Digital Commons Network^™

Vitamin D Fortification Of Processed Meat To Reduce Self-Reported Deficiencies: Consumer Acceptance In The Irish Market, Emma Lynn Donaldson

Theses

It is believed that many areas of the world are experiencing a Vitamin D deficiency pandemic. With Ireland’s geographic location, genetic characteristics, and the reemergence of rickets in Ireland in the early noughties; Ireland is a part of the deficiency pandemic. Vitamin deficiencies have historically been handled effectively through food fortification schemes, however additional food products, like processed meats, need to be assessed for their ability to address the deficiency and consumer acceptance. Aim: The aim of this study is to analyse the general consumer acceptance of future Vitamin D fortified, processed meats in the Irish market, in order to …

The Efficacy Of Lactic Acid And Steam Vacuum Applications In Reducing Microbial Load And Prolonging The Shelf Life Of Beer Carcases, Rachel Smith

Theses

Many foodborne outbreaks occur globally each year compromising consumer confidence and highlighting the need for continued improvements with regards to product safety. Therefore, intervention decontamination applications are currently gaining a lot of attention within the beef industry as an additional measure to improve the microbiological condition of finished products. Many studies have shown decontamination methods to be effective, however variations within the published literature makes scientific comparison difficult. This aim of this study is to determine the efficacy of a 2-3% lactic acid solution and steam vacuum technologies as intervention methods in reducing the microbial load and extending the shelf …

Assessing The Food Safety Culture Of A Dairy Processing Facility In Ireland, Emer Marie Hughes

Theses

ood safety culture has become a prominent topic, with food safety management systems (FSMS), food safety regulations, training and auditing being challenged due to the reoccurrence of foodborne outbreaks. Due to its link with food safety performance, food organisations must have the ability to accurately measure their food safety culture to ensure it is an integral part of the company’s culture. The food safety culture of a dairy processing facility in Ireland was measured quantitatively using a questionnaire which was an adaptation of a food safety climate self-assessment tool. The questionnaire assessed the human dimension of food safety culture such …

Comparison Of Allergen Legislation Between India And Ireland, Naresh Machha

Theses

2 Abstract Food allergen is one of the major issues in countries like Ireland and India. In Ireland, allergen and ingredients labelling are considered as the topmost problems in the Irish food business. The problems can be solved under a strict framework guided by strong regulations. The problem is bigger in India than Ireland as in India, there is no proper legalized standard in the context of food allergens so the people who are allergic to certain food products are on high risk. Labelling is a major issue in India due to pluralism and diverse linguistic barriers. Ireland operated FSAI …

A Study Of Consumer Perception Of Antibiotic Resistance And Antibiotic Use In Ireland, Andrea Todea

Theses

The purpose of this study was to assess the knowledge of Irish consumers regarding antibiotic use in Ireland. Data was obtained on antibiotic use, frequency, associated source and general awareness regarding antibiotics and antibiotic resistance. A cross-sectional survey was designed to analyse consumer’s perception and knowledge of antibiotic and antibiotic resistance. A total of 763 completed questionnaires were collected. The questionnaire was targeted for general public, based in Ireland. Fifty-seven percent of respondents are trying to completely avoid antibiotics, unless absolutely necessary. Half of respondents (50%) took antibiotics in the last 12 months. The majority of respondents obtained antibiotics through …

Food Fraud In Nigeria: Challenges, Risks And Solutions, Joy Ewomazino Opia

Theses

Food fraud is one of the most urgent and active food research and regulatory areas. It is an evolving problem in Nigeria that has led to the deaths of many people especially the vunerable groups that includes mostly children, the elderly and immunocomprised persons. Therefore the aim of this study is to investigate the current challenges of food fraud in Nigeria, identify the risks it poses on the health and wellbeing of Nigerians and propose measures to tackle food fraud at local and international levels by regulatory and government agencies. This study explored the relationship between food fraud, food security …

An Investigation Into The Prevalence Of Food Hypersensitivity Amongst Children In The Early Years Service In Ireland, Ruta Patel

Theses

In the early years services in Ireland, the study studied the prevalence of hypersensitivity to food and the associated food among children between the aging of 0 and 12. Participants were 980 EYS recorded with the State and Department of Education of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland during 2019. In the descriptive-analytical report, the management guideline for answering these questions by the EYS was circulated electronically via emails and included information regarding class, age, food hypersensitivity and food that induce hypersensitivity among children. Results on the prevalence of allergens to Food and Coeliac diseases and current policies to …

Food Proteins: Sustainable Sources Of Proteins Responsible For Emulsions Stability In Food Products, Gleicy Kelly Oliveira Nogueria

