Ideologies’ Role in Africa’s Political Underdevelopment

Ideology is the theoretical and practical mirror through which the society is viewed. It gives social, political and economic direction to governments and their policy makers. But a particular ideology could be of disservice to a particular people at a particular time. And in the African situation, some ideologies, instead of serving the good of the black people, were rather promoting underdevelopment and divisions among the people. Africa, naturally had an ideology, namely Conceptual democracy, but which has been substituted by those that played negative roles in Africa’s political development namely: leftist, Rightist, Center leftist and Center rightist ideologies. All these are examined peri-pasu, the Thirdway theory, which this paper believes is serving the end of neocolonialism. The objective of this article is to critically examine the roles of different ideologies and classes in the Africa’s political underdevelopment. We shall examine the collapse of consensual democracy and review the roles of the rightist, leftist, centre leftist, centre rightist ideologies in the underdevelopment of Africa. We shall take a critically look on the Third way theory

Sustainability Strategies of Small Business Owners in Northcentral Texas

While small businesses contribute significantly to job creation in the United States, they fail financially at alarming rates. Fifty percent of small businesses survive 5 years or longer, and only one-third of small business startups survive more than 10 years. Owners of small businesses could benefit from strategies used to mitigate the small firms’ failure rate by obtaining suitable leadership values and skills, understanding the business’s nature, and engaging in financial planning. Grounded in Schumpeter’s entrepreneurship theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies small home health business owners used to sustain their businesses beyond the first 5 years of operation. The participants comprised 3 small home health business owners in Northcentral Texas with successful experience sustaining their businesses beyond the first 5 years of operation. Data were collected from semistructured interviews and organizational documents, such as minutes of meetings, financial statements, training manuals, and staff schedules. Yin’s 5-step analysis process was used to analyze the data with 4 themes emerging: suitable leadership values and skills, effective staff management, effective customer service, and open and effective communication. A key recommendation is that business leaders understand the importance of personal values such as honesty and integrity toward achieving organizational sustainability. The implications for positive social change include the potential for small home healthcare business owners to increase revenue and provide more jobs, increasing the local tax base to sustain roads, libraries, parks, police, and other community services

ADVANCED APPLICATIONS OF VIBRATIONAL CIRCULAR DICHROISM: FROM SMALL CHIRAL MOLECULES TO FIBRILS

Vibrational Circular Dichroism (VCD), first discovered in the early 1970s, and commercialized in the late 1990's, is finally coming of age! No longer a curiosity of the few selected academic groups, it is now used by all major pharmaceutical companies, regulatory agencies, government labs and academic institutions. The main application for the technology has been determination of absolute configuration of small pharmaceutical molecules. In more recent years, this has extended to more complicated molecules such as natural products with many chiral centers and conformational flexibility. Other applications include determination of enantiomeric purity, chiral polymers, and characterization of other biological molecules such as proteins, carohydrates and nucleic acids. _x000d_ _x000d_ One of the most fascinating discoveries in the VCD field has been been unusual enhancement in intensity for proteins that form fibrils. We have demonstrated sensitivity of VCD to in situ solution-phase probe of the process of fibrillogenesis and subsequent development that currently can only be studied in detail with dried samples by such techniques as scanning electron microscopy or atomic force microscopy. We have further shown that several different proteins, that in their native state have different secondary structures, have a very similar unique signature of mature fibrils. _x000d_ _x000d_ In this presentation, we will discuss fundamentals of VCD, demonstrate a few examples of different applications and showcase the sensitivity to structure of fibrils, including new results on micro-sampling

Importance of chirality and reduced flexibility of protein side chains: A study with square and tetrahedral lattice models

