Delta Epsilon Research Articles

The ODE Undergraduate Research Award Competition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Undergraduate Research Award Competition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Graduate Research Award Competition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Graduate Research Award Competition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Undergraduate Research Award Competition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Undergraduate Research Award Competition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Graduate Research Award Competition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Graduate Research Award Competition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Graduate Research AwardCompetition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Graduate Research AwardCompetition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Graduate Research Award Competition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Graduate Research Award Competition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Undergraduate Research Award Competition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Undergraduate Research Award Competition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Graduate Research AwardCompetition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Graduate Research AwardCompetition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Undergraduate Research AwardCompetition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Undergraduate Research AwardCompetition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Undergraduate Research AwardCompetition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Undergraduate Research AwardCompetition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Graduate Research AwardCompetition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Graduate Research AwardCompetition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Undergraduate Research Award Competition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Undergraduate Research Award Competition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Graduate Research Award Competition Competition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

The ODE Graduate Research Award Competition Competition Sponsored by Omicron Delta Epsilon International Honor Society in Economics

Students’ Understanding on Formal Definition of Limit

This paper reports our preliminary findings of students’ understanding on the formal definition of limit - epsilon delta definition. The aim of this study is to develop students understanding of definition of limit by construction learning trajectories in teaching limit. The subjects were five students majoring in mathematics. The methods were test and interview. The test is used to identify how the subjects proof the limit using formal definition. Interview aims to confirm and explore information about the students’ difficulties in proving the limit using the definition. The interviews were then transcribed and analyzed along with the test results to get conclusions about the difficulties of students proving the limit by using formal definition. The result shows that the subjects were still facing difficulties in interpreting the definition of limits.

Ideals, passion, and courage

Dear MJM:Helping a fellow human being is likely the most common reason why students enter the medical profession. The immense satisfaction that we experience by helping another person motivates us to devote our lives to a profession that proclaims this as its raison d’être. However, as we enter the clinical years of medical education, it becomes evident that to achieve this in the context of medicine is indeed a challenge.Why is it that we have the ideals, yet still fail to help others the way we hoped to? On June 19th, 2000, the McGill Chapter of Phi Delta Epsilon medical fraternity had the honor of hosting Dr. Miguel N. Burnier Jr., Chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology, McGill University, as the Aaron Brown Lecturer. Dr. Burnier gave a lecture titled “A Story”, through which he communicated an inspiring message, and answered this unasked question. “What makes a good physician is not the knowledge one possesses, but three things: ideals, passion, and courage.”Ideals give direction to our lives. It is the ideal of wanting to help the sick that brought most of us to the doors of the medical profession. Through medicine we hoped to cure disease and thus alleviate suffering. However, the suffering of a patient is more than the symptoms of the disease, it is the consequences of the disease – physical, emotional, psychological, and social consequences. Only if we are able to recognize the distinction between disease and illness and address the full impact of both can we alleviate the suffering.Passion empowers ideals. The practice of medicine in the 21st century is a foreboding challenge. Physicians are inundated with increased numbers of patients and concomitant decreased availability of support staff and health care funding. These factors not only compromise patient care directly but they also affect the physician’s interactions with patients. Physicians, when working in stressful situations, rarely have enough time to spend with their patients. They are unable to provide the holistic care that is needed to alleviate the suffering. Furthermore, these behaviors and stressors are passed down to the residents and the medical students. The passion that we have as young medical students starts to decline as we face the similar challenges of worsening working conditions. The small, yet frequent difficulties we encounter on the way to becoming the “good doctors” we set out to become, make us question the realism of such an entity. Passion empowers us to practice our ideals and the loss of passion allows us to compromise our ideals.It is courage that will carry us through the difficult times that we may encounter as health care professionals. Courage is the capacity to suffer in the name of our ideals. When in situations that challenge our ideals and dampen our passion, it is courage that sustains us. Courage transforms the challenges we experience into opportunities to grow through suffering. As medical students develop courage, they give depth to their passion and ideals, and thus mature to become the role models they once followed. Thus, young medical professionals need to remember their ideals, sustain their passion, and harness their courage to achieve their goal.

Abstract 3549: Low frequency of germline mutations in POLE and POLD1 proofreading domains in Middle Eastern colorectal cancers

Abstract Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the main causes of cancer related morbidity and mortality. Only ~ 5% of all CRCs occur as a result of mutations in well-defined CRC predisposing genes. The underlying causes in genetically unexplained CRC cases from Middle Eastern region are still unknown. We performed Capture sequencing and Sanger sequencing to screen the proofreading domains of DNA Polymerase Epsilon (POLE) and DNA Polymerase Delta 1 (POLD1) genes to find out the genetic causes in over 1100 CRC cases from Middle Eastern region. In our cohort, five mutations (0.44%) were identified in 1135 CRC cases, four in POLE gene (0.35%, 4/1135) and one (0.1%, 1/1135) in POLD1 gene. These mutations have been infrequently reported in Western populations. Furthermore, low expression of POLE was noted in 38.9% (417/1071) of cases and showed significant association with lymph node involvement (p=0.0184) and grade 3 tumors (p=0.0139). Whereas, low expression of POLD1 was observed in 51.9% (555/1069) of cases and was significantly associated with adenocarcinoma histology (p=0.0164), larger tumor size (T3 and T4 tumors; p=0.0012) and stage III tumors (p=0.0341). Our findings revealed that there was a low frequency of mutations in POLE and POLD1 proofreading region in CRC cases and established that the mutations in the proofreading domain of these two genes were a rare cause of CRC in Middle Eastern region. It is feasible to screen multiple cancer related genes in CRC patients from Middle Eastern region using multigene panels including POLE and POLD1. Citation Format: Rong Bu, Abdul K. Siraj, Kaleem Iqbal, Sandeep K. Parvathareddy, Tariq Masoodi, Nabil Siraj, Nabil Siraj, Maha Al-Rasheed, Sarah Siraj, Yan Kong, Saeeda O. Ahmed, Khadija A.S. Al-Obaisi, Ingrid G. Victoria, Khawla S. Al-Kuraya. Low frequency of germline mutations in POLE and POLD1 proofreading domains in Middle Eastern colorectal cancers [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research 2020; 2020 Apr 27-28 and Jun 22-24. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2020;80(16 Suppl):Abstract nr 3549.

