Letter from Josefina Niggli to her family – October 12, 1935

Josefina María Niggli was in Monterrey, Mexico on July 13, 1910, but her family fled to Texas when violence emerged during the Mexican Revolution. Her family stayed roving back and forth across the border for many years and Josefina was home-schooled for the majority of her primary school years. She and her mother eventually established a new home in San Antonio, Texas when Josefina was fifteen where she went on to complete high school and pursue a higher education while her father stayed in Mexico “until near the time of his death”. Niggli would continue making visits to Mexico, but America was her country of residence starting in 1925 (Martinez 7-8)

An Examination Of The Leisure Activities And Recreational Interests Of Students, And Available Equipment And Facilities At Appalachian State Teachers College

The college administration offers many possibilities for adjustment to changes which students with their varying backgrounds must make. The individual who, prior to his coming to college, had been molding his actions toward personal gains may find out early that he cannot always achieve his goals in a new environment . . . Participation in some form of recreation can relieve tensions already set up; through recreation some immediate problems can be alleviated

A Novel Mutagenic Screen Reveals A Model For Interaction Between The Biofilm Regulatory Proteins NspS And MbaA In Vibrio Cholerae

The transition between motility and biofilm formation is important to the lifecycle of the human pathogen Vibrio cholerae, which causes the disease cholera. Polyamines are ubiquitous, organic molecules and an example of one environmental signal that play a role in the regulation of V. cholerae biofilm formation. V. cholerae detects polyamines through a putative signaling pathway composed of a periplasmic protein, NspS, and a transmembrane protein, MbaA. Previous studies have determined that the cytoplasmic EAL domain of MbaA has phosphodiesterase (PDE) activity and can break down c-di-GMP, which positively regulates biofilm formation. In this pathway, NspS bound by a polyamine is hypothesized to interact with the periplasmic domain of MbaA to alter the PDE activity of the EAL domain dependent on the polyamine bound. Altering this activity of MbaA is thought to modify levels of c-di-GMP, affecting biofilm formation. The purpose of this study was to determine the potential binding surface on NspS that interacts with the periplasmic domain of MbaA. Based on the results, I present a model of this interaction in which NspS interacts with the periplasmic domain of MbaA to alter its PDE activity and regulate biofilm formation in response to polyamines in the environment

Multiple goals and time constraints: perceived impact on physicians\u27 performance of evidence-based behaviours

Background: Behavioural approaches to knowledge translation inform interventions to improve healthcare. However, such approaches often focus on a single behaviour without considering that health professionals perform multiple behaviours in pursuit of multiple goals in a given clinical context. In resource-limited consultations, performing these other goal-directed behaviours may influence optimal performance of a particular evidence-based behaviour. This study aimed to investigate whether a multiple goal-directed behaviour perspective might inform implementation research beyond single-behaviour approaches.Methods: We conducted theory-based semi-structured interviews with 12 general medical practitioners (GPs) in Scotland on their views regarding two focal clinical behaviours-providing physical activity (PA) advice and prescribing to reduce blood pressure (BP) to < 140/80 mmHg-in consultations with patients with diabetes and persistent hypertension. Theory-based constructs investigated were: intention and control beliefs from the theory of planned behaviour, and perceived interfering and facilitating influence of other goal-directed behaviours performed in a diabetes consultation. We coded interview content into pre-specified theory-based constructs and organised codes into themes within each construct using thematic analysis. Results: Most GPs reported strong intention to prescribe to reduce BP but expressed reasons why they would not. Intention to provide PA advice was variable. Most GPs reported that time constraints and patient preference detrimentally affected their control over providing PA advice and prescribing to reduce BP, respectively. Most GPs perceived many of their other goal-directed behaviours as interfering with providing PA advice, while fewer GPs reported goal-directed behaviours that interfere with prescribing to reduce BP. Providing PA advice and prescribing to reduce BP were perceived to be facilitated by similar diabetes-related behaviours (e. g., discussing cholesterol). While providing PA advice was perceived to be mainly facilitated by providing other lifestyle-related clinical advice (e. g., talking about weight), BP prescribing was reported as facilitated by pursuing ongoing standard consultation-related goals (e. g., clearly structuring the consultation). Conclusion: GPs readily relate their other goal-directed behaviours with having a facilitating and interfering influence on their performance of particular evidence-based behaviours. This may have implications for advancing the theoretical development of behavioural approaches to implementation research beyond single-behaviour models

Personality, job performance, and job satisfaction in non-profit organizations

Formal assessment of personality characteristics is common in many organizational settings, for reasons such as personnel selection, personnel training, determining leadership styles and team building. This study documents the use of personality assessment in non-profit organizations and examines the associations between personality and job outcomes among directors of non-profit organizations. Personality traits are associated with many job-related variables, including job satisfaction and job performance. Clearly, the relevance of personality traits to these job-related characteristics is highly dependent on the type of job and type of organization. This paper will also discuss the limitations and problems with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Even though the MBTI is popular in many organizational settings, it is a flawed instrument for measuring personality. Modern personality psychologists agree that the instrument relies on an outdated theory of personality. A better conceptual schema is the five-factor model of personality (FFM), an empirically verified, theoretically sound framework that is in concordance among personality psychologists as the best measure of personality. The public sector has favored the MBTI (Coe, 1992), but the recent paper by Cooper, Knotts, Johnson, and McCord (in press) argues for the effectiveness of the FFM in this domain. Virtually no literature exists at present with regard to the use of personality assessment within the domain of non-profit and volunteer organizations. The purpose of the current project is to examine the usefulness of FFM-based personality measurement to predict job performance and job satisfaction in the non-profit sector and to compare the FFM to the MBTI in this regard

