Digital Commons Network^™

Major Religious Plants Of Rudraprayag District (Garhwal), Uttarakhand (India), Balwant Kumar

Ethnobotanical Leaflets

The Himalayas are one of the richest sources with respect to the occurrence of religious plants. These plants contribute to religious activities and are also important as food, fodder and medicine. Presented here are the descriptions of 21 religious plants which are traditionally used by local people in the Rudraprayag district (Garhwal) for various religious activities.

Catholic Institutions Of Higher Education And K-12 Schools Partnering For Social Justice: A Call For Scholarship, Joan L. Whipp, Martin Scanlan

Journal of Catholic Education

This article calls for scholarship on emerging partnerships between Catholic institutions of higher education and Catholic K-12 schools that aim at socially just schooling. Justice, ethical care, learning, and social entrepreneurship are explored as possible conceptual frameworks for this research.

A Shift Towards Gender Equality In Prosecutions: Realizing Legitimate Enforcement Of Crimes Committed Against Women In Municipal And International Criminal Law, Tamara F. Lawson

Southern Illinois University Law Journal

A new era of law enforcement has emerged recognizing the importance of punishing gender-specific violence.  This first wave of "gender-sensitive prosecutors" has changed the way crimes against women are handled in the criminal justice system.  The enactment of gender neutralizing laws and policies has dramatically improved the enforcement of crimes against women and attempts to end the era of impunity.  This Article addresses the changes in prosecutions and further considers international human rights treaties that require gender equality in law enforcement.

In criminal law, it is the willingness of a prosecutor to exercise his or her discretionary authority to file …

A Conversation With Philippe Descola, Eduardo Kohn

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

The distinguished anthropologist Philippe Descola has worked among the Jivaroan Achuar in Ecuador’s Amazon region, since the mid-1970s. Author of numerous influential books and publications, he holds a professorship at the Collège de France and is also Directeur d’études and Directeur du Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

How Do Animal Mitochondria Tolerate Water Stress?, Michael A. Menze, Steven C. Hand

Faculty Publications

The vast majority of animal species do not tolerate severe water stress, but the encysted embryo of the brine shrimp Artemia franciscana is an exceptionally useful organism to investigate physiological mechanisms for enduring extreme environmental insults. Any substantial reduction in cellular water poses a threat to survival. Nevertheless anhydrobiotic animals survive virtually complete loss of cellular water. The mechanisms that govern " life without water" (anhydrobiosis) are still not well understood. With certain exceptions, it seems that a recurring strategy for tolerating severe water loss involves the accumulation of both low molecular weight solutes (e.g., trehalose or other polyol) and …

Accelerated Destructive Degradation Test Planning, Ying Shi, Luis A. Escobar, William Q. Meeker

Faculty Publications

Accelerated destructive degradation tests (ADDTs) provide reliability information quickly. An ADDT plan specifies factor-level combinations of an accelerating variable (e.g., temperature) and evaluation time and the allocations of test units to these combinations. This article describes methods for finding good ADDT plans for an important class of destructive degradation models. First, a collection of optimum plans is derived. These plans minimize the large sample approximate variance of the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator of a specified quantile of the failure-time distribution. The general equivalence theorem is used to verify the optimality of these plans. Because an optimum plan is not robust …

Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln And The Great Secession Winter, 1860-1861, Harold Holzer

Civil War Book Review

Interview with Harold Holzer

Interviewed by Christopher Childers

Optimal Partitions For Eigenvalues, Blaise Bourdin, Dorin Bucur, Édouard Oudet

Faculty Publications

We introduce a new numerical method for approximating partitions of a domain minimizing the sum of Dirichlet-Laplacian eigenvalues of any order. First we prove the equivalence of the original problem and a relaxed formulation based on measures. Using this result, we build a numerical algorithm to approximate optimal configurations. We describe numerical experiments aimed at studying the asymptotic behavior of optimal partitions with large numbers of cells. © 2009 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Chemically Striking Regions On Mars And Stealth Revisited, Suniti Karunatillake, James J. Wray, Steven W. Squyres, G. Jeffrey Taylor, Olivier Gasnault, Scott M. Mclennan, William Boynton, M. R.El Maarry, James M. Dohm

