Digital Commons Network^™

Predicting Systemic Confidence, Stephanie Inez Falke

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

Using a mixed method approach, this study explored which educational factors predicted systemic confidence in master’s level marital and family therapy (MFT) students, and whether or not the impact of these factors was influenced by student beliefs and their perception of their supervisor’s beliefs about the value of systemic practice. One hundred and twenty graduate students in Commission on Accreditation for Marriage and Family Therapy Education-accredited (COAMFT) programs completed an online survey that assessed their training experiences, beliefs about systemic practice and perceptions of confidence. Quantitative findings revealed that students who reported greater research expectations in their program, obtained more …

Pulmonary Vasoconstrictor Reactivity Following Intermittent Hypoxia, Jessica Snow

Biomedical Sciences ETDs

Sleep apnea (SA) affects as many as 20% of the adult population in the United States. It elicits intermittent hypoxia (IH) and causes pulmonary hypertension (PH), however the mechanisms of this PH have not been well studied. IH has been shown to cause polycythemia, pulmonary vascular remodeling and increases in vasoconstrictor reactivity. CO2 supplementation may be protective in the development of PH, therefore we assessed effects of IH with and without CO2 supplementation on indices of PH and pulmonary vasoconstrictor reactivity. IH with CO2 supplementation resulted in eucapnic IH (E-IH) and the lack of polycythemia or vascular remodeling. However, E-IH …

Decreased Functional Connectivity With Aging And Disease Duration In Schizophrenia, Christopher Abbott

Biomedical Sciences ETDs

Objective: Progressive brain changes late in the disease course of schizophrenia may be detected with functional connectivity. This study compared functional connectivity between patients with schizophrenia late in the disease course with matched healthy controls.

Method: Subjects included 18 patients with schizophrenia with minimum 15 years disease duration and 28 matched healthy controls from the MIND Clinical Imaging Consortium database. The functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm was the auditory oddball task. We used independent components analysis to identify temporally cohesive but spatially distributed neural networks. We selected the executive control and default mode networks for additional analysis. The temporal course …

Adult Neural Stem/Progenitor Cells In Response To Their Microenvironment: Proliferation, Differentiation, And Migration, Basam Z. Barkho

Biomedical Sciences ETDs

The plasticity of adult neural stem/progenitor cells allows a differential response to a variety of environmental cues. Over the past decade, significant research efforts have been devoted into understanding the regulation of neural stem/progenitor cells due to their promising potential for cell replacement therapies in adult neurological diseases. It has been demonstrated that after brain injury both endogenous and grafted neural stem/progenitor cells have the ability to proliferate to expand their number, migrate long distances to the lesioned site and differentiate into new specific neurons to replace the ones that have been lost. All these procedure are regulated by extrinsic …

Molecular Dynamics Of Adenovirus Type 3 And 7 Infections In Military And Civilian Populations In The United States, Laura M. Dickson

Biomedical Sciences ETDs

Human adenoviruses (HAdV) are major causative agents of acute respiratory disease (ARD) worldwide. Military recruits and children are two of the populations most susceptible to HAdV infection in the United States. Infections by species B serotypes, including HAdV-3 and HAdV-7, are often associated with some of the most severe clinical manifestations of respiratory disease. In 1996, the production of the HAdV vaccine that was administered to US military recruits was discontinued. Since then, HAdV-associated ARD has reemerged in military training facilities nationwide compromising readiness and deployability of troops and causing significant financial burden to the Department of Defense (DoD). The …

Labor Law Reforms: China’S Response To Challenges Of Globalization, Yunqiu Zhang

Peace and Conflict Studies

The post-Mao years witnessed vigorous labor law reform efforts in China, which can be partly understood in terms of globalization, economic and legal. In the economic globalization, China was increasingly integrated into the world economic system and exposed to international pressures to reform its traditional labor system and follow internationally-accepted labor rules. In other words, the economic globalization created the need for labor law reforms in China. In the legal globalization, China was apparently the recipient or borrower of foreign legal ideas including ideas about labor legislation. These ideas inspired the Chinese to build a new legal system concerning labor.

