Digital Commons Network^™

Beauty, Real Or Apparent: Christian Kings, Muslim Artisans, And The Development Of An Imperial Image Through The Silk And Horticulture Industries In Sicily. (Ca. 1090-1190), Casey K. Brown

History ETDs

In the wake of the Norman conquest of Sicily in the second half of the eleventh century, the Mediterranean island housed a diverse collection of Greek, Latin, and Muslim communities. Norman kings chose Palermo to become the seat of Latin-Christian Sicilian government for its productivity and strategic location and included the island into the complex world of self-fashioning politics and exchange. For Sicilian and ‘foreign’ Muslims alike, the imperious pose Roger II and his successors held created a precarious balancing act between the real and imagined worlds of Sicily. The content of this thesis is primarily concerned with the impact …

The Birth And Incision History Of The San Juan River In The Past 5 Ma, Micael T. Albonico

Earth and Planetary Sciences ETDs

This study addresses the evolution of the San Juan River system and its confluence with the Colorado River, ~ 100 km above the regionally important Lees Ferry knickzone. The San Juan River is a 600-km-long continental-scale tributary of the Colorado River. From its headwaters in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado, the San Juan River flows across the Colorado Plateau, and into the Colorado River upstream of Grand Canyon. Published apatite fission track and apatite (U-Th)/He thermochronologic data show that rocks in Marble Canyon, as well as in middle and upper reaches of the San Juan River, were >75 °C …

Cognizant Composites: Seamless Integration Of Circuitry And Sensors Into Structural Composites, Reuben Fresquez

Computer Science ETDs

This thesis describes a set of novel techniques for embedding sensors, circuitry, and electronics into structural composites. I leverage recent developments in human computer interaction to create sensors and circuitry that are seamlessly incorporated into structural composites. I fabricate bend and compression sensors, along with circuitry, from textiles, which enables me to add electronic capabilities without impacting the composite’s structural integrity. I describe the construction of these “cognizant composites” and demonstrate their functionality. I also explore techniques for embedding standard electronic components, including microcontrollers, into structural composites. Potential applications of this technology include buildings that can warn occupants if load-bearing …

Three Essays In Development And Environmental Economics, Michael Benjamin Goodwin

Economics ETDs

This dissertation explores three unique topics in development and environmental economics. The first paper looks at the value people place on clean air in Mexico City using an alternative air pollution measure to the typical ground measurement. Research and policy addressing air pollution remains hampered by a lack of ground level air quality data. This study attempts to overcome this issue using aerosol optical depth from satellite imagery as a proxy for air pollution. Using a hedonic framework and least squares estimation, results show that Mexico City residents place a significant value on clean air as demonstrated by their choices …

Quantification Of Soil Microbial Biomass In The Mcmurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, Emily Ruth Reynebeau

Biology ETDs

Quantifying microbial biomass is important for understanding microbial contribution to nutrient cycling and population flux. Widely accepted biomass estimation methods are sufficient for well-studied and high biomass systems, though are often not sensitive enough for systems with extremely low biomass. The McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica are characterized as an extremely harsh environment with severe restrictions on life, with perhaps some of the lowest biomass in the world. We measured prokaryote biomass across Taylor and Wright Valleys using four estimation metrics to determine the most appropriate method for this ecosystem. The chloroform fumigation method was not sensitive enough for the …

The Personal And Relational Impact Of Varying Responses To Fat Talk In The Context Of Female Friendship, Riley M. Sebastian

Psychology ETDs

The current study aimed to measure the immediate impact of various responses to Fat Talk on college women. Participants were given trait-level questionnaires followed by prompts to imagine a scenario in which they engaged in Fat Talk. Participants were presented with four counterbalanced audio response conditions followed by several single-item measures. Repeated-measures one-way ANOVAs examined the impact of response and significant differences in personal and relational factors across the four response conditions were found. A mixed-model ANOVA demonstrated that baseline variables did not impact participants’ reactions to the different Fat Talk responses. Finally, frequency of Fat Talk was correlated with …

Breathing Can Be Dangerous: Coccidioides And The Diverse Community Of The Lung Mycobiome, Paris S. Salazar-Hamm

Biology ETDs

Coccidioidomycosis, caused by soil-dwelling species of Coccidioides, is endemic to the Southwestern United States. It can present as a mild respiratory illness to life-threatening disseminated infections.Multi-gene phylogenetics and tracing patient histories revealed the presence of both Coccidioides species in New Mexico, and Native Americans may represent an unrecognized risk group. A PCR method developed distinguishes Coccidioides species by targeting regions of the mitochondrial genome. Recent advancements in molecular genetics solidifies lungs are not sterile. Illumina community data from 199 small mammals from Arizona, California, and New Mexico demonstrated a great diversity of fungi inhabiting lung tissues. One dominant order, Onygenales, …

20211112_What Are You Thankful For, David Lucero

HSLIC Blog Post

No abstract provided.