Theses

One of the major challenges manufactures are facing is the fact that consumer’s personal health standards are changing constantly, modern consumers are willing to know more about the ingredients used in their food. The relationship with ethics and sustainability is leading to changes in the food industry. Seen this, manufactures are opting for other sources of ingredients, such as plant-based alternatives. However, the use of these sort of products need to be developed due to of their unknown properties. The use of sustainable plant proteins provides a variety of benefits to the product, such as added nutritional value as fiber, …

Mcnp Design Of Radiation Shielding For Pulsed Fusion Propulsion, David Jason Hewitt

Theses

Pulsed fusion, fission and fission-fusion hybrid systems are currently being studied for advanced propulsion to enable rapid interplanetary space travel. A testbed for evaluating these technologies at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, called Charger-1, utilizes a form of Magneto-Inertial Fusion to implode small plasma loads with z-pinch that will produce thrust when coupled with a magnetic nozzle. Like all forms of nuclear propulsion, this experiment will also be able to produce significant amounts of ionizing radiation in the form of high energy neutrons and photons that need mitigation to protect personnel and equipment. The laboratory housing this testbed has …

Lew.1wr1 Rats Have Altered Hepatic Metabolism During Their Type 1 Diabetes Susceptibility Window, Madushika Wimalarathne

Theses

LEW.1WR1 (1WR1) rats have increased type 1 diabetes (T1D) onset with the administration of polyinosinic-polycytidylic acid (PIC). The objective of this study was to compare the insulitis status and liver gene expression in both control and treated 1WR1 rats during disease induction with a T1D-resistant strain of rat, the LEW/SsNHsd (SsNHsd). Using immunohistochemistry we observed higher T cell infiltration in the 1WR1 treated rats compared to the control strain, the SsNHsd PIC-treated rat. Yet we confirmed that the 1WR1 rats were not undergoing significant insulitis at the time point we selected. Interestingly the 1WR1 treated rat had significantly increased insulin …

Conservation Grazing With Native Irish Cattle In High Nature Value Environments, Kilian Kelly

Theses

Marrying conservation objectives with farming practices is a challenging necessity in the current era of anthropogenically-driven biodiversity loss. Upland habitats created by traditional farming are havens for wildlife but face multiple threats, including overgrazing and abandonment. Extensive cattle farming in the uplands has been mooted as a useful conservation measure, but Irish evidence supporting this approach is lacking. This thesis examines home range, habitat preferences and activity budgets for Dexter cattle in an extensive upland setting in southwest Ireland. It investigates the effects of the grazing regime on EU-protected habitats and ground beetles. Free-ranging cattle grazed the site over three …

The Effects Of Gill Parasitization By An Undescribed Species Of Genus Aethycteron On The Reproductive Capabilities Of Etheostoma Kennicotti, The Stripetail Darter, Joy Garcia

Theses

The aim of this experiment was to determine what effect gill parasites have on reproduction in stripetail darters. Nearly 450 stripetail darters were collected from Estill Fork stream in Jackson County, Alabama. Their gonads were excised and the oocytes were photographed, counted, and then classified into one of four developmental stages. Their gill parasites, flatworms belonging to genus Aethycteron, were also removed and counted. Sexual dimorphism in size was discovered in the stripetails, as well as a high gonadosomatic index and large (2.0 mm) size of clutch oocytes. Reproductive maturity was observed in females as small as 19.3 mm in …

Remodeling Recovery : Understanding Social Conditioning And Communication During Adolescent Stages Of Development And How They Correlate With Substance Use Disorders, Douglas Stogner

Theses

This thesis uses a mix method research design to collect data from entry assessments and a survey administered to current residents of the His Way recovery center. The survey was also administered to a control group of participants that did not have substance use disorders (SUD). This study addresses the potential determinants that may be associated with SUD. The data from the entry assessment shows that the preference or drug of choice for clients in His Way recovery is consistent with compatible data collected in the United states. The results of the survey data suggest that people who suffer from …

An Implementation Of The Wireless Body Area Network Of Synchronized Inertial Sensors For Balance Testing, Harsha Ganegoda

Theses

In an aging society with increased lifespans, falls represent a serious risk for older adults. Balance is a key indicator of mobility, stability, and risk of falls. Wireless body area networks (WBAN) provide opportunity for unobtrusive monitoring and assessment of balance impairments and mobility. This thesis presents an implementation of WBAN system for monitoring of balance in older adults in smart homes. The system features two wireless inertial sensor nodes, a smart watch, an always-on home server, and an Android smartphone application. The sensors are placed on the user’s lower back and forehead. We designed and implemented custom smart inertial …

Development Of A Pzt Fiber Sensor Rosette For Structural Health Monitoring Using Lamb Wave Responses, Bao Chi Ha

