“Evil Enchantment” versus Platonic Vision: Dante, Lewis, and the Weight of Glory

C. S. Lewis was convinced that, in the modern world, goodness often strikes us as bland and diluted, a kind of spiritual neutral. What we need, especially in the modern world, he thought, is a positive vision of the good, a vision of beauties that “pierce like swords or burn like cold iron,” as he once said of Tolkien’s work. We need a positive picture and we need to have positive desire, as opposed to thinking of goodness primarily in negative terms, as “not being bad.” Lewis thought we need to have a sense of the gravity and heaviness and, even, viscosity , if I may, of goodness: in other words, we need to feel the “weight of glory,” the title of his famous sermon. As I will argue in the remainder of this paper, no author taught him more about the gravity of goodness or the “weight of glory” than the medieval poet Dante Alighieri

A Pilot Study for Enhancing Postpartum Discharge Instructions for Incision Care: Assessment of Comprehension

Literacy and Health Care • 14.5% of United States is illiterate 1 • Reading level of most medical forms is 10th grade 2 Improving Outcomes with a Visual Aid • Cesarean Surgical Site Infection (SSI) rate is 5% 3 • A patient with a SSI can be 2 times as expensive 4 • Visual aids improve information recall 8 and confidence in wound care 5 Study Objectives 1. To evaluate the readability of the cesarean wound care discharge instructions relative to the patient population’s reading level 2. To conduct a pilot Randomized Control Trial (RCT) to evaluate the effectiveness of a visual aid on improving comprehension of the cesarean wound care instructionshttps://jdc.jefferson.edu/cwicposters/1034/thumbnail.jp

An FPGA Implementation of Carrier Phase and Symbol Timing Synchronization for 16-APSK

Proper synchronization between a transmitter and receiver, in terms of carrier phase and symbol timing, is critical for reliable communication. Carrier phase synchronization is related to the frequency translation hardware, where perfect synchronization means that the local oscillators of the transmitter’s upconverter and receiver’s downconverter are aligned in phase and frequency. Timing synchronization is related to the analog-to-digital converter in the receiver, where perfect synchronization means that samples of the received signal are taken at transmitted symbol times. Perfect synchronization is unlikely in practical systems for a number of reasons, including hardware limitations and the independence of the transmitter and receiver. This thesis explores an FPGA implementation of a PLL-based carrier phase and symbol timing synchronization subsystem as part of a 16-APSK aeronautical telemetry receiver. The theory behind this subsystem is presented, and the hardware implementation of each component is described. Results demonstrate successful demodulation of a test signal, and system performance is shown to be comparable to double-precision floating point simulations in terms of error vector magnitude, synchronization lock time, and BER

Constraining Dark Matter Microphysics with the Annihilation Signal from Subhalos

In the cold dark matter scenario, galactic dark matter halos are populated with a large number of smaller subhalos. Previous work has shown that dark matter annihilations in subhalos can generate a distinctive, non-Poisson signal in the gamma-ray photon counts probability distribution function (PDF). Here we show that the gamma-ray PDF also carries information about the velocity dependence of the dark matter annihilation cross section. After calculating the PDF assuming $s$-wave and Sommerfeld-enhanced annihilation, we perform a mock data analysis to illustrate how current and future observations can constrain the microphysics of the dark matter annihilation. We find that, with current Fermi data, and assuming a dark matter annihilation cross section roughly at the limit of current bounds from annihilation in dwarf spheroidal galaxies, one can potentially distinguish the non-Poissonian fluctuations expected from dark matter annihilation in subhalos from Poisson sources, as well as from dark matter models with an incorrect velocity-dependence. We explore how robust these results are to assumptions about the modeling of astrophysical backgrounds. We also point out a four-parameter degeneracy between the velocity dependence of the dark matter annihilation, the minimum subhalo mass, the power law index of the subhalo mass function, and the normalization of the dark matter signal. This degeneracy can be broken with priors from N-body simulations or from observational constraints on the subhalo mass function.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figure

