Corpus Christi: an economy in transition

Corpus Christi tempts tourists with miles of beaches, sea breezes, an arts and museum district, waterfront restaurants, shopping and more. It is also home to a major seaport, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, a large health care system, military bases, refineries and chemical plants. Port activity and tourism remain important components of the Corpus Christi economy. However, some sectors are declining in importance, such as agriculture, oil and gas, petrochemicals and military, while others are expanding, such as health care, alternative energy and education. ; Jobs in the Corpus Christi metropolitan statistical area (MSA) have been growing steadily since 1970. The pace has been slightly faster than in the U.S., but less than in Texas and about average for other comparable metros. Recent gains in energy prices, expansion by Texas A&M–Corpus Christi, low housing costs, increased activity at the Port of Corpus Christi and the continued retirement of baby boomers suggest increased opportunity for growth in Corpus Christi in the near future.Texas ; Economic conditions - Texas ; Employment - Texas ; Petroleum industry and trade ; Wages ; Education ; Cost and standard of living

Wearing the Collaborator Hat

Writing tutors take on several roles when working with students, which range from coaches to counselors. However, one of the most important roles of writing tutors is the collaborator. Collaboration encourages both the tutor and the student to draw on each of their strengths, rather than only relying on the knowledge of the tutor alone. Some roles that restrict tutors as collaborators are roles such as editors and experts. Tutors avoid being editors of papers because they are only able to address surface level issues in writing rather than global issues. Being an expert is too much of a burden for peer tutors because they too are students and humans with an incomplete knowledge. But being a collaborator provides the tutor and student with opportunities to work in tandem to learn and find solutions and develop stronger writing skills

Pamphlets for War: The Role of Lord Burghley’s Pamphlet Discourse in Avoiding Civil War

During the sixteenth century, England sat as a conflicted nation among a continent of tumultuous civil wars and reformations. While neighboring countries fought within and among themselves, England somehow managed to avoid a formal civil war. The confounding lack of war in England during the latter half of the sixteenth century could be related to the constant discourse between prominent protestants and catholics. One such prominent protestant was Lord Cecil Burghley, who served as a royal minister and maintained good relations with Queen Elizabeth I. Lord Burghley’s pamphlet, The Execution of Justice in England, and other documents of discourse at the time may contribute to a war of pamphlets based on the rhetoric and relationship Burghley demonstrated. With our research, we hope to discover what within the pamphlets contributed to keeping the religious turbulence within the realms of a war of discourse rather than a full-fledged civil war. Based on preliminary investigation, we have found that the rhetoric of the pamphlets, the sheer amount of discourse and correspondence, and the relationship between the writers and the audiences could have contributed to England’s abstinence from civil war. Observing the discourse within Burghley’s pamphlet and other responding documents, we can gain an understanding of what set England apart from other surrounding countries facing similar religious and political tumult. Our findings may also contribute to a greater conversation surrounding the power of conversation, dialogue, and discourse to either prevent or incite war

Exponents of Jacobians of Graphs and Regular Matroids

Let G be a finite undirected multigraph with no self-loops. The Jacobian Jac (G) is a finite abelian group associated with G whose cardinality is equal to the number of spanning trees of G. There are only a finite number of biconnected graphs G such that the exponent of Jac (G) equals 2 or 3. The definition of a Jacobian can also be extended to regular matroids as a generalization of graphs. We prove that there are finitely many connected regular matroids M such that Jac (M) has exponent 2 and characterize all such matroids

The Eye of the Beholder

https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/english_3315/1001/thumbnail.jp

Evaluating duration of antimicrobial therapy for community-acquired pneumonia in clinically stable patients

"In the United States, community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) results in an estimated 2 to 3 million diagnoses each year, 10 million physician visits, and 600,000 hospitalizations resulting in a total cost of over 20 billion dollars annually. Common causative organisms of CAP include Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae, Mycoplasma pneumoniae, Chlamydia pneumoniae, and Legionella pneumophila. Identifying the etiologic organism helps guide therapeutic decisions, however, the pathogen remains unknown in about 50 percent of cases. Therefore, optimal empiric therapy relies on a physician's experience and clinical judgment. The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) guidelines for treatment of community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) recommend a minimum 5-day course of antibiotics for patients who achieve clinical stability within 48 to 72 hours from initiation of appropriate therapy. A multicenter, cohort study of 686 patients hospitalized with CAP found that most were treated for 7 to 10 days despite median time to clinical stability of 3 days, indicating that a shorter duration of therapy is often not favored by clinicians despite guideline recommendations. Moreover, although many patients receive active antimicrobial therapy while hospitalized, additional courses of antimicrobials are often prescribed upon discharge resulting in excessive antibiotic use. While many patients are given prolonged courses of therapy for CAP, shorter durations of antibiotics in patients eligible for such courses of treatment offer a number of advantages such as minimizing the emergence and selection of resistant organisms, increasing patient compliance, and reducing the risk of medication adverse effects. The objective of this study was to assess the percentage of hospitalized patients diagnosed with uncomplicated CAP receiving antimicrobial therapy in excess of the guideline-recommended duration, evaluate subsequent thirty-day all-cause readmission rates, and determine if select co-morbidities influenced the length of antimicrobial therapy prescribed."--Introduction.Lucy Hahn (Parkland Health and Hospital System, Dallas, Texas), Anita Hegde (University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas), Norman Mang (Parkland Health and Hospital System, Dallas, Texas, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas), Jessica K. Ortwine (Parkland Health and Hospital System, Dallas, Texas, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas), Wenjing Wei (Parkland Health and Hospital System, Dallas, Texas, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas), Bonnie Chase Prokesch (University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas)Includes bibliographical reference