Measurement Of Resilience Performance For Infrastructure Construction Project Delivery, Fei Han

Civil Engineering ETDs

In the past decade, infrastructure resilience in the U.S. has become critical due to increasing disruptions to the built environment and the resultant consequences on economic, social, and environmental goals. This attention to resilience research is drawn to investigating the ability of existing structures and facilities to resist and recover from natural and human-caused hazards. From a broader view, resilience also applies to processes, such as infrastructure project delivery processes. During these processes, a project often suffers inevitable threats and disruptions, which can significantly delay or derail the project if the process is not resilient.

This research aimed to conceptualize …

Monte Carlo Perturbation Analysis Of Dimension And Density Variations Of The Annular Core Research Reactor Model Fuel, Karissa Currie

Nuclear Engineering ETDs

This thesis assesses sources of uncertainty in the neutron energy spectrum of the Annular Core Research Reactor (ACRR) Monte Carlo N-Particle Transport Code (MCNP) model. Uncertainty evaluations have been performed on the ACRR core but were computationally intensive and could not isolate the uncertainties associated with discrete sources. Monte Carlo Perturbation Theory (MCPT) is used in MCNP to calculate 640-group neutron energy fluences and their associated uncertainties [1]. To understand the uncertainties associated with only the UO₂-BeO fuel, perturbations in densities and dimensions were evaluated. A 640 by 640 covariance and correlation matrices were produced and compared to …

The Reward Positivity In Individuals With Alcohol Use Disorder, Garima Singh

Psychology ETDs

The Reward Positivity (RewP) is a positive deflection in the EEG after receiving a reward. Recent evidence suggests that the RewP is modulated by both reward probability aside from affective liking. Here we examined the sensitivity of the RewP to affective and alcohol images in individuals with alcohol use disorder (AUD). We recruited 55 participants (AUD =28, Control= 27). Participants completed an image rating task and a reinforcement learning task with picture feedback (puppy or alcohol images over a green or red screen). Although there was no between group differences in puppy image ratings, there was a significant group difference …

Effectiveness Of Growth Mindset Intervention On Elementary Students’ Academic Performance: A Systematic Review, Salma Yeasmin

Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy ETDs

The lack of academic success of the U.S. adolescents and wide achievement gap have become a persistent problem of the United States. Therefore, several educational reforms have been made to increase U.S. students’ academic performance as well as close achievement gap. However, despite the various reforms and efforts that have been enacted in educational sectors, U.S. students’ academic performance seemed not enough. Therefore, psychological factors were considered in the educational reform strategy, in which promoting growth mindset among students has become a way to accelerate students’ academic performance as well as reduce the achievement gap. Since then, numerous growth mindset …

Social Informatics Techniques Used To Develop A Tool For Testing Electronic Prescription Systems For Substance Use Management In A Pandemic, Azka Riaz Naru

Biomedical Informatics Seminar Series (BioMISS)

Learning Objectives

Effective prescription practices for opioid addicts involve a complex process. This seminar describes how informatics need assessment techniques clarified prescribers’ needs for a software interface.

By completion of this seminar, participants should be able to:

1. Describe how the Covid-19 Pandemic complicated an already complex prescribing decision making process.
2. Summarize how the investigator conducted the needs assessment process using social informatics techniques.

Target Audience

Anyone from UNM or who has an interest in biomedical informatics including physicians, nurses, pharmacists, educators, researchers, faculty, and staff.

Improving Peer Review Of Systematic Reviews By Involving Librarians And Information Specialists: Protocol For A Randomized Controlled Trial, Melissa L. Rethlefsen, Sara Schroter, Lex M. Bouter, David Moher, Ana Patricia Ayala, Jamie J. Kirkham, Maurice P. Zeegers

Publications

BACKGROUND: Problems continue to exist with the reporting quality and risk of bias in search methods and strategies in systematic reviews and related review types. Peer reviewers who are not familiar with what is required to transparently and fully report a search may not be prepared to review the search components of systematic reviews, nor may they know what is likely to introduce bias into a search. Librarians and information specialists, who have expertise in searching, may offer specialized knowledge that would help improve systematic review search reporting and lessen risk of bias, but they are underutilized as methodological peer …

