Digital Commons Network^™

A Case Study Of A Multidisciplinary Service-Learning Project In An Appalachian Regional College Campus On A Health-Related Community Awareness Campaign, Alice L. Crume, Lisa A. Beltz, Dean A. Porr

PRISM: A Journal of Regional Engagement

Abstract

In this case study, faculty from Communication Studies, Biological Sciences, and Management & Information Systems combined resources of six courses and approximately 135 students in a health-related service-learning project during Fall 2010. The project focused on Cystic Fibrosis (CF) concluding with a public event that attracted audience members from two Appalachian Ohio counties. The project’s goal was to disseminate CF-related information to the surrounding communities in order to improve the lives of CF patients and/or their caregivers. This article describes the connection between the students’ lives and the information.

Communication Studies and Biology students were given lectures on CF …

The Observer, Central Washington University

Student Newspaper

Student newspaper for Central Washington University for May 31-June 20, 2012. Vol. 91, No. 9.

Energy Methods For Reaction-Diffusion Problems, Xing Zhong

Dissertations

Nonlinear reaction-diffusion equations arise in many areas of applied sciences such as combustion modeling, population dynamics, chemical kinetics, etc. A fundamental problem in the studies of these equations is to understand the long time behavior of solutions of the associated Cauchy problem. These kinds of questions were originally studied in the context of combustion modeling.

For suitable nonlinearity and a monotone increasing one-parameter family of initial data starting with zero data, small values of the parameter lead to extinction, whereas large values of the parameter may lead to spreading, i.e., the solution converging locally uniformly to a positive spatially independent …

Structural Analysis And Auditing Of Snomed Hierarchies Using Abstraction Networks, Yue Wang

Dissertations

SNOMED is one of the leading healthcare terminologies being used worldwide. Due to its sheer volume and continuing expansion, it is inevitable that errors will make their way into SNOMED. Thus, quality assurance is an important part of its maintenance cycle.

A structural approach is presented in this dissertation, aiming at developing automated techniques that can aid auditors in the discovery of terminology errors more effectively and efficiently. Large SNOMED hierarchies are partitioned, based primarily on their relationships patterns, into concept groups of more manageable sizes. Three related abstraction networks with respect to a SNOMED hierarchy, namely the area taxonomy …

Advanced Intelligent Control And Optimization For Cardiac Pacemaker Systems, Wei Shi

Dissertations

Since cardiovascular diseases are major causes of morbidity and mortality in the developed countries and the number one cause of death in the United States, their accurate diagnosis and effective treatment via advanced cardiac pacemaker systems have become very important. Intelligent control and optimization of the pacemakers are significant research subjects. Serious but infrequently occurring arrhythmias are difficult to diagnose. The use of electrocardiogram (ECG) waveform only cannot exactly distinguish between deadly abnormalities and temporary arrhythmias. Thus, this work develops a new method based on frequency entrainment to analyze pole-zero characteristics of the phase error between abnormal ECG and entrained …

Investigation Of The Fracture Phenomena During The Milling Process Of Inorganic Particulates And Brittle Fracture Of Polymer Composites Using Fractal Theory, Zheng Qian

Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the applicability and usefulness of applying Fractal mathematics and to the fracture of brittle particulates in Fluid Energy Mill devices, and in particular quantifying the resulting power law particle size distributions, examining the Surface Fractal Dimension of milled particulates, and relating the Izod Impact Strength values of composites of polypropylene and Calcium carbonate particulates which are large un-milled, small milled, as well as small and produced by the simultaneous milling and coating with nano-silica to the Surface Fractal Dimension of the impact fracture surfaces.

First, the dissertation examines the behavior of un-coated and micron-sized wax pre-coated particulates …

Registration And Categorization Of Camera Captured Documents, Venkata Gopal Edupuganti

Dissertations

Camera captured document image analysis concerns with processing of documents captured with hand-held sensors, smart phones, or other capturing devices using advanced image processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning techniques. As there is no constrained capturing in the real world, the captured documents suffer from illumination variation, viewpoint variation, highly variable scale/resolution, background clutter, occlusion, and non-rigid deformations e.g., folds and crumples. Document registration is a problem where the image of a template document whose layout is known is registered with a test document image. Literature in camera captured document mosaicing addressed the registration of captured documents with …

