Digital Commons Network^™

Genetic Analysis Of Colony And Population Structure Of Three Introduced Populations Of The Formosan Subterranean Termite (Isoptera: Rhinotermitidae) In The Continental United States, Edward L. Vargo, Claudia Husseneder, David Woodson, Michael G. Waldvogel, J. Kenneth Grace

Faculty Publications

The Formosan subterranean termite, Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki, is a major invasive pest species in many parts of the world. We compared the colony breeding system and population genetic structure in three introduced populations in the continental United States: Charleston, SC; City Park, New Orleans, LA; and Rutherford County, NC. Based on worker genotypes at 12 microsatellite loci, we found that colonies were mainly genetically distinct entities consisting of either simple families headed by monogamous pairs of reproductives or extended families containing multiple neotenic (replacement) reproductives descended from simple families. Populations varied from 48% simple families in Charleston to 82% simple …

Dating Paleosol And Animal Remains In Loess Deposits, H. C. Zhang, B. Li, M. S. Yang, G. L. Lei, H. Ding, Jie Niu, H. F. Fan, W. X. Zhang, F. Q. Chang

Faculty Publications

Accurate and reliable dating of paleosols, animal remains, and artifacts is of crucial importance in reconstructing environmental change and understanding the interrelationship between human activities and natural environments. Dating different materials in the same sample can help resolve problems such as soil carbon sources and carbon storage state. Conventional radiocarbon dating of soil (inorganic and organic matter) and accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of animal remains (fossil bones and teeth) result in different ages for materials from the same sample position in a typical loess section at Xinglong Mountain, Yuzhong County, Gansu Province in NW China. Inorganic matter is ∼3400 …

Human Genomic Deletions Mediated By Recombination Between Alu Elements, Shurjo K. Sen, Kyudong Han, Jianxin Wang, Jungnam Lee, Hui Wang, Pauline A. Callinan, Matthew Dyer, Richard Cordaux, Ping Liang, Mark A. Batzer

Faculty Publications

Recombination between Alu elements results in genomic deletions associated with many human genetic disorders. Here, we compare the reference human and chimpanzee genomes to determine the magnitude of this recombination process in the human lineage since the human-chimpanzee divergence ∼6 million years ago. Combining computational data mining and wet-bench experimental verification, we identified 492 human-specific deletions (for a total of ∼400 kb) attributable to this process, a significant component of the insertion/deletion spectrum of the human genome. The majority of the deletions (295 of 492) coincide with known or predicted genes (including 3 that deleted functional exons, as compared with …

Introduction: Self-Organization In Nonequilibrium Chemical Systems, Irving R. Epstein, John A. Pojman, Oliver Steinbock

Faculty Publications

The field of self-organization in nonequilibrium chemical systems comprises the study of dynamical phenomena in chemically reacting systems far from equilibrium. Systematic exploration of this area began with investigations of the temporal behavior of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky oscillating reaction, discovered accidentally in the former Soviet Union in the 1950s. The field soon advanced into chemical waves in excitable media and propagating fronts. With the systematic design of oscillating reactions in the 1980s and the discovery of Turing patterns in the 1990s, the scope of these studies expanded dramatically. The articles in this Focus Issue provide an overview of the development and …

Quantum Interpretations, A. R.P. Rau

Faculty Publications

Difficulties and discomfort with the interpretation of quantum mechanics are due to differences in language between it and classical physics. Analogies to the special theory of relativity, which also required changes in the basic world-view and language of nonrelativistic classical mechanics, may help in absorbing the changes called for by quantum physics. There is no need to invoke extravagances such as the many-worlds interpretation or specify a central role for consciousness or neural microstructures. The simple, but basic, acceptance that what is meant by the state of a physical system is different in quantum physics from what it is in …

Occurrence Of Freshwater Bivalves In A Chronically Hypoxic Coastal Stream In Louisiana, Usa, Michael D. Kaller, William E. Kelso