African American Female Caregivers’ Perceptions, Experiences, And Expectations Of The Special Education Process, Lenell Denise Walton

Special Education ETDs

A select few African American families who have a child with a disability have the skills and knowledge to be proactive in the special education process. Special education teams must guide and mentor African American students and their families through the special education process. However, African American families have consistently contended that their child’s special education team does not provide the services necessary to meet their child’s academic goals. This qualitative study examined the perceptions, experiences, and expectations of African American female caregivers regarding the special education process. Participants were nine African American mothers and one sibling whose family members …

20211111_Hslic Food Drive A Success, David Lucero

HSLIC Blog Post

No abstract provided.

Staying Afloat: Experiences Of Previously Incarcerated Students, Jodi Burshia, Jodi Burshia

Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy ETDs

The experiences of Previously Incarcerated Indigenous Students (PIIS) need to be understood so that educators and administrators can include the experiences, perspectives, and realities of Indigenous students who have been previously incarcerated in Adult Basic Education (ABE) and collegiate programs at Tribal Community Colleges and Universities (TCUs). To date, considering and providing targeted support for this population has not been part of the focus of TCUs even when all tribal colleges work to strengthen the cultural heritage of their respective tribes (Bad Wound, 1990) and some students at TCUs are PIIS. This qualitative study offers a respectful critique of higher …

Washington Monthly Interviews Vinay Harpalani: Asian Americans And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness, Vinay Harpalani, Reginald C. Oh

Faculty Scholarship

EXCERPT:

There are, however, several problems with depicting Asian Americans as victims of affirmative action. First, it is necessary to distinguish between affirmative action and negative action. Affirmative action refers to admissions policies that use the race of an underrepresented racial group as a “plus factor” in admissions. According to the law professor Vinay Harpalani, negative action “refers to policies or practices which disadvantage Asian Americans” in comparison to whites. If schools like Harvard covertly impose a higher standard for Asian Americans than for whites, the problem is negative action, not affirmative action. And if Harvard’s admissions decisions are …

Explorations And Developments In Multifunctionality, 3d Printing, And Accelerated Aging For Thermoplastics And Thermosets, Zachary Brounstein

Nanoscience and Microsystems ETDs

If the world is to progress through the fourth industrial revolution, rapid advances in materials science must complement new technological feats in manufacturing, computation and device functionality, and a broader understanding of how materials behave as they age and degrade. To this effect, much effort has been directed towards polymeric materials to address and solve many problems in this new era. This includes developing polymer composites that incorporate fillers to imbue multifunctionality, fabricating novel formulations for additive manufacturing, and conducting aging studies to assess the performance of these materials over long time spans. Building and expanding on the latest research …

20211110_Upcoming Workshops For Bias In The Research Process, Kelleen Maluski

HSLIC Blog Post

No abstract provided.

11-30-2021 Hsc Committee Notice, Hsc Committee

HSC Committee (A subcommittee of the UNM Board of Regents)

No abstract provided.

20211109_National Library Of Medicine Fellow Joins Hslic, Sally Bowler-Hill

HSLIC Blog Post

No abstract provided.

Tracing Transmission Of Sin Nombre Virus And Discovery Of Infection In Multiple Rodent Species, Samuel M Goodfellow, Robert A. Nofchissey, Kurt C. Schwalm, Joseph A. Cook, Jonathan L. Dunnum, Yan Guo, Chunyan Ye, Gregory J. Mertz, Kartik Chandran, Michelle Harkins, Daryl B. Domman, Darrell L. Dinwiddie, Steven B. Bradfute

Pediatrics Research and Scholarship

Sin Nombre orthohantavirus (SNV), a negative-sense, single-stranded RNA virus that is carried and transmitted by the North American deer mouse Peromyscus maniculatus, can cause infection in humans through inhalation of aerosolized excreta from infected rodents. This infection can lead to hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HCPS), which has an ∼36% case-fatality rate. We used reverse transcriptase quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) to confirm SNV infection in a patient and identified SNV in lung tissues in wild-caught rodents from potential sites of exposure. Using viral whole-genome sequencing (WGS), we identified the likely site of transmission and discovered SNV in multiple rodent species not previously known …

Assessment Of Preference, Health Issues, And Spatial Dependence In A Solid Waste Management System, Mohammad Mashiur Rahman

