Biblical Leadership Principles and Practices Used By University Leaders

This study was conducted to ascertain the leadership principles and practices of those persons in leadership positions at a private, Christian university. The purpose, therefore, was to determine to what degree the leaders at the Christian university under study did practice biblical principles and practices in their leadership. The research design was an explanatory sequential mixed methods study. The same private, Christian university was used for both the quantitative and the qualitative study. The quantitative method employed the Leadership Practices Inventory which asked 30 questions using a Likert scale to determine to what degree 50 leaders at the university practiced the five exemplary leadership practices of modeling the way, inspiring a shared vision, challenging the process, encouraging others to act, and encouraging the heart. The qualitative method contained nine questions asking 13 leaders at the same university their observation and practice of the five exemplary leadership practices along with any other leadership practices, biblical or otherwise, that guided them in their leadership practice. The results discovered from the explanatory sequential mixed method approach for this dissertation were encouraging and supportive that the leaders who were surveyed and interviewed were active in applying biblical principles in their leadership

Cancer Biomarker Discovery: The Entropic Hallmark

Background: It is a commonly accepted belief that cancer cells modify their transcriptional state during the progression of the disease. We propose that the progression of cancer cells towards malignant phenotypes can be efficiently tracked using high-throughput technologies that follow the gradual changes observed in the gene expression profiles by employing Shannon's mathematical theory of communication. Methods based on Information Theory can then quantify the divergence of cancer cells' transcriptional profiles from those of normally appearing cells of the originating tissues. The relevance of the proposed methods can be evaluated using microarray datasets available in the public domain but the method is in principle applicable to other high-throughput methods. Methodology/Principal Findings: Using melanoma and prostate cancer datasets we illustrate how it is possible to employ Shannon Entropy and the Jensen-Shannon divergence to trace the transcriptional changes progression of the disease. We establish how the variations of these two measures correlate with established biomarkers of cancer progression. The Information Theory measures allow us to identify novel biomarkers for both progressive and relatively more sudden transcriptional changes leading to malignant phenotypes. At the same time, the methodology was able to validate a large number of genes and processes that seem to be implicated in the progression of melanoma and prostate cancer. Conclusions/Significance: We thus present a quantitative guiding rule, a new unifying hallmark of cancer: the cancer cell's transcriptome changes lead to measurable observed transitions of Normalized Shannon Entropy values (as measured by high-throughput technologies). At the same time, tumor cells increment their divergence from the normal tissue profile increasing their disorder via creation of states that we might not directly measure. This unifying hallmark allows, via the the Jensen-Shannon divergence, to identify the arrow of time of the processes from the gene expression profiles, and helps to map the phenotypical and molecular hallmarks of specific cancer subtypes. The deep mathematical basis of the approach allows us to suggest that this principle is, hopefully, of general applicability for other diseases