Developing Spiritual Leaders for New Hope Christian Church

The purpose of the ministry focus paper is to develop spiritual leaders at New Hope Church of Papillion, Nebraska who effectively lead teams by providing biblical principles and metaphors for leadership, offering church and business leadership wisdom, and training in effective team leadership and spiritual practices. New Hope Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) (hereafter, New Hope Church) is located in Papillion, Nebraska—a community in flux. There is a crying need for true Christ-led community—a sense of belonging that meets needs. Leaders grounded in spiritual disciplines can lead teams to help people live together well in community-building ways. The proposed project will present a strategy, accompanying resources, and training events for developing such spiritual leadership for the community. The focus of the project will be to help spiritual leaders learn how to effectively lead teams. Part One of this paper will examine the surrounding community and New Hope’s mission. The community will be studied through demographic data analysis and interviews within the community. New Hope Church’s mission will be examined through its history, spiritual practices, governance, and reflections by church members. Part Two establishes the theological and biblical foundations for the project. An understanding of team ministry will be examined through the biblical images of the trinity and of the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12). The underpinnings of good spiritual leadership will be presented through an examination of biblical characters and narratives, varieties of Disciples of Christ leadership, other theological traditions, ecclesiology, and recent church and business leadership resources. Part Three focuses on the specific plan for this project, including how its goals, content, target population, and leadership flow from the previous theological and organizational resources. The implementation plan will include specific timelines, assignments, resources, and assessment. Theological Mentor: Kurt Frederickson, Ph

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Design of an Experiment to Investigate ISR Coordination and Information Presentation Strategies in an Expeditionary Strike Group

12th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium (ICCRTS), June 19-21, 2007 at the Naval War College, Newport, RI.This paper describes the design of an experiment that combines research of the Adaptive Architectures for Command and Control (A2C2) and the Command 21 programs, both sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. The experiment focuses on the nexus of organizational design and information presentation strategies – both of which are undergoing dramatic changes in form and function within the US military. The formation of Expeditionary Strike Groups (ESGs) is one example of the transformational vision provided in the Naval Operating Concept wherein an ESG provides a flexible force package, capable of tailoring itself to a wide variety of mission sets. In this effort, the objective is to examine experimentally how ESGs with alternative structures and processes – here specifically related to the incorporation of an ISR officer and different information presentation strategies – affects performance and information flow in an information rich planning and execution environment. We present the process used to develop the scenario environment in which the team-in-the-loop simulation experiment is conducted. This scenario reflects the new mission areas faced by ESGs that include Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief (HA/DR), Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) and Maritime Security Operations (MSO)

Spectroscopic analysis through thermoelastic optical coherence microscopy

We exploit the thermoelastic effect to acquire spectroscopic information which is based on the inherent tissue optical absorption properties. We support the acquired data with a 2D model along with system characterisation.</p

Thermo-elastic optical coherence microscopy

The absorption of laser pulses by tissue leads not only to the generation of acoustic waves, but also to nanometer to sub-micrometer scale displacement. After the initial expansion, a quasi-steady state is achieved in a few microseconds. Previously we introduced the concept of thermo-elastic optical coherence tomography (TE-OCT) to "visualise" the rapid thermo-elastic expansion by measuring the Doppler phase shift rather than istening" to the acoustic wave as in photoacoustic imaging. In this study, we built a microscopic setup for high-speed 3D TE-OCT imaging, by means of thermo-elastic optical coherence microscopy (TE-OCM). The repetition rate of pulsed laser was set to 100 Hz and the line rate of the OCT system is 1.5 MHz. The OCT beam and the laser pulse were focused upon the same location on the sample FWHM spot sizes of 300 μm for the pulsed laser and 40 μm FWHM for the OCT beam. For each laser pulse, an M-mode OCT image consisting of 90 A-lines was acquired. The Doppler phase shift was extracted by comparing the phase signal before and after the pulse arrival. Within 6 minutes, a 3D TE-OCM image (10 × 10 × 4 mm3) can be acquired and processed. Imaging experiments were carried out in swine meat using 1210 nm excitation wavelength to highlight lipid in tissue. The results show that no significant displacement was detected in swine muscle while strong displacement was observed in lipid, owing to the optical absorption features. Furthermore, fatty tissue is easily identified in the 3D TE-OCM image while the conventional OCT images provides the structural information.</p

