Dimensions of Grace: Factor Analysis of Three Grace Scales

Measuring grace is challenging. Prior research found the Grace Scale (GS), Richmont Grace Scale (RGS), and The Amazing Grace Scale (TAGS) to be reliable, have promising convergent and divergent validity, and to inter-correlate strongly. However, they may tap different constructs, or grace may be multidimensional (Bufford, Blackburn, Sisemore, & Bassett, 2015). Here two exploratory factor analyses of the combined items showed five factors: experiencing God’s grace, costly grace, grace to self, grace from others, and grace to others, partially paralleling Watson, Chen and Sisemore (2011). Items from all three scales loaded on Factor 1, only items from the RGS loaded on Factor 2. The remaining factors were mostly GS items and a few RGS items. The three scales measure somewhat different constructs. Preliminary validity for the five factors is promising. Regressions showed that combinations of the other four proposed scales accounted for at most about one third of the variance on any given grace factor. The five factors showed different patterns of relationships to criterion variables. We propose a 36 item Dimensions of Grace Scale combining items from all three scales for further exploration

Aloe vera: A Multipurpose Healer and Bacterial Eradicator

The Aloe vera plant is a succulent known for its rich content in vitamins and minerals, thus gaining popularity over the years in healthcare products. With advancements in alternative medicine, it has been recently found useful in dentistry due to properties such as anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and antimicrobial actions that contribute to wound healing. The purpose of this study was to examine and discover how Aloe vera can be used as an alternative therapy in the dental field. The PubMed, Google Scholar and Dentistry & Oral Sciences (DOSS) databases were utilized to find current scientific evidence on the effects of Aloe vera. Relevant articles were summarized to write a review of findings. In this study, 21 articles published from 2015 to present were reviewed. From the studies, there is strong evidence to support that Aloe vera exhibits beneficial effects in prevention of carious lesions, non-surgical scaling and root planing in patients with chronic periodontitis, and oral wounds. Furthermore, it is cost effective and easily accessible. This review’s findings indicate that dental health care providers could recommend Aloe vera as a preventive and an alternative treatment option to improve patients’ oral health status.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/denh_student/1005/thumbnail.jp

Habitat conversion and global avian biodiversity loss

The magnitude of the impacts of human activities on global biodiversity has been documented at several organizational levels. However, although there have been numerous studies of the effects of local-scale changes in land use (e.g. logging) on the abundance of groups of organisms, broader continental or global-scale analyses addressing the same basic issues remain largely wanting. None the less, changing patterns of land use, associated with the appropriation of increasing proportions of net primary productivity by the human population, seem likely not simply to have reduced the diversity of life, but also to have reduced the carrying capacity of the environment in terms of the numbers of other organisms that it can sustain. Here, we estimate the size of the existing global breeding bird population, and then make a first approximation as to how much this has been modified as a consequence of land-use changes wrought by human activities. Summing numbers across different land-use classes gives a best current estimate of a global population of less than 100 billion breeding bird individuals. Applying the same methodology to estimates of original land-use distributions suggests that conservatively this may represent a loss of between a fifth and a quarter of pre-agricultural bird numbers. This loss is shared across a range of temperate and tropical land-use types

Singlet-Triplet Physics and Shell Filling in Carbon Nanotube Double Quantum Dots

An artifcial two-atomic molecule, also called a double quantum dot (DQD), is an ideal system for exploring few electron physics. Spin-entanglement between just two electrons can be explored in such systems where singlet and triplet states are accessible. These two spin-states can be regarded as the two states in a quantum two-state system, a so-called singlet-triplet qubit. A very attractive material for realizing spin based qubits is the carbon nanotube (CNT), because it is expected to have a very long spin coherence time. Here we show the existence of a gate-tunable singlet-triplet qubit in a CNT DQD. We show that the CNT DQD has clear shell structures of both four and eight electrons, with the singlet-triplet qubit present in the four-electron shells. We furthermore observe inelastic cotunneling via the singlet and triplet states, which we use to probe the splitting between singlet and triplet, in good agreement with theory.Comment: Supplement available at: http://www.fys.ku.dk/~hij/public/singlet-triple_supp.pd

Spin and Orbital Splitting in Ferromagnetic Contacted Single Wall Carbon Nanotube Devices

We observed the coulomb blockade phenomena in ferromagnetic contacting single wall semiconducting carbon nanotube devices. No obvious Coulomb peaks shift was observed with existing only the Zeeman splitting at 4K. Combining with other effects, the ferromagnetic leads prevent the orbital spin states splitting with magnetic field up to 2 Tesla at 4K. With increasing magnetic field further, both positive or negative coulomb peaks shift slopes are observed associating with clockwise and anticlockwise orbital state splitting. The strongly suppressed/enhanced of the conductance has been observed associating with the magnetic field induced orbital states splitting/converging

