Theoretical investigation of the scope of sequential ligand tuning using a bifunctional scorpionate tris(1,2,4-triazolyl)borate-based architecture

The donor properties of a series of tripodal mixed N-donor/carbene ligands derived through sequential alkylation of hydrotris(1,2,4-triazolyl)borate have been investigated by density functional theory (DFT) methods. The structures of complexes of the form [Mo(L)(CO)3]- were optimized (L = [HB(1,2,4-triazolyl)n(1,2,4-triazol-5-ylidene)3-n]- (n = 0 – 3), hydrotris(pyrazolyl)borate, hydrotris(3,5-dimethylpyrazolyl)borate and hydrotris(imidazol-2-ylidene)borate) and nuCO frequencies for these complexes and partial charges of their Mo(CO)3 fragments were determined. Results show that ligand donation is highly tunable when compared to similar experimentally known ligands with a shift in the symmetric nuCO stretching mode of -39 cm -1 on going from the tris(1,2,4-triazolyl)borate complexes to that of the triscarbene hydrotris(1,2,4-triazol-5-ylidene) and an increase in partial charge (distributed multipole analysis) of the Mo(CO)3 fragment from -0.23 to -0.48

Understanding and Measuring Net Positive Business Strategies

Despite their attempts to mitigate ecological impacts through sustainability initiatives, businesses are a major cause of the world\u27s ecological problems. Some progressive businesses are attempting to move beyond “net zero” in terms of achieving neutral environmental impacts and instead are now pursuing a goal of net positive. Net positive refers to the idea that business activities could contribute value-added benefits to earth’s ecological systems, for example, by using technologies that sequester and store carbon. However, except for a handful of high-profile corporate case studies, little is known about how companies are developing their strategies to become net positive and if it is even a realistic goal. Further, little is known regarding the measurements they are using to determine what net positive business practices are. My thesis research addressed three fundamental questions: (1) “What are the types and impacts of net positive strategies an established business might use?”; (2) “What are the measurement issues associated with evaluating the impacts of those strategies?”; and (3) What are the challenges a business faces when implementing net positive strategies? Based on data collected from an organic brewery in western Montana, Wildwood Brewing, my research evaluated two on-site negative emission technologies (NETs), short rotation coppice agroforestry (SRCA) and pyrolysis, as well as on-site energy generation through photovoltaics (PV). Using two environmental accounting methodologies—emergy analysis (EMA) and life cycle assessment (LCA)—to assess Wildwood’s ecological impact, results show that Wildwood must employ NETs over larger amounts of hectarage than it has available on-site in order to attain a net positive state. LCA proved a more useful approach to measuring net positive benefits to the environment over EMA because of its ability to express negative CO2e values from NETs. Based on in-depth interviews with the owner, the main challenges a business may face in achieving net positive include lack of personnel and infrastructure, poor cash flow to fund the initiatives, and a lack of a formal marketing and sales plan to generate greater revenue

Measuring and understanding employee engagement

Employee engagement has generated interest in many stakeholder groups ranging from academics (e.g. Kahn, 1990; May et al., 2004; Schaufeli et al., 2002), HR practitioners and consultancies (e.g. Harter et al., 2002; Masson et al., 2008), to government policy-makers (e.g. MacLeod, Clarke 2009). As this interest in employee engagement has rapidly increased over the last decade (as highlighted by Wilmar Schaufeli in Chapter 1 of this volume), so has the desire to measure, evaluate, and benchmark levels of engagement within and between organizations. Measurement is powerful, because ‘what gets measured gets attention’ (Eccles, 1991: 131). Performance dashboards, of which the ‘balanced scorecard’ (Kaplan, Norton,1992) is a well-known example, attempt to ensure that all the major factors contributing to an organization’s success are being measured – related to operations, customers, finance and employees. A performance indicator that represents the extent to which employees are engaged can constitute a useful headline measure for the ‘employee’ section of the dashboard or scorecard. However, there has been a lack of a unifying definition or framework (MacLeod, Clarke, 2009; Truss, Mankin and Kelliher, 2012) and so there exists a wide range of ‘employee engagement’ indicators. Therefore, this chapter aims (a) to provide a review of the main ways in which employee engagement has been measured; (b) to give insight into issues that may occur when designing and implementing such measures; and (c) to consider implications in regards to presenting and interpreting engagement scores. Whilst covering academic material, this chapter is designed with the practitioner in mind. Two short case studies illustrating how employee engagement can be measured and evaluated in practice are discussed at the end of this chapter

Platelet Lysate to Promote Angiogenic Cell Therapies

Cellular therapies for patients with ischemic muscle have been limited by poor cell retention and survivability. Platelets are a robust source of growth factors and structural proteins, and extracts from this peripheral blood component may be manipulated to improve both cell retention and survivability in percutaneous delivery methods. Human platelet lysate is generated from pooled human platelets and contains a growth factor milieu that promotes robust human mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) proliferation without risk of xenogenic contamination. As such, platelet lysate is a practical alternative to animal serum for MSC culture and, with minor adjustments to the production process, can also be used as a scaffold for cell delivery. Human platelet lysate is a promising substrate that can provide nutritive delivery both in vitro and during cell implantation, potentially improving retention and survivability of MSCs that may improve angiogenic function for cell therapy in treatment of ischemic tissues

Structure-function characterization and engineering of polysaccharides and antibodies with therapeutic activity