Thermo-elastic optical coherence microscopy

The absorption of laser pulses by tissue leads not only to the generation of acoustic waves, but also to nanometer to sub-micrometer scale displacement. After the initial expansion, a quasi-steady state is achieved in a few microseconds. Previously we introduced the concept of thermo-elastic optical coherence tomography (TE-OCT) to "visualise" the rapid thermo-elastic expansion by measuring the Doppler phase shift rather than istening" to the acoustic wave as in photoacoustic imaging. In this study, we built a microscopic setup for high-speed 3D TE-OCT imaging, by means of thermo-elastic optical coherence microscopy (TE-OCM). The repetition rate of pulsed laser was set to 100 Hz and the line rate of the OCT system is 1.5 MHz. The OCT beam and the laser pulse were focused upon the same location on the sample FWHM spot sizes of 300 μm for the pulsed laser and 40 μm FWHM for the OCT beam. For each laser pulse, an M-mode OCT image consisting of 90 A-lines was acquired. The Doppler phase shift was extracted by comparing the phase signal before and after the pulse arrival. Within 6 minutes, a 3D TE-OCM image (10 × 10 × 4 mm3) can be acquired and processed. Imaging experiments were carried out in swine meat using 1210 nm excitation wavelength to highlight lipid in tissue. The results show that no significant displacement was detected in swine muscle while strong displacement was observed in lipid, owing to the optical absorption features. Furthermore, fatty tissue is easily identified in the 3D TE-OCM image while the conventional OCT images provides the structural information.ImPhys/Medical Imagin

Thermo-elastic optical coherence microscopy

The absorption of laser pulses by tissue leads not only to the generation of acoustic waves, but also to nanometer to sub-micrometer scale displacement. After the initial expansion, a quasi-steady state is achieved in a few microseconds. Previously we introduced the concept of thermo-elastic optical coherence tomography (TE-OCT) to "visualise" the rapid thermo-elastic expansion by measuring the Doppler phase shift rather than istening" to the acoustic wave as in photoacoustic imaging. In this study, we built a microscopic setup for high-speed 3D TE-OCT imaging, by means of thermo-elastic optical coherence microscopy (TE-OCM). The repetition rate of pulsed laser was set to 100 Hz and the line rate of the OCT system is 1.5 MHz. The OCT beam and the laser pulse were focused upon the same location on the sample FWHM spot sizes of 300 μm for the pulsed laser and 40 μm FWHM for the OCT beam. For each laser pulse, an M-mode OCT image consisting of 90 A-lines was acquired. The Doppler phase shift was extracted by comparing the phase signal before and after the pulse arrival. Within 6 minutes, a 3D TE-OCM image (10 × 10 × 4 mm3) can be acquired and processed. Imaging experiments were carried out in swine meat using 1210 nm excitation wavelength to highlight lipid in tissue. The results show that no significant displacement was detected in swine muscle while strong displacement was observed in lipid, owing to the optical absorption features. Furthermore, fatty tissue is easily identified in the 3D TE-OCM image while the conventional OCT images provides the structural information.</p

Spectroscopic thermo-elastic optical coherence tomography for tissue characterization

Optical imaging techniques that provide free space, label free imaging are powerful tools in obtaining structural and biochemical information in biological samples. To date, most of the optical imaging technologies create images with a specific contrast and require multimodality integration to add additional contrast. In this study, we demonstrate spectroscopic Thermo-elastic Optical Coherence Tomography (TE-OCT) as a potential tool in tissue identification. TE-OCT creates images based on two different forms of contrast: optical reflectance and thermo-elastic deformation. TE-OCT uses short laser pulses to induce thermo-elastic tissue deformation and measures the resulting surface displacement using phase-sensitive OCT. In this work we characterized the relation between thermo-elastic displacement and optical absorption, excitation, fluence and illumination area. The experimental results were validated with a 2-dimensional analytical model. Using spectroscopic TE-OCT, the thermo-elastic spectra of elastic phantoms and tissue components in coronary arteries were extracted. Specific tissue components, particularly lipid, an important biomarker for identifying atherosclerotic lesions, can be identified in the TE-OCT spectral response. As a label-free, free-space, dual-contrast, all-optical imaging technique, spectroscopic TE-OCT holds promise for biomedical research and clinical pathology diagnosis