Theses

Because of their electro-mechanical coupling property, Lead-Zirconate-Titanate (PZT) materials have been widely used for ultrasonic wave sensing and actuation in structural health monitoring applications. In this thesis, a PZT rosette sensor concept is proposed to conduct Lamb wave based damage detection in panel-like structures by exploring its best directional sensing capability. First, a directivity study was conducted to investigate sensing of flexural Lamb wave propagation using the d33 effect in a PZT fiber. Then, commercial off-the-shelf PZT fibers were polarized in-house in order to construct the PZT rosette in a rectangular configuration, in which three PZT fibers were oriented at …

The Impact Of Cognitive Style, Affectivity, And Mental Toughness On Non-Clinical Symptoms Of Stress, Anxiety, And Depression In College Students, Cristina M. CabañAs Garcia

Theses

The current study aimed to determine whether cognitive style, positive affect (PA), negative affect (NA), and mental toughness (MT) were distinct but related constructs as well as to study the nature of the relationships between the three constructs, and their impact on non-clinical symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression. Participants completed a paper-pencil version of a measure that assessed cognitive style as well as three self-report questionnaires via Qualtrics that assessed positive and negative affect, individual’s MT, and symptoms of non-clinical depression, anxiety, and life stress. Results indicated that MT was positively related to PA and negatively related to NA. …

Development Of A Composite Sustainability Index For Roadway Intersecttion Design Alternatives In The Uae, Maryam Juma Al-Kaabi

Theses

Many studies had been carried out to evaluate the sustainability of transportation systems, but little attention was given in these studies to the design of roadway intersections. The objective of this study was to define a framework to assess intersection sustainability from a road-user perspective and to develop a visual tool that helps decision-makers to support a more sustainable design of roadway intersections. Suitable sustainability indicators that would serve as elements in the built framework at the strategic and early planning level were extracted from the literature. The extracted indicators were utilized with relative weights to develop basic dimensional indices …

Narratives Of Creativity Among Social Care Educators In Irish Higher Education, Louisa Goss

Theses

Research on creativity in the delivery of social care highlights growing evidence of its importance for the wellbeing and quality of life of those in receipt of care, as well as benefits for the workforce. However, what is less well understood and overlooked in the literature is how creativity is conceptualised and operationalised in practice and education. This thesis attends to this gap in research from the perspective of social care educators. With the aim of deepening understanding of higher education teachers’ construction of creativity, the study explores small stories about creativity from six educators teaching into an undergraduate degree …

A Study Of Food Safety Training And Associated Barriers To Effective Training Outcomes, Diane Fox

Theses

The safety of food is fundamental to public health, businesses and wider society and effective food safety training is an essential element to ensure safe food reaches our consumers. This is true for all food business operators in all sectors of the food industry including food service, retail and manufacturing facilities. Not complying with food safety obligations can have a serious impact on human health and serious consequences for the food business operator. In 2015 the World Health Organisation reported that almost 1 in 10 people fall ill every year from eating contaminated food and 420,000 die as a result. …

Investigation Of Consumer Attitudes Towards Emerging Novel Food Processing Technologies In The Republic Of Ireland, Emine Berna Cibik

Theses

Food industry and governmental organisations are continuously working on innovative food processing technologies in order to produce safe foods without causing undesirable changes in the food products. Food is a very sensitive area so consumers are conservative in accepting food products produced from novel technologies compared to other products. Food is basic needs of humans and it is becoming more and more globalized recently, but public perceptions are not same in different countries. The aim of this research was to investigate consumer attitudes toward novel food processing technologies in Republic of Ireland. A quantitative research was conducted and data was …

Effect Of 3d Printed Tablet Shape On Drug Release Profile, Christina Gedeon

Theses

There is a growing interest in utilizing additive manufacturing (AM) as a manufacturing tool to develop oral tablets for personalized medicine. This ultimate goal in mind, this study explores the feasibility of extrusion-based fused deposition modeling (FDM) to 3D print oral tablets with tunable design to control drug release profile. Tablets are printed using poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) loaded with model drugs: acetaminophen and caffeine. Hot melt extrusion (HME) is used to fabricate PVA filaments loaded with acetaminophen and caffeine. These filaments are used to fabricate a range of tablets with varying designs to prepare immediate and delayed release tablets. Thermal …

Predictive Modeling Of Influenza In New England Using A Recurrent Deep Neural Network, Alfred Amendolara

Theses

Predicting seasonal variation in influenza epidemics is an ongoing challenge. To better predict seasonal influenza and provide early warning of pandemics, a novel approach to Influenza-Like-Illness (ILI) prediction was developed. This approach combined a deep neural network with ILI, climate, and population data. A predictive model was created using a deep neural network based on TensorFlow 2.0 Beta. The model used Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) nodes. Data was collected from the Center for Disease Control, the National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI) and the United States Census Bureau. These parameters were temperature, precipitation, wind speed, population size, vaccination rate and …

