Digital Commons Network^™

Population Genetics Of The Western Prairie Fringed Orchid, Andrew August Ross

Environmental and Conservation Sciences

The Western Prairie Fringed Orchid (WPFO) Platanthera praeclara is listed as a federally threatened species in the United States. The habitat of the WPFO is highly fragmented, causing the possibility of genetic isolation among populations. I assessed microsatellite polymorphism in eight WPFO populations using six polymorphic microsatellite markers. High levels of within population genetic diversity were found: 12.5 alleles per locus and mean expected heterozygosity (HE) of 0.622. The genetic structure among the populations was weak; the overall FST value was 0.0692. A mantel test showed no correlation between genetic and geographic distance r = 0.2793 (P = 0.31). The …

Occurrence Of Salmonella And Listeria Monocytogenes In Ready To Eat Meats In The United States: 2000-2010, Anthony Wilfred Ntaate

Food Safety

The purpose of this review is to characterize the occurrence of Salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes in ready to eat (RTE) meats in the United States between the years 2000-2010. Data were obtained from the CDC foodborne outbreak online database, morbidity and mortality weekly reports, summary of notifiable diseases and the foodborne outbreaks page. Additional information was obtained from peer reviewed journals. RTE roast pork, turkey deli meat, and Italian type salami meats were the vehicles in the Salmonella outbreaks reported. Half of the eight outbreaks reviewed were multistate in nature affecting many states and the rest were sporadic. The Salmonella …

Phosphate Removal And Recovery Using Iron Nanoparticles And Iron Cross-Linked Biopolymer, Talal Bakheet Almeelbi

Environmental and Conservation Sciences

Nanoscale zero-valent iron (NZVI) particles and iron cross-linked alginate (FCA) beads were successfully used for the first time for phosphate removal and recovery. NZVI was successfully used for phosphate removal and recovery. Batch studies indicated a removal of ~96 to 100% phosphate in 30 min (1, 5, and 10 mg PO43--P/L with 400 mg NZVI/L). Phosphate removal efficiency by NZVI was 13.9 times higher compared to Microscale ZVI (MZVI) particles. The successful rapid removal of phosphate by NZVI from aqueous solution is expected to have great ramification for cleaning up nutrient rich waters. The presence of sulfate, nitrate, and humic …

Development And Scale Up Of Aqueous Surfactant-Assisted Extraction Of Canola Oil For Use As Biodiesel Feedstock, Nattapong Tuntiwiwattanapun

Environmental and Conservation Sciences

In oilseed extraction, alternative extraction media have been studied to replace the traditional solvent, hexane, due to health, safety, and environmental concerns. In this work, aqueous surfactant-assisted extraction was developed and scaled up for hexane-free canola oil extraction. An inexpensive commercial surfactant system was formulated and used as an extraction medium based on the dynamic interfacial tension value. The extraction conditions were evaluated to achieve the maximum oil recovery. The highest oil detachment efficiency was 80% in the absence of hexane at room temperature. The extracted oil had acceptable content of free fatty acids, water and phospholipids for use as …

Identification And Characterization Of Fibrous Zeolites In Western North Dakota, Jason Triplett

Environmental and Conservation Sciences

The fibrous zeolite mineral erionite is a concern due to its potential for causing lung disease in humans. Studies have shown that exposure to altered volcanic bedrock containing erionite may be the explanation for a high lung disease rate throughout regions of the world (Metintas et al., 1999). Erionite was reported by Forsman (1986) as occurring in tuffaceous rock units of the Arikaree Formation in the Killdeer Mountains of western North Dakota. Rock and soil samples were collected where zeolite minerals are known or suspected to be present including North and South Killdeer Mountains in Dunn County and West and …

Attenuation Of Nitrate From Simulated Agricultural Wastewater Using An Immobilized Anaerobic Biofilm, Mohammad Jahidul Anar

Environmental and Conservation Sciences

A number of methods are currently in use for attenuating nitrates from wastewater with varying degrees of efficiency. Bioremediation using bacteria may be an efficient and cost effective method. In an anaerobic bioremediation system, nitrate can replace carbon dioxide as an electron acceptor and aids in nitrate attenuation by assimilatory reduction. The purpose of this study was to investigate nitrate attenuation in a hyperfiltration system using a pure culture of strictly anaerobic, facultative Methanobrevibacter ruminantium bacteria. Filtration experiments were conducted using amalgamated Na- montmorillonite clay-glass beads compacted at 500 psi differential hydraulic pressure with or without a biofilm. A simulated …