Faculty Publications

We sampled bivalves in Mill Creek, a low-gradient stream in southwestern Louisiana, and found a comparatively diverse assemblage in a disturbed, chronically hypoxic stream. We found few bivalves in April, nearly 1,700 in June, but only 170 in September. Species richness varied temporally with one species in April, eight species in June, and three species in September. We suggest dissolved oxygen level plays a particularly important role in bivalve community dynamics in this stream. © 2006, Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Avian Influenza (H5n1) And The Evolutionary And Social Ecology Of Infectious Disease Emergence, Durrell D. Kapan, Shannon N. Bennett, Brett N. Ellis, Jefferson Fox, Nancy D. Lewis, James H. Spencer, Sumeet Saksena, Bruce A. Wilcox

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Case Study: Cholera, Edward Laws

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Transcending The Individualist Paradigm In Sexual Orientation Antidiscrimination Law, Holning S. Lau

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Race And Ethnicity Of Same-Sex Couples In California, Gary Gates, Holning S. Lau, R. Bradley Sears

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Constitutional Function Of Biological Paternity: Evidence Of The Biological Mother's Consent To The Biological Father's Co-Parenting Of Her Child, E. Gary Spitko

Faculty Publications

This article argues that a father's biological connection to a child is constitutionally significant principally because it evidences the consent of the biological mother to the father's parental relationship with the child. The biological mother's consent is critical because she is the initial "constitutional parent." Her constitutional parental rights arise from her role nourishing the child in her womb and enduring the pain and danger of childbirth. This labor gives her a constitutionally protected voice in the child's upbringing including a right to decide generally who else shall be allowed to develop a parental relationship with the child. Only if …

Choice And Fraud In Racial Identification: The Dilemma Of Policing Race In Affirmative Action, The Census, And A Color-Blind Society, Tseming Yang

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Panzea: A Database And Resource For Molecular And Functional Diversity In The Maize Genome, Wei Zhao, Payan Canaran, Rebecca Jurkuta, Theresa Fulton, Jeffrey Glaubitz, Edward Buckler, John Doebley, Brandon Gaut, Major Goodman, Jim Holland, Stephen Kresovich, Michael Mcmullen, Lincoln Stein, Doreen Ware

Faculty Publications

Serving as a community resource, Panzea is the bioinformatics arm of the Molecular and Functional Diversity in the Maize Genome project. Maize, a classical model for genetic studies, is an important crop species and also the most diverse crop species known. One average, two randomly chosen maize lines have one single-nucleotide polymorphism every ~100 bp; this divergence is roughly equivalent to the differences between humans and chimpanzees. This exceptional genotypic diversity underlies the phenotypic diversity maize needs to be cultivated in a wide range of environments. The Molecular and Functional Diversity in the Maize Genome project aims to understand how …

Behold, Ye Shall Have Joy With Me’: A Study On The Lord, The Servant And The Allegory Of The Olive Tree, Dan Belnap, Daniel L. Belnap

Faculty Publications

In chapter 5 of the book of Jacob, we find a unique text commonly referred to as the allegory of the olive tree. President Joseph Fielding Smith once said that “the parable of Zenos . . . is one of the greatest parables ever recorded.”1 Composed of seventy-seven verses, this allegory is thought to follow the progression of a particular olive tree and its offspring in the Lord’s vineyard. Many readers have commented on the special nature of the allegory, with studies ranging from theological meaning, to linguistic comparisons, to actual viticultural practices. Though these studies differ in content, they …

The Ethical Importance Of Being Human: God And Humanism In Levinas's Philosophy, Pat J. Gehrke

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Parallelization Of Multicategory Support Vector Machines (Pmc- Svm) For Classifying Microarray Data, Chaoyang Zhang, Peng Li, Arun Rajendran, Youping Deng, Dequan Chen

Faculty Publications

Background: Multicategory Support Vector Machines (MC-SVM) are powerful classification systems with excellent performance in a variety of data classification problems. Since the process of generating models in traditional multicategory support vector machines for large datasets is very computationally intensive, there is a need to improve the performance using high performance computing techniques.

