Cooperative Evolution

Cooperative Evolution offers a fresh account of evolution consistent with Charles Darwin's own account of a cooperative, inter-connected, buzzing and ever-changing world. Told in accessible language, treating evolutionary change as a cooperative enterprise brings some surprising shifts from the traditional emphasis on the dominance of competition. The book covers many evolutionary changes reconsidered as cooperation. These include the cooperative origins of life, evolution as a spiral rather than a ladder or tree, humans as a part of natural systems rather than the purpose, relationships between natural and social change, and the role of the individual in adaptive radiation onto new ground. The story concludes with a projection of human evolution from the past into the future

Deformations of G_2 and Spin(7) Structures on Manifolds

We consider some infinitesmal and global deformations of G_2 structures on 7-manifolds. We discover a canonical way to deform a G_2 structure by a vector field in which the associated metric gets "twisted" in some way by the vector cross product. We present a system of partial differential equations for an unknown vector field whose solution would yield a manifold with holonomy G_2. Similarly we consider analogous constructions for Spin(7) structures on 8-manifolds. Some of the results carry over directly, while others do not because of the increased non-linearity of the Spin(7) case.Comment: 51 pages, no figures, part of author's Ph.D. Thesis. Version 4: Changes made after publication: There were sign errors in equations (2.26) and (2.34) and in the proof of Lemma 2.4.3 that have now been corrected in this arXiv version. Also Remark 3.3.7 was incorrect and has been removed. Finally, hyperlinks now adde

Cooperative Evolution

Cooperative Evolution offers a fresh account of evolution consistent with Charles Darwin's own account of a cooperative, inter-connected, buzzing and ever-changing world. Told in accessible language, treating evolutionary change as a cooperative enterprise brings some surprising shifts from the traditional emphasis on the dominance of competition. The book covers many evolutionary changes reconsidered as cooperation. These include the cooperative origins of life, evolution as a spiral rather than a ladder or tree, humans as a part of natural systems rather than the purpose, relationships between natural and social change, and the role of the individual in adaptive radiation onto new ground. The story concludes with a projection of human evolution from the past into the future

Chamblee High School Extended Learning Time Optimization Project

The following is a report on the design and documentation of a program meant to assist Chamblee High School. The definition of the problem, front and back-end development, analysis of the program, integration between programs, final results and conclusions contained within the report contain multitudes of information about the system and recommendations for the continued development of the program after the involvement of the Kennesaw Industrial Education Team. The basic problem of the project is the organization of information flow. To solve problems with the basic solution to organization within the school, the team must develop a method to creating a software that will assign students and teachers within the new flexible learning period that Chamblee intends to integrate into its block schedule in the fall semester, 2022. In response to the problems with the baseline solution, the team developed a new flowchart that would alleviate the problems presented by it and found a method of testing the program quality to check if the final product was sufficient or if new tools would need to be recommended. The front-end development was handled entirely through the preferred system, Coda.io, at the recommendation of the client. The development of the software was temporarily halted due to the legal ramifications behind student anonymity and the school’s inability to share information, but the development of the software served to establish the future for a new software. The front-end accomplished the creation of a teacher and student view that accomplished most requirements of the interface. The back-end development accomplished the stated goals of the algorithm and servers but was not optimal because of the difficulties integrating with Coda.io and involved the use of MySQL, R, and Python. Integration proved to be the most intense challenge of the project. Maintaining the data structure and working with the suboptimal routines for data transfer in Coda.io made the process incredibly difficult. Employing the use of API, third-party servers, and Python after the initial solution recommended by the developers at Coda.io, Zapier, failed to be capable of the data transfer that was necessary. After the analysis of the program revealed a less than optimal software quality, and that the program on review did not meet all requirements of the software due to limitations in Coda.io, the team is forced to make recommendations that involve the abandonment of Coda.io as a platform and strategies to rework the current back-end development and servers to create a smoother overall program

Can Arabidopsis thaliana Seeds Survive Exposure to Extreme Cold?

Amanda Scott, Bryant Brown, John Solomon's poster about Arabidopsis thaliana seeds and there ability to survive exposure to extreme cold

Benefits and challenges of multi-level learner rural general practices – an interview study with learners, staff and patients

Background: General practices vary in the provision of training and education. Some practices have training as a major focus with the presence of multi-level learners and others host single learner groups or none at all. This study investigates the educational benefits and challenges associated with 'multi-level learner' practices. Methods: This paper comprised three case studies of rural general practices with multiple levels of learners. Qualitative data were collected from 29 interviews with learners (n = 12), staff (n = 12) and patients (n = 5). Interviews were initially analyzed using open and axial coding and thematic analysis. Results: Thematic analysis showed 'multi-level learning' in general practices has benefits and challenges to learners and the practice. Learner benefits included knowledge exchange, the opportunity for vertical peer learning, a positive learning environment and the development of a supportive network. The presence of multi-level learners promoted sharing of knowledge with all staff, a sense of community, an increase in patient services and enthused supervisors. Challenges for learners included perception of decreased access to supervisors, anxiety with peer observation, reduced access to patient presentations and patient reluctance to be seen by a learner. Practice challenges were administration requirements, high learner turnover, infrastructure requirements and the requirement for supervisors to cater to a range of learner level needs. Conclusions: The presence of medical students, interns and registrars in general practice has educational benefits to the learners extending to the other stakeholders (staff and patients). Multi-level learners present challenges to the learners and the practice by increasing pressures on resources, staff (administrative and supervisors) and infrastructure