The Burlington Races Revisited: A Revised Analysis of an 1813 Naval Battle for Supremacy on Lake Ontario

From the safety of the Lake Ontario shore near Burlington, military and civilian observers witnessed the jockeying for position for many sailing vessels during the afternoon of Tuesday, September 28, 1813. They likened the event to a yacht race. Thus, a pivotal naval engagement that would determine the outcome of the War of 1812 was facetiously labelled, The Burlington Races. The facts of this important piece of Canadiana, have, like so many significant historical events, been cloaked by myth and misconception until recently. The discovery in the US National Archives of the log of the British flagship of the Lake Ontario Squadron, HMS Wolfe, has made it possible to interpret this episode in Canadian history more accurately

Are We the Ones to Blame?: Ideological Polarization and Voter Choice

Political polarization is the social process by which the ideas and values of a politically moderate majority are slowly replaced by an uncompromising political ideology. In the American context, the term ‘polarization’ is meant to conjure an image of Americans moving from the moderate center to the uncompromising ideologies of modern conservatism or liberalism. This study examined whether a group’s level of political polarization can be a reliable predictor for its voting patterns. To do so, a two-part questionnaire was disseminated to a sample of undergraduate students at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM). The first section determined if a participant possessed strong ideological convictions and the second part was a hypothetical election that had five political candidates running for a Congressional seat. Unbeknownst to the participant, however, each nominee represented a particular position on the political ideological spectrum. The survey results showed that the sample did not hold a polarizing stance on any of the political issues outlined in the first section and the two candidates that possessed strong ideological convictions received the least number of votes in the Congressional election. The survey data was run through SPSS software to create a political summary index that could rank survey takers on the degree of their ideological convictions. A difference in proportions test was then used to compare these rankings to the corresponding votes. The outcome showed that there is a statistically significant correlation between a group’s level of political polarization and its preferred voting choice

Outcomes from an Entry-level Occupational Therapy Doctoral Practice-Scholar Apprenticeship Program

The introduction of the occupational therapy doctoral (OTD) program to the field of occupational therapy (OT) education was intended to advance the field by developing future leaders, increasing advanced practice, and promoting scholarship in practice. Limited information to date is available regarding outcomes of the OTD program related to the future research potential of graduates. One such approach to promoting the scholarship of practice among OTD graduates is the use of the practice-scholar model. The practice-scholar model is designed to build research skills among OTD students to encourage their ongoing commitment to evidence-based practice through implementing their own research in practice. Founded in 2014, the Northern Arizona University (NAU) entry-level OTD program has implemented the practice-scholar model through their practice-scholar apprenticeship (PSA) program. The NAU PSA program involves a mentorship experience with OTD students engaging in faculty and/or community clinician led research. The purpose of this paper is to share evaluation results of the NAU PSA program related to the research development among the program’s graduates. NAU OTD students completed pre and post surveys regarding their expectations towards research and a post qualitative feedback session. Students reported statistically significant improvements in their research self-efficacy skills. Qualitatively students identified their developed research skills, the importance of research and their desire to continue implementing research in the future. The field of OT should continue to identify structural ways to support research in practice to realize the potential of future OTD practitioners

Discovery of Thienoquinolone Derivatives as Selective and ATP Non-Competitive CDK5/p25 Inhibitors by Structure-Based Virtual Screening

Calpain mediated cleavage of CDK5 natural precursor p35 causes a stable complex formation of CDK5/p25, which leads to hyperphosphorylation of tau. Thus inhibition of this complex is a viable target for numerous acute and chronic neurodegenerative diseases involving tau protein, including Alzheimer’s disease. Since CDK5 has the highest sequence homology with its mitotic counterpart CDK2, our primary goal was to design selective CDK5/p25 inhibitors targeting neurodegeneration. A novel structure-based virtual screening protocol comprised of e-pharmacophore models and virtual screening workflow was used to identify nine compounds from a commercial database containing 2.84 million compounds. An ATP non-competitive and selective thieno[3,2-c]quinolin-4(5H)-one inhibitor (10) with ligand efficiency (LE) of 0.3 was identified as the lead molecule. Further SAR optimization led to the discovery of several low micromolar inhibitors with good selectivity. The research represents a new class of potent ATP non-competitive CDK5/p25 inhibitors with good CDK2/E selectivity