China’S Evolving “Double-Track” Socio-Legal System In Conflict Resolution, Jieli Li

Peace and Conflict Studies

Contemporary China's sociolegal control system is built upon a unique organizational arrangement which differs not only from other countries in the world but also from its own past. The very core of this organizational arrangement is what I define as a “double-track” socio-legality with laws and codified regulation mainly concentrated on economic and commercial sectors with the ruling party focusing its administrative control on political and ideological sectors. This institutional context is critical to understanding the nature of social control mechanism in China. The fact is that with all the laws and regulations promulgated in recent years, the newly developed …

An Emerging South-South Coalition Strategy: China, Africa And Latin America, Tricia Gray

Peace and Conflict Studies

Concomitant with the astronomical rise of China in international politics, there has been an increased frequency and intensity of foreign relations between Global South states. This research attempts to, first, illuminate these largely overlooked foreign policy activities, and, second, to evaluate the implications of the trends. A South-South strategy is based on improving the position of developing countries in multilateral organizations, struggling against international marginalization, enhancing economic and technical cooperation, and challenging hegemonism and imperialism. This study concludes that a South-South coalition framework is a useful model for understanding Global South states’ foreign policy behavior and for addressing future conflicts.

Public Use, Public Choice, And The Urban Growth Machine: Competing Political Economies Of Takings Law, Daniel A. Lyons

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Kelo decision has unleashed a tidal wave of legislative reforms ostensibly seeking to control eminent domain abuse. But as a policy matter, it is impossible to determine what limits should be placed upon local government without understanding how cities grow and develop, and how local governments make decisions to shape the communities over which they preside. This Article examines takings through two very different models of urban political economy: public choice theory and the quasi-Marxist Urban Growth Machine model. These models approach takings from diametrically opposite perspectives, and offer differing perspectives at the margin regarding proper and improper condemnations. …

Front Matter, Journal Of Law Reform

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Front matter for Volume 42, Issue 2 of the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform.

Penalizing Poverty: Making Criminal Defendants Pay For Their Court-Appointed Counsel Through Recoupment And Contribution, Helen A. Anderson

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Over thirty years ago the United States Supreme Court upheld an Oregon statute that allowed sentencing courts, with a number of important procedural safeguards, to impose on indigent criminal defendants the obligation to repay the cost of their court appointed attorneys. The practice of ordering recoupment or contribution (application fees or co-pays) of public defender attorney's fees is widespread, although collection rates are unsurprisingly low. Developments since the Court's decision in Fuller v. Oregon show that not only is recoupment not cost-effective, but it too easily becomes an aspect of punishment, rather than legitimate cost recovery. In a number of …

The Acute Effects Of Whole Body Vibration On Isometric Mid-Thigh Pull Performance, W. Guy Hornsby, Mark A. South, Ashley Kavanaugh, Andrew S. Layne, G. Gregory Haff, William A. Sands, Marco Cardinale, Michael W. Ramsey, Michael H. Stone

ETSU Faculty Works

Acute exposure to vibration has been suggested to produce transient increases in muscular strength (1,2,8), vertical jump displacement (4,8), and power output (2,6,7) recorded while performing various tasks. It has been hypothesized that the reported acute vibration induced increases in performance occur as a result of alterations in neuromuscular stimulation (1,3,4). Specifically, most studies have ascribed the observed improvements to the likeliness of Whole Body Vibration (WBV) in producing a “tonic vibration reflex” (TVR) in which the primary nerve endings of the Ia afferents of the muscle spindle are activated. This is thought to result in the excitation of the …

Table Of Contents, Volume 8, Number 1, 2009, Editorial Board

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

Table of Contents for Volume Eight, Issue Number One.

Can We Get Nurses To Stay? A Qualitative Study To Evaluate The Effectiveness Of A Formal Mentoring Program In An Acute Care Health System, Eileen M. Willits

Dissertations

This qualitative phenomenological case study was designed to investigate the affect that a formal mentoring program had on job satisfaction including a nurse's intent to stay with their current employer and their intent to stay in the nursing profession. The research was intended to determine whether mentoring programs could be used to help avoid the affect of the upcoming predicted nursing shortage in the acute care hospital.