Economics ETDs

The insurmountable population growth in developing countries, specifically in the urban cities, has posed numerous socio-economic and environmental challenges. The growth of household solid waste is one of them, creating environmental disruption and climate change from a broader perspective. This dissertation investigates three issues related to a solid waste management system; the health risks from improper waste management behavior, household's preference to participate in a waste management system, and the solution to a municipality for optimal allocation of waste disposal by multiple techniques. The first paper uses a primary survey data collected in 2016 to investigate the association between health …

Sociolinguistic Analysis Of Spanish R- Variation By New Mexican Child Heritage Speakers: How Speech Analysis Can Improve Speech Impairment Diagnosis And Teaching Techniques, Mariana Marchesi

Shared Knowledge Conference

Sociolinguistic Analysis of Spanish r- Variation by New Mexican Child Heritage Speakers: How Speech Analysis Can Improve Speech Impairment Diagnosis and Teaching Techniques Mariana Marchesi, PhD Student, Linguistics, University of New Mexico Abstract In many varieties of Spanish, variation among rhotic segments - r-sounds - is a salient dialectal feature (Lipski, 2008; Hualde, 2014), and this variability is due to a combination of sociolinguistic and phonetic factors (Melero Garcia, 2015). Previous research on adult speakers of Spanish in New Mexico shows that trill (carro) and tap (roca) productions are not as common as assibilated (shower) and approximant (rest) segments (C.E. …

Faena: A Narrative-Based Language Learning Video Game, Isabel Last

Shared Knowledge Conference

In 2018, the Modern Language Association revealed that Spanish as a second-language higher education enrollment decreased by 9.8% and those who were enrolled in large part are not reaching minimal communicative fluency in Spanish. Both traditional classrooms and non-traditional methods such as Duolingo, Babbel, and Rosetta Stone are part of the problem of failing to provide learners a successful path towards actually speaking and interacting in the target language nor do they successfully maintain motivation long enough for learners to have a chance to even reach communicative fluency. Usage-based, second-language acquisition (SLA) theorists and data on cognition and memory posit …

Left-Handed Dna: The Right Way Forward, Tracy Mallette

Shared Knowledge Conference

Rapid detection of emerging pathogens, environmental monitoring of waterways, and cancer treatments that operate on a cell by cell basis are all technological advances which could be achieved with DNA-based molecular computers. DNA encodes the building blocks of life and researchers have already shown that it can be used as a powerful tool for us to build nanoscale devices that can interact with the molecular world. However, DNA-based molecular devices are susceptible to degradation by natural defense mechanisms called nucleases. This makes operating in the desired biological settings challenging and has thus limited their practical application. My NSF-funded research in …

I Know What You've Been Looking At! Testing Visual Recognition Of Photographs To Retroactively Track Visual Attention In Online Visual Search Tasks, Mark Lavelle

Shared Knowledge Conference

Tracking eye movements is a useful tool for understanding the relationship between what we seek and what attracts our attention. Without eye-tracking, we might know that certain tasks are more difficult without knowing why or where the bottlenecks are in visual processing. When the pandemic forced us to shift to remote data collection on visual search tasks (akin to Where's Waldo), we developed a resourceful way to track visual attention without recording eye movements. By leveraging the fact that people are more likely to remember objects they spend more time looking at, we measured recognition memory for images as a …

Olfactory Detection Of Viruses Shapes Brain Immunity And Behavior, Aurora Kraus

Shared Knowledge Conference

Olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) directly contact the environment and are exposed to pathogens, such as viruses. When OSNs detect a virus, they coordinate antiviral immune responses locally to stop virus progression into the brain, termed the central nervous system (CNS). For example, in COVID-19 patients the SARS-CoV-2 virus replicates in the olfactory epithelium resulting in loss of olfaction, yet viral detection in the CNS is rare. However, neuronal detection of a virus by OSNs will send electrical signals to the CNS via the olfactory bulb (OB) and shape our CNS. Because the OB is the nexus between the pathogen exposed …

Investigating Earthquake Hazards In South And Southeast Asia Using Satellite Observations, Jeng Hann Chong

Shared Knowledge Conference

Large to moderate-sized earthquakes can occur throughout South and Southeast Asia, such as the 2004 magnitude 9.1 earthquake in Sumatra, Indonesia and the 2015 magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Nepal. Earthquakes in this region occur as a result of the collision between the Indian Plate, Eurasian Plate, and Sunda Plate. To the north, the collision between the Indian and Eurasian Plates gave rise to the Himalayas and represents a well-known seismic hazard, whereas the region to the east where the three tectonic plates collide beneath Bangladesh, northeastern India, and Myanmar is more complex and still largely understudied. Nevertheless, the resulting tectonic …