NMR Studies of Solvent-Free Ceramic Composite Polymer Electrolytes—A Brief Review

Polyether-based polymer electrolytes containing ceramic inorganic oxide fillers often exhibit improved mechanical and ion transport properties compared to their filler-free counterparts. The nature of local scale interactions that give rise to these enhanced properties is explored by nuclear magnetic resonance measurements

Trauma and identity: A reciprocal relationship?

Trauma can alter the course of identity development and destabilize existing identity commitments. Trauma, whether past or current, can also impact the resources a person brings to identity work. However, identity can also be a lens through which trauma is perceived and interpreted, helping to determine whether a traumatic experience results in posttraumatic stress disorder or posttraumatic growth. Despite the apparent implications each construct has for the other, the scholarship at the intersection of trauma and identity remains sparse. This Special Issue explores how and when trauma and identity influence one another by considering their association across various adolescent populations, methodologies, traumatic event types, and facets of identity. In doing so, this Special Issue lays the groundwork necessary for exploring, proposing, and testing more complex and nuanced reciprocal relations models between identity and trauma

The Development and Validation of a Measure of Identity Distress

The most frequently used measures of identity development do not contain a scale to measure the distress that can sometimes be associated with the process. The purpose of this study was to assess the reliability and validity of the Identity Distress Survey. The measure was found to have high internal consistency and test–retest reliability. Identity distress was related to the constructs of identity style and identity status. Identity distress was positively correlated with identity exploration and associated with the informational style and was negatively correlated with identity commitment. This measure could help identify those people who are having exceptional difficulties in the process of identity development and in need of intervention

An Investigation of Professionalism Reflected by Student Comments on Formative Virtual Patient Encounters

Background: This study explored the use of virtual patient generated data by investigating the association between students’ unprofessional patient summary statements, which they entered during an on-line virtual patient case, and detection of their future unprofessional behavior. Method: At the USUHS, students complete a number of virtual patient encounters, including a patient summary, to meet the clerkship requirements of Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, and Pediatrics. We reviewed the summary statements of 343 students who graduated in 2012 and 2013. Each statement was rated with regard to four features: Unprofessional, Professional, Equivocal (could be construed as unprofessional), and Unanswered (students did not enter a statement). We also combined Unprofessional and Equivocal into a new category to indicate a statement receiving either rating. We then examined the associations of students’ scores on these categories (i.e. whether received a particular rating or not) and Expertise score and Professionalism score reflected by a post-graduate year one (PGY-1) program director (PD) evaluation form. The PD forms contained 58 Likert-scale items designed to measure the two constructs (Expertise and Professionalism). Results: The inter-rater reliability of statements coding was high (Cohen’s Kappa = .97). The measure of receiving an Unprofessional or Equivocal rating was significantly correlated with lower Expertise score (r = −.19, P \u3c .05) as well as lower Professionalism score (r = −.17, P \u3c .05) during PGY-1. Conclusion: Incident reports and review of routine student evaluations are what most schools rely on to identify the majority of professionalism lapses. Unprofessionalism reflected in student entries may provide additional markers foreshadowing subsequent unprofessional behavior

Quantitative method for the assignment of hinge and shear mechanism in protein domain movements

Motivation: A popular method for classification of protein domain movements apportions them into two main types: those with a ‘hinge’ mechanism and those with a ‘shear’ mechanism. The intuitive assignment of domain movements to these classes has limited the number of domain movements that can be classified in this way. Furthermore, whether intended or not, the term ‘shear’ is often interpreted to mean a relative translation of the domains. Results: Numbers of occurrences of four different types of residue contact changes between domains were optimally combined by logistic regression using the training set of domain movements intuitively classified as hinge and shear to produce a predictor for hinge and shear. This predictor was applied to give a 10-fold increase in the number of examples over the number previously available with a high degree of precision. It is shown that overall a relative translation of domains is rare, and that there is no difference between hinge and shear mechanisms in this respect. However, the shear set contains significantly more examples of domains having a relative twisting movement than the hinge set. The angle of rotation is also shown to be a good discriminator between the two mechanisms. Availability and implementation: Results are free to browse at http:// www.cmp.uea.ac.uk/dyndom/interface/. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online

US Presidential Awards: An Outcomes Analysis

Around 99% of U.S. Presidential Awards for mentored student research in science go to college level mentors like Steve Oppenheimer. We have an opportunity here to describe the research and mentorship outcomes of two US Presidential Awardees. One is Steve and the other is a high school teacher, Dominique Evans-Bye, who also achieved a US Presidential Award for mentored student research in science. Dominique is one of only about two at the high school level, of hundreds in decades given at the college level. Because of the rarity of high school Presidential award winners, we show here what can be done at the high school level. And we show how vastly different, yet similar, university and high school programs can be. We believe that this paper is the only one ever to explore university and high school mentored student research in one place. We also review high school student research from the New Journal of Student Research Abstracts and show that it is sometimes every bit as good as university level research and should be considered an important part of the U.S. research effort. This may be the first time such a statement has been made. This review from our lab should help others understand what goes into a U.S. Presidential Award, the highest White House mentoring award in the nation, administered by the National Science Foundation. The important accomplishments of Dominique will help high school and middle school teachers enhance their student research programs if they choose to do so. Motivation is key

Computational identification of developmental enhancers: conservation and function of transcription factor binding-site clusters in Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila pseudoobscura

BACKGROUND: The identification of sequences that control transcription in metazoans is a major goal of genome analysis. In a previous study, we demonstrated that searching for clusters of predicted transcription factor binding sites could discover active regulatory sequences, and identified 37 regions of the Drosophila melanogaster genome with high densities of predicted binding sites for five transcription factors involved in anterior-posterior embryonic patterning. Nine of these clusters overlapped known enhancers. Here, we report the results of in vivo functional analysis of 27 remaining clusters. RESULTS: We generated transgenic flies carrying each cluster attached to a basal promoter and reporter gene, and assayed embryos for reporter gene expression. Six clusters are enhancers of adjacent genes: giant, fushi tarazu, odd-skipped, nubbin, squeeze and pdm2; three drive expression in patterns unrelated to those of neighboring genes; the remaining 18 do not appear to have enhancer activity. We used the Drosophila pseudoobscura genome to compare patterns of evolution in and around the 15 positive and 18 false-positive predictions. Although conservation of primary sequence cannot distinguish true from false positives, conservation of binding-site clustering accurately discriminates functional binding-site clusters from those with no function. We incorporated conservation of binding-site clustering into a new genome-wide enhancer screen, and predict several hundred new regulatory sequences, including 85 adjacent to genes with embryonic patterns. CONCLUSIONS: Measuring conservation of sequence features closely linked to function - such as binding-site clustering - makes better use of comparative sequence data than commonly used methods that examine only sequence identity