Systemic design of an Idea Zone at a science center.

In this working paper we bring key systems and cybernetics ideas to the design of an Idea Zone in a large regional science center. Most notably, we bring the ecology and systems approaches of Gregory Bateson and the cybernetic systems designapproachesofRanulphGlanville,tothisevolvingdesign project and explore how our learning from this particular case may also inform more general systemic design principles. This includes issues of context at many levels, movement across boundaries, as well as the importance of the design of a communicationprocessforthedesignofanIdeaZon

Presence Of A Congenitally Bicuspid Aortic Valve Among Patients Having Combined Mitral And Aortic Valve Replacement

Although bicuspid aortic valve occurs in an estimated 1% of adults and mitral valve prolapse in an estimated 5% of adults, occurrence of the 2 in the same patient is infrequent. During examination of operatively excised aortic and mitral valves because of dysfunction (stenosis and/or regurgitation), we encountered 16 patients who had congenitally bicuspid aortic valves associated with various types of dysfunctioning mitral valves. Eleven of the 16 patients had aortic stenosis (AS): 5 of them also had mitral stenosis, of rheumatic origin in 4 and secondary to mitral annular calcium in 1; the other 6 with aortic stenosis had pure mitral regurgitation (MR) secondary to mitral valve prolapse in 3, to ischemia in 2, and to unclear origin in 1. Of the 5 patients with pure aortic regurgitation, each also had pure mitral regurgitation: in 1 secondary to mitral valve prolapse and in 4 secondary to infective endocarditis. In conclusion, various types of mitral dysfunction severe enough to warrant mitral valve replacement occur in patients with bicuspid aortic valves. A proper search for mitral valve dysfunction in patients with bicuspid aortic valves appears warranted. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (Am J Cardiol 2012;109:263-271)Integrative Biolog

Centering the Marginalized: The Impact of the Pandemic on Online Student Retention

During the pandemic, much of the focus of administrators and scholars has been on its impact on residential students and the sudden shift to online instruction. While justified, researchers have yet to focus on online students—who often represent marginalized communities in higher education—to ask whether they were impacted by factors related to the pandemic other than the modality shift. In this study, we examined how the first-year retention of online students was affected during the pandemic, and whether it differed from first-year residential students who transitioned online. We examined records of two student cohorts (Fall 2017 and Fall 2019) from a university to determine each cohort’s retention rate by modality. Holding other relevant factors constant, we found the COVID cohort of students were less likely to persist to the following Fall regardless of modality, although residential students were still much more likely to be retained overall. However, Black and Hispanic students were less likely to be retained across both modalities, and even Black residential students were more vulnerable to not returning than their White counterparts, suggesting that racial inequalities persist across learning modalities. We conclude by suggesting how one retention tool—financial aid—could be used to address the particular needs of online students to improve their retention

Effect Of Coronary Bypass And Valve Structure On Outcome In Isolated Valve Replacement For Aortic Stenosis

Reports differ regarding the effect of concomitant coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) in patients who undergo aortic valve replacement (AVR) for aortic stenosis (AS), and no reports have described the effect of aortic valve structure in patients who undergo AVR for AS. A total of 871 patients aged 24 to 94 years (mean 70) whose AVR for AS was their first cardiac operation, with or without first concomitant CABG, were included. Patients who underwent mitral valve procedures were excluded. In comparison with the 443 patients (51%) who did not undergo CABG, the 428 (49%) who underwent concomitant CABG were significantly older, were more often male, had lower transvalvular peak systolic pressure gradients and larger valve areas, had lower frequencies of congenitally malformed aortic valves, had lighter valves by weight, had higher frequencies of systemic hypertension, and had longer stays in the hospital after AVR. Early and late (to 10 years) mortality were similar by propensity-adjusted analysis in patients who did and did not undergo concomitant CABG. Congenitally unicuspid or bicuspid valves occurred in approximately 90% of those aged 21 to 50, in nearly 70% in those aged 51 to 70 years, and in just over 30% in those aged 71 to 95 years. Unadjusted and adjusted survival was significantly higher in patients with unicuspid or bicuspid valves compared to those with tricuspid valves. In conclusion, although concomitant CABG had no effect on the adjusted probability of survival, the type of aortic valve (unicuspid or bicuspid vs tricuspid) significantly affected the unadjusted and adjusted probability of survival. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (Am J Cardiol 2012;109:1334-1340)Statistic