In simple models side chains are often represented implicitly (e.g., by spin-states) or simplified as one atom. We study side chain effects using square lattice and tetrahedral lattice models, with explicitly side chains of two atoms. We distinguish effects due to chirality and effects due to side chain flexibilities, since residues in proteins are L-residues, and their side chains adopt different rotameric states. Short chains are enumerated exhaustively. For long chains, we sample effectively rare events (eg, compact conformations) and obtain complete pictures of ensemble properties of these models at all compactness region. We find that both chirality and reduced side chain flexibility lower the folding entropy significantly for globally compact conformations, suggesting that they are important properties of residues to ensure fast folding and stable native structure. This corresponds well with our finding that natural amino acid residues have reduced effective flexibility, as evidenced by analysis of rotamer libraries and side chain rotatable bonds. We further develop a method calculating the exact side-chain entropy for a given back bone structure. We show that simple rotamer counting often underestimates side chain entropy significantly, and side chain entropy does not always correlate well with main chain packing. Among compact backbones with maximum side chain entropy, helical structures emerges as the dominating configurations. Our results suggest that side chain entropy may be an important factor contributing to the formation of alpha helices for compact conformations.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figures, 2 tables. Accepted by J. Chem. Phy

Skunk River Review Fall 2004, vol 16

https://openspace.dmacc.edu/skunkriver/1012/thumbnail.jp

Evaluation of catheter-induced tribological damage to porcine aorta using infra-red spectroscopy

© 2016 Elsevier Ltd Studies were carried out to assess the potential of attenuated total internal reflection Fourier transform infrared (ATR)-FTIR spectroscopy as a tool for evaluating mechanical-tribological damage to the blood vessel wall occurring during simulated endovascular catheterization on fresh ex-vivo porcine aortic tissue. It is envisaged that this method could be used in laboratory tests to quantitatively compare catheters or catheterization approaches with regard to their effect on damage to the aorta wall. Tribological damage was induced on the tissue. Obvious changes were visible in the FTIR spectra as well as the friction coefficient as a function of increasing damage. In particular, the spectral changes due to damage to the outermost layer of the tissue were significant, provided appropriate sample conditioning was performed. These changes, which correlated with a reduction in friction coefficient, can be attributed to the removal of successive layers of tissue as a result of a wear process. In conclusion, FTIR spectroscopy was found to be a reliable and effective measurement technique for quantifying catheter-induced tissue damage, allowing very repeatable spectra to be obtained from the tissue up to 36 h after excision with no major spectral changes observed during this time frame due to tissue age

Infrared spectroscopy characterization of normal and lung cancer cells originated from epithelium

The vibrational spectral differences of normal and lung cancer cells were studied for the development of effective cancer cell screening by means of attenuated total reflection infrared spectroscopy. The phosphate monoester symmetric stretching νs(PO32-) band intensity at ~970 cm-1 and the phosphodiester symmetric stretching νs(PO2-) band intensity at ~1,085 cm-1 in nucleic acids and phospholipids appeared to be significantly strengthened in lung cancer cells with respect to the other vibrational bands compared to normal cells. This finding suggests that more extensive phosphorylation occur in cancer cells. These results demonstrate that lung cancer cells may be prescreened using infrared spectroscopy tools

Recent advances in optical diagnosis of oral cancers: review and future perspectives

Optical diagnosis techniques offer several advantages over traditional approaches, including objectivity, speed and cost, and these label-free, non-invasive methods have the potential to change the future work-flow of cancer management. The oral cavity is particularly accessible and thus such methods may serve as alternate/adjunct tools to traditional methods. Recently, in vivo human clinical studies have been initiated with a view to clinical translation of such technologies. A comprehensive review of optical methods in oral cancer diagnosis is presented. Following an introduction to the epidemiology and aetiological factors associated with oral cancers currently employed diagnostic methods and their limitations are presented. A thorough review of fluorescence, infrared absorption and Raman spectroscopic methods in oral cancer diagnosis is presented. The applicability of minimally invasive methods based on serum/saliva is also discussed. The review concludes with a discussion on future demands and scope of developments from a clinical point of view