Results: In this paper, Parallel Multicategory Support Vector Machines (PMC-SVM) have been developed based on the sequential minimum optimization-type decomposition method for support vector machines (SMO-SVM). It was implemented in parallel using MPI and C++ libraries and executed on both shared memory supercomputer and Linux cluster …

Disruption Of Cortical Microtubules By Overexpression Of Green Fluorescent Protein-Tagged Α-Tubulin 6 Causes A Marked Reduction In Cell Wall Synthesis, David H. Burk, Ruiqin Zhong, W. Herbert Morrison, Zheng Hua Ye

Faculty Publications

It has been known that the transverse orientation of cortical microtubules (MTs) along the elongation axis is essential for normal cell morphogenesis, but whether cortical MTs are essential for normal cell wall synthesis is still not clear. In the present study, we have investigated whether cortical MTs affect cell wall synthesis by direct alteration of the cortical MT organization in Arabidopsis thaliana. Disruption of the cortical MT organization by expression of an excess amount of green fluorescent protein-tagged α-tubulin 6 (GFP-TUA6) in transgenic Arabidopsis plants was found to cause a marked reduction in cell wall thickness and a decrease in …

Emd: An Ensemble Algorithm For Discovering Regulatory Motifs In Dna Sequences, Jianjun Hu, Y. D. Yang, D. Kihara

Faculty Publications

Background

Understanding gene regulatory networks has become one of the central research problems in bioinformatics. More than thirty algorithms have been proposed to identify DNA regulatory sites during the past thirty years. However, the prediction accuracy of these algorithms is still quite low. Ensemble algorithms have emerged as an effective strategy in bioinformatics for improving the prediction accuracy by exploiting the synergetic prediction capability of multiple algorithms.

Results

We proposed a novel clustering-based ensemble algorithm named EMD for de novo motif discovery by combining multiple predictions from multiple runs of one or more base component algorithms. The ensemble approach is …

Integrative Missing Value Estimation For Microarray Data, Jianjun Hu, H. Li, M. S. Waterman, X. J. Zhou

Faculty Publications

Background

Missing value estimation is an important preprocessing step in microarray analysis. Although several methods have been developed to solve this problem, their performance is unsatisfactory for datasets with high rates of missing data, high measurement noise, or limited numbers of samples. In fact, more than 80% of the time-series datasets in Stanford Microarray Database contain less than eight samples.

Results

We present the integrative Missing Value Estimation method (iMISS) by incorporating information from multiple reference microarray datasets to improve missing value estimation. For each gene with missing data, we derive a consistent neighbor-gene list by taking reference data sets …

Taxometric Investigation Of Ptsd: Data From Two Nationally Representative Samples, Joshua J. Broman-Fulks, Kenneth J. Ruggiero, Bradley A. Green, Dean G. Kilpatrick, Carla Kmett Danielson, Heidi S. Resnick, Benjamin E. Saunders

Faculty Publications

Current psychiatric nosology depicts posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a discrete diagnostic category. However, only one study has examined the latent structure of PTSD, and this study suggested that PTSD may be more accurately conceptualized as an extreme reaction to traumatic life events rather than a discrete clinical syndrome. To build on the existing literature base, the present research examined the latent structure of posttraumatic stress reactions by applying three taxometric procedures (MAXEIG, MAMBAC, and L-Mode) to data collected from large nationally representative samples of women (ns = 2684 and 3033) and adolescents (n = 3775). Results …

The Ducks Stop Here? The Environmental Challenge To Federalism, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

PIn Solid Waste Association of Northern Cook County v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ("SWANCC"), the Supreme Court considered whether federal regulatory authority reaches isolated wetlands and ponds due to the potential presence of migratory birds. In rejecting such an expansive view of federal authority, the Court's majority underlined its devotion to the federalism principles enunciated in Lopez and other recent cases. The federalist majority further reiterated its support for a canon of statutory construction which holds that federal statutes will not be interpreted to intrude into state matters, such as local land-use control, absent a clear statement by Congress. …

Baseline Mapping Of Phragmites Australis (Common Reed) In Three Coastal Mississippi Estuarine Basins, Mark S. Peterson, Melissa L. Partyka

Faculty Publications

Over the last two decades, the northern Gulf of Mexico has undergone tremendous growth and development that has resulted in extensive and ongoing habitat modification. We had the opportunity to survey the main channels and bayous of three coastal estuarine basins for the presence and coverage of the invasive Phragmites australis (common reed). The occurrence and area of P. australis was highly variable among the lower Pascagoula River, Back Bay of Biloxi, and St. Louis Bay basins, with the largest amount of coverage (0.489 km(2)) found within the lower Pascagoula River basin and the smallest in Back Bay of Biloxi …