Temporal Relation Between Pubertal Development and Peer Victimization in a Prospective Sample of US Adolescents

Peer victimization typically peaks in early adolescence, leading researchers to hypothesize that pubertal timing is a meaningful predictor of peer victimization. However, previous methodological approaches have limited our ability to parse out which puberty cues are associated with peer victimization because gonadal and adrenal puberty, two independent processes, have either been conflated or adrenal puberty timing has been ignored. In addition, previous research has overlooked the possibility of reverse causality—that peer victimization might drive pubertal timing, as it has been shown to do in non-human primates. To fill these gaps, we followed 265 adolescents (47% female) prospectively across three-time points (Mage: T1 = 9.6, T2 = 12.0, T3 = 14.4) and measured self-report peer victimization and self- and maternal-report of gonadal and adrenal pubertal development on the Pubertal Development Scale. Multilevel modeling revealed that females who were further along in adrenal puberty at age 9 were more likely to report peer victimization at age 12 (Cohen\u27s d = 0.25, p = .005). The relation between gonadal puberty status and peer victimization was not significant for either sex. In terms of the reverse direction, the relation between early peer victimization and later pubertal development was not significant in either sex. Overall, our findings suggest that adrenal puberty status, but not gonadal puberty status, predicted peer victimization in females, highlighting the need to separate gonadal and adrenal pubertal processes in future studies

Detection of a new non-native freshwater species by DNA metabarcoding of environmental samples — first record of Gammarus fossarum in the UK

© 2017 The Author(s). and 2017 REABIC. We report the discovery of a non-native gammarid, Gammarus fossarum (Koch, 1836) (Crustacea, Amphipoda), in UK rivers. Gammarus fossarum is a common freshwater gammarid in many parts of mainland Europe, but was previously considered absent from the UK. Gammarus fossarum was detected in a number of UK rivers following DNA metabarcoding of a mini-barcode region of the COI gene in macroinvertebrate kick samples, and environmental DNA (eDNA) from water and sediment samples. Subsequent morphological analysis and standard DNA barcoding showed that the species could be reliably identified and separated from Gammarus pulex (Linnaeus, 1758), the most dominant and widespread native freshwater gammarid in the UK. Our data demonstrate extensive geographical coverage of G. fossarum in the UK, spanning distant river catchments. At present there is no data to confirm the likely origin of G. fossarum’s introduction. Subsequent re-examination of historic archive material shows the species to have been present in the UK since at least 1964. This study is among the first to demonstrate the potential of eDNA metabarcoding for detection of new non-native species

Erstellung und Realisierung einer institutionellen Forschungsdaten-Policy

Die Hochschulrektorenkonferenz hat 2015 Empfehlungen zum Forschungsdatenmanagement verfasst, worin den Hochschulen nahegelegt wurde eigene Forschungsdaten-Policies zu verabschieden. Ziel sei es, den Hochschulangehörigen mehr Orientierung im Forschungsdatenmanagement zu geben. Umfang, Inhalt und der Verabschiedungsprozess einer Forschungsdaten-Policy können jedoch stark voneinander abweichen. Die vorliegende Empfehlung sowie die zugehörigen Erfahrungsberichte geben einen Überblick über die verschiedenen Möglichkeiten der Gestaltung einer Policy sowie Wege zu deren Erstellung. Neben einer Definition von Forschungsdaten-Policies sowie einer tabellarischen Übersicht thematischer Bausteine werden Empfehlungen zur Erstellung und Verabschiedung gegeben

Mothers’ Prenatal Distress Accelerates Adrenal Pubertal Development in Daughters

Human life history schedules vary, partly, because of adaptive, plastic responses to early-life conditions. Little is known about how prenatal conditions relate to puberty timing. We hypothesized that fetal exposure to adversity may induce an adaptive response in offspring maturational tempo. In a longitudinal study of 253 mother-child dyads followed for 15 years, we investigated if fetal exposure to maternal psychological distress related to children’s adrenarche and gonadarche schedules, assessed by maternal and child report and by dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate (DHEA-S), testosterone, and estradiol levels. We found fetal exposure to elevated maternal prenatal psychological distress predicted earlier adrenarche and higher DHEA-S levels in girls, especially first-born girls, and that associations remained after covarying indices of postnatal adversity. No associations were observed for boys or for gonadarche in girls. Adrenarche orchestrates the social-behavioral transition from juvenility to adulthood; therefore, significant findings for adrenarche, but not gonadarche, suggest that prenatal maternal distress instigates an adaptive strategy in which daughters have earlier social-behavioral maturation. The stronger effect in first-borns suggests that, in adverse conditions, it is in the mother’s adaptive interest for her daughter to hasten social maturation, but not necessarily sexual maturation, because it would prolong the duration of the daughter allomothering younger siblings. We postulate a novel evolutionary framework that human mothers may calibrate the timing of first-born daughters’ maturation in a way that optimizes their own reproductive success