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Organizing organic reactions can teach the importance of antibonding orbitals. Frontier orbital concepts can be used not only in the beginning organic chemistry course but also to provide a simplifying and unifying framework from which organic reaction chemistry can be learned at the introductory level.

Chirality, or where something rotates either right or left, was first discovered in organic compounds in 1815. German chemist Emil Fischer designed a system to classify the absolute configuration of chiral molecules in the early 1900s. The concept of chirality is essential for X-ray crystallography and so chemists need to understand the impact of the chirality of a molecule within a crystal lattice.

Aleksandr Mikhailovich Zaitsev and his students, Egor Egorevich Vagner, Sergei Nikolayevich Reformatsky and Aleksandr Erminingeldovich Arbuzov, are responsible for many of the Russian advances in organic chemistry. They all studied and some taught at the University of Kazan. Zaitsev was responsible for the discovery of sulfoxides, Vagner helped found terpene chemistry, Reformatsky worked with beta-hydroxycarbonyl compound reactions and Arbuzov determined the number of hydroxyl groups in phosphorus acids.

The Russian contribution to organic chemistry has gone largely unrecognized by the English-speaking science world while German contributions have been emphasized. However, many leading chemists who were considered German were actually Russian. The University of Kazan was home to a number of important chemists such as Nikolai Nikolaevich Zinin, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Butlerov and Vladimir Vasilevich Markovnikov. Zinin discovered a method to synthesize aromatic amines, Butlerov discovered the synthesis reaction for tertiary alcohol and Markovnikov proved rings larger than six-membered could exist.

The application of the concept of protocenter in teaching geometric isomerism and chirality is explained. A protocenter is an atom that carries two different groups in a nonlinear position. The concept can also be used in determining which type of stereoisomerisim for compounds is possible.

A thin-layer chromatography (TLC) microscale experiment based on synthesis of a fluorescent dye has been developed. Synthesis of the very fluorescent dye, 4-hexylamino-N-hexyl-1,8-naphthalimide, from technical grade 4-chloro-1,8-naphthalic anhydride is carried out. The experiment has qualities that will excite the imagination of typical undergraduate chemistry students. Students can monitor the progress of the reaction using TLC and will respond more positively than they will to most exercises involving TLC, most of which involve visualization effected by charge-transfer complexation with iodine or by looking at fluorescence quenching of an inorganic fluorescer added to adsorbent.

The paper 'Can Reaction Mechanisms Be Proven?' raises valid and pertinent points such as that the concept of mechanism can not be proven. However, their argument to support their extension of the dogma where repetitious experiments that fail to disprove a mechanism do not prove it, is something of a reductio ad absurdum.

The authors use data from the Federal Human Capital Survey to measure comparative leadership and management performance among executives in the military bureaucracy. The authors evaluate whether differences in executive backgrounds, training, and management environments influence employee evaluations of leadership, management, and work climate. Military service agencies get systematically higher evaluations in leadership and work climate, but not management. Among the services, the Air Force consistently received the highest evaluations. Air Force managers have the highest ranks, the longest military service, and a high level of graduate education when they assume executive positions; these characteristics are positively correlated with performance. Other managerial characteristics associated with high performance were long job tenures and private management experience. The authors conclude that greater attention to graduate training, exploring ways to increase tenure, and the selection of retired officers with private management experience for important executive posts may improve performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]