Formulating a Communal Covenant for the Elders and Ministers of South Fork Church of Christ

This project addressed the lack of a communal covenant for the elders and ministers of South Fork Church of Christ. The purpose of the project was to formulate a covenant that would promote the spiritual discernment and leadership of the elders and ministers. For the theological framework, I relied upon Mark’s portrait of Jesus. I looked at Jesus’s lived example as well as his teachings to discern values and practices that defined his leadership and should therefore be normative for Christian leaders. These values and practices were analyzed according to three relational categories—relationship with God, with each other, and with the larger community. By way of contrast, I analyzed the values and practices demonstrated by the disciples in Mark’s Gospel. I turned to Ruth Haley Barton’s Pursuing God’s Will Together to guide the process of formulating the communal covenant. I then used works by Edwin Friedman and Peter Steinke to analyze the relational obstacles that kept the disciples from following Christ’s example and would prove to be destructive in the present context. The intervention was conducted among the elders and ministers of South Fork by studying, reflecting on, and discussing the values and practices we saw in Mark’s Jesus and proposing ways in which we might embody those values and practices as a leadership team. The resulting covenant described values and practices that we wished to adopt for ourselves in our relationships with God, with each other, and with the larger community. Finally, I evaluated the success of the project and reflected upon its implications for congregational leadership

Unmanned Aviation Systems and FAA Requirements

Unmanned aviation systems (drones) have become a serious concern and topic for potential conflicts with airplane traffic. This presentation will provide information concerning drone activity in relation to aircraft and FAA requirements

Steric Hindrance as a Factor in the Hydrolytic Stability of Aromatic Ketimines

A comparison of the velocities of hydrolysis of the 2-, the 3- and the 4-methyl diphenyl ketimine hydrochlorides, in which the velocity of the first is very much slower than either of the other two, suggests steric hindrance. The very slow rate of hydrolysis of 2, 4, 6-trihydroxy diphenyl ketimine hydrochloride has been reported by one of us. This slow rate may be accounted for on the basis of the multiple opportunities for tautomerism involving the very stable enamine forms. We have recently found 2-methyl, 4, 6-dihydroxy di phenyl (orcinyl phenyl) ketimine hydrochloride to be even more slowly hydrolyzed. It would appear here that the steric hindrance effect outweighs the possible enamine tautomerism

Balancing multiple roles through consensus: Making revisions in haircutting sessions

This study demonstrates how participants in haircutting sessions merge different roles during one of the most sensitive moments of an encounter: requesting and/or making revisions to a new cut. During the process of arriving at a consensus of whether or not changes need to be made to the new cut, the stylist and the client negotiate not only the quality of the cut, but also their expected roles. Caring about both the bodies and the minds of customers is an important element in measuring the quality of cosmetological services, a consideration which may oblige stylists to immediately agree with and act upon every client request or concern. However, simply yielding to the customer’s opinions can threaten the stylist’s role as a beauty expert, one who possesses their own professional standards. The analysis reveals that the participants frequently transform revision requests/offers into mutual decisions through a combination of verbal and bodily actions. In doing so, they harmonize the sometimes conflicting responsibilities of “service provider/patron” and “expert/novice.

Probing the Ground State Properties of Iron-based Superconducting Pnictides and Related Systems by Muon-Spin Spectroscopy

In this short review, we attempt to give a comprehensive discussion of studies performed to date by muon-spin spectroscopy (more precisely the relaxation and rotation technique, also know as \muSR technique) on the recently discovered layered iron-based superconductors. On one side, \muSR has been used to characterized the magnetic state of different families of layered iron-based systems. Similarly the subtle interplay of the magnetic state and the structural transition present in some families has been investigated. We will also discuss the information provided by this technique on the interaction between the magnetic state and the superconducting phase. Finally the \muSR technique has been used to investigate the magnetic penetration depth of the superconducting ground state. The study of its absolute value, temperature and magnetic field dependence provides crucial tests for investigating possible unconventional superconducting states in such systems.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. Physica C Special Edition on Superconducting Pnictides. Version 2: Fig. 3 modified due to data corrections in Ref. 6, typos correcte

Healthy Parks, Healthy Person App

Final Project for INST490: Integrated Capstone for Information Science (Spring 2021). University of Maryland, College Park.Through its Department of Parks and Recreation, Prince George’s County is looking for ways to improve community health by developing a mobile application to aid in physical and mental wellness. This application will be used as a tool to promote and track the use of parks, trails, and open space and the reported impacts on health outcomes. With the stress induced by the events of the past year (including but not limited to the COVID-19 pandemic), physical and emotional health concerns have become increasingly prevalent issues that the County’s Department of Parks and Recreation could help address. This project’s objective is to track the impact and performance of methods like ParkRx, which could prescribe the use of parks to citizens to increase healthy lifestyles in Prince George’s County. This will be accomplished by designing a mobile application that connects residents with available county parks, trails, facilities, and programs. The app will include a reward system that incentivizes engagement with these offerings, as well as track use metrics such as age, gender, and basic demographic information to help the county understand who is using what facilities and how often. The data collected through the app will be used by the Department of Parks and Recreation to assess the usage of its parks, facilities, and programs, to gauge where to focus its efforts in creating a physically and mentally healthier environment for Prince George’s County’s residents. The people involved in this project included teams from Prince George’s County Department of Parks and Recreation. Katrina Williams, Edeline Dormevil, Edith Michel, Thomas Paolucci, Lynell Poyner, Michael Wigglesworth, and Bonnie Man were involved in developing the wireframes for this project.Prince George’s Count