Faculty Publications

The Mars Odyssey Gamma Ray Spectrometer Suite has yielded global chemical information for Mars. In this work, we establish regions of unusual chemical composition relative to average Mars primarily on the basis of Ca, Cl, Fe, H, K, Si, and Th. Using data from Mars Odyssey; the Mars Exploration Rovers; the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Imaging; and 3.5 cm and 1.35 cm radar observations from Earth, we examine a chemically striking ≈2.E6 km2 region and find it to overlap significantly with a radar Stealth region on Mars. It is remarkably enriched in Cl and depleted in Fe and Si (along with …

The Behavior Of Novae Light Curves Before Eruption, Andrew C. Collazzi, Bradley E. Schaefer, Limin Xiao, Ashley Pagnotta, Peter Kroll, Klaus Löchel, Arne A. Henden

Faculty Publications

In 1975, E. R. Robinson conducted the hallmark study of the behavior of classical nova light curves before eruption, and this work has now become part of the standard knowledge of novae. He made three points: 5 out of 11 novae showed pre-eruption rises in the years before eruption, one nova (V446 Her) showed drastic changes in the variability across eruptions, and all but one of the novae (excepting BT Mon) have the same quiescent magnitudes before and after the outburst. This work has not been tested since it came out. We have now tested these results by going back …

Impact Of Reproductive Effort On Survival Of Rio Grande Wild Turkey Meleagris Gallop Intermedia Hens In Texas, Bret A. Collier, Kyle B. Melton, Jason B. Hardin, Nova J. Silvy, Markus J. Peterson

Faculty Publications

The southeastern portion of the Edwards Plateau of Texas, historically a stronghold of Rio Grande wild turkeys Meleagris gallopavo intermedia, has seen the numbers of turkeys declining since the 1970s. Because hen survival is a key parameter affecting turkey population dynamics, we monitored radio-tagged Rio Grande wild turkey hens on the Edwards Plateau during 2001-2007 to compare survival during the breeding season in areas where turkey abundance has declined vs areas with stable populations. Breeding season survival was best predicted by a model that allowed variation during different periods of the reproductive season (initial nesting during 25 March 21 April, …

Existing Biomass Infrastructure And Theoretical Potential Biomass Production In The U.S, Jeremy R. Porter, Frank M. Howell, Philip B. Mason, Troy C. Blanchard

Faculty Publications

The recent and projected status of energy production and consumption in the U.S., resulting in substantial dependencies upon foreign oil, has continued to provide pressure on domestic energy security. All told, bio-energy systems, and biomass crop production in particular, will be important elements of national security, economic vitality, and public policy. Using biomass crop estimates based upon models developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, we identify potential biomass crop production zones within the contiguous 48 states of the United States using spatially centered analytic methods. The Midwest and the South regions of the United States are, by far, the …

Field Sensitivity To Lp Variations Of A Scatterer, Stephen P. Shipman

Faculty Publications

For the problem of diffraction of harmonic scalar waves by a lossless periodic slab scatterer, we analyze field sensitivity with respect to the material coefficients of the slab. The governing equation is the Helmholtz equation, which describes acoustic or electromagnetic fields. The main theorem establishes the variational (Fréchet) derivative of the scattered field measured in the H¹ (root-mean-square-gradient) norm as a function of the material coefficients measured in an L^p (p-power integral) norm, with 2 < p < ∞, as long as these coefficients are bounded above and below by positive constants and do not admit resonance. The derivative is Lipschitz continuous. We also establish the variational derivative of the transmitted energy with respect to the material coefficients in L^p. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Complete Issue

Journal of STEM Teacher Education

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Journal of STEM Teacher Education

No abstract provided.

