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Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

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Forthcoming Publications

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

Abraham in Egypt, by Hugh W. Nibley, second edition, edited by Gary P. Gillum. This book duplicates the original 1981 volume published by Deseret Book but adds chapters from Nibley's "A New Look at the Pearl of Great Price" series that appeared in the Improvement Era from 1968 to 1970. Nibley examines discoveries that have shed light on Abraham and his times and that help confirm the authenticity of the Book of Abraham. Available in spring 2000.

Byu Devotional Transcript On Ancient Records

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

Newly available from FARMS are transcripts of Daniel C. Peterson's BYU devotional address given on 3 August 1999. Peterson's remarks focused on BYU's role in the research and publication of ancient documents. "There is divine purpose in the things that I will treat today," Peterson began. "I believe that there is more going on here than our own merely human efforts can fully explain."

Third Volume Of Islamic Translation Series Released

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

With the release of a third volume, and with several more soon to follow, the continuity of the Islamic Translation Series is assured. The latest volume is an English translation of a newly prepared critical text of The Philosophy of Illumination, by Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi. Like the other books in the series, it belongs to a rich tradition of medieval Islamic philosophy and mysticism that has, until now, remained obscure in the Western world and largely unavailable in English translation.

Farms Web Site Features Information On The Dead Sea Scrolls

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

The FARMS Web site now offers a link to material on the Dead Sea Scrolls. To access it from the Member Services section or the Free Services section of the FARMS Web site, click on the heading "Dead Sea Scrolls," found under "Links of Interest." Nine topics will appear, covering general information on the scrolls as well as information on the scroll exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago and the traveling scroll exhibit currently touring Latter-day Saint stake centers in the Midwest.

Lds Church Sponsors Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit In Chicago

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of the principal sponsors of an exhibit on the Dead Sea Scrolls that opened on 10 March at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois. Running through 11 June 2000, the exhibit features 15 scroll texts and 80 artifacts excavated at Qumran, a site of ancient ruins located near the caves where the scrolls were first discovered.

Questions On The Dead Sea Scrolls? A New Book Responds

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

For more than 50 years the Dead Sea Scrolls have aroused public curiosity. This discovery of ancient biblical texts and other writings at sites near the Dead Sea is no less intriguing for Latter-day Saints, whose scriptures speak of ancient records yet to come forth. A new book from FARMS, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Questions and Responses for Latter-day Saints, provides long-awaited answers to questions about the scrolls that Latter-day Saints commonly ask.

Barriers To Cataract Surgery In Africa: Providers’ Perspective (Research Protocol), Cougar Hall, Scott Herrod, Benjamin Crookston, Sadik Taju Sherief, Akwasi Ahmed, Grace Chipalo Mutati, John Welling, Boatang Wiafe, Michae Gyasi, Joshua West

Faculty Publications

Purpose: Millions of individuals in sub-Saharan Africa are needlessly blind from cataracts. While progress was made towards the Vision 2020: The Right to Sight goals, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Zambia fell short of the recommended cataract surgical rate (CSR) on a national level. The purposes of this study were to describe possible economic factors impacting surgeon surgical productivity, possible barriers to attaining the recommended CSR, and surgical services in each of these countries.

Methods: An online survey was sent to ophthalmologists practising in Ethiopia, Ghana, and Zambia. Responses were collected between June 25, 2021 and January 30, 2022.

Results …

The Politics Of Daca: Explaining Variation In Republican Support For Daca, Diana Gonzales

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This study examines political divisions among Republicans regarding DACA. To begin with, I provide a historical account of the issue and its importance. Then a survey experiment is conducted, surveying 901 Republicans, and randomly assigning half to the Republican treatment and half to the Democratic treatment. Results indicate that exposure to the Republican treatment increased the likelihood of supporting policies for DACA recipients. Furthermore, knowing a DACA recipient positively impacted attitudes toward DACA policy regardless of treatment. These findings shed light on the complexities of political polarization and immigration policy.