Virtual Reality Visual Feedback And Its Effect On Brain Excitability, Soha Saleh

Dissertations

This dissertation examines manipulation of visual feedback in virtual reality (VR) to increase excitability of distinct neural networks in the sensorimotor cortex. The objective is to explore neural responses to visual feedback of motor activities performed in complex virtual environments during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and to identify sensory manipulations that could further optimize VR rehabilitation of persons with hemiparesis. In addition, the effects of VR therapy on brain reorganization are investigated. An MRI-compatible VR system is used to provide subjects with online visual feedback of their hand movement. First, the author develops a protocol to analyze variability in …

Transport Of Terrigenous Sediment And Horseshoe Crab Eggs In The Swash Zone Of An Estuarine Foreshore In Delaware Bay, New Jersey, Usa, Sherestha Saini

Dissertations

Identification of processes responsible for egg exhumation and transport in the swash zone is paramount to conservation of species that use the intertidal foreshore. One example where the understanding of these processes is critical to egg exhumation, transport and deposition is in Delaware Bay, USA. Beaches in Delaware Bay provide foraging grounds to many shorebird species that migrate thousands of miles from Central and South America to feed on nutrient rich horseshoe crab eggs during their peak spawning season. Eggs laid at depth by horseshoe crabs are exhumed and transported by bioturbation, wave and swash processes and made available to …

Adsorption Of Particles On Fluid-Liquid Interfaces, Bhavin Dalal

Dissertations

Particles floating on fluid-liquid interfaces are of considerable interest because of their importance in a range of physical applications and biological processes, e.g., self-- assembly of particles at fluid-fluid interfaces resulting in novel nano structured materials, stabilization of emulsions, formation of pollen and insect egg rafts, etc. The aim of this dissertation is to explore the mechanism by which particles are adsorbed at fluid-liquid interfaces. It is shown that the inertia of a particle plays an important role in its motion in the direction normal to a fluid-liquid interface, and in determining the particles adsorption trajectory and orientation in …

Rational Design Of Hydrogen-Free Catalytic Active Sites, Andrei Ioan Loas

Dissertations

Materials that are organic-based and exhibit oxidative catalytic activity, including free-radical pathways, while being refractory to the activated oxygen species are not known. The synthesis of several classes of such materials, their electronic and structural characterizations as well as catalytic properties are reported. Their rational molecular design and biologically inspired reactivity are based on enzymatic active sites, which are reengineered into robust metal-organic fluoroalkylated scaffolds that, for the first time, exhibit structural asymmetry and tunable π-π interactions both in solution and solid state. In these complexes, labile C-H bonds are replaced with chemically and thermally resistant C-F bonds to create …

Desalination Of Brine And Produced Water By Membrane Distillation At Lower As Well As Higher Temperatures And Pressures, Dhananjay Singh

Dissertations

Direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD)-based desalination process is a thermally- driven separation process where a hydrophobic microporous membrane separates a hot brine feed and a cold distillate which condenses the water vapor from the hot brine passing through the membrane pores. So far, DCMD has been explored for hot brines and other aqueous solutions below 100oC. For feed solutions above 100oC, DCMD has an extra advantage over other conventional separation processes like reverse osmosis (RO) which requires cooling of the feed solution costing additional energy; further, RO can not utilize the heat available in the feed solution. Produced water obtained …

Dispersibility Of And Adsorption On Functionalized Carbon Nanotubes, Susana Addo Ntim

Dissertations

As the applications of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) proliferate, mass production and widespread use of these nanocarbons will continue to rise. While raw, unrefined, and hydrophobic carbon nanotubes tend to settle out of aqueous media/environments, water dispersible, functionalized CNTs (F-CNTs) will contaminate water resources and will also be highly bioavailable on exposure. Therefore, there is a need to develop an understanding of the fate of F-CNTs in aqueous media.

The colloidal behavior of aqueous dispersions of F-CNTs formed via carboxylation and polymer wrapping with polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP) is investigated. The presence of polymer on the nanotube surface provides steric stabilization, and …

Mathematical Models Of Combustion At High Pressure, Daniel Fong

Dissertations

In this dissertation, we develop new mathematical theories of flame propagation that are valid at elevated, or extreme, pressures. Of particular interest is the regime of burning in which the pressure exceeds the critical pressure of the species undergoing chemical reaction. Fluids and flames are known to behave differently under these extreme conditions as opposed to atmospheric pressure. The focus of this dissertation is to investigate these differences by deriving reduced models that contain the unique features.