Motivation While Designing In Engineering And Technology Education Impacted By Academic Preparation, Nathan Mentzer, Kurt Becker

Journal of STEM Teacher Education

The purpose of this study was to determine if high school students’ academic preparation was correlated with change in motivation during an engineering design challenge. The research was conducted in a high school classroom in which elements of engineering design were taught in a technology education context to eleventh-grade student from diverse academic backgrounds (measured by grade point average [GPA]). Participant motivation was assessed by the California Measure of Mental Motivation (CM3). The CM3 measures student motivation to apply critical thinking skills and reasoning to solve problems in five subscales: mental focus, learning orientation, creative problem solving, cognitive integrity, and …

Heme Reversibly Damps Period2 Rhythms In Mouse Suprachiasmatic Nucleus Explants, C. J. Guenthner, David Bickar, Mary E. Harrington

Psychology: Faculty Publications

The hypothalamic suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which in mammals serves as the master circadian pacemaker by synchronizing autonomous clocks in peripheral tissues, is composed of coupled single-cell oscillators that are driven by interlocking positive/negative transcriptional/translational feedback loops. Several studies have suggested that heme, a common prosthetic group that is synthesized and degraded in a circadian manner in the SCN, may modulate the function of several feedback loop components, including the REV-ERB nuclear receptors and PERIOD2 (PER2). We found that ferric heme (hemin, 3-100 μM) dose-dependently and reversibly damped luminescence rhythms in SCN explants from mice expressing a PER2::LUCIFERASE (PER2::LUC) fusion protein. …

Is Performance In Pre-Clinical Assessment A Good Predictor Of The Final Doctor Of Medicine Grade?, Nadia M. Al-Wardy, Syed G. Rizvi, Riad A. Bayoumi

Saudi Medical Journal

OBJECTIVES: To investigate if any correlation exists between students9 grades on their final doctor of Medicine (MD) assessment and their overall preclinical grade point average (GPA) and its component parts. METHODS: Student data available from the Deanship of Admissions and Registration were analyzed. Pearson correlation coefficient was obtained to assess the degree of linear relationship between performance in the preclinical and the MD assessment of 529 students who graduated from the College of Medicine and Health Sciences, Sultan Qaboos University, Al-Khoud, Oman from June 1998 to June 2005. Simple and multiple regression analyses were performed to evaluate individual and combined …

Intervention Study Of Needle Stick Injury In Iran, Sinao Mobasherizadeh, Sayed A. Ebneshahidi, Nazafarin A. Mohammadi, Fereshteh Abazarie

Saudi Medical Journal

In manuscript “Intervention study of needle stick injury in Iran” Saudi Medical Journal 2005; Vol. 26 (8): 1225-1227, the author9s name should have appeared as follows: Sina Mobasherizadeh, Sayed A. Ebneshahidi, Nazafarin A. Mohammadi, Fereshteh Abazari

Identification And Genotyping Of Bacteria From Paired Vaginal And Rectal Samples From Pregnant Women Indicates Similarity Between Vaginal And Rectal Microflora, Nabil Abdullah El Aila, Inge Tency, Geert Claeys, Hans Verstraelen, Bart Saerens, Guido Lopes Dos Santos Santiago, Ellen De Backer, Piet Cools, Marleen Temmerman, Rita Verhelst

Obstetrics and Gynaecology, East Africa

Background: The vaginal microflora is important for maintaining vaginal health and preventing infections of the reproductive tract. The rectum has been suggested as the major source for the colonisation of the vaginal econiche.

Methods: To establish whether the rectum can serve as a possible bacterial reservoir for colonisation of the vaginal econiche, we cultured vaginal and rectal specimens from pregnant women at 35-37 weeks of gestation, identified the isolates to the species level with tRNA intergenic length polymorphism analysis (tDNA-PCR) and genotyped the isolates for those subjects from which the same species was isolated simultaneously vaginally and rectally, by RAPD-analysis. …

A Bandwidth Aware Modification To The Dsr Routing Protocol For Wireless Mesh Networks, Mustafa Ramadhan, Mark Davis

Conference papers

This work proposes a bandwidth aware cross-layer modification to the DSR routing protocol. We include the Access Efficiency Factor (AEF) parameter in addition to the hop-count in the routing discovery mechanism. AEF is a measure to the local availability of bandwidth at a node. Employing the AEF as a metric in the routing discovery mechanism attempts to avoid routing through a congested area in the network. In this modification, we impose a limit on the hop-count in order to control the delay time in the network. The path selection procedure operates by finding a path with the highest minimum AEF …

Ict Innovation Diffusion In Small Logistics Service Providers: An Empirical Survey, Pietro Evangelista, Edward Sweeney, Claudia-Maria Wagner

Conference papers

For companies competing in highly dynamic markets, innovation is considered a fundamental component of a successful business as it allows companies to sustain profit margins, sales growth and reduce competitors’ pressures. Information and communication technology (ICT) is essential innovation enablers especially in service companies. The focus of the paper is on the analysis of the role of ICT in innovation processes of small third-party logistics service providers (3PLs). On the basis of quantitative evidence emerging from a recent survey carried out on the Italian 3PL market, the paper analyses how ICT is used to support innovation and the factors the …

Supply Chain Learning:The Role Of Games, John Cotter, Gerry Forster, Edward Sweeney

Practitioner Journals

No abstract provided.