Dental Professionals Occupational Noise Exposure And Its Auditory And Non-Auditory Effects, Alexis Frees

Theses

The purpose of this study was to assess noise exposure and its auditory and non-auditory effects on workers in five clinical departments in the School of Dental Medicine at Rutgers Biomedical Health Sciences Campus in Newark, New Jersey. The study included environmental noise level measurement, dental instrument sound level measurement, personal noise dosimetry and a questionnaire survey to assess non-auditory effects. Octave band analysis of environmental noise levels showed that they are slightly above the standard noise criteria for clinics, and measurements from six dental instruments confirm that they contribute higher sound pressure levels at the frequencies of 1000, 2000, …

Lithium As A Possible Therapeutic Drug In Posttraumatic Brain Injury, Tulika Das

Theses

Lithium, a popular drug for treating mental health disorder has shown promising effect in recent research on traumatic brain injury (TBI). The mechanism of lithium for treating bipolar mood disorder is still not properly understood, but recent studies showed that lithium is neuroprotective in TBI. In my thesis, the neuroprotective effects of lithium were examined in primary neuronal culture and mild blunt injury using rodent model of Lateral Fluid Percussion Injury (LFPI). At first determination of the neuroprotective/toxicity effects of lithium in neuronal culture was done and observed that 0.5 - 1.0 mM concentrations were found to be neuroprotective as …

Micro Pipes – A Portable Integrated Platform For Electrochemical Sensing Using Essence Architecture, Hansin Kim

Theses

The field of microfluidics and lab-on-chip (LOC) technology has the potential to have a truly transformative effect in biological engineering. This includes areas such as single-cell analysis, environmental monitoring, regenerative medicine, and point-of-care diagnostics. Yet despite being the subject of intense research over the past two decades, LOC devices have not been widely adopted. It is increasingly evident that there is a need for an effective and adaptable integration strategy to realize the potential of this technology.

Presented in this thesis is a design for a chip-to-world interface that aims to improve integration while maintaining cost-efficiency and ease of fabrication. …

Widen People’S Career Opportunities With Ar Technology, Yuedan Shi

Theses

According to some existing research, a lot of people regret about their career selection due to the lack of sufficient knowledge and research when they made the decisions. By exploring the reasons, process, and factors that influence people’s decision-making, I designed an mobile application that help people find more career opportunities beyond their own living experience by leveraging AR recognition technology, and provided a platform for people to get sufficient information so that they could make a better choice for their future career.

Funsigns - An Interactive Educational Tool To Learn Sign Language, Shiqi Fang

Theses

This thesis aims to provide an educational and interactive tool where deaf children and their hearing parents can learn, bond, enjoy and interact with each other.

More than 90% of children which severe to profound hearing losses are born to normally hearing families. When parents are told that their child is deaf, their dreams are crushed and a grief response may be triggered (Weaver, K. A., & Starner, T, 2011). Due to this lack of knowledge when faced with a deaf family member for the first time, parents tend to base their perceptions on obsolete stereotypes which can greatly affect …

Towards An Intelligent System For Software Traceability Datasets Generation, Waleed Abdu Zogaan

Theses

Software datasets and artifacts play a crucial role in advancing automated software traceability research. They can be used by researchers in different ways to develop or validate new automated approaches. Software artifacts, other than source code and issue tracking entities, can also provide a great deal of insight into a software system and facilitate knowledge sharing and information reuse. The diversity and quality of the datasets and artifacts within a research community have a significant impact on the accuracy, generalizability, and reproducibility of the results and consequently on the usefulness and practicality of the techniques under study. Collecting and assessing …

Test Anxiety, Performance Expectancy, And Actual Performance On The Professional Licensure Examination Among Diploma Nursing Graduates, Melissa L. Mastorovich

Theses

This prospective study examined the relationship between test anxiety and performance on the National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses (NCLEX-RN) in diploma nursing graduates. A convenience sample of 77 diploma graduate nurses, who were eligible for licensure and volunteered to participate, was utilized.

Smartphone-Based Human Fatigue Detection In An Industrial Environment Using Gait Analysis, Swapnali Babasaheb Karvekar

Theses

Human fatigue due to repetitive and physically challenging jobs may result in poor performance and a Work-related Musculoskeletal Disorder (WMSD). Thus, the importance of being able to monitor fatigue to implement preventative interventions cannot be overstated. This study was designed to monitor fatigue through the development of a methodology that objectively classifies an individual’s level of fatigue in the workplace by utilizing the motion sensors embedded in smartphones. An experiment consisting of squatting tasks, primarily involving the lower extremity musculature, was conducted with 24 participants using a smartphone attached to their right shank. Using Borg’s Ratings of Perceived Exertion (RPE) …