Best Selling Books by Evan Thomas

It''s been four years since the crisis at the Coated Coast had revealed the ancient truth hidden in Lloyd''s genetics. Growing up as a child prodigy and trained by a secretive branch of the C.I.A., Lloyd is now 17 years old and currently working hard on a project at the Chicago branch that could make him eligible for more advanced training. Zahna finds herself struggling to make ends meet while she lives with her aunt in the city. Back in Springfield, IL, Earl finds himself divided between the human world of his mother and the alien Cosmic race his father has been transformed to by the events of the Coated Coast. Somewhere in space and time, Genesis begins to make his move. Using the Entity of Time, a mysterious power source that allows access to the Linear Highway, this unnaturally created being begins to draw all our characters back together for a Cosmic Reckoning.

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This thesis describes the comprehensive planning effort undertaken by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in the Boston area. This effort engaged over 4,000 of the area''s residents between 2002 and 2009 and produced a new vision and action plan for the region entitled ''MetroFuture,'' Without formal authority to ensure compliance with the plan, the agency worked to increase the scale, transparency, and specificity of its efforts in order to build broad-based support for implementation. This study analyzes MAPC''s use of modeling, public participation, and advocacy and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the agency''s "new regionalism" approach. They were able to achieve more diverse participation, a more comprehensive plan, and actionable recommendations with input from a much broader set of actors than previous efforts. They were hampered by the lack of political endorsement from state and local leaders, as well as by financial constraints and their inability to secure stakeholder agreement on key recommendations. The concluding discussion makes recommendations to other metropolitan regions trying to re-think how best to conduct comprehensive regional planning efforts.

CTLA-4 and PD-1 are immune checkpoints that inhibit T cell activity to maintain immune homeostasis. These checkpoints have also emerged as highly validated cancer targets to stimulate immune responses against cancer. Despite the potential advantages of small molecule inhibitors have over antibodies, the discovery of small molecules that target the CTLA-4 or PD-1 checkpoints has greatly lagged behind the development of monoclonal antibodies. To discover small molecule inhibitors of the CTLA-4 and PD-1 signaling pathways, we have utilized a fragment-based approach. Fragment screens were conducted against CTLA-4, PD-1, and PD-L1 proteins to identify lead compounds for further optimization. While CTLA-4 and PD-1 fragment screens resulted in low hit rates and suboptimal start points, PD-L1 had a much higher hit rate and is likely druggable by small molecules. Fragments were identified that bind to PD-L1 at the PD-1 binding site and displace PD-1 using an NMR-based displacement assay. Co-crystal structures of these fragments bound to PD-L1 were obtained to facilitate structure-based design to develop more potent analogs. The fragment screening results and preliminary SAR discussed in this thesis serve as important starting points for the further development of novel small molecule-based checkpoint inhibitors.

Sermons on St. Paul’s Epistle to Philemon.

The search for neutrinoless double-beta decay, a theoretical particle decay process in which a nucleus undergoes two simultaneous beta decays without emitting any neutrinos, is a field on the cutting edge of neutrino physics because of this type of decay''s potential to expand our knowledge beyond the standard model. nEXO will be a next-generation neutrinoless double-beta decay detector with a lifetime sensitivity on the order of 10^{28} years. An important task in detecting neutrinoless double-beta decay is mitigating background radiation, particularly from radioactive impurities within the detector. An important class of radioactive impurities are radon-222 and its decay daughters. Radon daughter ions, attracted to the negatively-charged cathode, have a chance to embed themselves into the cathode material due to nuclear recoil. This ion implantation presents a more complicated problem in modelling the effect of these radon daughters on radioactive background. As demonstrated in this thesis, ion implantation is significant enough of a factor in how background radiation will be detected in nEXO that this phenomenon must be carefully studied in the detector design.

Keywords: physics problems, physics worked examples.

This dissertation is an evaluation of the impacts of assignment to and enrollment in postsecondary remedial coursework in the state of Arkansas. In this study, I evaluate the impacts of the policy on students'' academic achievement and attainment as measured by graduation rates and persistence. I include subgroup analyses of these outcomes to determine whether there are heterogeneous effects for students enrolling at two-year or four-year institutions, institutions with the highest remediation rates, and students of different races, genders, and baseline achievement. Like previous evaluations of remediation in other settings, the results here point to negative impacts of remediation on students'' persistence and earning a degree, regardless of institution type. Secondary analyses show that students who were assigned to English Language Arts remediation but tested out of the course earned higher grades in the first college-level course compared to their peers who were unable to test out of remedial courses. There was no detectable difference in course performance for math students. Similarly, there were few substantial differences in noncognitive skills for students enrolling in remedial English courses compared to their nonremedial peers. These studies contribute to the literature on college remediation policies by providing the first rigorous evaluation of the policy in Arkansas, a comparison of noncognitive skills of remedial and nonremedial students, and a descriptive analysis of course performance for students who avoided remedial courses.