Transverse lipid organization dictates bending fluctuations in model plasma membranes

© 2020 The Royal Society of Chemistry. Membrane undulations play a vital role in many biological processes, including the regulation of membrane protein activity. The asymmetric lipid composition of most biological membranes complicates theoretical description of these bending fluctuations, yet experimental data that would inform any such a theory is scarce. Here, we used neutron spin-echo (NSE) spectroscopy to measure the bending fluctuations of large unilamellar vesicles (LUV) having an asymmetric transbilayer distribution of high- and low-melting lipids. The asymmetric vesicles were prepared using cyclodextrin-mediated lipid exchange, and were composed of an outer leaflet enriched in egg sphingomyelin (ESM) and an inner leaflet enriched in 1-palmitoyl-2-oleoyl-phosphoethanolamine (POPE), which have main transition temperatures of 37 °C and 25 °C, respectively. The overall membrane bending rigidity was measured at three temperatures: 15 °C, where both lipids are in a gel state; 45 °C, where both lipids are in a fluid state; and 30 °C, where there is gel-fluid co-existence. Remarkably, the dynamics for the fluid asymmetric LUVs (aLUVs) at 30 °C and 45 °C do not follow trends predicted by their symmetric counterparts. At 30 °C, compositional asymmetry suppressed the bending fluctuations, with the asymmetric bilayer exhibiting a larger bending modulus than that of symmetric bilayers corresponding to either the outer or inner leaflet. We conclude that the compositional asymmetry and leaflet coupling influence the internal dissipation within the bilayer and result in membrane properties that cannot be directly predicted from corresponding symmetric bilayers

Near-Earth injection of MeV electrons associated with intense dipolarization electric fields: Van Allen Probes observations.

Substorms generally inject tens to hundreds of keV electrons, but intense substorm electric fields have been shown to inject MeV electrons as well. An intriguing question is whether such MeVelectron injections can populate the outer radiation belt. Here we present observations of a substorm injection of MeV electrons into the inner magnetosphere. In the premidnight sector at L ∼ 5.5, Van Allen Probes (Radiation Belt Storm Probes)-A observed a large dipolarization electric field (50 mV/m) over ∼40 s and a dispersionless injection of electrons up to ∼3 MeV. Pitch angle observations indicated betatron acceleration of MeV electrons at the dipolarization front. Corresponding signals of MeV electron injection were observed at LANL-GEO, THEMIS-D, and GOES at geosynchronous altitude. Through a series of dipolarizations, the injections increased the MeV electron phase space density by 1 order of magnitude in less than 3 h in the outer radiation belt (L > 4.8). Our observations provide evidence that deep injections can supply significant MeV electrons

The Tangential Nucleus Controls a Gravito-inertial Vestibulo-ocular Reflex

Whilst adult vertebrates sense changes in head position using two classes of accelerometer, at larval stages zebrafish lack functional semicircular canals and rely exclusively on their otolithic organs to transduce vestibular information. Despite this limitation, they perform an effective vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) that serves to stabilize gaze in response to pitch and roll tilts. Using single-cell electroporations and targeted laser-ablations, we identified a specific class of central vestibular neurons, located in the tangential nucleus, which are essential for the utricle-dependent VOR. Tangential nucleus neurons project contralaterally to extraocular motoneurons, and in addition, to multiple sites within the reticulospinal complex. We propose that tangential neurons function as a broadband inertial accelerometer, processing utricular acceleration signals to control the activity of extraocular and postural neurons, thus completing a fundamental three-neuron circuit responsible for gaze stabilization.Molecular and Cellular Biolog

Paraphrases and summaries: A means of clarification or a vehicle for articulating a preferred version of student accounts?

The use of group discussions as a means to facilitate learning from experiences is well documented in adventure education literature. Priest and Naismith (1993) assert that the use of the circular discussion method, where the leader poses questions to the participants, is the most common form of facilitation in adventure education. This paper draws on transcripts of facilitation sessions to argue that the widely advocated practice of leader summaries or paraphrases of student responses in these sessions functions as a potential mechanism to control and sponsor particular knowledge(s). Using transcripts from recorded facilitation sessions the analysis focuses on how the leader paraphrases the students’ responses and how these paraphrases or ‘formulations’ function to modify or exclude particular aspects of the students’ responses. I assert that paraphrasing is not simply a neutral activity that merely functions to clarify a student response, it is a subtle means by which the leader of the session can, often inadvertently or unknowingly, alter the student’s reply with the consequence of favouring particular knowledge(s). Revealing the subtle work that leader paraphrases perform is of importance for educators who claim to provide genuine opportunities for students to learn from their experience