Digital Commons Network^™

Vitamin D And Athletic Performance: A Critical Assessment For Coaches And Athletes, Lauren Mcguigan

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In addition to the well-established role of vitamin D in bone health, there is evidence to suggest that vitamin D may also be associated with the prevention of a wide array of non-skeletal, autoimmune, and chronic diseases. In addition, correlational studies suggest that maintaining a sufficient vitamin D status may positively influence athletic performance indicators, namely strength, power, speed, cardiorespiratory fitness, reaction time, coordination, and body composition. However, there is a lack of consensus among the Institute of Medicine and various vitamin D researchers in defining ideal vitamin D concentrations for both health and performance related benefits. Although this controversy …

Ph Modulation Of Fibril Dissociation And Copper Binding Properties Of The Prion Protein, Xu Qi

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The cellular form of prion protein (PrP^C) is a cell-surface glycoprotein attached to lipid rafts via its glycosylphosphatidylinositol anchor. Conversion of PrP^C to its "scrapie" conformer (PrP^Sc, the fibrillar form) constitutes the key event of the etiology of prion diseases. Fibril dissociation is necessary for efficient conversion and continued propagation of the disease state. Recent studies have revealed that conversion occurs along the endocytic pathway. To better understand the dissociation process, we have investigated the effect of low pH on the stability of recombinant prion fibrils. We show that under conditions that mimic the endocytic …

Spreadsheet Activities With Conditional Progression And Automatically Generated Feedback And Grades, Thomas C. Juster

School of Geosciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Spreadsheet activities following the Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum (SSAC) model have been modified using VBA programming to automatically generate feedback, calculate grades, and ensure that students complete them in a linear fashion. Feedback is based not only on the value of cells, but also on the formulas used to compute the values. These changes greatly ease the burden of grading on instructors, and help students more quickly master tasks and concepts by providing immediate and directed feedback to their answers. Students performed significantly better on the new spreadsheet activities compared to traditional SSAC versions, with 87% achieving perfect scores of …

Bankruptcy, Backwards: The Problem Of Quasi-Sovereign Debt, Anna Gelpern

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Feature considers the debts of quasi-sovereign states in light of proposals to let them file for bankruptcy protection. States that have ceded some but not all sovereign prerogatives to a central government face distinct challenges as debtors. It is unhelpful to analyze these challenges mainly through the bankruptcy lens. State bankruptcy posits an institutional fix for a problem that remains theoretically undefined and empirically contested. I suggest a way of mapping the problem that does not work back from a solution. I highlight the implications of sovereign immunity, immortality, concurrent authority, macroeconomic policy, and democratic accountability for quasi-sovereign debt …

The Problem About The Nature Of Law Vis-À-Vis Legal Rationality Revisited: Towards An Integrative Jurisprudence, Imer Flores

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this paper the author argues, following Frederick Schauer, that attempting to move theoretically from-the-necessary-to-the-important may hinder our understanding of law. He further argues that attempting to move from-the-important-to-the-necessary may well be a more promising route for advancing our understanding of law as an interpretive practice which is not merely important or valuable but morally important or valuable and even necessary, as Ronald Dworkin has advocated. The authors argument also draws on the insights of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who by discussing the important, but apparently neither necessary nor sufficient aspects of legal practice, integrated both logic and experience into …

The Limits Of Government Regulation Of Science, John D. Kraemer, Lawrence O. Gostin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The recent controversy over the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity’s (NSABB) request that Science and Nature redact key parts of two papers on transmissible avian (H5N1) influenza reveal a troubled relationship between science and security. While NSABB’s request does not violate the First Amendment, efforts to censor the scientific press by force of law would usually be an unconstitutional prior restraint of the press absent a compelling state interest. The constitutional validity of conditions on grant funding to require pre-publication review of unclassified research is unclear but also arguably unconstitutional.

