Algorithms and a Software Application for the Discovery of Heparin-Binding Proteins for Chemical Analysis

Heparin is a biological molecule that plays a vital role in anticoagulation. As such, it is used for the prevention of blood clotting in a variety of medical disorders. However, it is easily contaminated with foreign substances, and this can prove fatal for a person receiving heparin. In order to prevent this, proteins that easily bind to heparin need to be added to the solution. Then, the unwanted substances can easily be filtered out. Certain sequences or patterns of amino acids are known to have a high probability of binding to heparin. Thus, proteins that contain large numbers of these sequences of amino acids are more likely to bind to heparin. This research is focused on programmatically identifying these proteins so that they may be tested in the lab. The resulting software program was run on a number of different sets of proteins and various results were gathered. If the chemical phase of this research proves successful, many new proteins could be identified and used in practice to save lives from harmful heparin solution contaminants

A Study of the Curriculum and Personnel of Physical Education for Boys in Secondary Schools with Fifty to Ninety-Nine Students for the Year 01/01/1958-59

This study is an inventory of 125 high schools in the state of Kansas with an enrollment of from fifty to ninety-nine students. The purpose of this study is to find facts concerning the curriculum and personnel of physical education for boys in these schools. This study deals with the following phases of the physical education program. These are: first, the required program; second, the intramural program; third, the interscholastic program; fourth, financing the physical education program; and fifth, the duties, experience and training of the instructors of physical education as well as coaches. A second purpose of this study is to compare it to a similar study made in 1948 and to find the general trends in the field of physical education

Fire Dynamics and Woody Cover Changes in the Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem 2000 to 2005 - A Remote Sensing Approach

The Serengeti-Mara savanna environment in East Africa is characterized by changing levels of woody cover and a dynamic fire regime. The relative proportion of woodland to grassland savanna affects animal habitat, biodiversity, and carbon storage, and is regulated by factors such as the fire regime (frequency, intensity, seasonality), and precipitation. The main objectives of this dissertation are to determine recent changes in woody cover at a regional scale and identify fire regimes and climate associated with these changes. Understanding these relationships is important for the assessment of future trajectories of woody cover under changing climate. Required spatially coherent data layers can only be obtained at the regional scale through the analysis of remote sensing data. Woody cover changes between 2000 and 2005 were derived from field data and a time series of MODIS satellite imagery at 500 m spatial resolution. Data layers on the controlling variables (fire frequency, seasonality, intensity and rainfall) were developed using a combination of remote sensing and model-based approaches. Burned areas were mapped using daily MODIS imagery at 250 m resolution. Outputs were used to make the requisite layers depicting fire frequency and seasonality. Fire intensity was derived using a model based on empirical relationships, mainly estimating fire fuel load as a function of rainfall and grazing. The combined data layers were analyzed using regression and decision tree techniques. Results suggest woody cover in central and northern Serengeti National Park continued to increase after 2000. Woody cover decreases were strongest in the wider Maswa Game Reserve area (MSW) under low precipitation conditions and late season burning. Woody cover losses in burned areas were also higher in the low fire frequency region of the Maasai Mara National Reserve (MNR). Fire seasonality was the most important fire regime parameter controlling woody cover in burned woodland savanna areas while fire intensity was most relevant for grassland savanna areas. Continued late season burning in drought years might cause further decrease of woody cover in MSW. MNR is expected to continue to be dominated by grassland savanna at similar fire frequency and browsing levels

Orlando West Fire Station

This proposal for the Orlando West Fire Station seeks to build connections between the community and the fire fighters through a contextually inspired design that caters to the needs of the community, ensures a healthy environment for the fire fighters, and serves as a node of interaction between the community and fire fighters. The contents of this report explore the process and result of the architectural, structural, and building system design

Ethical Considerations in Agro-biodiversity Research, Collecting, and Use

Humans have always played a crucial role in the evolutionary dynamics of agricultural biodiversity and thus there is a strong relationship between these resources and human cultures. These agricultural resources have long been treated as a global public good, and constitute the livelihoods of millions of predominantly poor people. At the same time, agricultural biodiversity is under serious threat in many parts of the world despite extensive conservation efforts. Ethical considerations regarding the collecting, research, and use of agricultural biodiversity are currently topics of great concern. For example, easy access to genetic resources for breeding purposes is important, but international agreements and legal frameworks are necessary to ensure adequate recognition of the contributions of local communities and traditional farmers in creating and nurturing these resources. Here, we assess ethical principles in the context of existing codes of conduct that are relevant for agro-biodiversity researchers. We aim to create awareness among scientists and policy makers who are concerned with agro-biodiversity research and its potential impact on local communities. We encourage a serious assessment of the ethical principles presented here and hope to facilitate an integration of these principles into the reader's personal ethical framework. Key ethical principles considered here include the importance of obtaining prior informed consent, equity, and the inalienability of rights of local communities and farmers

Building and district administrator perceptions of the Kansas dyslexia initiatives

