Social and Affordable Housing in Thames-Coromandel District

A commissioned report into housing needs of the Thames Coromandel region. Prepared as part of a Research Office Voucher Project. The report examines housing conditions, as well as particularly vulnerable groups in the region in relation to housing

Facilitating moral maturity: integrating developmental and cultural approaches

This study integrates developmental and cultural approaches to student development and finds that millennial college students are responsive to moral formation. A particular challenge to prosociality among contemporary generations is growing up within a cultural context that aggrandizes a self-focus during emerging adulthood. Businesses are increasingly integrating spirituality at work, in part because of the benefits religiosity has in developing prosocial behaviors. However, businesses and universities can have concerns about explicitly engaging religiosity. We thus study a pedagogical approach that engages religiosity to investigate whether this promotes prosocial moral values. Employing a mixed-methods design, we analyze quantitative and qualitative changes in students completing a management education course with this pedagogical approach and compare their changes over time to a control group completing conventional ethics courses during the same time period. Findings indicate that prosocial development is possible during college and that explicit attention to diverse religious views aids moral development

Conformal submanifolds, distinguished submanifolds, and integrability

For conformal geometries of Riemannian signature, we provide a comprehensive and explicit treatment of the core local theory for embedded submanifolds of arbitrary dimension. This is based in the conformal tractor calculus and includes a conformally invariant Gauss formula leading to conformal versions of the Gauss, Codazzi, and Ricci equations. It provides the tools for proliferating submanifold conformal invariants, as well for extending to conformally singular Riemannian manifolds the notions of mean curvature and of minimal and CMC submanifolds. A notion of distinguished submanifold is defined by asking the tractor second fundamental form to vanish. We show that for the case of curves this exactly characterises conformal geodesics (a.k.a. conformal circles) while for hypersurfaces it is the totally umbilic condition. So, for other codimensions, this unifying notion interpolates between these extremes, and we prove that in all dimensions this coincides with the submanifold being weakly conformally circular, meaning that ambient conformal circles remain in the submanifold. Stronger notions of conformal circularity are then characterised similarly. Next we provide a very general theory and construction of quantities that are necessarily conserved along distinguished submanifolds. This first integral theory thus vastly generalises the results available for conformal circles in [56]. We prove that any normal solution to an equation from the class of first BGG equations can yield such a conserved quantity, and show that it is easy to provide explicit formulae for these. Finally we prove that the property of being distinguished is also captured by a type of moving incidence relation. This second characterisation is used to show that, for suitable solutions of conformal Killing-Yano equations, a certain zero locus of the solution is necessarily a distinguished submanifold.Comment: 87 page

The role of the X chromosome in embryonic and postnatal growth

Women born with only a single X chromosome (XO) have Turner syndrome (TS); and they are invariably of short stature. XO female mice are also small: during embryogenesis, female mice with a paternally-inherited X chromosome (XPO) are smaller than XX littermates; whereas during early postnatal life, both XPO and X MO (maternal) mice are smaller than their XX siblings. Here I look to further understand the genetic bases of these phenotypes, and potentially inform areas of future investigation into TS. Mouse pre-implantation embryos preferentially silence the XP via the non-coding RNA Xist. XPO embryos are smaller than XX littermates at embryonic day (E) 10.5, whereas XMO embryos are not. Two possible hypotheses explain this observation. Inappropriate expression of Xist in XPO embryos may cause transcriptional silencing of the single X chromosome and result in embryos nullizygous for X gene products. Alternatively, there could be imprinted genes on the X chromosome that impact on growth and manifest in growth retarded XPO embryos. In contrast, during the first three weeks of postnatal development, both XPO and XMO mice show a growth deficit when compared with XX littermates. This deficit is not observed in the presence of a second sex chromosome - i.e. in normal XX female mice, or in females with a Y chromosome that lacks Sry - suggesting haploinsufficiency of genes with homologues present on, and expressed from, both sex chromosomes as a cause. In this thesis I have investigated the role of Xist in XPO embryonic growth retardation; and utilised mouse stem cells to perform an in vitro screen to identify X-linked imprinted genes. To characterise postnatal haploinsufficiency, I identify four candidate genes and, utilising CRISPR-Cas genome editing, delineate the role of each in the growth deficit phenotype. I further use these X-linked mutants to investigate the functional divergence of the X and Y chromosomes in the context of postnatal survival

American Individualism in the Anthropocene: The Cycle of Disruption and the Collapse of the Happy Consciousness

61 pagesGeological science widely accepts that in the middle of the 20th century the Earth entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. There is a key difference between the Anthropocene and previous geological epochs: Humans are the driving force of planetary evolution. During this geological transition the fabric of American society was massively disrupted by rapid industrialization and technological development. John Dewey recounts this destabilization in Individualism Old and New, and Herbert Marcuse describes the results of the destabilization in One-Dimensional Man. This essay will explore the characteristics of the Anthropocene and the implications it has for the American individual including the establishment of two predominant individualistic mindsets. Then, it will explain a four-step process called the Cycle of Disruption that I believe occurred after the industrial revolution and continues to this day. It will examine how the forces of the Anthropocene have influenced the two prevailing individualistic mindsets and where contemporary American society falls within the Cycle of Disruption; focusing on the disruption caused by the Internet and its accessory technologies. These concepts will be explored through the film Assassination Nation, and the television show Euphoria, both by Sam Levinson. The goal of this essay is to suggest a potential reframing of the chaotic and nihilistic Anthropocenic forces in order to develop a more mature kind of individualism, and thus a more mature kind of Anthropocene

Kiri Karl Morgensternile, Gieβen

http://tartu.ester.ee/record=b1805803~S1*es

Endocrine and dog factors associated with semen quality

Knowledge of factors associated with semen quality may help in investigations of the aetiology and pathophysiology. We investigated the correlation between biomarkers for testicular cell function (antimüllerian hormone, AMH, Inhibin B, testosterone, free androgen-index (testosterone/sex-hormone binding globulin), insulin like peptide 3, INSL-3), alkaline phosphate (ALP), canine prostate-specifc esterase (CPSE), and heterophilic antibodies with dog variables, semen quality, and fertility. Blood and semen were collected from 65 Bernese Mountain Dogs. We evaluated total sperm count, motility and morphological parameters. The semen quality ranged from poor to excellent, with an average total sperm count of 1.1 × ­109 and 50% morphologically normal spermatozoa (MNS). Age and abnormal testicular consistency correlated with decreased motility and MNS. Higher ALP correlated with higher total sperm count. AMH could not be detected in seminal plasma. AMH in blood correlated with head defects and high AMH concentration correlated with a severe decline in several semen parameters. Testosterone was negatively and CPSE positively correlated with age. No correlations were found for INSL-3, inhibin B, or heterophilic antibodies. Our fndings contribute to the understanding of factors associated with semen quality in dogs, particularly related to Sertoli cell function