Searching for Virtue in the City: Bell and Her Sisters

The burden of our claim here is that virtue in the city is to be found not so much in the abstractions and theorizing of higher philosophy but in “vulgar ethics,” Lewis C. Mainzer’s brilliant description of moral education in the classroom and street-level moral practices in the city’s departments and agencies (1991). The hope of virtue in the city is to be found not just in the individual propensity to be virtuous but more so in the development of political and organizational rules and procedures, in virtuous leadership, and in the development of virtuous public cultures

Informed Governance: Complexity and the Commons

We wish to express our appreciation to all who contributed in the production of this volume, including all those who served as Reviewers whose careful and insightful re- views enhanced and improved the articles presented at the symposium and in this volume. We also want to express our appreciation to Dean Abe Helou, College of Business and Public Management, University of La Verne, for his continuing support for continuous dialogue and research regarding the potential of complexity theory and approaches for improving governance

Managing the entanglement: complexity leadership in public sector systems

Complexity in public sector systems requires leaders to balance the administrative practices necessary to be aligned and efficient in the management of routine challenges and the adaptive practices required to respond to dynamic circumstances. Conventional notions of leadership in the field of public administration do not fully explain the role of leadership in balancing the entanglement of formal, top-down, administrative functions and informal, emergent, adaptive functions within public sector settings with different levels of complexity. Drawing on and extending existing complexity leadership constructs, this article explores how leadership is enacted over the duration of six urban regeneration projects representing high, medium, and low levels of project complexity. The article suggests that greater attention needs to be paid to the tensions inherent in enabling leadership if actors are to cope with the complex, collaborative, cross-boundary, adaptive work in which they are increasingly engage

Changes in corneal collagen architecture during mouse postnatal development

Purpose. To characterize changes in corneal collagen arrangement during mouse postnatal development. Methods. Small-angle X-ray scatter patterns were gathered from the centers of 32 excised mice corneas aged between postnatal days 10 (before eye opening) and 28 (onset of sexual maturity). These were analyzed to produce measurements of the average separation distance between corneal collagen fibrils. Changes in the predominant orientation of corneal collagen and its relative distribution during the same developmental period were determined using wide-angle X-ray scatter data collected at 0.2-mm intervals over the entire cornea and limbal region of each specimen. Results. Collagen interfibrillar spacing decreased in the days leading up to eye opening (61.3 ± 2.9 nm at day 10 to 45.5 ± 4.5 nm at day 14), after which it remained constant. However, changes in collagen orientation and distribution occurred throughout the entire developmental period. After eye opening at day 12, collagen alignment gradually increased in the peripheral cornea and limbus. By day 28, an annulus of highly aligned collagen surrounded the cornea. Conclusions. Changes in corneal thickness before and after eye opening are not caused by widespread alterations in the collagen fibrillar array but are more likely caused by expansion and contraction of regions devoid of regularly arranged collagen. The postnatal development of a corneal annulus of collagen, thought to play a role in stabilizing the curvature of the cornea, may be triggered by visual factors

Constraint-based probabilistic learning of metabolic pathways from tomato volatiles

Clustering and correlation analysis techniques have become popular tools for the analysis of data produced by metabolomics experiments. The results obtained from these approaches provide an overview of the interactions between objects of interest. Often in these experiments, one is more interested in information about the nature of these relationships, e.g., cause-effect relationships, than in the actual strength of the interactions. Finding such relationships is of crucial importance as most biological processes can only be understood in this way. Bayesian networks allow representation of these cause-effect relationships among variables of interest in terms of whether and how they influence each other given that a third, possibly empty, group of variables is known. This technique also allows the incorporation of prior knowledge as established from the literature or from biologists. The representation as a directed graph of these relationship is highly intuitive and helps to understand these processes. This paper describes how constraint-based Bayesian networks can be applied to metabolomics data and can be used to uncover the important pathways which play a significant role in the ripening of fresh tomatoes. We also show here how this methods of reconstructing pathways is intuitive and performs better than classical techniques. Methods for learning Bayesian network models are powerful tools for the analysis of data of the magnitude as generated by metabolomics experiments. It allows one to model cause-effect relationships and helps in understanding the underlying processes

Military located in Holly Springs National Forest, Holly Springs, Mississippi

Ed Meek in background with camera.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/meek_umint/1006/thumbnail.jp