The clearest case where government may restrict publication is …

Another Day, Another Donut: Political Economy, Agency, And Food In A Montanan Homeless Shelter, Jacqueline Devereaux Semmens

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Despite widespread undernutrition among the homeless, there has been little anthropological research on the experience of food insecurity in this population. Between 20 and 40 percent of the homeless population is undernourished and one third regularly miss meals (Gelberg 1995). This thesis addresses the significant problem of food insecurity in the homeless from a political economic perspective, analyzing how larger social structures influence the individual person. Fifteen residents at a shelter in Missoula, MT were interviewed about their dietary practices and experience of social service programs. The macro-social level influences the diet of the individual in two important ways: first, …

Bison Conservation In The Northern Great Plains, Michel Thomas Kohl

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Temperate grasslands are the least protected ecosystem in the world. In North America, only < 4% of tallgrass prairie, 64% of mixed-grass prairie, and 66% of shortgrass prairie are intact. Historically, grazing played an important role in maintaining prairie landscapes through nutrient cycling and the diversification of vegetation structure and composition. Within grasslands, the plains bison (Bos bison) was the most numerous and influential grazer. However, by 1900 bison were reduced to ¡Ü 1,000 animals throughout North America. Today, bison are scattered throughout their historical range, numbering > 500,000 individuals. Recent questions have surfaced regarding the success of this effort, however, because < 21,000 plains bison are managed as conservation herds (n = 62) and 8% of those herds are managed on areas of > 2,000 km2. In addition, >100,000,000 cattle now graze rangelands in the U.S. and Canada leading to questions regarding the ecological significance of replacing bison with livestock. Our objectives were to increase knowledge regarding the ecological similarities between bison and cattle, and to determine how both species can be managed to mimic ecological patterns that approximate historical bison populations. We used behavioral observations, movement analyses, and Resource Selection Function (RSF) analyses too quantify …

Characterization Of A Cardboard Recycling Facility's Plastic Waste For Beneficial Use, Tova Sardot

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

An issue with old cardboard container (OCC) recycling is the generation of a plastic waste that currently either gets land-filled or burned. A Wandel screen, a common process unit, generates 35% of overall rejects that contain 75% of the facility's total plastic output. Plastic-rich Wandel wastes have not been well characterized. This study evaluated the plastic waste stream for engineering new, second-life products. Wandel wastes were composed typically of hot melt adhesives (37%), polypropylene (32%), polyethylene (17%), and polystyrene (9%). Proportions varied 10% or less in each polymer category. The plastic waste was compounded, milled and injection molded into test …

Coming To The Surface: The Environment, Health, And Culture In Butte, Montana, Stacie Lynn Barry

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Butte is a small town in southwest Montana that was profoundly shaped by over a century of mining and smelting activities. Today, Butte is a post-industrial city that is the focal point of America's largest Superfund site as well as the nation's largest National Historic District. There are two types of remediation occurring in Butte: environmental and cultural. Environmental remediation occurs throughout the city, most notably at the operable units of the Butte Superfund sites. This remediation does not restore the environment to its original state but instead reclaims it to a level of risk deemed acceptable by the EPA. …

Composition, Distribution, And Conservation Of The Herpetofauna Of Santa Barbara Mountain, Honduras, Alicia Marie Ward

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Santa Barbara Mountain is an important and unique ecosystem in Honduras because of its topography and high proportion of endemic species. Despite its prospects for valuable discoveries and the profusion of threats to its biodiversity, there is almost no scientific information about Santa Barbara Mountain. This study is the first systematic investigation of hepetofauna species on the mountain. Research objectives included inventorying of the reptile and amphibian species present on Santa Barbara Mountain, identifying locations and microhabitat types where each species can be found, and determining if the amphibian disease chytridiomycosis is present and in which locations. A community education …

Consequences Of Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptor Activation In Steady-State And Inflammatory Dendritic Cells, Thomas Simones