Body In Rebellion: The Closing Body, Romantic Mesmerism, And Gothic Doubles In Hogg's Justified Sinner, Elizabeth E. Hinds

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the western Romantic period as a transition between the medieval “open body” and the modern “closed body.” It focuses on “closing body” phenomena such as “mesmerism” (i.e. animal magnetism), somnambulism, substance abuse, and the “second-self,” including notions of the subconscious and the trope of gothic Doppelgängers. This study draws from many pieces of western Romantic literature but is most centered around James Hogg’s 1824 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. This new reading of Hogg’s novel suggests a core theme of body anxiety, rather than theological dispute.

While It's Still Morning, Cosenza Marie Hendrickson

Theses and Dissertations

While It's Still Morning is a collection of lyric poems exploring themes of love, gratitude, and praise. The critical essay introducing the collection discusses possible pitfalls of this genre of poetry and how I've sought to avoid them. It also details qualities often present in my favorite poems (surprise, particularity, strangeness, tension, attention, allusion) and ways in which I've striven to create these qualities in my own poetry.

A Language-Model-Based Chatbot That Considers The User's Personality Profile And Emotions To Support Caregivers Of People With Dementia, Yeganeh Nasiri

Theses and Dissertations

Chatbots are programs that mimic human conversation using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Recent advances in natural language pro- cessing pave the way for chatbots to generate more human-like responses. Therefore, chatbots are finding more complex tasks to perform, such as emotional support which requires both understanding emotions and the ability to properly respond to them. This work presents a chatbot capable of identifying the user's personality and creating responses based on that. During this process, emotion detection is being used to detect and react to users' emotions. The chatbot uses a dynamic knowledge graph to save information as the conversation goes …

Unsupervised Categorical Clustering On Labor Markets, Matthew James Steffen

Theses and Dissertations

During this "white collar recession,'' there is a flooded labor market of workers. For employers seeking to hire, there is a need to identify potential qualified candidates for each job. The current state of the art is LinkedIn Recruiting or elastic search on Resumes. The current state of the art lacks efficiency and scalability along with an intuitive ranking of candidates. We believe this can be fixed with multi-layer categorical clustering via modularity maximization. To test this, we gathered a dataset that is extensive and representative of the job market. Our data comes from PeopleDataLabs and LinkedIn and is sampled …

Finished, Shayla Frandsen

Theses and Dissertations

Sixteen-year-old Tiny Sinclair begins her first year at Charity Ambrose Finishing School in 1953 already feeling like an outcast: her mother, a glamorous movie star, is dead, and her father is imprisoned under suspicion of being a Communist. All her classmates seem to have it so easy: beautiful Betty is an elegant and popular socialite, while Diane, the richest girl in school, is dangerous and mysterious (and, for some reason, hell-bent on ruining Tiny's life). When a classmate is found dead and Tiny becomes the number one suspect, the situation seems to go from bad to worse. Determined to clear …

Halophilic Genes That Impact Plant Growth In Saline Soils, Mckay A. Meinzer

Theses and Dissertations

Many plants are highly sensitive to salt in the soil, and their growth and yield can be greatly hindered by as little as less than 1% salt concentration in the soil. Additionally, soil salinity is a growing issue globally and affects significant areas in Utah. Halophytes are plants that are adapted to grow in saline soils and have been widely studied for their physiological and molecular characteristics, but little is known about their associated microbiomes. Bacteria were isolated from the rhizosphere and as root endophytes of Salicornia rubra, Sarcocornia utahensis, and Allenrolfea occidentalis, three native Utah halophytes. Several strains of …

O Silêncio Da Mulher Carioca Oitocentista E Sua Representação No Romance Naturalista Lar De Pardal Mallet, Jessyca Kimberly De Oliveira Zanetti

Theses and Dissertations

The 19th century represents the arrival of the Portuguese royal family in Brazil and, with it, significant changes in society and the local population. A formerly reclusive member of society begins to take shape not only in public life but also within the literature: the Brazilian woman. Despite her changing social role, prevailing hygienist and medical theories of the time pointed to the lack of vocation of the nineteenth-century woman for rational matters; which in naturalism implies that these pseudo-scientific theories would be the base to dissect and explain the social pathologies of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and society at …

Characterizing The Informativity Of Level Ii Book Data For High Frequency Trading, Logan B. Nielsen