The Pancake Story and the Epsilon–Delta Definition

The complexity in understanding the ϵ–δ definition has motivated research into the teaching and learning of the topic. In this paper I share my design of an instructional analogy called the Pancake Story and four different questions to explore the logical relationship between ϵ and δ that structures the definition. I designed the story from an anti-deficit perspective on students’ mathematical thinking. I leverage students’ intuitions about quality control, and explicitly build on students’ prior knowledge that I gathered from student interviews. I illustrate the utility of the story in supporting students’ sense-making of the formal definition by sharing changes in students’ claims and justifications about the relationship between ϵ and δ. Students' justifications also provide examples of the kind of thinking an instructor might expect to see in the classroom when using the story. I end the paper with some classroom implications and a teaching episode illustrating how students might use the story to make sense of limit more broadly.

The landscape of POLE/POLD1 mutations in Chinese solid tumor patients.

e13050 Background: DNA polymerase epsilon and polymerase delta encoded by the POLE and POLD1 gene are the major components participating in DNA replication, which both carry a proofreading (exonuclease) domain allowing error correction during replication. In case of POLE/POLD1 mutation, a deficient DNA repair activity results in a hypermutated phenotype of cancer, which would be a promising biomarker for immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICPIs). However, the prevalence of POLE and POLD1 in Chinese patients (pts) with solid tumors remained unknown. Methods: Targeted panel sequencing of 450 cancer genes were performed on FFPE tissues and matched blood samples obtained from 6313 Chinese pts with 23 different types of solid tumors. In our cohort, 41% were female pts with a median age of 56-year-old (range: 1-91), while 59% were male with a median age of 59-year-old (range: 1-96). The major cancer types were NSCLC (29%), HCC (11%), CRC (11%), gastric cancer (GC, 7%), soft tissure sarcoma (6%), pancreatic cancer (5%), intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (5%), and others. Somatic genomic alterations (sGAs) including single base substitutions, short and long insertions/deletions (indels), copy number alterations (CNA), rearrangements, TMB and MSI status were assessed by NGS. Results: Clinical relevant genomic alterations (CRGAs) were defined as known loss-of-function mutations, truncations, mutations on splicing sites and confirmed somatic mutations in COSMIC. CRGAs of POLE and POLD1 accounted for 2.1% and 1.3% of Chinese solid tumors respectively. Tumors with highest frequency of POLE CRGAs in Chinese cohort were endometrial cancer (8.3%), urothelial cancer (4.8%), CRC (4.3%), GC (3.2%), breast cancer (2.9%), cancer of unknown primary (CUP, 2.5%), ovarian cancer (2.1%) and NSCLC (2.0%), which tumors with highest frequency of POLD1 CRGAs were endometrial cancer (8.3%), urothelial cancer (4.8%), GC (3.0%), CRC (2.8%), SCLC (2.1%), HCC (1.9%), cervical cancer (1.6%), CUP (1.2%) and pancreatic cancer (1.2%). In addition, 1.6% and 1.2% of Chinese solid tumors harbored variants of unknown significance of POLE and POLD1, respectively. Conclusions: For the first time, our study reported prevalence of somatic mutations of POLE and POLD1 in large samples of Chinese population. Comparing with large cohort study of western population (ESMO 2017, 1170P), more CRGAs of POLE were identified in Chinese solid tumors (2.1% vs. 0.6%, p < 0.0001) indicating ethnic differences of ICPIs potential candidates between Chinese and western populations.

Laura Micheletti Puaca. Searching for Scientific Womanpower: Technocratic Feminism and the Politics of National Security, 1940–1980. xiii + 261 pp., illus., bibl., index. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. $34.95 (paper).

Laura Micheletti Puaca. <i>Searching for Scientific Womanpower: Technocratic Feminism and the Politics of National Security, 1940–1980</i>. xiii + 261 pp., illus., bibl., index. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. $34.95 (paper).

Free Will and Turing Test with Multiple Agents: An Example of Chatbot Design

Free will is an important component of consciousness. Modeling an artificial consciousness requires clarifying the significance and the definition of free will. This study proposes a definition of free will similar to the epsilon-delta definition of continuous space (e.g., real numbers). Selection capability and frame expanding potential (i.e., the ability to allow for the exploration of further options), which are significant functions of free will, are discussed in the problem-solving context. We also propose a Turing test with multiple agents in which the intelligence of humans and machines will be relatively scored based on chats in a mixed community of humans and machines. Agents (machines) fail in the multiple agents Turing test because they lack the ability to evaluate chats with another agent, as well as chats between two other agents.