Proteomics of Carbon Fixation Energy Sources in Halothiobacillus neapolitanus

Through the use of proteomics, it was uncovered that the autotrophic, aerobic purple sulfur bacterium Halothiobacillus neapolitanus displays changes in cellular levels of portions of its carbon dioxide uptake and fixation mechanisms upon switch from bicarbonate to CO2(g) as carbon source. This includes an increase in level of a heterodimeric bicarbonate transporter along with a potential switch between form I and form II of RubisCO. Additional changes are seen in several sulfur oxidation pathways, which may indicate a link between sulfur oxidation pathways as an energy source and carbon uptake/fixation mechanisms

Virtual School Counseling Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

School counselors work with students and families to remove or minimize social, emotional, and academic barriers to education. In a traditional setting, school counseling can be rewarding yet not without obstacles. These obstacles or challenges are compounded when variables like role changes, shifts in the work setting, and a pandemic are present. This phenomenological study aimed to understand the lived virtual school counseling experience amid COVID-19 for elementary school counselors in Georgia. The phenomenological theoretical framework by Edmund Husserl was the theory guiding this study. This theoretical framework helped provide a rich description of school counselors\u27 lived experiences working virtually amid COVID-19. It provided insights into challenges faced as school counselors attempted to meet their students\u27 social and emotional needs in a virtual setting and their perceptions and attitudes regarding their lived experience with virtual school counseling. The study employed snowball sampling to recruit elementary school counselors employed in Georgia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the school counselors’ notes. The findings of this study will fill in the gap of limited qualitative research in the counseling profession. There were five themes and eight subthemes that emerged from this study. The themes/subthemes were adaptability/role and program delivery, social emotional learning (SEL), communication/parents, technology/devices, internet accessibility and training, and engagement/staff attendance and student attendance and participation

From Management to Sustainability: Strategies for Producers, Consumers, and Small Businesses; Journal: Journal of Management and Sustainability

The effects of climate change and other stressors on the agricultural sector provide proof that the need to achieve agricultural sustainability is a legitimate issue that should be addressed immediately. The ultimate financial benefits to achieving sustainability are immense. This study investigated the causes of climate change and reported how it directly and indirectly affects the agricultural sector of the Southeastern Region of the United States. We concluded that crops vary with the different adaptation strategies and with the predicted rise in temperature and fluctuation in precipitation. It is essential for producers to monitor closely their previous growing seasons. Long term investments include plant breeding, rotating crops, building infrastructure, and mitigation systems. Climate awareness and its impacts on agriculture by consumers, producers, and policymakers are essential to develop adaptation strategies to mitigate the effects of climate change

Using audit and feedback to increase clinician adherence to clinical practice guidelines in brain injury rehabilitation: v

ObjectiveThis study evaluated whether frequent (fortnightly) audit and feedback cycles over a sustained period of time (>12 months) increased clinician adherence to recommended guidelines in acquired brain injury rehabilitation.DesignA before and after study design.SettingA metropolitan inpatient brain injury rehabilitation unit.ParticipantsClinicians; medical, nursing and allied health staff.InterventionsFortnightly cycles of audit and feedback for 14 months. Each fortnight, medical file and observational audits were completed against 114 clinical indicators.Main outcome measureAdherence to guideline indicators before and after intervention, calculated by proportions, Mann-Whitney U and Chi square analysis.ResultsClinical and statistical significant improvements in median clinical indicator adherence were found immediately following the audit and feedback program from 38.8% (95% CI 34.3 to 44.4) to 83.6% (95% CI 81.8 to 88.5). Three months after cessation of the intervention, median adherence had decreased from 82.3% to 76.6% (95% CI 72.7 to 83.3, pConclusionA fortnightly audit and feedback program increased clinicians’ adherence to guideline recommendations in an inpatient acquired brain injury rehabilitation setting. We propose future studies build on the evidence-based method used in the present study to determine effectiveness and develop an implementation toolkit for scale-up.</div

The Power of Feminist Judgments?

