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Is character education a legitimate goal of higher education? Character education should aim to form people so they can live well in a world worth living in. All universities, whether faith-inspired or not, have an obligation to prepare students for life—a life worth living, a life with purpose. The Christian faith conviction that we as humans have a common telos, that there is an ultimate common good, or highest good, that is God, is central to any Catholic concept of character and flourishing in the university. The practice of the virtues, through good character, is the road to this spiritual end. Catholic Universities traditionally have many features that make them well-placed to cultivate the virtues of character in their students, particularly through the lens of a Christian anthropology. The work of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues on universities is highlighted together with recent scholarly discussion of the place of character virtues in secular and Christian universities.

Canadian nitrogen (N) fertilizer use has more than doubled since 1990 (1.2 to 2.9 MtN by 2021). Consequently, a better understanding of this trend is needed. A comprehensive set of recommended N rates (RNRs) that agreed with the fertilizer sales data from 1996 and 2001 was compared with the Fertilizer Use Survey (FUS). The FUS was conducted from 2014 to 2021, with 2017 being the most representative year for these data. Using non-parametric statistics, confidence intervals were derived from the histograms used to present the FUS data. N application rates from the RNR for canola, spring and Duram wheat, and oats in the west were all below their respective FUS confidence intervals, whereas N application rates for grain corn showed almost no difference in N use between the RNR and FUS. Crop-specific N application rates interpolated from the RNR and FUS were integrated over their respective crop areas and plotted against national fertilizer sales records from 1990 to 2021. The rapid increase in N use between 2001 and 2017 (0.89 MtN), 90% of it (0.80 MtN) in Western Canada, was primarily due to the increased application rates per crop, rather than crop area changes. The RNR-FUS interpolations were a good approximation of N sales records and could improve farm GHG emissions modelling. The economically important crops in Western Canada should be the main focus for N-related GHG reduction measures, but production losses need to be avoided.

Abstract Transparent conductive oxides are appealing materials for optoelectronic and plasmonic applications as, amongst other advantages, their properties can be modulated by engineering their defects. Optimisation of this adjustment is, however, a complex design problem. This work examined the modification of the carrier transport properties of sputtered tin-doped indium oxide (ITO) via laser annealing in reactive environments. We relate the optical modifications to the structural, compositional, and electronic properties to elucidate the precise mechanisms behind the reactive laser annealing (ReLA) process. For sufficiently high laser fluence, we reveal an ambient-dependent and purely compositional modulation of the carrier concentration of ITO thin films. Hereby, we demonstrate that ReLA utilises the precise energy delivery of photonic processing to enhance the carrier mobility and finely tune the carrier concentration without significantly affecting the crystal structure. Exploitation of this phenomena may enable one to selectively engineer the optoelectronic properties of ITO, promising an alternative to the exploration of new materials for optoelectronic and photonic applications.

Combining single-cell cytometry datasets increases the analytical flexibility and the statistical power of data analyses. Here, the authors present a method to robustly integrate cytometry data from different batches, experiments, or even different experimental techniques.

Achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement will require fast and far-reaching changes, including transformative governance within the international climate negotiations. Processes and interactions within the negotiations have been historically perceived as inequitable, as low-income countries' interests were undermined by the small size of their delegations. Since COP21 in Paris, however, the delegation size of poorer countries has significantly increased. Following the Paris Agreement, the average delegation size of low-income and lower middle-income countries, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, has risen considerably compared with other country income groupings and regions. While the drivers behind this increase are yet unclear, the trend could contribute to greater equity in the negotiations through better representation and visibility of issues shared by these countries, for instance those related to high climate vulnerability and low readiness. However, delegation size is only one factor in negotiation success, which is related to a variety of factors both internal and external to the negotiations themselves. Further analysis on the causes of the shifts observed in this paper is required to understand their possible consequences, and better determine whether they can successfully contribute to greater climate equity in the context of the necessary transformative climate governance.

This research mathematically investigates the hypothesis of slow economic growth under capitalism, relative to potential economic growth under a profit-oriented market socialist alternative. The hypothesis is examined within two different economic models: (1) a current-period model that looks at the optimal level of investment in any period from the respective standpoints of the capitalist minority and the general population, and (2) a steady-state equilibrium model that looks at the optimal capital-labor ratio from the respective standpoints of the capitalist minority and the general population. In both cases, two inequalities are derived for the determination of parameter combinations under which growth retardation will hold, the first under the assumption that the aggregate CES production function is linear homogeneous, and the second under the assumption that this function is homogeneous to any degree. The fact that parameter combinations exist under which growth retardation would hold, and also under which growth retardation would not hold, suggests that this issue is essentially an empirical issue rather than a theoretical issue

Combining single-cell cytometry datasets increases the analytical flexibility and the statistical power of data analyses. However, in many cases the full potential of co-analyses is not reached due to technical variance between data from different experimental batches. Here, we present cyCombine, a method to robustly integrate cytometry data from different batches, experiments, or even different experimental techniques, such as CITE-seq, flow cytometry, and mass cytometry. We demonstrate that cyCombine maintains the biological variance and the structure of the data, while minimizing the technical variance between datasets. cyCombine does not require technical replicates across datasets, and computation time scales linearly with the number of cells, allowing for integration of massive datasets. Robust, accurate, and scalable integration of cytometry data enables integration of multiple datasets for primary data analyses and the validation of results using public datasets.

Para el aprovechamiento hidroeléctrico de la cuenca superior del río Allt-Na-Lairige (Escocia) se ha construido una presa de 22,55 m de altura y 414 m de longitud, que presenta la innovación, en Inglaterra, de utilizar los procedimientos del pretensado en las obras hidráulicas.

Background: Traumatic rhabdomyolysis (RM) is common and associated with the development of acute kidney injury and potentially with other organ dysfunctions. Thus, RM may increase the risk of death. The primary objective was to assess the effect of severe RM (Creatine Kinase [CK] > 5000 U/L) on 30-day mortality in trauma patients using a causal inference approach. Methods: In this multicenter cohort study conducted in France using a national major trauma registry (Traumabase) between January 1, 2012, and July 1, 2023, all patients admitted to a participating major trauma center hospitalized in intensive care unit (ICU) and with CK measurement were included. Confounding variables for both 30-day mortality and exposure were used to establish a propensity score. A doubly robust approach with inverse treatment weighting enabled the calculation of the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT). Analyses were performed in the overall cohort as well as in two subgroups: hemorrhagic shock subgroup (HS) and traumatic brain injury subgroup (TBI). Sensitivity analyses were conducted. Results: Among the 8592 patients included, 1544 (18.0%) had severe RM. They were predominantly males (78.6%) with median [IQR] age of 41 [27–58] years and severely injured (ISS 20 [13 – 29]) mainly from blunt trauma (90.8%). In the entire cohort, the ATT, expressed as a risk difference, was 0.073 [-0.054 to 0.200]. Considering the 1311 patients in the HS subgroup, the ATT was 0.039 [0.014 to 0.063]. As in the overall cohort, there was no effect on mortality in the TBI subgroup. Severe RM was associated with greater severity of trauma and more complications (whether related to renal function or not) during the ICU stay. Mortality due to multiorgan failure (39.9% vs 12.4%) or septic shock (2.6% vs 0.8%) was more frequent among patients with severe RM. Conclusions: Severe RM was not associated with 30-day mortality considering the overall cohort. However, it was associated with a 4.0% increase in 30-day mortality among patients with concurrent hemorrhagic shock. Severe RM plays a significant role in ICU morbidity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]