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) is a steroid-like transcription factor that mediates the toxicity of various environmental pollutants, including 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) and TCDD-like compounds. Exposure to environmentally relevant levels of TCDD and TCDD congeners has been shown to cause immune suppression, yet the mechanisms underlying TCDD-induced immune suppression remain poorly understood. Dendritic cells (DCs) are professional antigen presenting cells (APCs) that play an integral role in both innate and adaptive immune responses. DCs constitutively express AhR and represent a highly sensitive immune cell population to AhR activation by environmental pollutants. In a murine inflammatory bone marrow-derived DC (BMDC) model, AhR …

Forgotten Sepulchers: The Uninscribed Tombs In The Valley Of The Kings In Luxor, Egypt, Roselyn Campbell

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The elaborately decorated tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt, have captured the imagination of scholars and tourists alike for thousands of years. Yet despite the attention lavished on these tombs, they are outnumbered in the Valley of the Kings uninscribed tombs that have been largely ignored. Excavations in several of the uninscribed tombs have demonstrated that although their walls may be bare, the tombs are certainly not empty, and a variety of finds ranging from scattered funerary objects and human remains to several nearly intact burials of high officials have been uncovered. This thesis will assemble …

Geoarchaeological Assessment Of Horseshoe Cave (24rb1094, Rosebud County, Montana, Norman Bernard Smyers

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Horseshoe Cave is located south of Ashland, Montana and at the northern end of the Powder River Basin. Its earliest documented human use and occupation dates to 2,000 years before the present. Evidence of that past use and occupation includes diagnostic bone and stone tools, hearth features and animal remains. The geoarchaeological investigation of this sandstone cave site reveals the cave host rocks to be sandstones of the Tongue River Member of the Early Tertiary Fort Union Formation. Results of the geoarchaeological inquiry demonstrate that a difference in the calcite cementation between the two host sandstone units is the leading …

How Ch-Paa-Qn Got It's Name: A Sixth-Grade Geography Curriculum Unit For Indian Education For All In Montana, Mary Elizabeth Nellis

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Nellis, Mary, M.A., Summer 2013 Geography How Ch-Paa-Qn Got Its Name: A Sixth-Grade Geography Curriculum Unit for Indian Education for All in Montana Chair: Sarah J. Halvorson This thesis reports on the design and implementation of a sixth-grade geography curriculum based on Montana House Bill 412 (HB412), a bill whereby the legislature mandated the removal of the word “squaw” from public places in Montana. The framework for this unit is founded on place-based education principles and is tailored to fit within the concepts of Indian Education for All as mandated in the Montana State Constitution. Furthermore, as a place-based unit …

Impacts Of Mountain Pine Beetle Outbreak On Biogeochemical Cycling In A High Elevation Whitebark Pine Ecosystem, Megan Keville

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Ecological disturbances can significantly impact biogeochemical cycles in terrestrial ecosystems, but the effects of the current widespread mountain pine beetle outbreak on ecosystem processes like carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycling are poorly understood. This is especially true in high elevation whitebark pine (WbP) (Pinus albicaulis) ecosystems of western North America. WbP has been described as a keystone species, providing a critical food source and regulating hydrologic regimes. However, widespread WbP mortality caused by the mountain pine beetle drives structural and physiological changes in WbP forests, which could result in shifts in pools and fluxes of C and N within …

La Fotografía De Un País En Tres Obras De Laura Restrepo, Nancy Pinzón

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

La violencia en Colombia es un problema que lleva más de sesenta años. Siempre se ha hablado de la “Época de la violencia” como los años de la guerra entre conservadores y liberales que se inició con el asesinato del líder liberal Jorge Eliecer Gaitán en abril de 1948. Sin embargo, esa época no tuvo un final, ella fue simplemente la introducción a una forma de vida a la cual los colombianos se han acostumbrado, la violencia. Esta violencia sin tregua ha sido tema importante en la narrativa contemporánea. Desde los años noventas hemos visto la incursión en ese campo …