Preclinical characterization of drug like glucocorticoid induced leucine zipper peptide analogs

poster abstractMany intermolecular interactions in a eukaryotic cell are mediated through protein-peptide interactions. For efficient interaction, the peptide scans the protein surface for a large enough pocket into which it anchors through a small number of residues/core motif that contribute maximally to the free energy of binding. Of special significance is the preponderance of proline rich sequences that preferentially adopt the left-handed polyproline type II (PPII) helical conformation in the interface peptides. Availability of both side chain and backbone carbonyls for interaction makes PPII helix an excellent recognition motif. Glucocorticoid induced leucine zipper (GILZ), is a glucocorticoid responsive protein that has been shown to suppress immuno-inflammatory responses by preventing the nuclear translocation of the p65 subunit of the transcription factor nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-κB). Mutational and binding studies localized the sites of interaction to the proline rich region at the carboxy terminus of GILZ and the transactivation domain of p65. Similar to most intermolecular interactions mediated by proline rich motifs the strength of interaction between the GILZ and the p65 proteins is in the micromolar concentration suggesting weak binding kinetics. A widely used strategy in the discovery of peptide drugs involves exploitation of the complementary surfaces of the naturally occurring binding partners. We observed that a synthetic peptide (GILZ-P) derived from the proline rich region of GILZ suppressed immune mediated inflammatory responses in mice. Here we characterize GILZ-P structurally and evaluate its toxicity and efficacy in mature human macrophage like THP-1 cells. We show that the GILZ-P adopts an extended polyproline type II helical conformation. Functionally GILZ-P is non-toxic, suppresses NF B activation on by activated macrophages suggesting a therapeutic potential in pathologies wherein persistent inflammation plays critical role in the disease initiation and/or progression

Periodic Solutions of the Einstein Equations for Binary Systems

This revision includes clarified exposition and simplified analysis. Solutions of the Einstein equations which are periodic and have standing gravitational waves are valuable approximations to more physically realistic solutions with outgoing waves. A variational principle is found which has the power to provide an accurate estimate of the relationship between the mass and angular momentum of the system, the masses and angular momenta of the components, the rotational frequency of the frame of reference in which the system is periodic, the frequency of the periodicity of the system, and the amplitude and phase of each multipole component of gravitational radiation. Examination of the boundary terms of the variational principle leads to definitions of the effective mass and effective angular momentum of a periodic geometry which capture the concepts of mass and angular momentum of the source alone with no contribution from the gravitational radiation. These effective quantities are surface integrals in the weak-field zone which are independent of the surface over which they are evaluated, through second order in the deviations of the metric from flat space.Comment: 18 pages, RevTeX 3.0, UF-RAP-93-1

Parameter estimation for compact binaries with ground-based gravitational-wave observations using the LALInference software library

The Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo gravitational-wave (GW) detectors will begin operation in the coming years, with compact binary coalescence events a likely source for the first detections. The gravitational waveforms emitted directly encode information about the sources, including the masses and spins of the compact objects. Recovering the physical parameters of the sources from the GW observations is a key analysis task. This work describes the LALInference software library for Bayesian parameter estimation of compact binary signals, which builds on several previous methods to provide a well-tested toolkit which has already been used for several studies. We show that our implementation is able to correctly recover the parameters of compact binary signals from simulated data from the advanced GW detectors. We demonstrate this with a detailed comparison on three compact binary systems: a binary neutron star, a neutron star–black hole binary and a binary black hole, where we show a cross comparison of results obtained using three independent sampling algorithms. These systems were analyzed with nonspinning, aligned spin and generic spin configurations respectively, showing that consistent results can be obtained even with the full 15-dimensional parameter space of the generic spin configurations. We also demonstrate statistically that the Bayesian credible intervals we recover correspond to frequentist confidence intervals under correct prior assumptions by analyzing a set of 100 signals drawn from the prior. We discuss the computational cost of these algorithms, and describe the general and problem-specific sampling techniques we have used to improve the efficiency of sampling the compact binary coalescence parameter space

Dynamics and controls of urban heat sink and island phenomena in a desert city:development of a local climate zone scheme using remotely-sensed inputs

This study aims to determine the dynamics and controls of Surface Urban Heat Sinks (SUHS) and Surface Urban Heat Islands (SUHI) in desert cities, using Dubai as a case study. A Local Climate Zone (LCZ) schema was developed to subdivide the city into different zones based on similarities in land cover and urban geometry. Proximity to the Gulf Coast was also determined for each LCZ. The LCZs were then used to sample seasonal and daily imagery from the MODIS thermal sensor to determine Land Surface Temperature (LST) variations relative to desert sand. Canonical correlation techniques were then applied to determine which factors explained the variability between urban and desert LST. Our results indicate that the daytime SUHS effect is greatest during the summer months (typically ∼3.0 °C) with the strongest cooling effects in open high-rise zones of the city. In contrast, the night-time SUHI effect is greatest during the winter months (typically ∼3.5 °C) with the strongest warming effects in compact mid-rise zones of the city. Proximity to the Arabian Gulf had the largest influence on both SUHS and SUHI phenomena, promoting daytime cooling in the summer months and night-time warming in the winter months. However, other parameters associated with the urban environment such as building height had an influence on daytime cooling, with larger buildings promoting shade and variations in airflow. Likewise, other parameters such as sky view factor contributed to night-time warming, with higher temperatures associated with limited views of the sky