Digital Commons Network^™

Disruptions Of The Human Connectome Associated With Hemispatial Neglect, Sadhvi Saxena, Zafer Keser, Chris Rorden, Leonardo Bonilha, Julius Fridriksson Ph.D., Alexandra Walker, Argye Elizabeth Hillis

Faculty Publications

Background and Objectives

Hemispatial neglect is a heterogeneous and complex disorder that can be classified by frame of reference for “left” vs “right,” including viewer-centered neglect (VCN, affecting the contralesional side of the view), stimulus-centered neglect (SCN, affecting the contralesional side of the stimulus, irrespective of its location with respect to the viewer), or both. We investigated the effect of acute stroke lesions on the connectivity of neural networks that underlie VCN or SCN.

Methods

A total of 174 patients within 48 hours of acute right hemispheric infarct underwent a detailed hemispatial neglect assessment that included oral reading, scene copy, …

Fine Ash-Bearing Particles As A Major Aerosol Component In Biomass Burning Smoke, Kouji Adachi, Jack E. Dibb, Eric Scheuer, Joseph M. Katich, Joshua P. Schwarz, Anne E. Perring, Braden Mediavilla, Hongyu Guo, Pedro Campuzano-Jost, Jose L. Jimenez, James Crawford, Amber J. Soja, Naga Oshima, Mizuo Kajino, Takeshi Kinase, Lawrence Kleinman, Arthur J. Sedlacek Iii, Robert J. Yokelson, Peter R. Buseck

Faculty Publications

Biomass burning (BB) events are occurring globally with increasing frequency, and their emissions are having more impacts on human health and climate. Large ash particles are recognized as a BB product with major influences on soil and water environments. However, fine-ash particles, which have diameters smaller than several microns and characteristic morphologies and compositions (mainly Ca and Mg carbonates), have not yet been explicitly considered as a major BB aerosol component either in field observations or climate models. This study measured BB aerosol samples using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and ion chromatography during the Fire Influence on Regional to Global …

Fine Ash-Bearing Particles As A Major Aerosol Component In Biomass Burning Smoke, Kouji Adachi, Jack E. Dibb, Eric Scheuer, Joseph M. Katich, Joshua P. Schwarz, Anne E. Perring, Braden Mediavilla, Hongyu Guo, Pedro Campuzano-Jost, Jose L. Jimenez, James Crawford, Amber J. Soja, Naga Oshima, Mizuo Kajino, Takeshi Kinase, Lawrence Kleinman, Arthur J. Sedlacek Iii, Robert J. Yokelson, Peter R. Buseck

Faculty Publications

Biomass burning (BB) events are occurring globally with increasing frequency, and their emissions are having more impacts on human health and climate. Large ash particles are recognized as a BB product with major influences on soil and water environments. However, fine-ash particles, which have diameters smaller than several microns and characteristic morphologies and compositions (mainly Ca and Mg carbonates), have not yet been explicitly considered as a major BB aerosol component either in field observations or climate models. This study measured BB aerosol samples using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and ion chromatography during the Fire Influence on Regional to Global …

Evolutionary Analyses Of Visual Opsin Genes In Frogs And Toads: Diversity, Duplication, And Positive Selection, Ryan K. Schott, Leah Perez, Matthew Kwiatkowski, Vance Imhoff, Jennifer M. Gumm

Faculty Publications

Among major vertebrate groups, anurans (frogs and toads) are understudied with regard to their visual systems, and little is known about variation among species that differ in ecology. We sampled North American anurans representing diverse evolutionary and life histories that likely possess visual systems adapted to meet different ecological needs. Using standard molecular techniques, visual opsin genes, which encode the protein component of visual pigments, were obtained from anuran retinas. Additionally, we extracted the visual opsins from publicly available genome and transcriptome assemblies, further increasing the phylogenetic and ecological diversity of our dataset to 33 species in total. We found …

Limitations In Representation Of Physical Processes Preven Successful Simulation Of Pm2.5 During Korus-Aq, Katherine R. Travis, James H. Crawford, Gao Chen, Carolyn E. Jordan, Benjamin A. Nault, Hwajin Kim, Jose L. Jimenez, Pedro Campuzano-Jost, Jack E. Dibb, Jung-Hun Woo, Younha Kim, Shixian Zhai, Xuan Wang, Erin E. Mcduffie, Gan Luo, Fangqun Yu, Saewung Kim, Isobel J. Simpson, Donald R. Blake, Limseok Chang, Michelle J. Kim

