With All My Heart

Photograph of Rudy Valleehttps://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/cht-sheet-music/6818/thumbnail.jp

Is “end of life” a special case? Connecting Q with survey methods to measure societal support for views on the value of life-extending treatments

Preference elicitation studies reporting societal views on the relative value of end-of-life treatments have produced equivocal results. This paper presents an alternative method, combining Q methodology and survey techniques (Q2S) to determine the distribution of 3 viewpoints on the relative value of end-of-life treatments identified in a previous, published, phase of this work. These were Viewpoint 1, “A population perspective: value for money, no special cases”; Viewpoint 2, “Life is precious: valuing life-extension and patient choice”; and Viewpoint 3, “Valuing wider benefits and opportunity cost: the quality of life and death.”. A Q2S survey of 4,902 respondents across the United Kingdom measured agreement with these viewpoints; 37% most agreed with Viewpoint 1, 49% with Viewpoint 2, and 9% with Viewpoint 3. Regression analysis showed associations of viewpoints with gender, level of education, religion, voting preferences, and satisfaction with the NHS. The Q2S approach provides a promising means to investigate how in-depth views and opinions are represented in the wider populati

Differential analysis of gene expression in Arabidopsis thaliana organ boundary mutants

Differences in gene expression occur due to cell type differentiation, the stages of an organism’s life cycle, genetic variation, and changes in the environment. The quantification of these changes can be valuable for helping deduce the molecular mechanisms underlying the development of model organisms such as Arabidopsis. A pair of homeobox genes, ARABIDOPSIS THALIANA HOMEOBOX GENE1 (ATH1) and SHOOT MERISTEMLESS (STM), encode transcription factors that play key roles in establishing organ boundaries in Arabidopsis flowers. Plants that carry mutations in both of these genes are missing floral organ-stem boundary regions and fail to shed their outer floral organs. Previous studies have shown that expression of HAESA, a receptor-like kinase that activates a signaling cascade necessary for organ shedding, is substantially reduced in stm ath1 mutant flowers. RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq) was used to profile the transcriptomes of wild-type and stm ath1 inflorescences (clusters of flowers). The first aim of my study was to test the hypothesis that the expression of HAE is reduced in stm ath1 inflorescences compared to wild-type. The second aim was to identify other candidate genes whose expression may be regulated by the STM and ATH1 transcription factors and that may play downstream roles in forming organ boundaries and regulating organ abscission. My analysis of a pilot RNA-seq study carried out through the ‘RNA-Seq for the Next Generation’ project at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory identified a set of twenty-four genes that are expressed at significantly lower levels in stm ath1 mutants compared to wildtype. Although expression of HAE is also reduced in stm ath1 plants compared to wildtype, this result does not fall within the range considered to be significant

Exact hydrodynamics and onset of phase separation for an active exclusion process

We consider a lattice model of active matter with exclusion and derive its hydrodynamic description exactly. The macroscopic limit is an integro-differential equation for the particles' density in phase space (positions and orientations) and includes nonlinearities in both the diffusive and advective components. Systems of active particles can undergo phase separation without any attractive interactions, a mechanism known as motility-induced phase separation. We explore the onset of such a transition in the parameter space of occupied volume fraction and self-propulsion speed via a linear stability analysis and numerical simulations. At low densities, the stability boundary is consistent with the linear analysis, but for higher densities, the homogeneous state is found to be less stable than the linearised model predicts.Comment: 31 Pages, 8 figure

Biomass spectra in benthic fish assemblages in the Benguela system.

6 páginas, 1 figura, 2 tablas.Biomass spectra in the different benthic fish assemblages at depths between 100 and 800 m off the coast of Namibia were studied over a period of 3 yr These assemblages were located in areas spanning active upwelling centres on the shelf and zones of lower productivity on the lower slope. The slopes of the curves for the normallzed size distributions were related to zonal productivity and abundance of the smallest slze classes. In the main upwelling centre, in which abundance of small specimens was high earn d comrnunlty diversity lower, biomass clearly dropped off with increasing size; teleost fishes and mid-level predators (which prey on euphausiids and other pelagic crustaceans) predominated In the less productive zone, where the biomass of small specimens was very low and communlty diversity very high, biomass increased or at least tended to remaln constant with size and elasrnobranchs and apex predators (which prey on fish and cephalopods) were most abundant.Peer reviewe

F22RS SGR 9 (Virtual TigerCard)

To Urge and Request Louisiana State University to implement a virtual TigerCard syste