Gospel Choir Concert

Kennesaw State University School of Music presents Gospel Choir.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/musicprograms/1355/thumbnail.jp

Clinical evaluation of the Life Support for Trauma and Transport (LSTAT) platform

INTRODUCTION: The Life Support for Trauma and Transport (LSTAT™) is a self-contained, stretcher-based miniature intensive care unit designed by the United States Army to provide care for critically injured patients during transport and in remote settings where resources are limited. The LSTAT contains conventional medical equipment that has been integrated into one platform and reduced in size to fit within the dimensional envelope of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) stretcher. This study evaluated the clinical utility of the LSTAT in simulated and real clinical environments. Our hypothesis was that the LSTAT would be equivalent to conventional equipment in detecting and treating life-threatening problems. METHODS: Thirty-one anesthesiologists and recovery room nurses compared the LSTAT with conventional monitors while managing four simulated critical events. The time required to reach a diagnosis and treatment was recorded for each simulation. Subsequently, 10 consenting adult patients were placed on the LSTAT after surgery for postoperative care in the recovery room. Questionnaires about aspects of LSTAT functionality were completed by nine nurses who cared for the patients placed on the LSTAT. RESULTS: In all of the simulations, there was no clinically significant difference in the time to diagnosis or treatment between the LSTAT and conventional equipment. All clinicians reported that they were able to manage the simulated patients properly with the LSTAT. Nursing staff reported that the LSTAT provided adequate equipment to care for the patients monitored during recovery from surgery and were able to detect critical changes in vital signs in a timely manner. DISCUSSION: Preliminary evaluation of the LSTAT in simulated and postoperative environments demonstrated that the LSTAT provided appropriate equipment to detect and manage critical events in patient care. Further work in assessing LSTAT functionality in a higher-acuity environment is warranted

Binocular vision of designing process for whole systems design crossing boundaries