The New Religious Prisons And Their Retributivist Commitments, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

The rise of the religious, or "faith-based," prison at the turn of the twenty-first century bears witness to the remarkable resilience of religion in shaping the philosophy of punishment. In the last decade, prisons that incorporate religion in various ways have sprouted around the country and there are some indications, though preliminary, inconclusive, and hotly contested, that inmates who participate in religious instruction and “programming” recidivate at lower rates than those who do not. The early success of these programs (and, some say, the preferential treatment accorded to participants in them) has resulted in high demand and long waiting lists. …

Coming Out For Kids: Recognizing, Respecting, And Representing Lgbtq Youth, Barbara A. Fedders

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

An Experimental Investigation Of Guided Wave Propagation In Corrugated Plates Showing Stop Bands And Pass Bands, Tribikram Kundu, Sourav Banerjee, Kumar V. Jata

Faculty Publications

Nonplanar surfaces are often encountered in engineering structures. In aerospace structures, periodically corrugated boundaries are formed by friction-stir-welding. In civil engineering structures, rebars used in reinforced concrete beams and slabs have periodic surface. Periodic structures are also being used to create desired acoustic band gaps. For health monitoring of these structures, a good understanding of the elastic wave propagation through such periodic structures is necessary. Although a number of research papers on the wave propagation in periodic structures are available in the literature, no one experimentally investigated the guided wave propagation through plates with periodic boundaries and compared the experimental …

Elastic Wave Propagation In Sinusoidally Corrugated Waveguides, Sourav Banerjee, Tribikram Kundu

Faculty Publications

The ultrasonicwave propagation in sinusoidally corrugated waveguides is studied in this paper. Periodically corrugated waveguides are gaining popularity in the field of vibration control and for designing structures with desired acoustic band gaps. Currently only numerical method (Boundary Element Method or Finite Element Method) based packages (e.g., PZFlex) are in principle capable of modeling ultrasonic fields in complex structures with rapid change of curvatures at the interfaces and boundaries but no analyses have been reported. However, the packages are very CPU intensive; it requires a huge amount of computation memory and time for its execution. In this paper a new …

The Paradox Of Personality: Mental Illness, Employment Discrimination, And The Americans With Disabilities Act, Deirdre M. Smith

Faculty Publications

Both medicine and the law devote considerable concern to drawing lines, that is, to classifying and making distinctions. In medicine, such line-drawing occurs when a person is designated healthy or ill, normal or disordered. In the law, such line-drawing determines who does and does not bear legal responsibility for a given situation. This Article reviews the demarcation drawn by psychiatry and the courts between disfavored personality and mental illness, a dichotomy not based upon empirical science and therefore, wholly susceptible to social construction and implementation. While society may pathologize noxious personalities, thus making them disabilities, it is loath to extend …

Perceptual Paths To Accurate Production Of L2 Vowels: The Role Of Individual Differences, Wendy Baker-Smemoe, Pavel Trofimovich

Faculty Publications

This study investigated whether individual differences in learners’ age of arrival (AOA) and length of residence (LOR) in a country where a second language (L2) is spoken determine the relationship between L2 perception and production. In the first experiment, 40 Korean learners of English and 10 native English speakers participated in vowel perception and production tasks in English. Results demonstrated that the relationship between perception and production depended on learners’ AOA, not LOR. In the second experiment, the same Korean learners of English participated in a vowel perception task in which they judged the accuracy of their own production of …

Principles Of U.S. Family Law, Vivian E. Hamilton

Faculty Publications

What explains U.S. family law? What are the origins of the current chaos and controversy in the field, the home of some of the most vituperative debates in public policy? To answer these questions, this Article identifies and examines family law's foundational principles. It undertakes a conceptual analysis of the legal practices that govern families. This analysis has yet to be done, and its absence hamstrings constructive thought on our family law. The Article develops a typology that conceptualizes U.S. family law and exposes its underlying principles. First, it identifies the significant elements, or rules, of family law. Second, it …

New Orleans, The Chesapeake, And The Future Of Environmental Assessment: Overcoming The Natural Resources Law Of Unintended Consequences, Erin Ryan

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.