Doctor of PhilosophyCurriculum and Instruction ProgramsKeith D LynchThe purpose of this qualitative study was to examine building and district administrators’ perceptions of the Kansas Dyslexia Initiatives. Their awareness and experiences may influence how administrators understand, plan for, and align the current approach for reading instruction within their respective buildings or district in relation to the dyslexia requirements. While other studies have documented the perceptions of teachers, principals, parents, and other stakeholders’ understanding of dyslexia, there appeared to be limited research that related specifically to Kansas’ efforts to address dyslexia in the public-school setting. The study aims to answer three research questions. First, what factors impact the extent to which administrators implement and understand the Kansas Dyslexia Initiatives? Second, how do administrators align instructional approaches to reading to adhere to the Kansas Dyslexia Initiatives? The overarching research question for this study explored administrators’ understanding of the Kansas Dyslexia Initiatives. A rural, kindergarten-12th grade Kansas public school district was selected for this study. Five school personnel -- a superintendent, a director of special education, and three building principals -- were first surveyed to identify demographic information of the participants, their role in the school system, and their years of experience in school/district leadership. Research participants were then interviewed to share their knowledge of the Kansas Dyslexia Initiatives, past and current reading instructional practices, and their efforts to adhere to the initiatives. A review of relevant documents provided by the school district was completed. Data analysis utilized Tesch’s (1990) method of data analysis. After interviews were transcribed verbatim data analysis began by reading all transcriptions, making sense of the transcribed data, and listing all of the topics and clustering similar topics together. Then, columns were created with clustered topics. Topics were abbreviated as codes and included next to the appropriate segments. Five themes were discovered during this study: (a) need for quality and effective professional development, (b) time constraints to adhere to the Kansas Dyslexia Initiatives, (c) availability of resources to intervene for students with dyslexia, (d) alignment of curriculum to satisfy necessary instructional changes, and (e) difficulty of change. The study includes descriptive data from surveys, interviews, and review of artifacts that further the knowledge in the field of education related to efforts to assist students with dyslexia. Based on the findings, I identified 15 implications for teaching and learning, administrators, and the Kansas State Department of Education

Validation of Automatically Generated Global and Regional Cropland Data Sets: The Case of Tanzania

There is a need to validate existing global cropland maps since they are used for different purposes including agricultural monitoring and assessment. In this paper we validate three recent global products (ESA-CCI, GlobeLand30, FROM-GC) and one regional product (Tanzania Land Cover 2010 Scheme II) using a validation data set that was collected by students through the Geo-Wiki tool. The ultimate aim was to understand the usefulness of these products for agricultural monitoring. Data were collected wall-to-wall for Kilosa district and for a sample across Tanzania. The results show that the amount of and spatial extent of cropland in the different products differs considerably from 8% to 42% for Tanzania, with similar values for Kilosa district. The agreement of the validation data with the four different products varied between 36% and 54% and highlighted that cropland is overestimated by the ESA-CCI and underestimated by FROM-GC. The validation data were also analyzed for consistency between the student interpreters and also compared with a sample interpreted by five experts for quality assurance. Regarding consistency between the students, there was more than 80% agreement if one difference in cropland category was considered (e.g., between low and medium cropland) while most of the confusion with the experts was also within one category difference. In addition to the validation of current cropland products, the data set collected by the students also has potential value as a training set for improving future cropland products

Asynchronous food-web pathways could buffer the response of Serengeti predators to El Niño southern oscillation

Understanding how entire ecosystems maintain stability in the face of climatic and human disturbance is one of the most fundamental challenges in ecology. Theory suggests that a crucial factor determining the degree of ecosystem stability is simply the degree of synchrony with which different species in ecological food webs respond to environmental stochasticity. Ecosystems in which all food-web pathways are affected similarly by external disturbance should amplify variability in top carnivore abundance over time due to population interactions, whereas ecosystems in which a large fraction of pathways are nonresponsive or even inversely responsive to external disturbance will have more constant levels of abundance at upper trophic levels. To test the mechanism underlying this hypothesis, we used over half a century of demographic data for multiple species in the Serengeti (Tanzania) ecosystem to measure the degree of synchrony to variation imposed by an external environmental driver, the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). ENSO effects were mediated largely via changes in dry-season vs. wet-season rainfall and consequent changes in vegetation availability, propagating via bottom-up effects to higher levels of the Serengeti food web to influence herbivores, predators and parasites. Some species in the Serengeti food web responded to the influence of ENSO in opposite ways, whereas other species were insensitive to variation in ENSO. Although far from conclusive, our results suggest that a diffuse mixture of herbivore responses could help buffer top carnivores, such as Serengeti lions, from variability in climate. Future global climate changes that favor some pathways over others, however, could alter the effectiveness of such processes in the future

The Present and Future of Insect Biodiversity Conservation in the Neotropics : Policy Gaps and Recommendations

Funding Information: We acknowledge members of the Natural Capital Project, the Land Change lab, and the Daily lab for insightful feedback. Additionally, we thank the reviewers for their helpful feedback on the manuscript. Funding Information: N. E. D. is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council NE/S007474/1, Oxford-NERC Doctoral Training Partnership in Environmental Research and an Oxford-Reuben Scholarship. A. E. was funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Publisher Copyright: © 2023, The Author(s).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The potential of payment for ecosystem services for crop wild relative conservation

Crop wild relatives (CWR) have proven to be very valuable in agricultural breeding programs but remain a relatively under-utilized and under-protected resource. CWR have provided resistance to pests and diseases, abiotic stress tolerance, quality improvements and yield increases with the annual contribution of these traits to agriculture estimated at USD 115 billion globally and are considered to possess many valuable traits that have not yet been explored. The use of the genetic diversity found in CWR for breeding provides much-needed resilience to modern agricultural systems and has great potential to help sustainably increase agricultural production to feed a growing world population in the face of climate change and other stresses. A number of CWR taxa are at risk, however, necessitating coordinated local, national, regional and global efforts to preserve the genetic diversity of these plants through complementary in situ and ex situ conservation efforts. We discuss the absence of adequate institutional frameworks to incentivize CWR conservation services and propose payment for ecosystem services (PES) as an under-explored mechanism for financing these efforts. Such mechanisms could serve as a potentially powerful tool for enhancing the long-term protection of CWR