The findings were based on the results of a sample of twelve nurses who had voluntarily signed up to take part in a formal mentoring program sponsored by the staff development department of …

Three Pirates Earn Pbc Volleyball All-Academic Team Honors, Armstrong State University

Armstrong Athletics: Women's Volleyball News (Archived)

Three Pirates Earn PBC Volleyball All-Academic Team Honors. The Armstrong Atlantic State volleyball squad placed three players on the Peach Belt Conference's Volleyball All-Academic Teams, released today by conference officials.

Unifying America: The Use Of American Propaganda During World War I, Maxwell Riley Woodcock

Communication Studies

This project offers a historical look at the Committee on Public Information (CPI), its leader George Creel, and the uses of propaganda in America during the First World War. The paper discusses Creel's role in creating a propaganda machine that influenced the beliefs of millions of Americans. The last section analyzes what critics thought of the American government after they propagandized the American people.

Finding Words In Alphabet Soup: Inference On Freeform Character Recognition For Historical Scripts, Nicholas Howe, Shaolei Feng, R. Manmatha

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

This paper develops word recognition methods for historical handwritten cursive and printed documents. It employs a powerful segmentation-free letter detection method based upon joint boosting with histograms of gradients as features. Efficient inference on an ensemble of hidden Markov models can select the most probable sequence of candidate character detections to recognize complete words in ambiguous handwritten text, drawing on character n" role="presentation" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: normal; font-size: 16.2px; word-spacing: normal; overflow-wrap: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; border: 0px; position: relative;">n-gram and physical …

Material Sustainability, Jessica Meadows, Natasha Morris

Architectural Engineering

This paper addresses the sustainability of the materials used to construct buildings today. Timber, concrete and steel are analyzed for carbon output, cost, and recyclable-ability.

An Abridged Visual History Of Graphic Design, Tierney Cunningham

Art and Design

This is a documentation of the research, design methods, and production of “An Abridged Visual History of Graphic Design.” First the documentation explains the choice to create an illustrated design history book. Then, it describes the research methods and findings of the process, as well as a detailed description of the design decisions made for each graphic movement covered. It provides in-progress illustrations and covers the production methods for the two final books.

Neo-Orthodoxy In Academic Freedom, J. Peter Byrne

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This review essay analyzes two recent books that advance neo-orthodox theories of academic freedom: Matthew Finkin and Robert Post, For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom, and Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time. Both books develop principles articulated in the American Association of University Professors 1915 Declaration, which emphasize the role of faculty in advancing knowledge and the need to insulate professional evaluation of academic work from lay, political interference. This review essay defends the return to protection of the scholarly search for truth as the touchstone of academic freedom, offers critiques of the authors’ …

Fighting Freestyle: The First Amendment, Fairness, And Corporate Reputation, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

There are three distinct groups who might want to engage in speech about commercial entities or to constrain those commercial entities from making particular claims of their own. Competitors may sue each other for false advertising, consumers may sue businesses, and government regulators may impose requirements on what businesses must and may not say. In this context, this Article will evaluate a facially persuasive but ultimately misguided claim about corporate speech: that because consumers regularly get to say nasty things about corporations under the lax standards governing defamation of public figures, corporations must be free to make factual claims subject …

And They Lived Happily For All Eternity, Kyndra Price

Communication Studies

This paper focuses on the four novels of Twilight and what it is about it that has made it become so popular. Also looks into Stephenie Meyer's religion, Mormonism, and the influences and parallels from it in Twilight.

Water Conservation's Role In California Water Transfers, Charles M. Burt

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

This paper describes various irrigation district water transfer projects. Water transfers have been of many types, including agriculture to agriculture, agriculture to urban, and agriculture to environment. In each case that will be described, the unique circumstances of each district will be described. Typical actions include developing a water balance to determine if “wet water” truly exists for conservation, then identifying the sources of that wet water. Subsequent actions include developing designs that will conserve the water, achieving board approval, and constructing and implementing the conservation measures.

Annual Pastoral Land Condition Report: 2008 / 2009 Financial Year, Paul E. Novelly, Philip Thomas

Natural resources published reports

This report to the Pastoral Lands Board of Western Australia presents information for the 2008/2009 financial year. The report also satisfies the Commissioner of Soil and Land Conservation’s obligation to provide the Pastoral Lands Board with a report on the current condition of land under pastoral leases in the State.