The Ecology Of The Peaks Of Otter Salamander (Plethodon Hubrichti) In Sympatry With The Eastern Red-Backed Salamander (Plethodon Cinereus), Norman Reichenbach, Andrew Kniowski

Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Peaks of Otter Salamander, Plethodon hubrichti, is found along a 19 km length of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia, USA, often in sympatry with the Eastern Red-backed Salamander, P. cinereus. In a sympatric area of Bedford County, Virginia, we conducted a mark-recapture study on a 10 × 10 m site. Surface densities of salamanders increased as the number of days without precipitation prior to a collection event increased. This suggests vertical movements in response to surface moisture. When salamanders returned to the surface after rain, individuals appeared to “shuffle” between rocks and likely, leaf litter. That is, we were …

Ict Usage In Microfinance Institutions In Uganda, Joseph Kaumba Ssewanyana

The African Journal of Information Systems

Microfinance institutions (MFIs) are always often faced with high operating costs to provide financial services to the poor people and Small and Medium Enterprises. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) has been found to promote the dual objective of microfinance - sustainability and outreach to the poor people. Using a quantitative survey and descriptive research approach, this paper has established the extent to which ICT has been used in the microfinance institutions in Uganda. Despite the barriers, ICT usage in MFIs has been on the rise; and different applications and technologies have been adopted by some MFIs to control costs, create …

Preface, Robert Simon

The Kennesaw Tower Undergraduate Foreign Language Research Journal

Preface to Volume II.

Electronic-Supply Chain Information Security: A Framework For Information, Alizera Bolhari

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Over the last few years, the materials and distribution management has developed into a broader strategic approach known as electronic supply chain management by means of information technology. This paper attempts to visibly describe supply chain management information security concepts which are necessary for managers to know about. So, the depth of information presented in this paper is calibrated for managers, not technical security employees or agents. Global supply chains are exposed to diverse types of risks that rise along with increasing globalization. Electronic supply chains will be more vulnerable from information security (IS) aspect among other types of supply …

Exploring The Relationship Between Organizational Culture And Information Security Culture, Joo S. Lim, Shanton Chang, Sean Maynard, Atif Ahmad

Australian Information Security Management Conference

Managing Information Security is becoming more challenging in today’s business because people are both a cause of information security incidents as well as a key part of the protection from them. As the impact of organizational culture (OC) on employees is significant, many researchers have called for the creation of information security culture (ISC) in organizations to influence the actions and behaviour of employees towards better organizational information security. Although researchers have called for the creation of ISC to be embedded in organizations, nonetheless, literature suggests that little past research examining the relationship between the nature of OC and ISC. …

Number 51 (December 2009), Southern Fishes Council

Southeastern Fishes Council Proceedings

(December 2009) - Post-impoundment Changes in the Cyprinid Fauna of the Lower Sabine River, Louisiana and Texas By Royal D. Suttkus and Maurice F. Mettee

The Desperate Dozen: Southeastern Freshwater Fishes on the Brink. By Bernard R. Kuhajda, Anna L. George, and James D. Williams

Prioritizing Areas of the Conasauga River Sub-basin in Georgia and Tennessee for Preservation and Restoration. By Seth J. Wenger, Megan M. Hagler, and Byron J. Freeman.

State Southeastern Fishes Council State Reports

Minutes, Business Meeting, 34th Annual Meeting, Southeastern Fishes Council

2008 Treasurer's Report for the Southeastern Fishes Council

Prioritizing Areas Of The Conasauga River Sub-Basin In Georgia And Tennessee For Preservation And Restoration, Seth J. Wenger, Megan M. Hagler, Byron J. Freeman

Southeastern Fishes Council Proceedings

No abstract provided.