In the spirit of honoring Bateson’s metaphor of binocular vision (1979), this proposal brings together two design scenes for comparison in the mind of the reader as a way of generating new connections relating design and systems thinking as they played out (and are playing out at the time of this writing) in practice together with stakeholders and others in international and intercultural design contexts. The two comparative design scenes we explore are the Generation of Peace Project in the state of Ceara, Brazil, where more than 10,000 co-researchers sought to foster cultures of peace statewide, and the design of a Design Thinking course in the Honors College at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. Connecting these two distinct scenes are not only shared practices rooted in design and systems thinking but also the World Café (Brown and Isaacs, 2005; Steier, Brown, & Mesquita da Silva, 2015), a group communication process facilitated in each scene that later also emerged as a conversational bridge connecting the scenes. As a first scene for binocular vision, the setting is Brazil’s Generation of Peace Project, a cooperation between the State Department of Education of Ceará (SEDUC), Brazil, and United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), aimed at building networks of a culture of peace between 700 high schools and their communities. The focus on peace in a broad sense, promoting inclusion and respect for diversity, directly and indirectly involved almost 500,000 youth and their families as well as over 16,000 teachers and school administrators, in creating and maintaining a culture of peace. The voices of most societal segments brought in conversation facilitated by the World Café across the whole process of inception and development of the project made it possible to reach more than 200 high schools in less than a year. On the fourth year, in 2014, the project certified 509 schools that presented evidence of building peace on a daily basis, accounting for almost 75% of the entire school system explicitly engaged in the movement. The syncretization of the concepts, tools, and methodologies of systems thinking and the vision, values, and philosophy of ecological thought, elegantly organized in Stephen Sterling’s (2003) thesis, gave rise to the conditions that allowed for the schools to contribute to the project’s evolution according to their local characteristics, sharing the same framework with the other schools while providing unique experiences. Hence, “Generation of Peace” is a result of a whole systems design approach (Mesquita da Silva, 2017). As a second scene for binocular vision, the setting is in the United States, in the Honors College at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa, Florida, where college leadership sought to bring about change together with their students across a number of different dimensions of student life, ranging from the design of a new, dedicated Honors College building to the redesign of students’ curricular processes. To begin that work, students were invited as co-designers together with college leadership and faculty in bringing about change in the College and the larger campus environment through recursively designing their (our) Design Thinking course. These student co-designers were also invited to consider their observing frames (Steier and Jorgenson, 2003) in relation to their learning together with others, and have engaged so far in diverse design projects ranging from enhancing support of refugees moving to the Tampa Bay area to designing green spaces in USF’s Marshall Student Center, and they are regularly engaged in redesigning the course – ranging from reflection-in-action during group activities in a single class setting to inviting redesign of the course as a whole at the end of the term. By looking at these two scenes in “double vision,” a number of key principles and patterns emerged for us that both connect these local contexts and offer opportunities for further inquiry as more general design principles. Most notably, in this proposal we highlight the recursive connections among design and communication, including how communication emerged as a key focus of design along with the other “objects” of design (Thompson, Steier, & Ostrenko, 2014) in both scenes, and also highlight an emergent need across both scenes for focus on cultivating learning from a whole systems perspective. In attending to communication as a designable aspect of the larger design efforts for both scenes, we extended Glanville’s observation (2012) that design is a conversational process among designers by opening conversations through World Cafés and other group processes with stakeholders and designers together as a way of bridging multiple levels of communication – similar in spirit to Bateson’s development of the “orders of learning” frame (1972) – affording focus on both communication process and content such that a new, “third language” might be cogenerated by designers and stakeholders together, leading to new opportunities for learning and shared understanding about local design contexts. Building on this attention to communication process as a designable aspect for design teams and stakeholders together, we also brought forward the integration of action and inquiry from both second-order cybernetics and action research (Greenwood and Levin, 2007) as a frame of colearning- suggesting that the learners in a design scene include both the designers AND the stakeholders, as well as the larger whole of designers and stakeholders together, as they jointly work toward whole systems design. Through this mutual learning and languaging together, new frames and metaphors emerged cogeneratively with new perspectives on shared possibilities for action. In bringing these systems and design thinking principles into practice through hundreds of meetings we co-facilitated across both of these scenes, ranging from hosting World Cafés for cultivation of peace in Brazil to facilitating students’ learning related to design research in a Design Thinking course, this proposal highlights the importance of transitioning design “meetings” from a frame that primarily foregrounds products over processes and roles over activities to a frame that affords a focus on relationships through joint attention to communication process and on mutual learning toward whole systems design

Use of 25-Hydroxyvitamin D3 to Improve Beef Tenderness

Feeding the 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 (25-OH D3) metabolite of vitamin D3 has been reported to improve beef tenderness and result in lower vitamin D3 metabolite concentrations in meat. Because 25-OH D3 remains elevated in plasma for at least 8 d subsequent to feeding, we believe that 25-OH D3 can be fed as a one-time oral bolus and allow a flexible time frame for harvest with the same improvement in postmortem calcium-dependent proteolysis and beef tenderness. To test this hypothesis, 108 crossbred steers were allotted, six steers per pen to 18 pens and treatments were assigned randomly to pen. Treatments were 25-OH D3 dosage (62.5 or 125 mg) and time of administration of the one-time oral bolus (4, 7, 21, or 35 d before harvest). Control steers received no 25-OH D3. Regardless of time of bolusing relative to harvest, the one-time oral bolus elevated plasma 25-OH D3 concentration and it remained elevated through harvest for steers assigned to either dosages of 25-OHD3. Plasma calcium concentration, however, remained unchanged compared with that of controls, regardless of dosage or time of bolusing relative to harvest. The one-time oral bolus of 25-OH D3 did not result in an improvement in tenderness as determined by Warner-Bratzler shear force or an improvement postmortem proteolysis as determined by troponin-T degradation. We conclude that a one-time oral bolus of 62.5 or 125 mg of 25-OH D3 was sufficient to elevate plasma 25-OH D3 concentration and maintain an elevated plasma 25-OH D3 concentration for up to 35 d. The dosage of 25-OH D3, however, was insufficient to result in elevated plasma calcium and therefore did not enhance calcium-dependent proteolysis postmortem to result in beef that is more tender