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Biological Engineering, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references.Proteins and polysaccharides are of growing importance as a source for novel therapeutic compounds and target a range of diseases, from cancer to infections from pathogens. However, owing to their large and complex structures, they face a unique set of challenges, compared to small molecules, in their discovery and development as safe, efficacious drugs. Towards addressing these challenges, we describe in this thesis the implementation of structure-function relationship approaches to characterize and engineer polysaccharides and antibodies to improve their therapeutic profiles. The plant polysaccharide pectin, when modified, has demonstrated significant anticancer activity in animal models and small-scale clinical trials. Its development has been hampered, however, due to its complex structure and lack of structure-activity correlates. Using an integrated approach, we engineer a modified pectin that exhibits significant in vivo anticancer activity, which we link to specific structural attributes and cellular functional mechanisms. These results improve our structure-function understanding of anticancer modified pectin, an important step towards the clinical use of this complex polysaccharide. Applying what we learned from pectin, we develop an integrated framework to identify a contaminant in batches of heparin, a polysaccharide anticoagulant drug, associated with an outbreak of allergic-type reactions in 2007-2008. Employing orthogonal analytical approaches to overcome challenges of characterizing structurally complex pharmaceutical heparin, we determine that the structurally related glycan, oversulfated chondroitin sulfate, is the major contaminant. We link its presence to activation of the contact pathway, thereby establishing a structure-function understanding of contaminated heparin and improving the safety profile of this polysaccharide drug. Transitioning knowledge gained from the structure-function characterization of polysaccharides, we engineer, by structure-based design, a broad spectrum neutralizing antibody to dengue virus, which yearly infects more than 200 million people, causing approximately 21,000 deaths. We incorporate complementary approaches of energetics and empirical informatics methods to rationally redesign an existing antibody for greater breadth and potency, resulting in an engineered antibody with binding to all four virus serotypes and good in vitro potency. Overall, this thesis provides important insights into structure-function approaches through the use of complementary methods to characterize and engineer therapeutic polysaccharides and antibodies.by Luke Robinson.Ph.D

Lab Retriever: a software tool for calculating likelihood ratios incorporating a probability of drop-out for forensic DNA profiles.

BackgroundTechnological advances have enabled the analysis of very small amounts of DNA in forensic cases. However, the DNA profiles from such evidence are frequently incomplete and can contain contributions from multiple individuals. The complexity of such samples confounds the assessment of the statistical weight of such evidence. One approach to account for this uncertainty is to use a likelihood ratio framework to compare the probability of the evidence profile under different scenarios. While researchers favor the likelihood ratio framework, few open-source software solutions with a graphical user interface implementing these calculations are available for practicing forensic scientists.ResultsTo address this need, we developed Lab Retriever, an open-source, freely available program that forensic scientists can use to calculate likelihood ratios for complex DNA profiles. Lab Retriever adds a graphical user interface, written primarily in JavaScript, on top of a C++ implementation of the previously published R code of Balding. We redesigned parts of the original Balding algorithm to improve computational speed. In addition to incorporating a probability of allelic drop-out and other critical parameters, Lab Retriever computes likelihood ratios for hypotheses that can include up to four unknown contributors to a mixed sample. These computations are completed nearly instantaneously on a modern PC or Mac computer.ConclusionsLab Retriever provides a practical software solution to forensic scientists who wish to assess the statistical weight of evidence for complex DNA profiles. Executable versions of the program are freely available for Mac OSX and Windows operating systems

Contingency and Event in China's New Documentary Film Movement

This paper addresses the issue of contingency and the event vis-a-vis private and public documentaries. In China, the private and the public documentary form are often understood as mutually antagonistic, with the former defining itself explicitly against the latter. Rather than dwell on these differences, many of which are both well-documented and legitimate, I intend here to demonstrate how in certain ways, the private documentary form may actually be seen as a logical culmination of the xianchang [shooting live] aesthetic initiated by the early pioneers of the New Documentary Film Movement [hereafter NDFM]. In order to do this, I will focus on the issue of the spontaneous event, and its connection with the two documentary forms. After outlining the theoretical relationship between the spontaneous event and the problem of contingency, I proceed to suggest that the early relationship with this aspect of shooting live was in fact highly conflicted, and that the development of the public documentary form was in part a response to such tension. In fact, it was a means of limiting exposure to the contingent as understood in these terms. In the documentary form, such inhibitions have been shed in favour of drawing the contingent event into the heart of the documentary film, something I argue is not in fact restricted to the private genre, but characteristic of a range of contemporary documentary film work. This reflects not only changes in documentary film practice, but also how understandings both of what a documentary is, and what it does, have altered in the decade since the NDFM's inception

Midi Z, network aesthetics from below, and the cultural politics of Taiwanese subimperialism

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YU, Kiki Tianqi. 2019. ‘My’ Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualizing China. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Who am I? This simple question was the catalyst for Kiki Tianqi Yu’s first book. Compelled to reflect on her own subjectivity while working as a researcher for a BBC-commissioned documentary about China’s modernisation, Yu responded by turning to the problem of how contemporary Chinese filmmakers have documented their own “I” on camera. Self-inscription, or including oneself at the centre of one’s film, has been common amongst Western filmmakers and artists since the 1960s. Yu notes in her intr..

YU, Kiki Tianqi. 2019. ‘My’ Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualizing China. Édimbourg : Edinburgh University Press.

Qui suis-je ? Cette simple question a constitué le point de départ du premier livre de Kiki Tianqi Yu. Amenée à réfléchir à sa propre subjectivité alors qu’elle travaillait comme chercheuse pour un documentaire sur la modernisation de la Chine commandé par la BBC, Yu y a répondu en examinant la manière dont les cinéastes chinois contemporains ont décrit leur propre « je » à l’écran. L’auto-inscription – le fait de s’inclure au centre de son propre film – est un procédé courant chez les réalisa..