Charles Williams and his Theology of Romantic Love: A Dantean Interpretation of the Christian Doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity

Relates Williams’s Romantic Theology to the precursors of Dante and Beatrice, and to the Christian doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation

Dataset associated with U.S. Apparel Manufacturers Survey

This dataset contains responses from 97 U.S. apparel manufacturers collected via an online survey during the fall of 2019. The apparel manufacturing sector in the U.S., as in many countries, has struggled with multiple disrupting factors contributing to the sector’s decline in firm continuance. Networks, serving to build domestic and international supply chain ties, may provide one solution for adapting the firm’s resources enhancing global competitiveness. The purpose of the study was to examine connections to entrepreneurs’ engagement in network ties from antecedents involving the firm’s knowledge absorptive capacity, business goals, entrepreneurial orientation, social interactions, and support from their environment.Firms do not continue and prosper purely on their own individual endeavors, as each firm is influenced by the activities of others, and thus direct and indirect relationships shape the firm’s strategic management. These relationships form the tactics by which knowledge and other strategically important resources are accessed and created. Forming and maintaining ties among members of a network have been the subject for numerous research studies in the social, economic, and business literature. Our work is framed by the resource-based view of the firm perspective along with social capital theory and its shared constructs in network theory. Prior findings suggest that networking ties are strategic actions generated for firm growth and continuance. The ties may be short-term or develop into long-term relationships. The purpose of this research is to fill some of the gaps in interorganizational networking strategy by analyzing five antecedents that have been suggested in the literature as individually associated with entrepreneurs’ engagement in network ties. In this way, our work provides another research avenue for examining networking’s contribution to strategic management. We hypothesized positive connections to entrepreneurs’ engagement in network ties from antecedents involving the firm’s knowledge absorptive capacity, business goals, entrepreneurial orientation, social interactions, and support from their environment. We tested our proposed macrolevel direct and moderating connections through an online survey of 125 U.S. apparel manufacturing firms. The apparel manufacturing sector in the U.S., as in many countries, has struggled with multiple disrupting factors contributing to the sector’s decline in firm continuance. Networks, serving to build domestic and international supply chain ties, may provide one solution for adapting the firm’s resources enhancing global competitiveness. Findings from OLS regression analyses support our hypothesized connections in that each of the five antecedents significantly contributed to entrepreneurs’ engagement in network ties; however, when all five were collectively examined only absorptive capacity, social interaction, and business goals were significant (R2 = 0.58). Further examination of moderation effects found the entrepreneurs’ perceptions of a supportive environment to modify both entrepreneurial orientation and business goals. The effects of a supportive environment on business goals’ relationship with network ties were greater when perceptions of a supportive environment decreased, while the effects of a supportive environment on entrepreneurship orientation’s relationship with network ties were greater when perceptions of a supportive environment increased. Future studies may direct attention to other industry sectors or countries for replication with larger sample sizes as we recognize the limitations to generalizability and scale refinement due to our limited sample size. Examining the five constructs sheds light on how an organization’s decisions may relate to engaging in networking and provides theoretical as well as practical implications that contributes to the larger organizational system framework.This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation’s Science of Organizations Program under grant number 1660570

Preferences of Co-Designed Cultural Textile Products from Guatemala and Peru

This research involves working with fair-trade weaving groups in Guatemala and Peru. Artisan textiles were co-designed with contemporary color palettes and layouts for backstrap weaving with U.S. designers. Co-design has been integrated into the textile design process in this study through pictures and technical diagrams. The textiles were then incorporated into modern silhouettes of apparel and home décor

What Works for Small Apparel Manufacturing: Issues Affecting Reshoring

This study is the first step in a National Science Foundation supported investigation of evolving innovative US supply chain linkages that support development of small apparel manufacturing centers across a southwestern state. We provide a case study of a small US apparel manufacturing business organized in 2014 to meet the needs of local and regional industry, while creating sustainable, dignified jobs. The company defined itself as, \u27a social enterprise with a sewing machine at its heart\u27. Researchers conducted in-depth interviews with the owner and founder of the manufacturing firm. Overall lessons learned that could advance emerging small manufacturing businesses include the importance of brand creation and building an organizational structure with cohesive alignment. Further research is needed, but there is the indication that the ability to collaborate or network with other similar small manufacturing centers could play an important role in meeting large orders or providing training for workers

ExprTarget: An Integrative Approach to Predicting Human MicroRNA Targets

Variation in gene expression has been observed in natural populations and associated with complex traits or phenotypes such as disease susceptibility and drug response. Gene expression itself is controlled by various genetic and non-genetic factors. The binding of a class of small RNA molecules, microRNAs (miRNAs), to mRNA transcript targets has recently been demonstrated to be an important mechanism of gene regulation. Because individual miRNAs may regulate the expression of multiple gene targets, a comprehensive and reliable catalogue of miRNA-regulated targets is critical to understanding gene regulatory networks. Though experimental approaches have been used to identify many miRNA targets, due to cost and efficiency, current miRNA target identification still relies largely on computational algorithms that aim to take advantage of different biochemical/thermodynamic properties of the sequences of miRNAs and their gene targets. A novel approach, ExprTarget, therefore, is proposed here to integrate some of the most frequently invoked methods (miRanda, PicTar, TargetScan) as well as the genome-wide HapMap miRNA and mRNA expression datasets generated in our laboratory. To our knowledge, this dataset constitutes the first miRNA expression profiling in the HapMap lymphoblastoid cell lines. We conducted diagnostic tests of the existing computational solutions using the experimentally supported targets in TarBase as gold standard. To gain insight into the biases that arise from such an analysis, we investigated the effect of the choice of gold standard on the evaluation of the various computational tools. We analyzed the performance of ExprTarget using both ROC curve analysis and cross-validation. We show that ExprTarget greatly improves miRNA target prediction relative to the individual prediction algorithms in terms of sensitivity and specificity. We also developed an online database, ExprTargetDB, of human miRNA targets predicted by our approach that integrates gene expression profiling into a broader framework involving important features of miRNA target site predictions

A novel member of the let-7 microRNA family is associated with developmental transitions in filarial nematode parasites

Background: Filarial nematodes are important pathogens in the tropics transmitted to humans via the bite of blood sucking arthropod vectors. The molecular mechanisms underpinning survival and differentiation of these parasites following transmission are poorly understood. microRNAs are small non-coding RNA molecules that regulate target mRNAs and we set out to investigate whether they play a role in the infection event. Results: microRNAs differentially expressed during the early post-infective stages of Brugia pahangi L3 were identified by microarray analysis. One of these, bpa-miR-5364, was selected for further study as it is upregulated ~12-fold at 24 hours post-infection, is specific to clade III nematodes, and is a novel member of the let-7 family, which are known to have key developmental functions in the free-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Predicted mRNA targets of bpa-miR-5364 were identified using bioinformatics and comparative genomics approaches that relied on the conservation of miR-5364 binding sites in the orthologous mRNAs of other filarial nematodes. Finally, we confirmed the interaction between bpa-miR-5364 and three of its predicted targets using a dual luciferase assay. Conclusions: These data provide new insight into the molecular mechanisms underpinning the transmission of third stage larvae of filarial nematodes from vector to mammal. This study is the first to identify parasitic nematode mRNAs that are verified targets of specific microRNAs and demonstrates that post-transcriptional control of gene expression via stage-specific expression of microRNAs may be important in the success of filarial infection