The Signifying Power Of Pearl, Jane Beal

Quidditas

The spiritual language, Ovidian love stories, and use of liturgical time in Pearl all invite allegorical interpretations of the poem. While there is clearly a literal, elegiac sense to the poem, there are also allegorical meanings. This makes perfect sense in light of the tradition of four-fold scriptural and literary interpretation in the Middle Ages, which the Pearl-Poet clearly used to understand biblical parables and compose his poetic masterpiece. The poet’s use of metaphoric language, memory of the legends of Orpheus and Eurydice and Pygmalion and Galatea, and astute interweaving of parables from the church liturgy alongside invocations of the …

Bathed In The Light: Conceptual Considerations For The Gospel-Centered Psychologist, Edwin Gannt

Issues in Religion and Psychotherapy

This paper is a brief response to Dr. Robert Gleave's (2012) article " Gospel Centered 'Therapist' or Gospel Centered 'Therapy': Is There a Difference and Does It Matter?" Dr. Gleave's essay is commended for its insight, timeliness, and importance to the LDS clinical and counseling community. Three areas in which LDS therapists need to engage in careful conceptual consideration of the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of their approach to therapy are enumerated: moral agency, embodiment, and sexuality. It is argued that a gospel-centered perspective in psychology requires that the LDS therapist pay careful attention to the conceptual "fit" between these …

An Open Letter To Dr. Michael Coe, John L. Sorenson

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

In August 2011 John Dehlin conducted a three-part interview with famed Mesoamericanist Michael Coe.1 Dehlin operates the podcast series Mormon Stories, which features in terviews discussing the faith and culture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This article examines a large num ber of dubious claims made in those interviews, providing clari f ications, responses, and references to numerous sources dealing with those issues. Much more detail will be forthcoming in Dr. Sorenson’s new book, Mormon’s Codex.

Encyclopedia Of The Sciences Of Learning [Book Review], Anne Jumonville Graf

Library Faculty Research

The Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning is the first major reference work in the growing and highly visible field of learning sciences. It brings together definitional entries from scholars who represent the breath of this interdisciplinary area of study, teaching, and practice: biology, neuroscience, psychology, computer and information science, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, education, and a range of narrower technical and applied fields. Given the increasing amount of scholarly and popular attention to the dimensions and questions of human learning, it’s important to note that this encyclopedia devotes equal time to animal and machine learning as well; this is a …

Experimental Pragmatism In The Third Globalization, Justin Deystone

Publications

Pragmatism dominates contemporary legal thought, but knowing this isn’t knowing so much. Legal pragmatism means different things to different people, and as this essay argues, minimalist and experimentalist forms of regulation both share a broadly pragmatic sensibility about law and democracy. As a consequence, we need to tease out the various threads of legal pragmatism in the hope of distinguishing the pragmatisms that work from the ones that don’t, or less pragmatically, the ones that are just from the ones that are not. This knowledge will come from an ongoing assessment of the political stakes immanent in the pragmatisms, and …

Deflected Agreement In The Book Of Mormon, Andrew C. Smith

Journal of Book of Mormon Studies

Deflected agreement is a grammatical phenomenon found in Semitic languages—it is ubiquitous in Arabic and found occasionally in Classical Hebrew. Deflected agreement is a plausible explanation for certain grammatical incongruities present, in translation, within the original and printer's manuscripts and printed editions in the Book of Mormon in the grammatical areas of verbal, pronominal, and demonstrative agreement. This finding gives greater credence to the plausibility of the authenticity and historicity of the Book of Mormon. Additionally, the implications of this finding on Book of Mormon scholarship are discussed.

Diesen Kufl Der Ganzen Welt!: Locating German Enlightenment Through The Idea Of Tolerance, Paul E. Kerry

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Where does one find the German Enlightenment? General surveys and otherwise highly serviceable scholarly readers on the Enlightenment tend to neglect it. A recent book on the German Enlightenment by T. J. Reed observes that for many outside Germany, including scholars, the connection Aufklarung und deutsch (Enlightenment and German) is almost paradoxical. Why should this be so? One explanation is that the German Enlightenment is overshadowed by the French Enlightenment. A second explanation is that late-nineteenth-century Germany is associated with a turn away from Enlightenment ideas, in part a countervailing reaction to the terror of the Napoleonic Wars and French …