Structural basis for the binding of tryptophan-based motifs by δ-COP.

Coatomer consists of two subcomplexes: the membrane-targeting, ADP ribosylation factor 1 (Arf1):GTP-binding βγδζ-COP F-subcomplex, which is related to the adaptor protein (AP) clathrin adaptors, and the cargo-binding αβ'ε-COP B-subcomplex. We present the structure of the C-terminal μ-homology domain of the yeast δ-COP subunit in complex with the WxW motif from its binding partner, the endoplasmic reticulum-localized Dsl1 tether. The motif binds at a site distinct from that used by the homologous AP μ subunits to bind YxxΦ cargo motifs with its two tryptophan residues sitting in compatible pockets. We also show that the Saccharomyces cerevisiae Arf GTPase-activating protein (GAP) homolog Gcs1p uses a related WxxF motif at its extreme C terminus to bind to δ-COP at the same site in the same way. Mutations designed on the basis of the structure in conjunction with isothermal titration calorimetry confirm the mode of binding and show that mammalian δ-COP binds related tryptophan-based motifs such as that from ArfGAP1 in a similar manner. We conclude that δ-COP subunits bind Wxn(1-6)[WF] motifs within unstructured regions of proteins that influence the lifecycle of COPI-coated vesicles; this conclusion is supported by the observation that, in the context of a sensitizing domain deletion in Dsl1p, mutating the tryptophan-based motif-binding site in yeast causes defects in both growth and carboxypeptidase Y trafficking/processing.We should like to thank the beamline scientists at the Diamond Light Source and Mike Lewis (MRC LMB), Gerry Johnston (Dalhousie University), and Mark Rose (Princeton University) for helpful discussions and technical advice. RJS and DJO are funded by a Wellcome Trust fellowship to DJO (090909). PPP was funded by Canadian Institute of Health Research. RD acknowledges support from the DFG Excellence Cluster “Inflammation and Interfaces” (ECX306) and the University of Lübeck. SMT and FMH acknowledge support from NIH (GM071574). PRE is funded by MRC grant U105178845This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from PNAS via http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.150618611

A Draft of the Genome of the Gulf Coast tick, \u3ci\u3eAmblyomma maculatum\u3c/i\u3e

The Gulf Coast tick, Amblyomma maculatum, inhabits the Southeastern states of the USA bordering the Gulf of Mexico, Mexico, and other Central and South American countries. More recently, its U.S. range has extended West to Arizona and Northeast to New York state and Connecticut. It is a vector of Rickettsia parkeri and Hepatozoon americanum. This tick species has become a model to study tick/Rickettsia interactions. To increase our knowledge of the basic biology of A. maculatum we report here a draft genome of this tick and an extensive functional classification of its proteome. The DNA from a single male tick was used as a genomic source, and a 10X genomics protocol determined 28,460 scaffolds having equal or more than 10 Kb, totaling 1.98 Gb. The N50 scaffold size was 19,849 Kb. The BRAKER pipeline was used to find the protein-coding gene boundaries on the assembled A. maculatum genome, discovering 237,921 CDS. After trimming and classifying the transposable elements, bacterial contaminants, and truncated genes, a set of 25,702 were annotated and classified as the core gene products. A BUSCO analysis revealed 83.4% complete BUSCOs. A hyperlinked spreadsheet is provided, allowing browsing of the individual gene products and their matches to several databases