Isotropic Band Gaps and Freeform Waveguides Observed in Hyperuniform Disordered Photonic Solids

Recently, disordered photonic media and random textured surfaces have attracted increasing attention as strong light diffusers with broadband and wide-angle properties. We report the first experimental realization of an isotropic complete photonic band gap (PBG) in a two-dimensional (2D) disordered dielectric structure. This structure is designed by a constrained-optimization method, which combines advantages of both isotropy due to disorder and controlled scattering properties due to low density fluctuations (hyperuniformity) and uniform local topology. Our experiments use a modular design composed of Al2O3 walls and cylinders arranged in a hyperuniform disordered network. We observe a complete PBG in the microwave region, in good agreement with theoretical simulations, and show that the intrinsic isotropy of this novel class of PBG materials enables remarkable design freedom, including the realization of waveguides with arbitrary bending angles impossible in photonic crystals. This first experimental verification of a complete PBG and realization of functional defects in this new class of materials demonstrates their potential as building blocks for precise manipulation of photons in planar optical micro-circuits and has implications for disordered acoustic and electronic bandgap materials

Cytochrome P450 site of metabolism prediction from 2D topological fingerprints using GPU accelerated probabilistic classifiers.

BACKGROUND: The prediction of sites and products of metabolism in xenobiotic compounds is key to the development of new chemical entities, where screening potential metabolites for toxicity or unwanted side-effects is of crucial importance. In this work 2D topological fingerprints are used to encode atomic sites and three probabilistic machine learning methods are applied: Parzen-Rosenblatt Window (PRW), Naive Bayesian (NB) and a novel approach called RASCAL (Random Attribute Subsampling Classification ALgorithm). These are implemented by randomly subsampling descriptor space to alleviate the problem often suffered by data mining methods of having to exactly match fingerprints, and in the case of PRW by measuring a distance between feature vectors rather than exact matching. The classifiers have been implemented in CUDA/C++ to exploit the parallel architecture of graphical processing units (GPUs) and is freely available in a public repository. RESULTS: It is shown that for PRW a SoM (Site of Metabolism) is identified in the top two predictions for 85%, 91% and 88% of the CYP 3A4, 2D6 and 2C9 data sets respectively, with RASCAL giving similar performance of 83%, 91% and 88%, respectively. These results put PRW and RASCAL performance ahead of NB which gave a much lower classification performance of 51%, 73% and 74%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: 2D topological fingerprints calculated to a bond depth of 4-6 contain sufficient information to allow the identification of SoMs using classifiers based on relatively small data sets. Thus, the machine learning methods outlined in this paper are conceptually simpler and more efficient than other methods tested and the use of simple topological descriptors derived from 2D structure give results competitive with other approaches using more expensive quantum chemical descriptors. The descriptor space subsampling approach and ensemble methodology allow the methods to be applied to molecules more distant from the training data where data mining would be more likely to fail due to the lack of common fingerprints. The RASCAL algorithm is shown to give equivalent classification performance to PRW but at lower computational expense allowing it to be applied more efficiently in the ensemble scheme.The authors would like to thank Unilever for funding. We thank Dr. Guus Duchateau, Leo van Buren and Prof. Werner Klaffke for useful discussions in the development of this work.This is the final version. It was first published by Chemistry Central at http://www.jcheminf.com/content/6/1/29

FIR Approximation of Fractional Sample Delay Systems

This paper examines the approximation of fractional delays by FIR systems using various techniques which have previously been reported in the literature. In particular, the equivalence of the time-domain Lagrangian interpolation, the frequency-domain maximally flat error criterion and the window method is shown, provided maximal flatness is specified at $\omega_0 = 0$ and the window used is a scaled binomial function. The first of these has been known before, the second equivalence is new