The report provides background information on pastoral leases, seasonal conditions and pastoral land condition, using information from the Bureau of Meteorology, the Western Australian Rangeland Monitoring System (WARMS) and the pastoral lease inspection program of the Department of Agriculture & Food Western Australia (DAFWA).

Pastoral leases cover 87.4 million hectares …

Skeleton Weed In Western Australia, Pocket Guide, State Skeleton Weed Committee, Department Of Agriculture And Food, Western Australia, Agriculture Protection Board

Bulletins 4000 -

The Skeleton Weed Program is a coordinated approach to eradicating skeleton weed in Western Australia. It is run jointly by the State Skeleton Weed Committee, the Department of Agriculture and the Agriculture Protection Board. It is funded through the skeleton weed levy collected from grain growers each harvest, and pooled in the Skeleton Weed Eradication Trust Fund.

Skeleton weed is targeted as a declared plant as it can drastically reduce crop yields (more than 1 tonne/ha in cereals) by competing for moisture and nutrients, mainly nitrogen. Its wiry stems impede headers and the sticky latex they contain cause machinery to …

A Market Assessment Of Greenhouse Products And Associated Rural Development In Semi-Arid Regions Of Mexico, Edgar Arturo Quevedo-Martinez

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Greenhouse products represent a feasible alternative for small producers compared to open-field production. Using a combination of enterprise budgeting, capital investment analysis and optimization, we found that under most of the conditions investigated the six different crops investigated are profitable. Greenhouse production has the added benefits of conserving scarce land and water resources, potentially reducing production and market risk, and offering consumers healthful products of good quality, that can contribute to the development of the local economy. One problem is that a larger up-front investment is often essential.;This study focused on three main areas: (1) A production and market assessment. …

A Software Response To Hard Drive Encryption, Justin John Mccarty Iii

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Current computer forensic practices primarily advise analysts to review and search all digital evidence within designated labs. This practice does not take into account the possibility of encryption software being present on the suspect machine. As a result, possible evidence may become unrecoverable to the investigator. This paper will review the current standard operating procedures used by law enforcement, complications with current procedures with regard to encryption, and the design of a free to use utility for law enforcement to facilitate live analysis.

In Situ Structural And Compositional Analysis Using Rheed Electrons Induced X-Rays, Sandeep Chandril

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The use of x-ray fluorescence (XRF) for in-situ chemical analysis of a sample surface using an electron gun for reflection high energy electron diffraction (RHEED) analysis has been studied by many groups and the technique is usually referred to as RHEED-total-refection-angle x-ray spectroscopy (RHEED-TRAXS), as the angle for x-ray detection was set close to the angle of total internal reflection.;In the current work, RHEED-TRAXS was developed as a thin film structural characterization technique based on the principles similar to the analysis of a multilayered structure by angular-dependent total-reflection x-rays. Initial experiments utilizing the technique for relative compositional analysis have also …

Cryptic Subtelomeric Rearrangements And Studies Of Telomere Length, Jasen Lee Wise

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Study One. An estimated five percent of individuals with unexplained mental retardation (MR) have chromosomally unbalanced subtelomere regions. Around half of these individuals inherited the imbalance from a parent with a balanced rearrangement. The frequency of carriers for cryptic balanced translocations is unknown. To determine this frequency, blood samples received from 565 out of 978 phenotypically normal, unrelated individuals were examined using fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) probes to analyze all subtelomere regions. No balanced subtelomeric rearrangements were identified. The frequency of balanced cryptic translocations in the general population was estimated to be 1/8,000 from the literature. However, three females …

Characteristics Of Subordinate Follicles Following Removal Of The Dominant Follicle: Induction Of Selection, Matthew Dean

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

In mammals, ovarian follicles begin as primordial follicles. Over time these follicles are gradually activated and begin growth. As they proceed, granulosal and thecal cells are acquired. Eventually, the follicles become dependent on FSH for survival. Two or three times each cycle, a transient increase in FSH allows a cohort of follicles, including the follicle that will ovulate, to continue growing. However, these follicles secrete inhibin and estradiol, which suppress FSH secretion. Eventually, all the follicles of the cohort undergo atresia due to the declining concentrations of FSH, except for the follicle which has the potential to ovulate. This follicle …