Digital Commons Network^™

Wrigg V. Junkermier, Clark, Campanella, Stevens, P.C.: The Effect Of Involuntary Termination On Post-Employment Non-Compete Agreements, Michelle H. Vanisko

Montana Law Review

While this author agrees with the Wrigg Court’s ultimate decision, the Court’s overall discussion was lacking on three points. First, before determining whether an agreement has the requirements of an enforceable noncompete clause, the Court should have addressed the contract issues involved in Wrigg. In particular, the Court should have addressed the question of consideration and the potential ambiguity surrounding the terms of the shareholder agreement. If the agreement is an unenforceable contract, enforceability of the non-compete clause becomes irrelevant. Next, even if a contract is enforceable, a non-compete clause within it is not automatically enforceable. As a general rule, …

Judging The Flood Of Litigation, Marin K. Levy

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court has increasingly considered a particular kind of argument: that it should avoid reaching decisions that would “open the floodgates of litigation.” Despite its frequent invocation, there has been little scholarly exploration of what a floodgates argument truly means, and even less discussion of its normative basis. This Article addresses both subjects, demonstrating for the first time the scope and surprising variation of floodgates arguments, as well as uncovering their sometimes-shaky foundations. Relying on in-depth case studies from a wide array of issue areas, the Article shows that floodgates arguments primarily have been used to protect three institutions: …

Towards Engaged Scholarship, Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Is There A Best Cow Size For Beef Cattle Producers?, Matthew Stockton, Sunil P. Dhoubhadel, Leslie Aaron Stalker

Cornhusker Economics

There are individuals in the beef cattle industry who claim there is a need for smaller brood cows, because smaller cows are more efficient and therefore more profitable. On the other hand, there are those who claim the larger the cow the better, and these generally are those who feed calves to slaughter. The proponents of both sides seem to have logical reasons that support their claims. So who is right?

Center Pivot Rental Rates With And Without Adjustments For Dryland Corners, Jim A. Jansen, Bruce B. Johnson

Cornhusker Economics

Cash rental rates on irrigated land have been on a strong upward trend in recent years, which has continued into 2013. Obviously, with heavy demand tenants have tended to bid aggressively. In an effort to obtain leases, the practice of bidding on a straight per acre rate for both the irrigated cropland and the dryland crop acres in the corners has become more common by tenants. After several years with normal or above rainfall, yield differentials on dryland corner acres were small enough to convince some tenants to bid essentially a per acre irrigated cash rent for the whole cropland …

Incidence Of Salmonella And Neighborhood Poverty Level In Connecticut, 2000-2011, Christina Marie Mainero

Public Health Theses

Background: Surveillance by the FoodNet program has shown that Salmonella, unlike other foodborne illnesses, has increased during the past fifteen years within the United States. Little work has been done to examine the role of socioeconomic factors in incidence of Salmonella. Neighborhood poverty level, measured as the percentage of people living below the poverty line, at the census tract level has been accepted as a useful indicator of socioeconomic status. This study utilized geographic information system (GIS) technology and census tract data to examine the variation in Salmonella incidence among census tracts in Connecticut. The objectives of this study were …

Environmental Risk Assessment Of Community Acquired Legionellosis From Recycled Water Use In Los Angeles County California, Luis Lozano

Public Health Theses

Abstract

Legionellosis is caused by Legionella pneumophila, resulting in 8,000-18,000 yearly hospitalizations and 4,000 deaths in the United States (Bouwknegt, 2012) (Toshiaki, 2004) (World Health Organization, 2012). L. pneumophila may persist in the built environment due to unique intracellular characteristics. Although the mode of transmission of L. pneumophila is inhalation of aerosolized contaminated water, this bacterium is not transmitted human to human (World Health Organization, 2012). L. pneumophila infection may be facilitated by the increased use of recycled water in Los Angeles County. In a water stressed area such as Los Angeles County, a limited potable water supply may not …

A Predictive Model Of Avian Influenza Among Poultry In Egypt, Natalie Price

Public Health Theses

Background: Avian Influenza (H5N1) has become entrenched in Egypt since its emergence in 2006. Control measures have failed and surveillance systems remain inadequate. A relatively new method for regression called Random Forests is presented here with the goal of providing accurate and timely predictions of the weekly number of outbreaks in each of the Egyptian governorates.

