President Obama's weekly radio addresses to the nation during his first two years in office were scored using thematic content analysis (TCA). TCA is a method for deriving quantitative data from qualitative materials through the use of detailed scoring manuals applied to oral or written texts by trained, reliable scorers. We scored the addresses for integrative complexity (IC), motive imagery (MI), and universal values. Obama's mean IC was second highest among recent presidents. His IC fluctuated in response to situational parameters, rising when he was negotiating and maneuvering his policies through Congress, falling when stress was high and a problem seemed amenable to a simple solution. His MI showed Achievement as his predominant motive. Achievement, Security, and Power were highest in his value hierarchy, which remained stable throughout the period; surprisingly, his ranking of Self-Direction was much lower than a previously published pan-cultural average. Last, we identified six clusters, time periods when his IC and Power imagery moved in opposite directions. The implications of this pattern for cooperative versus adversarial approaches in problem solving are discussed.
It’s not every day that a biotech investor stumbles across an entirely new field of science. And frankly, Carlo Rizzuto wasn’t even looking for such a thing. When Rizzuto, a partner at the venture capital firm Versant Ventures, embarked on a scouting trip to New York City in 2014, he was simply hoping to discover academic research that was ripe enough to form the basis of a biotech company. Rizzuto had an appointment with Samie Jaffrey, an RNA scientist at Weill Cornell Medicine. RNA is often described as a cousin to DNA—the stuff that our genes are made of. One kind of RNA, called messenger RNA, acts as the intermediary code that cells use to transfer information stored in DNA into a set of instructions that cells can easily read for making proteins. After Rizzuto rejected several of his projects, Jaffrey mentioned a relatively young line of work focused on
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