Leadership Development Program

Rapid growth at SWEF (Software Engineering Firm) in recent years has led to the creation of many new team lead positions. This led to Human Resources developing a leadership development program to better equip newly promoted individuals to perform in their new roles. This project research supplements HR’s efforts. It builds a more wholesome program by developing additional program components such as a Toastmasters chapter to develop communication skills, a personal development plan for a program project, and a training evaluation framework. The project’s chapter titled Program Design describes each of these components. Material developed and used for these components is included in the appendix. A literature review that discusses source material and research basis for some program components is included

Interactive Tool for Researching Large Unstructured Document Collections

Reviewing large document collections is an activity that arises commonly in certain professional contexts such as investigative journalism. Such document collections can arise in many use contexts such as investigative journalism; academic research; litigation, arbitration or other legal context; audit; research using document archives; etc. The collections may include a large number of documents, including scanned images of documents or handwritten documents, and are often devoid of structure or organization. This makes it difficult to sift through such collections and identify important pieces of information. This disclosure describes a tool that enables easier access to such collections and features that support review and research based on such document collections. Automated techniques such as optical character recognition, entity recognition, indexing, etc. are utilized to process the document collection to index the documents and to generate timelines, connection graphs, or other views on the collection. A user interface is provided that enables users to search the collection, view event timelines, make annotations, take notes, and collaborate with others. The described techniques facilitate sensemaking and can help surface latent insight

Adenosyl Radical: Reagent and Catalyst in Enzyme Reactions

Adenosine is undoubtedly an ancient biological molecule that is a component of many enzyme cofactors: ATP, FADH, NAD(P)H, and coenzyme A, to name but a few, and, of course, of RNA. Here we present an overview of the role of adenosine in its most reactive form: as an organic radical formed either by homolytic cleavage of adenosylcobalamin (coenzyme B 12 , AdoCbl) or by single-electron reduction of S -adenosylmethionine (AdoMet) complexed to an iron–sulfur cluster. Although many of the enzymes we discuss are newly discovered, adenosine's role as a radical cofactor most likely arose very early in evolution, before the advent of photosynthesis and the production of molecular oxygen, which rapidly inactivates many radical enzymes. AdoCbl-dependent enzymes appear to be confined to a rather narrow repertoire of rearrangement reactions involving 1,2-hydrogen atom migrations; nevertheless, mechanistic insights gained from studying these enzymes have proved extremely valuable in understanding how enzymes generate and control highly reactive free radical intermediates. In contrast, there has been a recent explosion in the number of radical-AdoMet enzymes discovered that catalyze a remarkably wide range of chemically challenging reactions; here there is much still to learn about their mechanisms. Although all the radical-AdoMet enzymes so far characterized come from anaerobically growing microbes and are very oxygen sensitive, there is tantalizing evidence that some of these enzymes might be active in aerobic organisms including humans.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/69165/1/604_ftp.pd