Theses and Dissertations

High Frequency Trading (HFT) algorithms are automated feedback systems interacting with markets to maximize returns on investments. These systems have the potential to read different resolutions of market information at any given time, where Level I information is the minimal information about an equity--essentially its price--and Level II information is the full order book at that time for that equity. This paper presents a study of using Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models to predict the spread of the DOW Industrial 30 index traded on NASDAQ, using Level I and Level II data as inputs. The results show that Level II …

Utilizing Isothermal Titration Calorimetry To Measure Β-Galactosidase Activity In Dairy Products, Tyler Ronald Jarrard

Theses and Dissertations

The dairy industry uses enzymes to make cheese, alter product flavor, and eliminate lactose. The activities of these enzymes have been measured in clear buffered solutions, but because of the limitations of spectrophotometric methods, enzyme activities have not been measured in opaque or colored dairy products where they are used. Isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) can be used to determine reaction kinetics in opaque and colored solutions by measuring the heat rate from enzyme-catalyzed reactions as a function of time. This study used ITC to measure β-galactosidase activity in opaque solutions of milk, sweet whey, sweet whey permeate, acid whey, and …

Network Representation Theory In Materials Science And Global Value Chain Analysis, Mats C. Haneberg

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is divided into two distinct chapters. In the first chapter, we apply network representation learning to the field of materials science in order to predict aluminum grain boundaries' properties and locate the most influential atoms and subgraphs within each grain boundary. We create fixed-length representations of the aluminum grain boundaries that successfully capture grain boundary structure and allow us to accurately predict grain boundary energy. We do this through two distinct methods. The first method we use is a graph convolutional neural network, a semi-supervised deep learning algorithm, and the second method is graph2vec, an unsupervised representation learning …

Psychology Of Design Open Education Textbook: An Application-Driven Design, William Sowards

Instructional Psychology and Technology Graduate Student Projects

Understanding the relationship between psychology and design is key for all of the different disciplines of design. The Design Psychology: Applying Theory to Design Practice textbook aims to address the gap in OER content by discussing more explicitly the relationship between psychology and design. A well-designed textbook can ensure that learners are enabled to learn both on their own and in a group setting. The chapter template for the Design Psychology: Applying Theory to Design Practice textbook is designed to ensure that every chapter in the textbook has consistent flow, pedagogy, and design. This consistency in design will provide learners …

The Topology And Dynamics Of Surface Diffeomorphisms And Solenoid Embeddings, Xueming Hui

Theses and Dissertations

We study two topics on surface diffeomorphisms, their mapping classes and dynamics. For the mapping classes of a punctured disc, we study the $\ZxZ$ subgroups of the fundamental groups of the corresponding mapping tori. An application is the proof of the fact that a satellite knot with braid pattern is prime. For the mapping classes of the disc minus a Cantor set, we study a special type of reducible mapping class. This has direct application on the embeddings of solenoids in $\mathbb{S}^3$. We also give some examples of other types of mapping classes of the disc minus a Cantor set. …

Development And Validation Of A Spanish Nutrition Screening Tool For Hispanic American 3 To 5-Year-Olds, Denisse Arias Olivas

Theses and Dissertations

Latinos comprise 18.9% of the population in the United States and are the largest and fastest growing minority group. Obesity prevalence was 26.2% among Hispanic children compared to 16.6% among non-Hispanic White children. The obesity epidemic among Latino children has been growing rapidly over the past three decades. Multiple barriers, such as lack of culturally appropriate screening tools, language, and lack of access to nutritional assessment and expert consultation, prevents screening of Latino children and further nutritional guidance. For this reason, prevention efforts such as the use of nutritional screening tools is required for early intervention, more so with populations …

Language Modeling Using Image Representations Of Natural Language, Seong Eun Cho

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents training of an end-to-end autoencoder model using the transformer, with an encoder that can encode sentences into fixed-length latent vectors and a decoder that can reconstruct the sentences using image representations. Encoding and decoding sentences to and from these image representations are central to the model design. This method allows new sentences to be generated by traversing the Euclidean space, which makes vector arithmetic possible using sentences. Machines excel in dealing with concrete numbers and calculations, but do not possess an innate infrastructure designed to help them understand abstract concepts like natural language. In order for a …

Real-Time Imaging And Measurement Of Compartmentalized Redox Shifts Using Novel Redox-Sensitive Biosensors: Implications In Developmental Toxicology, Brandon Mitchell Davies