Recent years have seen the advent of two feminist judgment-writing projects, the Women’s Court of Canada, and the Feminist Judgments Project in England. This article analyses these projects in light of Carol Smart’s feminist critique of law and legal reform and her proposed feminist strategies in Feminism and the Power of Law (1989). At the same time, it reflects on Smart’s arguments 20 years after their first publication and considers the extent to which feminist judgment-writing projects may reinforce or trouble her conclusions. It argues that both of these results are discernible—that while some of Smart’s contentions have proved to be unsustainable, others remain salient and have both inspired and hold important cautions for feminist judgment-writing projects

Identifying Linear Relational Concepts in Large Language Models

Transformer language models (LMs) have been shown to represent concepts as directions in the latent space of hidden activations. However, for any given human-interpretable concept, how can we find its direction in the latent space? We present a technique called linear relational concepts (LRC) for finding concept directions corresponding to human-interpretable concepts at a given hidden layer in a transformer LM by first modeling the relation between subject and object as a linear relational embedding (LRE). While the LRE work was mainly presented as an exercise in understanding model representations, we find that inverting the LRE while using earlier object layers results in a powerful technique to find concept directions that both work well as a classifier and causally influence model outputs

City of Colton Urban Forest Management Project

As population growth continues in our urban centers, urban forest management becomes an important priority. Trees are an essential component of resilient and healthy urban communities, providing benefits including mediating the urban heat island effect, storm water management, and energy and water efficiency, carbon sequestration, and city beautification. In order to assess the current status of Colton’s urban forest, interdisciplinary teams of students and scientists from the Center for Urban Resilience (CURes) at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) have assisted Jack Sahl & Associates with an extensive inventory of the tree resources within the City. In gathering data describing the size, distribution, age, health, and energy efficiency benefits of the city’s trees, this study seeks to provide recommendations for best management practices of Colton’s urban forest. Colton has strived to engage the public in an open dialogue about this project. Colton is the first city to deal with the task of conducting an inventory of all the trees located within the public domain, in the future the strategies used here will be improved.https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cures_posters/1014/thumbnail.jp

Capping Strategies for Covalent Template-Directed Synthesis of Linear Oligomers Using CuAAC.

Covalent templating provides an attractive solution to the controlled synthesis of linear oligomers because a template oligomer can be used to define the precise length and sequence of the product. If the monomer units are attached to the template using kinetically inert covalent bonds it should be possible to operate at high dilution to favor intramolecular over intermolecular reaction. However, for oligomerization reactions using copper-catalyzed azide alkyne cycloaddition (CuAAC) this is not the case. The rate-limiting step is formation of an activated copper complex, so any alkyne that is activated by copper reacts rapidly with the nearest available azide. As a result, every time a chain end alkyne is activated, rapid intermolecular reaction takes place with a different oligomer leading to the formation of higher order products. It proved possible to block these intermolecular reactions by adding an excess of an azide capping agent that intercepts the chain end of the growing oligomer on the template. By adjusting the concentration of the capping agent to compete effectively with the unwanted intermolecular reactions without interfering with the desired intramolecular reactions, it was possible to obtain quantitative yields of copy strands from covalent template-directed oligomerization reactions. Remarkably, the capping agent could also be used to control the stereochemistry of the duplex formed in the templated oligomerization reaction to give exclusively the antiparallel product.ERC-2012-AdG 320539-duplex, Herchel Smith Fun

Interpersonal prosodic correlation in frontotemporal dementia.

Communication accommodation describes how individuals adjust their communicative style to that of their conversational partner. We predicted that interpersonal prosodic correlation related to pitch and timing would be decreased in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). We predicted that the interpersonal correlation in a timing measure and a pitch measure would be increased in right temporal FTD (rtFTD) due to sparing of the neural substrate for speech timing and pitch modulation but loss of social semantics. We found no significant effects in bvFTD, but conversations including rtFTD demonstrated higher interpersonal correlations in speech rate than healthy controls