Heteronormative Recovery In The Bell Jar, Gretchen Therese Junglas

English

In Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood struggles to form a true identity. She emulates many women as a way to see how various identities work for her. One of these identities is that of a lesbian. During the novel’s 1953 setting, lesbianism was not a socially acceptable lifestyle. Esther struggles with own internalized homophobia as well as the control of her doctors. She undergoes treatment during her hospitalization that is suggestive of sexual conversion therapy at the time, including the use of electricity as a tool of discipline. Doctors lead her toward an identity that is not …

"Who Are You And I...?": The Rhetoric Of Identity In The Aloha Eagles Letters, Rebecca Joy Hayes

English

In 1969, four years before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, Aloha Eagles, a Republican legislator in the North Dakota House of Representatives, proposed a House Bill 319 to legalize abortion in North Dakota. Throughout the legislative session, Eagles corresponded with many North Dakotans regarding the bill. This study asks how Eagles and her correspondents construct identities, such as mother, citizen, or medical professional, to support or oppose abortion. Using rhetorical and archival research methods to examine rhetorics of identity in 78 pairs of letters between Eagles and her correspondents, the study reveals that writers construct marital, professional, parental, …

Towards Change Propagating Test Models In Autonomic And Adaptive Systems, Mohammed Abd Alwahab Akour

Computer Science

The major motivation for self-adaptive computing systems is the self-adjustment of the software according to a changing environment. Adaptive computing systems can add, remove, and replace their own components in response to changes in the system itself and in the operating environment of a software system. Although these systems may provide a certain degree of confidence against new environments, their structural and behavioral changes should be validated after adaptation occurs at runtime. Testing dynamically adaptive systems is extremely challenging because both the structure and behavior of the system may change during its execution. After self adaptation occurs in autonomic software, …

Assessment And Recommendation Of Requirement Management Tool Based On User Needs, Aditi Mohpal

Computer Science

Over recent years, requirement management has played a very vital role in materializing IT projects. Whether it is the healthcare sector, finance sector, banking sector, or any other industrial sector, requirement management is crucial for the successful completion of IT projects. Due to a tight time to market and severe competition, requirement management becomes one of the most critical activities for the software-development lifecycle process [1]. Requirements change all the time during the software-development lifecycle. Unmanaged changes lead to project overruns. Most companies are using requirement-management tools to manage requirements. However, many companies end up choosing a requirement-management tool that …

Fuzzy Decision Model For A Smart Grid, Muhammad Niamul Baqui

Computer Science

Electricity is vital for U.S. economy. Over the years, the demand and the usage of electricity have skyrocketed, but the electric transmission and distribution processes have been manual. The current work formulates an automated decision-making model for electric-grid resource allocation. Resource allocation is primarily in the form of assigning the best power source to a sink. The model is built in Fuzzy Logic. The input parameters for the model are the power capacity, the price and the distance. A rule base has been created by domain knowledge and analyzing an operator decision making activity. The Mamdani Min-Max approach of is …

Social And Ethical Dimensions Of Electronic Medical Records, Phani Tirupathi

Computer Science

Electronic Medical Records are a digital or computerized medical record created in an organization which delivers care as part of a health information system that allows the storage, retrieval, and modification of records. The present project explains the social and ethical dimensions of Electronic Medical Records and also the learning process for students by making a movie to identify different viewpoints.

Capacitated Transshipment Models For Predicting Signaling Pathways, Ritika Sahni

Computer Science

Signal transduction is a process of transmitting signals for controlling biological responses. The protein-protein interaction (PPI) data, containing signal transduction proteins, can be considered as a bi-directional, weighted network with the proteins as nodes, the interactions between them as edges, and the confidence score of the interaction as weights on edges. If the edges of this network are given a capacity of one, and if the starting and ending proteins are the supply and demand nodes, then this problem can be modeled as a capacitated transshipment model with pathways as the solutions. Our application concerns finding the signaling pathways for …

Application For Capturing Potential Tardiness In Operating Room Suites, Bethlehem Abera Gronneberg

Computer Science

This paper describes the design, architecture and implementation of a Dashboard Application, a tool developed to capture the potential tardiness in Operating Room (OR) Suites. The paper is focused on developing an automated application which is intended to monitor and display the progress of multiple out-patients on the day of their elective surgery as they advance from admission to the pre-operative stages leading up to their final destination of the operating room. The application will display OR patients’ real-time location, the time they entered at that location and the time remaining for their scheduled surgery once they arrive at the …