Faculty Publications

High levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution in East Asia often exceed local air quality standards. Observations from the Korea United States-Air Quality (KORUS-AQ) field campaign in May and June 2016 showed that development of extreme pollution (haze) occurred through a combination of long-range transport and favorable meteorological conditions that enhanced local production of PM2.5. Atmospheric models often have difficulty simulating PM2.5 chemical composition during haze, which is of concern for the development of successful control measures. We use observations from KORUS-AQ to examine the ability of the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model to simulate PM2.5 composition throughout the campaign …

Chronic Background Radiation Correlates With Sperm Swimming Endurance In Bank Voles From Chernobyl, Kati Kivisaari, Sara Calhim, Zbyszek Boratyríski, Timothy Mousseau, Anders P. Møller, Tapio Mappes

Faculty Publications

Sperm quantity and quality are key features explaining intra- and interspecific variation in male reproductive success. Spermatogenesis is sensitive to ionizing radiation and laboratory studies investigating acute effects of ionizing radiation have indeed found negative effects of radiation on sperm quantity and quality. In nature, levels of natural background radiation vary dramatically, and chronic effects of low-level background radiation exposure on spermatogenesis are poorly understood. The Chernobyl region offers a unique research opportunity for investigating effects of chronic low-level ionizing radiation on reproductive properties of wild organisms. We captured male bank voles (Myodes glareolus) from 24 locations in the Chernobyl …

Distributed Matrix Tiling Using A Hypergraph Labeling Formulation, Avah Banerjee, Maxwell Reeser, Guoli Ding

Faculty Publications

Partitioning large matrices is an important problem in distributed linear algebra computing, used in ML among others. Briefly, our goal is to perform a sequence of matrix algebra operations in a distributed manner on these large matrices. However, not all partitioning schemes work well with different matrix algebra operations and their implementations (algorithms). This is a type of data tiling problem. In this paper we consider a data tiling problem using hypergraphs. We prove some hardness results and give a theoretical characterization of its complexity on random instances. Additionally we develop a greedy algorithm and experimentally show its efficacy.

Brazilian Mangroves: Blue Carbon Hotspots Of National And Global Relevance To Natural Climate Solutions, Andre S. Rovai, Robert R. Twilley, Thomas A. Worthington, Pablo Riul

Faculty Publications

Mangroves are known for large carbon stocks and high sequestration rates in biomass and soils, making these intertidal wetlands a cost-effective strategy for some nations to compensate for a portion of their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. However, few countries have the national-level inventories required to support the inclusion of mangroves into national carbon credit markets. This is the case for Brazil, home of the second largest mangrove area in the world but lacking an integrated mangrove carbon inventory that captures the diversity of coastline types and climatic zones in which mangroves are present. Here we reviewed published datasets to derive …

Investigation Of Metastable Low Dimensional Halometallates, Navindra Keerthisinghe, Matthew S. Christian, Anna A. Berseneva, Gregory Morrison, Vladislav V. Klepov, Mark D. Smith, Hans Conrad Zur Loye

Faculty Publications

The solvothermal synthesis, structure determination and optical characterization of five new metastable halometallate compounds, [1,10-phenH][Pb_3.5I₈] (1), [1,10-phenH₂][Pb₅I₁₂]·(H₂O) (2), [1,10-phen][Pb₂I₄] (3), [1,10-phen]₂[Pb₅Br₁₀] (4) and [1,10-phenH][SbI₄]·(H₂O) (5), are reported. The materials exhibit rich structural diversity and exhibit structural dimensionalities that include 1D chains, 2D sheets and 3D frameworks. The optical spectra of these materials are consistent with bandgaps ranging from 2.70 to 3.44 eV. We show …

Assessing Reproducibility Of Inherited Variants Detected With Short-Read Whole Genome Sequencing, Bohu Pan, Luyao Ren, Vitor Onuchic, Meijian Guan, Rebecca Kusko, Steve Bruinsma, Len Trigg, Andreas Scherer, Baitang Ning, Chaoyang Zhang, Christine Glidewell-Kenney, Chunlin Xiao, Eric Donaldson, Fritz J. Sedlazeck, Gary Schroth, Gokhan Yavas, Haiying Grunenwald, Haodong Chen, Heather Meinholz, Joe Meehan, Jing Wang, Jingcheng Yang, Jonathan Foox, Jun Shang, Kelci Miclaus, Lianhua Dong, Leming Shi, Marghoob Mohiyuddin, Mehdi Pirooznia, Ping Gong, Rooz Golshani, Russ Wolfinger, Samir Lababidi, Sayed Mohammed Ebrahim Sahraeian, Steve Sherry, Tao Han, Tieliu Shi, Wanwan Hou, Weigong Ge, Wen Zou, Wenjing Guo, Wenjun Bao, Wenzhong Xiao, Xiaohui Fan, Yoichi Gondo, Ying Yu, Yongmei Zhao, Zhenqiang Su, Zhichao Liu, Weida Tong, Wenming Xiao, Justin M. Zook, Yuanting Zeng, Huixiao Hong