In the first part of this dissertation, we analyze the structure of laminar diffusion flames at high pressure in the limit of large …

Using Section 40(C) Of The Clean Water Act To Prohibit The Unacceptable Enviromental Impacts Of The Proposed Pebble Mine, David A. Wilkinson

Seattle Journal of Environmental Law

No abstract provided.

Section 404(C) Of The Clean Water Act And The History Of State And Federal Efforts To Conserve The Kvichak And Nushagak Drainages Of Alaska, Geoffrey Y. Parker

Seattle Journal of Environmental Law

No abstract provided.

2012 Printed Program, Taylor University

Colloquium Schedules

No abstract provided.

A Meaningful Hierarchy: How C.S. Lewis Perceives Humanity's Significance, Zachary A. Rhone

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

"Humans are amphibians -- half spirit and half animal," writes Screwtape. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis would clarify these halves as the Bios and the Zoe -- the biological and the spiritual, respectively. Humans are, as Dr. Ransom admits in That Hideous Strength, "More. But not less" than animals, yet humanity's Fall resulted from "the idea that they could 'be like gods' -- could set up on their own as if they had created themselves -- be their own masters -- invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God" (MC). Humans are …

The Emerging Legal Problem Of Naturally Occuring Abestos And Washington State's Swift Creek Conundrum, Jean O. Melious

Seattle Journal of Environmental Law

No abstract provided.

Let The River Run: Strategies To Remove Obsolete Dams And Defeat Resulting Fifth Amendment Taking Claims, Chistopher Scoones

Seattle Journal of Environmental Law

No abstract provided.

Switching Between Cooperation And Competition In Social Selection, August Guang

HMC Senior Theses

Roughgarden et al. (2006) proposed a theory called social selection as a behavioral game theoretic model for sexual reproduction that incorporates both competition and cooperation in 2006. Players oscillate between playing competitively to maximize their individual fitness, leading to a Nash Competitive Equilibrium, and playing cooperatively to maximize a team fitness function, leading to a Nash Bargaining Solution. Roughgarden et al. (2006) gives rates of change for both the competitive state and the cooperative state, but does not explain her rates or how to switch between the states in sufficient detail.

We test and rederive the rates, critiquing an assumption …

Inkjet Printing Of Resistive-Type Humidity Sensor For Harsh Environments, Hamed Kazerani

Dissertations

A flexible resistive-type humidity sensor for harsh environments is successfully designed and fabricated by an inkjet printing method using a Dimatix materials printer (DMP-2800 series from Fujifilm). Construction of the sensors is based on inkjet printed interdigitated silver electrodes on a polyimide flexible substrate along with an inkjet printable polyaniline (PANi) as humidity sensitive material. A copolymer of ethylene and vinyl alcohol (EVOH) is used as sensor protective coating. Double strand water- soluble PANi ink is synthesized by polymerization of aniline monomers with poly(4- styrenesulfonic acid) (PSSA) as a template.

Manufactured devices showed high sensitivity (/% @ 45%RH) to humidity …

Analysis Of Swarm Behavior In Two Dimensions, Louis Ryan

HMC Senior Theses

We investigate the steady state solutions that can exist for a two dimensional swarm of biological organisms, which have pairwise social interaction forces. The three steady states we investigate using a continuum model are a ribbon migrating swarm, a circular migrating swarm, and a milling swarm. We solve these numerically by reformulating the integral equation that arises from the continuum model as an energy minimization problem. For the ribbon migrating solution, we are able to determine an analytic solution from Carleman's equation which arises after an asymptotic expansion of the social interaction potential. Using this technique we are able to …

Religiosity, Knowledge Of Evolution, And Political Ideology As Predictors Of Attitudes Towards The Evolution V. Creationism Controversy, Nikolaus Philip Schuetz

Theses (6 month embargo)

Since Darwin On the Origin of Species over 150 years ago, evolution via natural selection has gained essentially unilateral support among scientists, with 97% of scientists agree that life evolved over time, while a mere 12% to 29% of the general public accepts evolution via natural selection. About three-quarters of the public support teaching creationism in public school science classes--a violation of the First Amendment--and a recent survey shows that just 28% of high school biology teachers advocating for evolution in their classroom, as per the national guidelines.