A Distributed Power Market For The Smart Grid, Ryan James Mcculloch

Computer Science

To address the challenges of resource allocation in the Smart Electrical Grid a new power market is proposed. A distributed and autonomous contract net based market system in which participants, represented by the agents, engage in two distinct yet interconnected markets in order to determine resource allocation. Key to this proposed design is the 2 market structure which separates negotiations between consumers and reliable generation from negotiations between consumers and intermittent energy resources. The first or primary market operates as a first price sealed bid reverse auction while the second or secondary market utilizes a uniform price auction. In order …

An Immense New Power To Heal: The Promise Of Personalized Medicine, Lee Gutkind, Pagan Kennedy

Books

There is no denying that new technology, which has triggered an explosion of scientific information, is ushering in a revolution in medicine. Through intimate patient stories as well as profiles of leading-edge doctors and scientists, this clear-eyed, lively, and highly engaging book explores one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of our time: the sequencing of the human genome and the subsequent development of personalized medicine.

Lives At Risk: High School Dropouts In The Northern Plains Region, Bruce Ralph Schumacher

Education

Education is essential to personal welfare. As educational levels increase, personal income rises, the quality of life improves, and society benefits as criminality declines, tax income increases, and the cost of social programs decreases. Unfortunately, every year thousands of students leave high school without graduating. Various factors place students at-risk of dropping out, but the question remains why some at-risk students drop out while others graduate. This phenomenology investigates dropping out by following the philosophy of Jurgen Habermas, guided by the work of Max van Manen. Participants discussed their lifeworld experiences and explained factors that had caused them to leave …

Emotional Intelligence Levels In Baccalaureate-Prepared Early Career Registered Nurses, Glenda Schooler Reemts

Education

The increasing complexity of the healthcare environment calls for increasing emotional intelligence (EI) competence in nurses so as to establish effective relationships that facilitate positive patient outcomes. Because nurses need to be competent in EI, it is important to determine if professional nursing programs prepare graduates in emotional intelligence and whether years of professional experience contribute to development of emotional intelligence. This study assessed the emotional intelligence competence of 164 baccalaureate nursing alumni who graduated during the years 2007-2010 from three Benedictine institutions in the Midwest to see if there was growth of EI with experience as a registered nurse, …

Physical Activity As An Aid To Smoking Cessation During Pregnancy (Leap) Trial: Study Protocol For A Randomized Controlled Trial, Michael Ussher, Paul Aveyard, Isaac Manyonda, S Lewis, Robert West, B Lewis, Bess Marcus, Adrian H. Taylor, Pelham Barton, Tim Coleman

Peninsula Medical School

No abstract provided.

Exploring The Effect Of Pelvic Belt Configurations Upon Athletic Lumbopelvic Pain, Leanne Sawle, Jennifer Freeman, Jonathan Marsden, M Mathews

School of Health Professions

No abstract provided.

An Attentional Control Task Reduces Intrusive Thoughts About Smoking., Jon May, Jackie Andrade, Kimberley Willoughby, Chris Brown

School of Psychology

INTRODUCTION: Attentional control tasks such as body scanning and following isometric exercise instructions have been shown to reduce smoking cravings, apparently by reducing stress (Ussher, M., Cropley, M., Playle, S., Mohidin, R., & West, R. [2009]. Effect of isometric exercise and body scanning on cigarette cravings and withdrawal symptoms. Addiction, 104, 1251-1257. doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2009.02605.x). Related work based upon elaborated intrusion theory (Kavanagh, D. J., Andrade, J., & May, J. [2005]. Imaginary relish and exquisite torture: The elaborated intrusion theory of desire. Psychological Review, 112, 446-467. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.112.2.446) has shown that similar tasks can reduce hungry participants' involuntary food-related thoughts (May, J., Andrade, …

Use Of A Clay Modeling Task To Reduce Chocolate Craving., Jackie Andrade, Sally Pears, Jon May, David J. Kavanagh

School of Psychology

Elaborated Intrusion theory (EI theory; Kavanagh, Andrade, & May, 2005) posits two main cognitive components in craving: associative processes that lead to intrusive thoughts about the craved substance or activity, and elaborative processes supporting mental imagery of the substance or activity. We used a novel visuospatial task to test the hypothesis that visual imagery plays a key role in craving. Experiment 1 showed that spending 10 min constructing shapes from modeling clay (plasticine) reduced participants' craving for chocolate compared with spending 10 min 'letting your mind wander'. Increasing the load on verbal working memory using a mental arithmetic task (counting …

The Effects Of Label Design Characteristics On Perceptions Of Genetically Modified Food, E. Hellier, M. Tucker, L. Newbold, J. Edworthy, J. Griffin, N. Coulson

School of Psychology

No abstract provided.