Faculty Publications

Background: Reproducible detection of inherited variants with whole genome sequencing (WGS) is vital for the implementation of precision medicine and is a complicated process in which each step affects variant call quality. Systematically assessing reproducibility of inherited variants with WGS and impact of each step in the process is needed for understanding and improving quality of inherited variants from WGS.

Results: To dissect the impact of factors involved in detection of inherited variants with WGS, we sequence triplicates of eight DNA samples representing two populations on three short-read sequencing platforms using three library kits in six labs and …

A Phase Field Model For Dynamic Simulations Of Reactive Blending Of Polymers, Mukul D. Tikekar, Kris T. Delaney, Michael C. Villet, Douglas R. Tree

Faculty Publications

A facile way to generate compatibilized blends of immiscible polymers is through reactive blending of end-functionalized homopolymers. The reaction may be reversible or irreversible depending on the end-groups and is affected by the immiscibility and transport of the reactant homopolymers and the compatibilizing copolymer product. Here we describe a phase-field framework to model the combined dynamics of reaction kinetics, diffusion, and multi-component thermodynamics on the evolution of the microstructure and reaction rate in reactive blending. A density functional with no fitting parameters, which is obtained by adapting a framework of Uneyama and Doi and qualitatively agrees with self-consistent field theory, …

Postseptic Cognitive Impairment And Expression Of Apoe In Peripheral Blood: The Cognition After Sepsis (Cass) Observational Pilot Study, Samuel M. Brown, Sarah J. Beesley, Chris Stubben, Emily L. Wilson, Angela P. Presson, Colin Grissom, Colin Maguire, Matthew T. Rondina, Ramona O. Hopkins

Faculty Publications

Background: Cognitive impairment after sepsis is an important clinical problem. Determinants of postseptic cognitive impairment are not well understood. We thus undertook a systems biology approach to exploring a possible role for apolipoprotein E (APOE) in postseptic cognitive impairment.

Design: Prospective, observational cohort. Setting: Intermountain Medical Center, a tertiary referral center in Utah.

Patients/Participants: Patients with sepsis admitted to study intensive care units. Interventions: None.

Methods: We obtained peripheral blood for deep sequencing of RNA and followed up survivors at 6 months with a battery of cognitive instruments. We defined cognitive impairment based on the 6-month Hayling test of executive …

The Renewal Workshop: Consumer Considerations In A Global Supply Chain, Aparna Sundar, Wendy G. Pothier, Bruce Pfeiffer, Leyi Lei

Faculty Publications

In responding to the international need for a circular economy, The Renewal Workshop (TRW) expanded its operations by opening a second factory in Amsterdam, The Netherlands in 2019. Much of the success of TRW, since its inception in Oregon in 2016, was due to its innovation in supply chain process. TRW incorporated novel solutions of renewing damaged apparel and upcycling overstock products, and consulted brands on ways to design for deconstruction. As the effectiveness of TRW becomes evident and demand grows internationally, it is facing some unexpected challenges. Students will need to reconsider positioning and communication strategy of The Renewal …

Response To Wasserman And Rhodes: The Texas S.B. 8 Litigation And “Our Formalism”, B. Jessie Hill

Faculty Publications

In Solving the Procedural Puzzles of the Texas Heartbeat Act and Its Imitators: The Limits and Opportunities of Offensive Litigation, Professors Howard Wasserman and Rocky Rhodes explain why the U.S. Supreme Court correctly rejected the pre-enforcement legal challenge brought by abortion providers challenging Texas’s draconian abortion law, S.B. 8, which was specifically designed to evade such challenges. Wasserman and Rhodes also provide grounds for hope on the part of future similarly situated challengers to S.B. 8 copycat laws, outlining a route by which the clinics could have engaged in offensive federal-court litigation against “any person” plaintiffs who seek to …