The present study aims to investigate and clarify certain relationships that lead …

Faculty Retirement Recognition Dinner 2012, Western Michigan University

Faculty Recognition

Faculty Retirement Recognition Dinner Program

May 31, 2012

Honored Guests:

• Roberta Allen
• Elizabeth Amidon
• Thomas Bailey
• Ellen Brinkley
• Ronald Chase
• David Cowan
• Curtis Curtis-Smith
• James Daniels
• Linda Dannison
• Eileen Evans
• Jaimy Gordon
• Martin Grant
• Bruce Haight
• Bassam Harik
• Suzanne Hedstrom
• Charles Hines
• Catherine Julien
• Trent Kynaston
• Hanjoon Lee
• Mary Lu Light
• Frederick MacDonald
• Von Washington

How Adopting Stereotypical Roles May Impact Sexual Risk Behavior Among Young African American College Women, Essie Hall

Dissertations (2 year embargo)

Sexually transmitted infection (STI) prevention issues for women, particularly women of color, are multifaceted and far-reaching. Cultural dynamics unique to black women, such as attitudes, values and beliefs are often not considered. The proposed study assesses culturally specific factors that may inform sexual decision-making for African American college students in an urban setting. The study proposes to analyze how knowledge, the adoption of stereotypical attitudes (four specifically: Mammy, Sapphire, Jezebel, and Superwoman) and religiosity (attendance) may influence the sexual choices of young adult African American college women.

One hundred and ten African American women attending a predominantly Black and urban …

Coherent Pattern Prediction In Swarms Of Delay-Coupled Agents, Luis Mier-Y-Teran-Romero, Eric Forgoston, Ira B. Schwartz

Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We consider a general swarm model of self-propelling agents interacting through a pairwise potential in the presence of noise and communication time delay. Previous work has shown that a communication time delay in the swarm induces a pattern bifurcation that depends on the size of the coupling amplitude. We extend these results by completely unfolding the bifurcation structure of the mean field approximation. Our analysis reveals a direct correspondence between the different dynamical behaviors found in different regions of the coupling-time delay plane with the different classes of simulated coherent swarm patterns. We derive the spatiotemporal scales of the swarm …

Discovery Of A Novel Antibiotic From A Bacillus Bacterium Cultivated From Its Natural Environment, Patrick J. Mcmonagle

Lawrence University Honors Projects

The current primary method of treating bacterial infections is using antibiotics. However, this continued treatment of these illnesses caused by pathogenic bacteria is causing the rate of evolution of these disease-inducing organisms to increase. Antibiotic resistance is forcing scientists to search for new forms of antibiotics to compete with these new ‘super bugs.’ I pursued the search for novel antibiotics through their natural source – antibiotic-producing microorganisms. As microbes have a direct advantage when producing antibiotics, it is my thought that they will be the best resource to discovering new and effective antibiotics. I conducted an exploratory search for antibiotic-producing …

The Dynamics Of Location: Influence Of Predation By Chaoborus Larvae On Rotifer Diel Vertical Migration Patterns, Kristina P. Riemer

Lawrence University Honors Projects

The locations of freshwater organisms in lakes are determined by the convergence of many competing factors. While predation pressure is one of these, also important are areas of food concentration and the physical and chemical constraints of a system. Diel vertical migration is a behavior exhibited by freshwater organisms in many taxa that is the result of balancing these factors. Diel vertical migration consists of movement by these organisms throughout the water column in accordance with a 24 hour cycle. This oscillation is generally driven by the competing factors of predation pressure and food acquisition, and is modified by physical …

Co-Infected Diseases And State Health Policy: Botswana And South Africa's Response To Hiv And Tuberculosis, Margaret H. Schmidt

Lawrence University Honors Projects

The emergence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has led to the growth of co-infection with other illnesses including tuberculosis. Many states are now attempting to address the problems presented with co-infected patients from a variety pathogens. In particular sub-Saharan Africa has suffered exponentially more from HIV and TB co-infection than other parts of the world. Thus, why have Botswana and South Africa not created national health policies to treat these diseases together? The following describes the process of how World Health Organization recommendations are translated into state policy. In turn, while donorship and international policy alterations create strong punctuations, the …