Feeling Good About Being Hungry: Food-Related Thoughts In Eating Disorder, Jf Blackburn, Ar Thomson, J May

School of Psychology

Objectives: This study explores the relationships to food and hunger in women living with anorexic type eating difficulties and asks how imagery-based elaborations of food and eating thoughts are involved in their eating restraint, and recovery. Design: The qualitative idiographic approach of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used. Four in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with women self-selected as having experienced anorexia or anorexic like behaviour. Methods: The data was analysed using IPA and an audit of the analysis was conducted to ensure that the process followed had been systematic and rigorous and appropriately considered reflexivity. Results: Hunger was perceived positively …

Sensory Imagery In Craving: From Cognitive Psychology To New Treatments For Addiction, J Andrade, J May, Dk Kavanagh

School of Psychology

Sensory imagery is a powerful tool for inducing craving because it is a key component of the cognitive system that underpins human motivation. The role of sensory imagery in motivation is explained by Elaborated Intrusion (EI) theory. Imagery plays an important role in motivation because it conveys the emotional qualities of the desired event, mimicking anticipated pleasure or relief, and continual elaboration of the imagery ensures that the target stays in mind. We argue that craving is a conscious state, intervening between unconscious triggers and consumption, and summarise evidence that interfering with sensory imagery can weaken cravings. We argue that …

Elaborated Intrusion Theory: A Cognitive-Emotional Theory Of Food Craving, Jon May, Jackie Andrade, David J. Kavanagh, Marion Hetherington

School of Psychology

A clear understanding of the cognitive-emotional processes underpinning desires to overconsume foods and adopt sedentary lifestyles can inform the development of more effective interventions to promote healthy eating and physical activity. The Elaborated Intrusion Theory of Desires offers a framework that can help in this endeavor through its emphases on the roles of intrusive thoughts and elaboration of multisensory imagery. There is now substantial evidence that tasks that compete for limited working memory resources with food-related imagery can reduce desires to eat that food, and that positive imagery can promote functional behavior. Meditation mindfulness can also short-circuit elaboration of dysfunctional …

Anticipation Of Action Intentions In Autism Spectrum Disorder, Matthew Hudson, Hollie G. Burnett, Tjeerd Jellema

School of Psychology

No abstract provided.

Doing, Seeing, Or Both: Effects Of Learning Condition On Subsequent Action Perception, Alison J. Wiggett, Matthew Hudson, Angela Clifford, Steven P. Tipper, Paul E. Downing

School of Psychology

No abstract provided.

Low Dose Ct Vs Plain Abdominal Radiography For The Investigation Of The Acute Abdomen, Long K. Nguyen, Daniel D. Wong, Daniel M. Fatovich, Justin M. Yeung, Jennifer Persaud, Christopher J. Wood, David De Vos, Richard M. Mendelson

Physiotherapy Papers and Journal Articles

Background: To compare low-dose abdominal computed tomography (LDCT) with plain abdominal radiography (AR) in the primary investigation of acute abdominal pain to determine if there is a difference in diagnostic yield, the number of additional investigations required and hospital length of stay (LOS).

Methods: This randomized controlled trial was approved by the institutional review board, and informed consent was obtained. Patients presenting to the emergency department with an acute abdomen and who would normally be investigated with AR were randomized to either AR or LDCT. The estimated radiation dose of the LDCT protocol was 2–3 mSv compared to 1.1 mSv …

Is Access To Neighborhood Green Space Associated With Bmi Among Egyptians? A Multilevel Study Of Cairo Neighborhoods, Mona Mowafi, Zeinab Khadr, Gary Bennett, Allan Hill, Ichiro Kawachi, S. V. Subramanian

Faculty Journal Articles

Evidence of a link between green space and obesity has increased in the developed world, but few studies have been conducted in the developing world. Our study tests whether availability of neighborhood green space is associated with BMI among adults in Cairo, Egypt. Using data from the 2007 Cairo Urban Inequity Study, we conducted multilevel analyses and found no significant green space-BMI association, leading us to conclude that this intervention may not be as promising in this developing world context as it has been in some western urban contexts. Other aspects of the urban environment should be evaluated to better …