Formation of a large, complex domain of histone hyperacetylation at human 14q32.1 requires the serpin locus control region

The human serine protease inhibitor (serpin) gene cluster at 14q32.1 is a useful model system to study cell-type-specific gene expression and chromatin structure. Activation of the serpin locus can be induced in vitro by transferring human chromosome 14 from non-expressing to expressing cells. Serpin gene activation in expressing cells is correlated with locus-wide alterations in chromatin structure, including the de novo formation of 17 expression-associated DNase I-hypersensitive sites (DHSs). In this study, we investigated histone acetylation throughout the proximal serpin subcluster. We report that gene activation is correlated with high levels of histone H3 and H4 acetylation at serpin gene promoters and other regulatory regions. However, the locus is not uniformly hyperacetylated, as there are regions of hypoacetylation between genes. Furthermore, genetic tests indicate that locus-wide controls regulate both gene expression and chromatin structure. For example, deletion of a previously identified serpin locus control region (LCR) upstream of the proximal subcluster reduces both gene expression and histone acetylation throughout the ∼130 kb region. A similar down regulation phenotype is displayed by transactivator-deficient cell variants, but this phenotype can be rescued by transfecting the cells with expression cassettes encoding hepatocyte nuclear factor-1α (HNF-1α) or HNF-4. Taken together, these results suggest that histone acetylation depends on interactions between the HNF-1α/HNF-4 signaling cascade and the serpin LCR

Searching for velocity-dependent dark matter annihilation signals from extragalactic halos

We consider gamma-ray signals of dark matter annihilation in extragalactic halos in the case where dark matter annihilates from a $p$-wave or $d$-wave state. In these scenarios, signals from extragalactic halos are enhanced relative to other targets, such as the Galactic Center or dwarf spheroidal galaxies, because the typical relative speed of the dark matter is larger in extragalactic halos. We perform a mock data analysis of gamma rays produced by dark matter annihilation in halos detected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We include a model for uncorrelated galactic and extragalactic gamma ray backgrounds, as well as a simple model for backgrounds due to astrophysical processes in the extragalactic halos detected by the survey. We find that, for models which are still allowed by other gamma ray searches, searches of extragalactic halos with the current Fermi exposure can produce evidence for dark matter annihilation, though it is difficult to distinguish the $p$-wave and $d$-wave scenarios. With a factor $10\times$ larger exposure, though, discrimination of the velocity-dependence is possible.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures; replaced to match version accepted by JCA

Control of Wrist and Arm Movements of Varying Difficulties

Three experiments compared wrist and arm performance in a cyclical Fitts’ target task. The purpose of Experiment I was to determine if movement kinematics differed for wrist/elbow flexion/extension movements to targets of varying difficulty. Participants were asked to flex/extend a manipulandum in the horizontal plane at the wrist and elbow joint in an attempt to move back and forth between two targets. Online knowledge of effector position was displayed as a visual trace on a projector screen. Target widths were manipulated with amplitude constant (16 degrees) in order to create Indexes of Difficulty of 1.5, 3, 4.5, and 6. Results failed to detect differences in elbow and wrist movements either in terms of movement time, movement accuracy, or kinematic characteristics of the movement. In studies that have reported difference in wrist and arm performance in Fitts’ target tasks, experimenters have typically utilized visual amplification to counterbalance the small resulting wrist movements. The purpose of Experiments II and III was to investigate how changes in task parameters and visual gain play a role in providing a performance advantage for the wrist. In these experiments arm movement amplitude was increased to 32 degrees and wrist amplitude was decreased to 8 degrees. Results found similar overall movement times for arm and wrist movements. However, kinematic analysis of the movement revealed relatively large dwell times for wrist movements at IDs of 4.5 and 6. Removal of dwell time resulted in faster movement times for the wrist compared to arm. The results of these three experiments add to the limited literature examining how different effectors perform a Fitts’ target task. These findings suggest that performance differences in past literature may be due to the visual amplification often used when arm, wrist, and finger movements are studied