Exploration into small, rural, declining, near end of life-cycle church turnaround in the Wesleyan and United Methodist Church

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/1832/thumbnail.jp

Malaria-filaria coinfection in mice makes malarial disease more severe unless filarial infection achieves patency

Coinfections are common in natural populations, and the literature suggests that helminth coinfection readily affects how the immune system manages malaria. For example, type 1–dependent control of malaria parasitemia might be impaired by the type 2 milieu of preexisting helminth infection. Alternatively, immunomodulatory effects of helminths might affect the likelihood of malarial immunopathology. Using rodent models of lymphatic filariasis (Litomosoides sigmodontis) and noncerebral malaria (clone AS Plasmodium chabaudi chabaudi), we quantified disease severity, parasitemia, and polyclonal splenic immune responses in BALB/c mice. We found that coinfected mice, particularly those that did not have microfilaremia (Mf), had more severe anemia and loss of body mass than did mice with malaria alone. Even when controlling for parasitemia, malaria was most severe in Mf coinfected mice, and this was associated with increased interferon-g responsiveness. Thus, in Mf mice, filariasis upset a delicate immunological balance in malaria infection and exacerbated malaria-induced immunopathology. Helminth infections are prevalent throughout tropical regions where malaria is transmitted [1–5]. Interactions among infections commonly alter disease severity [6, 7], and malaria-helminth coinfection can either exac

Unidirectional Propagation of an Ultra-Short Electromagnetic Pulse in a Resonant Medium with High Frequency Stark Shift

We consider in the unidirectional approximation the propagation of an ultra short electromagnetic pulse in a resonant medium consisting of molecules characterized by a transition operator with both diagonal and non-diagonal matrix elements. We find the zero-curvature representation of the reduced Maxwell-Bloch equations in the sharp line limit. This can be used to develop the inverse scattering transform method to solve these equations. Finally we obtain two types of exact traveling pulse solutions, one with the usual exponential decay and another with an algebraic decay.Comment: Latex, 10 pages, no figure

The online obstacle : a study of African-American enterprise on the Internet

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2010.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-74).Iconic Web companies based in the US, along the likes of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, have exhibited some racial/ethnic diversity among their founders, yet there appears to be a dearth of African-Americans in the group. In this thesis I conduct an empirical investigation into the potential existence of a set of impediments to blockbuster success for African-American founded consumer Internet companies -- or an "online obstacle," as I have chosen to term the condition. In utilizing a short-form survey and telephone interviews to collect the thoughts and opinions of 16 black entrepreneurs who have made at least one attempt at launching a consumer Internet start-up, I document three recurrent themes. First, there do not appear to be enough African-American graduates of engineering and computer science disciplines to facilitate creation of promising Internet ventures that could achieve blockbuster status. Second, black Web entrepreneurs by-and-large have not achieved the heights of capital infusion that seems to be necessary to transition a concept from "successful" to "blockbuster." Lastly, African-American founders of consumer Internet companies do not in any significant numbers appear to live and play in the start-up ecosystem that is Silicon Valley, inhibiting development of relationships and access to resources needed to ascend to blockbuster status online. Overall, my findings suggest that the online obstacle I seek to identify is very much a collection of barriers that has a direct correlation to issues black entrepreneurs have spoken about for decades, suggesting that any revealed online obstacle very much lacks an online origin.by Allen T. Lamb.M.B.A

Body-surface pressure data on two monoplane-wing missile configurations with elliptical cross sections at Mach 2.50

Tabulated body surface pressure data for two monoplane-wing missile configurations are presented and analyzed. Body pressure data are presented for body-alone, body-tail, and body-wing-tail combinations. For the lost combination, data are presented for tail-fin deflection angles of 0 deg and 30 deg to simulate pitch, yaw, and roll control for both configurations. The data cover angles of attack from -5 deg to 25 deg and angles of roll from 0 deg to 90 deg at a Mach number of 2.50 and a Reynolds number of 6.56 x 1,000,000 per meter. Very consistent, systematic trends with angle of attack and angle of roll were observed in the data, and very good symmetry was found at a roll angle of 0 deg. Body pressures depended strongly on the local body cross-section shape, with very little dependence on the upstream shape. Undeflected fins had only a small influence on the pressures on the aft end of the body; however, tail-fin deflections caused large changes in the pressures

Discovery of New, Dust-Poor B[e] Supergiants in the Small Magellanic Cloud

We present the discovery of three new B[e] supergiants (sgB[e] stars) in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). All three stars (R15, R38, and R48) were identified in the course of our Runaways and Isolated O Type Star Spectroscopic Survey of the SMC (RIOTS4). The stars show optical spectra that closely resemble those of previously known B[e] stars, presenting numerous low-ionization forbidden and permitted emission lines such as [Fe II] and Fe II. Furthermore, our stars have luminosities of log(L/L_sun) > 4, demonstrating that they are supergiants. However, we find lower infrared excesses and weaker forbidden emission lines than for previously identified B[e] supergiants. Thus our stars appear to either have less material in their circumstellar disks than other sgB[e] stars, or the circumstellar material has lower dust content. We suggest that these may constitute a new subclass of dust-poor sgB[e] stars.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, accepted to Ap

Two-Pulse Propagation in a Partially Phase-Coherent Medium

We analyze the effects of partial coherence of ground state preparation on two-pulse propagation in a three-level $\Lambda$ medium, in contrast to previous treastments that have considered the cases of media whose ground states are characterized by probabilities (level populations) or by probability amplitudes (coherent pure states). We present analytic solutions of the Maxwell-Bloch equations, and we extend our analysis with numerical solutions to the same equations. We interpret these solutions in the bright/dark dressed state basis, and show that they describe a population transfer between the bright and dark state. For mixed-state $\Lambda$ media with partial ground state phase coherence the dark state can never be fully populated. This has implications for phase-coherent effects such as pulse matching, coherent population trapping, and electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). We show that for partially phase-coherent three-level media, self induced transparency (SIT) dominates EIT and our results suggest a corresponding three-level area theorem.Comment: 29 pages, 12 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Hydrodynamics of confined colloidal fluids in two dimensions

We apply a hybrid Molecular Dynamics and mesoscopic simulation technique to study the dynamics of two dimensional colloidal discs in confined geometries. We calculate the velocity autocorrelation functions, and observe the predicted $t^{-1}$ long time hydrodynamic tail that characterizes unconfined fluids, as well as more complex oscillating behavior and negative tails for strongly confined geometries. Because the $t^{-1}$ tail of the velocity autocorrelation function is cut off for longer times in finite systems, the related diffusion coefficient does not diverge, but instead depends logarithmically on the overall size of the system.Comment: RevTex 13 pages, 9 figure