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Dissecting The Tissue-Specific Contributions To Seizures, Cardiorespiratory Dysfunction, And Sudden Death In The Kv1.1 Mouse Model Of Epilepsy Using Conditional Knockout Approaches
Get PDFSudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP), the primary cause of mortality in epilepsy, remains poorly understood. Studies suggest seizures may trigger dangerous signals affecting the heart and lungs leading to collapse and death. The Kv1.1 deficiency mouse model mirrors clinical SUDEP cases, showing spontaneous seizures, cardiorespiratory issues, and premature death. However, this model lacks regional specificity in Kv1.1 deletion, hindering insights into SUDEP’s mechanisms and anatomical substrates.
This dissertation employs three distinct conditional knockout (cKO) techniques to investigate the individual roles for the forebrain, brainstem, and heart in SUDEP related phenotypes. The findings reveal that the forebrain alone can trigger spontaneous seizures and premature death. Additionally, the brainstem may play a significant role in regulating blood oxygen levels and may show gender differences in respiratory measures. Lastly, Kv1.1 in the heart is essential for cardiomyocyte action potential repolarization but does not significantly impact overall cardiac function measured in mice. This research highlights how distinct brain circuits contribute to SUDEP mechanisms, providing insights specifically for researchers using the Kv1.1 deficiency model as to where the crucial anatomical substrates may be found in future studies
Best Practices for Teaching Shifting Gameplay Styles
Get PDFThis thesis explores four different methods (Golden Path, Punishers & Reinforcers, Teaching in Threes, and Forced Teaching) for teaching players how to engage with shifting gameplay styles within video games using Nico Fridja’s Valence Theory [1]. Using the Far Cry 5 Arcade Editor, the researcher created a single-player video game level in which all four teaching methods were tested in tandem with one another. The goal of creating this level was to evaluate the validity of the teaching methods and their ability to shift gameplay valences, specifically between stealth-focused gameplay and push-forward firefight combat gameplay
Radical Explorations Of Radical Empiricism: William James’s Transmissive Theory Of Mind In The Context Of Visionary Experience
Get PDFThe dominant ontology in science is a form of materialism and it filters down into the social sciences in ways I will touch on throughout this paper. The influence of the current dominant ontology is especially apparent when it comes to experiences and phenomena that challenge its underlying assumptions which is why I will primarily focus on visionary experience and psi phenomena as studied by radical empiricists throughout the ages.
The philosophical position of William James challenges materialist assumptions by championing the idea that the only world we can speak of is the world of our experience. William James affords academics the possibility of speaking from a place of personal experience when he argues that religious belief and visionary experience is psychologically “normal” and ripe grounds for rigorous academic consideration. Although James does not offer a systematic metaphysics, I will explore a series of analogies, metaphors, suggestions, and thick descriptions that are central to James’s effort to reclaim the intimacy and role of embodied experience in philosophy and James’s attempts to push empirical science into new territory that is currently assumed to be nonexistent in the dominant metaphysical episteme ruled by reductionary materialism. I will also visit radical empiricism within the broader context of his engagement with psychical research and various modalities of religious experience. I also draw on Edith Turner to show how James’s theory of mind can be productively extended to the methods of anthropology. Edith Turner’s anthropological method and interest in psychical research highlights intriguing parallels with James\u27s philosophy. Common to these approaches is the aim to reconcile religion and science; the adoption of a radical empiricist stance; acknowledgment of the inherent fallibility of hypotheses; a heavy reliance on personal and subjective epistemology; and a challenge to the traditional Cartesian mind-body dichotomy
Christian Innovation Communities: A Wicked Problem Framework For Church Innovation
Get PDFABSTRACT
Leslie A. Stewart
Mar 11, 2024
Christian Innovation Communities: A Wicked Problem Framework for Church Innovation
This dissertation uniquely proposes a “Wicked Problem” approach to Church Innovation. It introduces the term Christian Innovation Communities to the Church Innovation discussion advocating for a local and regional innovation ecosystem. The framework for Christian Innovation Communities uses a cross-discipline approach combining adaptive leadership principles, a collaborative systems design approach, asset-based community development principles, pastoral discernment, and missional theology. These are synthesized into a visual, action-driven, practical guide. It shows adaptive leaders how to lead a leadership team through an innovation process. A significant aspect of that leadership is the strategic use of narrative. While initial research on church innovation has focused on pairing Appreciative Inquiry with pastoral discernment, that approach fails to address the super-complex or “wicked” context of the Church’s problem space: the uncertainty of a quickly changing cultural condition; external boundary-spanning issues that involve diverse stakeholders that lack a shared perspective, language, or values; and that same level of internal complexity among church members, while demands on parochial leaders continue to increase. This necessitates the use of a “wicked problem” systems design approach. The first chapter outlines the need for this approach. Chapters two through four provide scriptural, historical, and theological support for Christian Innovation Communities. They are also narrative entry points for leading church innovation. The final chapter provides a visual framework for innovation so Christian Innovation Communities can become inventors for love’s sake and bear witness to the triumph of God’s love
The Post-Racial Deception of the Roberts Court
Get PDFStudents for Fair Admissions v. Harvard/UNC (SFFA) is a post-racial deception unmoored from precedent and societal reality. SFFA deceives the polity and signals an all out assault on anti-discrimination law. To preserve its institutional legitimacy, the Roberts Court promotes doctrinal and conceptual distortions—post-racial deceptions of cognizable injuries advanced through reverse discrimination claims of white plaintiffs; racial proxy claims of discrimination proffered by Asian-Americans; and the fairness rationale of the Court’s circular post-racial edict that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion discards the anti-subordination principle of the Fourteenth Amendment and replaces it with a post-racial anti-differentiation principle: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” Expanding the circularity of Chief Justice Roberts’s post-racialism even further, Justice Thomas’s concurrence offers an ostensibly originalist reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that erases the race-conscious history of the Reconstruction Amendments and reframes it as the codification of the Declaration of Independence. Rejecting this post-racial deception, Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, in dissent, foreground the anti-subordination principle as the essential doctrinal core of the Fourteenth Amendment and offer a rebuke of the Court’s facile post-racialism with a comprehensive discussion of systemic racism, structural inequality, and the present-day effects of past discrimination. The Court’s post-racial constitutionalism is a post-racial deception which must be discredited and rejected if we are to ever achieve the multi-racial democracy promised by the Second Founding
Cross-Party Voting in 21st Century Presidential Primaries: A Social and Empirical Analysis
Get PDFThis paper by Mark Trautmann explores the phenomenon of cross-party voting in U.S. presidential primaries, focusing on its prevalence and impact in open primaries. Trautmann examines cases in the Midwest, analyzing data and media narratives surrounding the Michigan Republican Primary (2000, 2012) and the Democratic Primaries in Wisconsin (2004) and Indiana (2008). The findings suggest that while media often overemphasizes the influence of cross-party voting, its actual effect on primary outcomes remains limited, though potentially disruptive in certain case
