Best Selling Books by Ann Howard

When her lovely, charming, and disgraced cousin Etta arrives, Grace finds her place in society, and in her mother''s heart, threatened. In a reckless moment, Grace reveals Etta''s scandalous past, and as punishment, she''s sent to work in Galveston''s back alleys, helping the poor. There, a silent waif known only as Miss Girl opens Grace''s eyes to new love and purpose. She''s determined to save this girl who lost her entire family in the hurricane and now slips along the shadows of the unfinished seawall with a mysterious resolve.

Pet Angels return to earth in order to achieve permanent membership in Pet Heaven. Assigned to families in need, they take an active role in protecting them, and become heroes.

A Miracle in Progress describes the incredible and successful journey of Duneland Resale, a faith-based charitable resale shop opened 10 years ago in Chesterton, Indiana. The book includes facts about the shop, such as organization and donations, as well as inspirational stories of miracles witnessed at Duneland Resale and in the lives of volunteers and customers of the shop.

The purpose of this paper was to determine the effect of summer vacation on the retention of reading vocabulary and comprehension skills of second graders.

Performance is often hypothesized to be a function of the interaction of ability and motivation, but past studies of this hypothesis have been sparse, and the researchers often used inadequate measures and inappropriate statistical analyses. The primary purpose of the present research was to explore the relationship of ability and intrinsic motivation in the prediction of job performance. Intrinsic motivation was traced to two primary determinants. One, an organizational factor, is the extent to which an employee''s job is ''enriched, '' or incorporates challenging elements such as autonomy and variety. A second determinant is an individual difference factor--the extent to which the individual desires to achieve and grow. Two primary hypotheses were tested and the results are discussed.

Fibroblast growth factor receptor plays a major role in several biological processes. Without FGFR, a human cannot live. FGFR is involved in cell differentiation and wound healing. Of course, if FGFR signaling becomes unregulated, it causes severe distress in the body. Several cancers are contributed to high signaling levels, as well as developmental conditions like rickets and Kallmann''s syndrome. FGFR is thought to undergo an auto-inhibition (or self-regulatory) process in order to try to facilitate regulation. The exact method of this inhibition is currently unknown, but is proposed to involve the unstructured acid box region of FGFR. We developed a simple model system in order to further investigate current models of inhibition that FGFR may undergo. By using our model system, which contains two 15-mer homopolypeptides of polyE and polyK that mimic the acid box region and its binding site respectively, we were able to use a combination of ITC, CD, NMR, and FRET to show that one model from the literature contains flaws. We are able to characterize the binding of our polypeptide system under varying ionic conditions and pH. This model system also provides a platform to better understand general principles of charge-charge interactions in proteins, which are often characterized by FRET. One of the important findings from this study is that 15-mers of polyE and polyK bind in a parallel arrangement. One of the hurdles in applying FRET to such systems is determining the role that the attached FRET dyes play in the charge-charge interactions. Our model system allowed us to use the preference of the charged polypeptides to bind in a parallel arrangement to determine the size, charge and structural effects of the attached FRET dyes on how peptides bind under electrostatic interaction conditions and to quantify how the attached fluorescent dyes are quenched by both the charged amino acids as well as by the FRET acceptor.

''Undoubtedly you write well...your work reminds me of Di Morrissey...your best writing reminds me of Delia Falconer (The Service of Clouds) at her best...'' - Kate Llewellyn