Cognitive Decline And The Workplace, Sharona Hoffman

Faculty Publications

Cognitive decline will increasingly become a workplace concern because of three intersecting trends. First, the American population is aging. In 2019, 16.5 percent of the population, or fifty-four million people, were age 65 and over, and the number is expected to increase to seventy-eight million by 2025. Dementia is not uncommon among older adults, and by the age of eighty-five, between twenty-five and fifty percent of individuals suffer from this condition. Second, individuals are postponing retirement and prolonging their working lives. For example, about a quarter of physicians are over sixty-five, as are fifteen percent of attorneys. The average age …

Electrophysiological Responses To Conspecific Odorants In Xenopus Laevis Show Potential For Chemical Signaling, Heather J. Rhodes, Melanie Amo

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Big Bad Roe, B. Jessie Hill

Faculty Publications

Now that Roe v. Wade is gone, what should replace it? This moment presents a rare opportunity to re-imagine the right to reproductive autonomy, given that the longstanding constitutional framework governing that right has been tossed out the window. For the most part, constitutional litigation over the right to abortion has shifted to state courts and is brought under state constitutions. Thus, as state courts begin to recognize the existence of a constitutional right to reproductive autonomy under state constitutions, they must decide what the right looks like. In several cases currently being litigated in state courts, advocates have argued …

Using Situational Analysis To Reimagine Infrastructure, Mary Le Rouge, Clancy Ratliff, Donnie Johnson Sackey

Faculty Publications

In this article, we ask what it means to think of infrastructure discursively through situational analysis. First, we consider how policymakers have historically used writing and rhetoric to redefine, reframe, and resituate what infrastructure can be in technical documents. Second, we address the impact of policymakers’ discursive practices on the spaces and material realities of communities. We view the infrastructural function of writing “as a conceptual foundation for revealing structures and foundations of organizations that affect people” (Read, 2019, p. 237). We use three texts as the space of our discourse mapping: President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chat on the Recovery …

Kinetics And Connectivity Properties Of Parvalbumin- And Somatostatin-Positive Inhibition In Layer 2/3 Medial Entorhinal Cortex, Fernando R. Fernandez, Guillem Via, Carmen C. Canavier, John A. White

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Fake It Until You Make It!: The Crimes And Trial Of Anna Sorokin (Delvey), Angelo Kevin Brown

Faculty Publications

The chapter will provide an overview of the life, crimes, and trial of Anna Sorokin better known as Anna Delvey. Anna had invented a false persona and life so that people would think she was a rich German heiress instead of her real identity of a woman from a working-class Russian family. Anna used her false identity to defraud banks, hotels, and friends for about $275,000. Anna's life became internationally known with her story being published in major news and media articles including podcasts, 60 Minutes, HBO, a $300,000 book deal to her former friend Rachel Williams, and a $320,000 …

U.S. Foreign Relations Law From The Outside In, Ryan M. Scoville

Faculty Publications

Arguments in the field of U.S. foreign relations law typically proceed from the inside out: legal actors focus on internal (domestic) sources of authority to reach conclusions with significant external (international) implications. The text and structure of the Constitution, case law, legislative intent, assessments of institutional competency, and historical practice thus dominate debates about treaty-making, war powers, diplomatic authorities, and related matters. This tendency reflects generic assumptions about the proper modalities of legal analysis and helps to ensure that the law reflects national values.

Yet inside-out arguments overlook a critical fact: the practical merits of U.S. foreign relations law often …

The Havoc Death Wreaks: Civil Rights Challenges To Capital Punishment, Bailey D. Barnes

Faculty Publications

Following a per curium opinion that banned the imposition of capital punishment because it violated the Eighth Amendment, as made applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall offered a unique criticism of capital punishment. Justice Marshall, an iconic civil rights litigator prior to his confirmation to the Court, stated, "[T]he death penalty wreaks havoc with our entire criminal justice system." Similarly, sometime in the late 1950s, Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson reportedly said that capital punishment "completely bitches up the criminal law." In essence, both Justices were asserting that the death penalty …

Solving The Procedural Puzzles Of The Texas Heartbeat Act And Its Imitators: The Limits And Opportunities For Offensive Litigation, Charles W. "Rocky" Rhodes, Howard M. Wasserman

Faculty Publications

Texas' Fetal Heartbeat Act, enacted in 2021 as Senate Bill 8, prohibits abortions following detection of a fetal heartbeat, a constitutionally invalid ban under current Supreme Court precedent. But the method of enforcement in the Texas law is unique—it prohibits enforcement by government officials in favor of private civil actions brought by “any person,” regardless of injury. Texas sought to burden reproductive-health providers and rights advocates with costly litigation and potentially crippling liability.

