorenz systems

We consider a system of two identical linearly coupled Lorenz oscillators, presenting synchro- nization of chaotic motion for a specified range of the coupling strength. We verify the existence of global synchronization and antisynchronization attractors with intermingled basins of attraction, such that the basin of one attractor is riddled with holes belonging to the basin of the other attractor and vice versa. We investigated this phenomenon by verifying the fulfillment of the mathematical requirements for intermingled basins, and also obtained scaling laws that characterize quantitatively the riddling of both basins for this system

SP-Sephadex equilibrium chromatography of bradykinin and related peptides: Application to trypsin-treated human plasma

An analytical method is deseribed for the separation of bradykinin, Lys-bradykinin, and Met-Lys-bradykinin by equilibrium chromatography on SP-Sephadex C-25 eluted in 0.02 Tris-HCl buffer, pH 8.10, 0.12 NaCl. A second elution buffer, 0.02 Tris-HCl buffer, pH 7.70, 0.06 NaCl, serves as a second parameter for the identification of bradykinin and also separates the hormone from plasma bradykinin-potentiating peptides. Ten to one-hundred nanomoles of each peptide can be recovered in high yields, identified by elution position, and measured by bioassay with the isolated guinea pig ileum. The identification of bradykinin as the peptide released by trypsin acting on acid-denatured plasma is documented as an illustration of the method

Near-universal hospitalization of US emergency department patients with cancer and febrile neutropenia

IMPORTANCE: Febrile neutropenia (FN) is the most common oncologic emergency and is among the most deadly. Guidelines recommend risk stratification and outpatient management of both pediatric and adult FN patients deemed to be at low risk of complications or mortality, but our prior single-center research demonstrated that the vast majority (95%) are hospitalized. OBJECTIVE: From a nationwide perspective, to determine the proportion of cancer patients of all ages hospitalized after an emergency department (ED) visit for FN, and to analyze variability in hospitalization rates. Our a priori hypothesis was that >90% of US cancer-associated ED FN visits would end in hospitalization. DESIGN: Analysis of data from the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample, 2006-2014. SETTING: Stratified probability sample of all US ED visits. PARTICIPANTS: Inclusion criteria were: (1) Clinical Classification Software code indicating cancer, (2) diagnostic code indicating fever, and (3) diagnostic code indicating neutropenia. We excluded visits ending in transfer. EXPOSURE: The hospital at which the visit took place. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: Our main outcome is the proportion of ED FN visits ending in hospitalization, with an a priori hypothesis of >90%. Our secondary outcomes are: (a) hospitalization rates among subsets, and (b) proportion of variability in the hospitalization rate attributable to which hospital the patient visited, as measured by the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC). RESULTS: Of 348,868 visits selected to be representative of all US ED visits, 94% ended in hospitalization (95% Confidence Interval [CI] 93-94%). Each additional decade of age conferred 1.23x increased odds of hospitalization. Those with private (92%), self-pay (92%), and other (93%) insurance were less likely to be hospitalized than those with public insurance (95%, odds ratios [OR] 0.74-0.76). Hospitalization was least likely at non-metropolitan hospitals (84%, OR 0.15 relative to metropolitan teaching hospitals), and was also less likely at metropolitan non-teaching hospitals (94%, OR 0.64 relative to metropolitan teaching hospitals). The ICC adjusted for hospital random effects and patient and hospital characteristics was 26% (95%CI 23-29%), indicating that 26% of the variability in hospitalization rate was attributable to which hospital the patient visited. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Nearly all cancer-associated ED FN visits in the US end in hospitalization. Inter-hospital variation in hospitalization practices explains 26% of the limited variability in hospitalization decisions. Simple, objective tools are needed to improve risk stratification for ED FN patients

Time resolved structural dynamics of butadiyne-linked porphyrin dimers

In this work the timescales and mechanisms associated with the structural dynamics of butadiyne-linked porphyrin dimers are investigated through time resolved narrowband pump / broadband probe transient absorption spectroscopy. Our results confirm previous findings that the broadening is partly due to a distribution of structures with different (dihedral) angular conformations. Comparison of measurements with excitations on the red and blue sides of the Q-band unravel the ground and excited state conformational re-equilibration timescales. Further comparison to a planarized dimer, through addition of a ligand, provide conclusive evidence for the twisting motion performed by the porphyrin dimer in solution