The relation between handedness for reaching and unimanual handedness from 6 to 14 months

Unimanual hand preference is a behavior in which one hand is used more often than the other when single-handedly manipulating objects. The progressive lateralization theory (Michel, 2002) of handedness proposes that handedness gradually concatenates during infancy as a cascade from initially a preference for contacting objects to acquiring them, to their unimanual manipulation, to the eventual emergence of a hand preference for role-differentiated bimanual manipulation (RDBM). Together, these behaviors represent the individual's handedness expressed across most manual skills. Thus, the theory posits that an early hand preference for object acquisition will predict a later preference for single-handed object manipulations. This proposal was examined by describing the development of hand-use preferences for unimanual manipulation of objects for 90 infants (57 males) tested monthly from 6 to 14 months. These 90 infants were obtained from a larger sample of 380 infants: 30 infants from a group of 45 with left hand-use preferences for acquiring objects were matched for sex and development of locomotion skills with 30 infants with a right hand-use preference and 30 with no hand preference for acquiring objects. Results showed that the frequency of unimanual manipulations is stable during the 6-14 month period. Multilevel modeling of unimanual manipulation trajectories for the three acquisition hand-preference groups revealed that hand-use preferences for unimanual manipulation become more prominent with age and the preference is predicted by the hand-use preference for object acquisition. Also, infants with a right-hand preference for object acquisition develop a hand-use preference for unimanual manipulation sooner than those with a left preference and infants without a preference for acquisition remain without a preference for manipulation

Ant Species Assembly in Constructed Grasslands

1. Agri-environmental incentive programmes encourage conversionof marginal agricultural land to grasslands to reduce soil erosion and supportbiodiversity of native flora and fauna. Most grassland animals colonise theseconstructed habitats as propagules from the surrounding landscape. Ants areslow to colonise and rely on resources within the patch, making them valuableas indicators of disturbance and recovery.2. We studied how ant species diversity and composition are structured bypatch and landscape variation of grasslands in Ohio, USA. Ant communitieswere collected from 23 constructed grasslands differing in area, age, vegetation,soils, management and surrounding land cover. We analysed trap frequency for14 species that varied in habitat specialisation to identify species responses topatch- and landscape-level predictors.3. Grassland age and soil texture determined ant species richness and communitycomposition. Trap frequency analysis showed contrasting speciesresponses to patch and landscape characteristics: habitat specialists were moreabundant in older, larger patches with more surrounding grassland, while disturbance-tolerantspecies were more frequent in younger patches surrounded byintensive agriculture. Habitat generalists and open habitat species included avariety of patch- and landscape-level factors in best models.4. Ant community assembly in constructed grasslands is shaped by time andphysical characteristics at the patch-level, but the surrounding landscape acts asa filter for the colonising community. Our findings support the use of ants asecosystem recovery indicators following disturbance in agricultural landscapes,but show that shifts in species composition are better indicators of grasslandhabitat variation than ant richness

The financing and completion of a group of shell homes

Many American families are unable to purchase adequate housing or improve their present housing situation primarily because of low income. The problem of supplying adequate housing for groups of various income levels becomes pressing since in recent years the costs of residential construction have been increasing more rapidly than other consumer costs.1 There have been numerous attempts to make adequate housing available. A partial list of these attempts includes prefabrication, public housing, insured loans from the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration, and, more recently, the shell house

Access to specialist cancer care: is it equitable?

The first principle of the Calman–Hine report's recommendations on cancer services was that all patients should have access to a uniformly high quality of care wherever they may live. This study aimed to assess whether the uptake of chemotherapy for colorectal cancer varied by hospital type in Scotland. Hospitals were classified according to cancer specialisation rather than volume of patients. To indicate cancer specialisation, hospitals were classified as ‘cancer centres’, ‘cancer units’ and ‘non-cancer’ hospitals. Colorectal cancer cases were obtained from cancer registrations linked to hospital discharge data for the period January 1992 to December 1996. Multilevel logistic regression was used to model the binary outcome, namely whether or not a patient received chemotherapy within 6 months of first admission to any hospital. The results showed that patients admitted first to a ‘non-cancer’ hospital were less than half as likely to go on to receive chemotherapy as those first admitted to a cancer unit or centre (OR=0.28). This result was not explained by distance between hospital of first admission and nearest cancer centre, nor by increasing age or severity of illness. The study covers the period immediately preceding the introduction of the Calman–Hine report in Scotland and should serve as a baseline for future monitoring of access to specialist care

The home lives of wild birds

The Home Lives of Wild Birds are original poems by Chloe Anne Campbell, in completion of a Masters of Fine Arts thesis. They examine the body, both living and dead, as well as its absence. Section One is a triptych of three burial scenes. Section Two is a long poem narrating the death of the speaker's brother using physicist Hugh Everett's Many Worlds Theory. Section Three follows the speaker's family after the death of her brother. Section Four narrates the arc of an ultimately failed romantic relationship. Section Five is focused on the speaker's self-reflection in adulthood