Impacts Des Changements Climatiques Sur La Santé Et La Sécurité Des Travailleurs, Ariane Adam-Poupart, France Labrèche, Audrey Smargiassi, Patrice Duguay, Marc-Antoine Busque, Charles Gagné, Joseph Zayed

Rapports de recherche scientifique

Les effets des changements climatiques (CC) sont souvent discutés en fonction de leurs impacts sur l’environnement et sur la population générale. Toutefois, leurs conséquences sur la santé et la sécurité des travailleurs (SST) n'ont été que très peu abordées par la communauté scientifique. Pourtant, les travailleurs peuvent être directement ou indirectement affectés par les CC notamment par des contraintes thermiques auxquelles ils peuvent être exposés ou encore, par des modifications aux écosystèmes qui sont à la base de leurs activités économiques. L’objectif général de cette étude était d’explorer les avenues de recherche en regard de l’impact négatif des changements climatiques …

Where We Build And Live, Ivar Kirkegaard

The Bridge

It falls outside the framework of this small dissertation to give personal historical narratives of Danes who have put down roots in the American soil, starting from the time when Jens Munk (15751628) and Vitus Bering (1681-1741) came to America’s inhospitable northernmost regions during their travels of discovery and down through the time when the actual immigration from Denmark got its start around 1850. Some names can be recognized such as Jonas Bronck (died 1643), after whom the great section of the Bronx in New York is named, Hans Christian Fibiger (1749-1796), who served as an officer under Washington, the …

History, Interactive Technology And Pedagogy: Past Successes And Future Directions, Stephen Brier

Publications and Research

Based on a keynote presentation at the 2012 Canadian Historical Association conference, this paper surveys the state of digital technology and its impact on academic publication and teaching in the contemporary university. Focusing on the dramatic rise of the Digital Humanities in the last few years, the paper examines alternative forms of peer review, academic scholarship and publication, and classroom teaching as they have been reshaped by the adoption of a variety of digital technologies and formats, including open-access, online peer reviewing, use of data- bases and visualization techniques in humanities work, online journal publication, and the use of blogs …

The Social Life Of Musical Instruments, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Accordion Crimes, a novel by E. Annie Proulx, traces the life of and routes travelled by a green diatonic button accordion: its birth in Sicily in the workshop of “The Accordion Maker,” its numerous changes of ownership in the Americas during encounters between various immigrant communities, and its death when it finally falls into disrepair in the town of Old Glory, Minnesota. There are other accordions in the book, and many temporary human owners, but it is one particular green accordion that is the book’s protagonist. We meet and experience other characters largely through their interactions with the green accordion, …

Analysis Of The Lactobacilluscasei Supragenome And Its Influence In Species Evolution And Lifestyle Adaptation, Jeff Broadbent, E. C. Neeno-Eckwall, B. Stahl, K. Tandee, H. Cai, W. Morovic, P. Horvath, J. Heidenreich, N. T. Perna, R. Barrangou, J. L. Steele

Nutrition, Dietetics, and Food Sciences Faculty Publications

The broad ecological distribution of L. casei makes it an insightful subject for research on genome evolution and lifestyle adaptation. To explore evolutionary mechanisms that determine genomic diversity of L. casei, we performed comparative analysis of 17 L. casei genomes representing strains collected from dairy, plant, and human sources. Results Differences in L. casei genome inventory revealed an open pan-genome comprised of 1,715 core and 4,220 accessory genes. Extrapolation of pan-genome data indicates L. casei has a supragenome approximately 3.2 times larger than the average genome of individual strains. Evidence suggests horizontal gene transfer from other bacterial species, particularly lactobacilli, …

Stone Oak Park Exploration: Kinder, Canyon Ridge Elementary School (San Antonio, Tex.)

Stone Oak Park UbD Units

Topic: Temperature, Living/Nonliving, Soil Characteristics, Evidence of Conservations.