In a series of articles, we explore how SB8's exclusive reliance on private enforcement creates procedural and jurisdictional hurdles to challenging the law's constitutional validity and obtaining …

A Declaration Of Rights Lost: The Diminution Of Tennesseans' Civil Rights, Bailey D. Barnes

Faculty Publications

The Constitution of the State of Tennessee, in its current form, offers to the citizens of the Volunteer State a "Declaration of Rights" that prevents abuses by those in power against the governed. To paraphrase late Associate United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the Tennessee Constitution, which was adopted following the state's secession from and eventual return to the United States during the Civil War, continues to serve as the charter of Tennesseans' liberties. Indeed, the Tennessee Constitution's Declaration of Rights proclaims in the very first section, "[A]ll power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are …

Solving The Procedural Puzzles Of Texas’ Fetal-Heartbeat Law And Its Imitators: The Potential For Defensive Litigation, Charles W. "Rocky" Rhodes, Howard M. Wasserman

Faculty Publications

Texas' Fetal Heartbeat Act, enacted in 2021 as Senate Bill 8, prohibits abortions following detection of a fetal heartbeat, a constitutionally invalid ban under current Supreme Court precedent. But the method of enforcement in the Texas law is unique—it prohibits enforcement by government officials in favor of private civil actions brought by “any person,” regardless of injury. Texas sought to burden reproductive-health providers and rights advocates with costly litigation and potentially crippling liability.

In a series of articles, we explore how SB8's exclusive reliance on private enforcement creates procedural and jurisdictional hurdles to challenging the law's constitutional validity and obtaining …

Resorbing Patent Law's Kessler Cat Into The General Law Of Preclusion, Dennis D. Crouch, Homayoon Rafatijo

Faculty Publications

It has become exceedingly common in our legal system that courts, in the guise of respect for precedent, compound upon errors. Legal precedents are written documents, but "[t]he reality we can put into words is never reality itself." As such, we seldom find a court decision that embodies the entire legal reality regarding the questions presented. In this respect, the legal system inherently suffers from a lack of what mathematicians call completeness. Each decision gives rise to countless inferences because what lower courts observe by reading the precedent is not the entire legal reality but an incomplete reality exposed to …

Constitutional Authority, Common Resources, And The Climate, Anthony L. Moffa

Faculty Publications

This work sets out to re-examine and challenge the history of the property clause with an eye towards increased congressional reliance on it in the face of daunting threats to our natural environment. No one could seriously question the primary motivations of the Framers, but that does not foreclose the importance of searching for secondary motivations that deepen our understanding of arguably the Constitution’s most explicitly environmental provision. Eugene Gaetke’s work in the 1980’s and Peter Appel’s work twenty years later laid the groundwork for the argument here by pushing back on the originalist argument for a narrow interpretation of …

The Color Of Property And Auto Insurance: Time For Change, Jennifer B. Wriggins

Faculty Publications

Insurance company executives issued statements condemning racism and urging change throughout society and in the insurance industry after the huge Black Lives Matter demonstrations in summer 2020. The time therefore is ripe for examining insurance as it relates to race and racism, including history and current regulation. Two of the most important types of personal insurance are property and automobile. Part I begins with history, focusing on property insurance, auto insurance, race, and racism in urban areas around the mid-twentieth century. Private insurers deemed large areas of cities where African Americans lived to be “blighted” and refused to insure all …

Optimal Illiquidity, John Beshears, James J. Choi, Christopher Clayton, Christopher Harris, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian

Faculty Publications

We calculate the socially optimal level of illiquidity in an economy populated by households with taste shocks and present bias (Amador, Werning, and Angeletos 2006). The government chooses mandatory contributions to respective spending/ savings accounts, each with a different pre-retirement withdrawal penalty. Penalties collected by the government are redistributed through the tax system. When naive households have heterogeneous present bias, the social optimum is well approximated by a three-account system: (i) a completely liquid account, (ii) a completely illiquid account, and (iii) an account with an ≃ 10% early withdrawal penalty. In some ways this resembles the U.S. system, which …

Taking Care With Text: “The Laws” Of The Take Care Clause Do Not Include The Constitution, And There Is No Autonomous Presidential Power Of Constitutional Interpretation, George Mader

Faculty Publications

"Departmentalism" posits that each branch of the federal government has an independent power of constitutional interpretation-all branches share the power and need not defer to one another in the exercise of their interpretive powers. As regards the Executive Branch, the textual basis for this interpretive autonomy is that the Take Care Clause requires the President to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" and the Supremacy Clause includes the Constitution in "the supreme Law of the Land." Therefore, the President is to execute the Constitution as a law. Or so the common argument goes. The presidential oath to "execute …