Theses and Dissertations

Glutathione (GSH) is a small antioxidant in the body and exists in large quantities compared to other antioxidants. The GSH redox state (Eh) helps developmental processes, however, when the GSH Eh is disrupted, cells may undergo significantly poor developmental pathways, possibly leading to long-lasting damages. Similarly, NADPH and Thioredoxin redox states can have a major impact on cellular function, viability, and response to both endogenous and exogenous toxicants. Subcellular, compartmentalized redox environments during normal or perturbed situations, specifically in the cytosol, mitochondria, and nucleus, are not well understood. Here, using the P19 neurogenesis model of cellular differentiation, the kinetics of …

A Comparison Of The Vascular Response To Acute Sauna Heating In Young And Middle-Aged Adults, Olivia Kathryn Leach

Theses and Dissertations

BACKGROUND: Age-related declines in endothelial function have been well documented with larger declines observed in middle-aged. Passive heat exposure has been shown to be a promising method to improve vascular endothelial health, with sauna specifically being linked to reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. Increases in blood flow and shear rates associated with heat exposure are often considered to have a major influence on the observed improved endothelial function following heat exposure. The magnitude of these changes in response to sauna have not yet been defined. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to quantify and compare the vascular response to …

Large-Scale Testing Of Lightweight Cellular Concrete Backfill For Sliver-Fill Mse Wall Configurations, Meghann Dee Morgan

Theses and Dissertations

Lightweight cellular concrete (LCC) is an aerated or foamed concrete where 25-80% of the concrete matrix consists of air voids. The high volume of air voids reduces the strength but significantly decreases the weight of the material, which has made it an attractive alternative to soil for retaining structure backfills. Though the use of LCC has increased, little research has been performed on the large-scale behavior of retaining structures containing LCC as backfill. This research test attempts to fill knowledge gaps found with regard to the use of LCC in a mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) wall with a trapezoidal or …

Creating A Culturally Adaptable Comprehensive Sexuality Education Teacher's Manual, Stephanie Carteciano

Student Works

Purpose: The purpose of this project was to create a culturally adaptable comprehensive sexual education teacher’s manual by (a) standardizing content using The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) 2018 International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education (CSE), (b) providing evidence-based CSE pedagogy in the form of classroom activities, and (c) including adaptable teaching methods to fit diverse cultural contexts.

Development: The manual lessons were derived from UNESCO’s 2018 International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education, and the pedagogy followed Anderson and Krathwohl’s revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Health information was obtained from various medical and university resources. We surveyed eight …

The War On Gender Equality: A Comparative Study Between Feminism And Anti-Feminism In South Korea And The United States, Ashley Dipenti

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Since the time of Confucianism and the development of patriarchal systems in South Korea, there have been distinct differences between male and female experiences and roles in various aspects of Korean life. The gendered history of South Korea has led to a gap between the two genders that persists today in important areas of Korean society, such as education and social life. As both genders struggle for equality and representation, both sides argue that they are being discriminated against. This struggle has led to two major groups being formed in South Korea (hereafter Korea): feminists and anti-feminists. The following review …

Pausing In American English: Documenting Native English Speakers' Pausing Patterns, Ammon Hunt

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine more deeply the relationship between pause location and duration and its connection to clause and phrase boundaries for native English speakers (NESs). Previous research has shown pauses produced by NESs to be located at clause boundaries (Brown & Miron, 1971; Hawkins, 1971; Tavakoli, 2011), but little empirical work has been done to probe this issue further. For this research, 80 speech samples, 40 male and 40 female, were randomly selected from the International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA) representing different regions in the United States. Oral data from the read-aloud portion of …

The Impact Of Speech Pause On The Perceived Effectiveness And Likability Of A Speaker's Communication, Rebecca Lyman

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine how length and location of speech pausing affects a listeners' perception of likability and communication effectiveness. Furthermore, the end goal of this study is to understand how to better assess atypical speech pause for persons with aphasia (PWA). Speech samples were collected from two neurotypical speakers over the age of 75. The speech samples were the recorded responses of picture description tasks found in the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) and the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE). These speech samples were then modified to include artificial pauses located both within sentence and between …