Methods: Predictions were generated from Random Forests models using outbreak data from the FAO EMPRES-i database, and local weather data from Weather Underground. This data was lagged by one and two weeks in order to make prospective predictions with the current week's data in …

Modeling The Epidemiological Impact Of Human Hookworm Infection, Laura Skrip

Public Health Theses

Background: Chronic hookworm infection affects an estimated 576 to 740 million people worldwide. Despite mass drug administration efforts, the morbidity associated with this soil-transmitted helminth remains a significant public health issue. Due to inter- and intra- community heterogeneity in susceptibility to infection, mathematical modeling can serve as an effective and efficient tool for investigating hookworm transmission in different settings and for guiding policymakers to consider new treatment and prevention strategies.

Methods: Here we developed an age-structured, compartmental S-I model to identify epidemiological parameters for hookworm infection and to assess rates of attributable anemia within the population of Zanzibar. The model …

Modeling Of Ambient Black Carbon Concentration Using Traffic, Temporal And Meteorology Data In Connecticut, Kunfeng Sun

Public Health Theses

Black carbon is a component of fine particle pollution that exerts adverse effects on both global climate change and human health. It is produced through incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biofuels. Therefore, some of its major emission sources are diesel engines, residential heating and industry. Due to its strong ability to absorb solar energy, black carbon is one of the major contributors to global warming. In addition, black carbon and other fine particle pollutants can be inhaled into the lower respiratory track, causing and exacerbating health conditions such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, low birth weight, cardiovascular diseases …

Neighborhood Level Socioeconomic Status And Rurality And Shiga Toxin-Producing Escherichia Coli Incidence: Connecticut, 2000-2011, Bridget Morrissey Whitney

Public Health Theses

Background: Shiga toxin Escherichia coli (STEC) O157 and other STEC strains are a well-known cause of enteric illness. National estimates are that STEC O157 causes approximately 96,534 illnesses every year in the United States, with another 168,698 illnesses caused by non-O157 STEC serotypes. Determining economic and sociodemographic factors associated with enteric disease incidence may provide new understandings of the transmission of these illnesses, particularly community transmission, and may prove useful in the prevention of disease.

Methods: A total of 764 incident STEC cases were reported in CT from 2000 to 2011. Incident cases were geocoded based on the case's address …

Epidemiology Of Malaria Infection Among School Aged Children In Kintampo North District, Ghana, Jennifer Du Mond

Public Health Theses

In June 2010 286 children from 16 participating schools were enrolled, with no more than one child from each household. Serum samples, fecal samples, and household surveys were used to assess the associations between the presence or density of malaria parasites and risk factors including nutritional status, hookworm infection, household risk prevention behaviors, and serum measures of parasite-specific immunoglobulin G (IgG).

Anthropometric and nutritional indicators were not associated with either outcome, nor was total malaria IgG. The primary risk factors for presence of infection included the house being sprayed in the past year (OR=0.04, p<0.001), child having a health care visit in the past year (OR=0.39, p<0.001), household malaria in the past year (OR=0.37, p=0.001), hookworm antibody density, with higher quartiles associated with elevated risk, greater household food insecurity, and geographic location.

Primary risk factors for elevated …

Epidemiology And Characterization Of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus From Swine Workers In Romania, Eileen Damin Huang

Public Health Theses

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a potent human pathogen associated with high morbidity and mortality worldwide. Livestock are known reservoir for MRSA, which pose substantial health risks for livestock farmers and their community contacts. However, little is known about MRSA among swine workers in Eastern Europe. In this study, we conducted a prevalence survey of swine workers in Romania. Three livestock-associated S. aureus strains (spa type t034, t011, and t4872) and one community-associated S. aureus strain (spa type t321) were isolated from workers on seven commercial swine farms in Transylvania. The rate of MRSA carriage in workers was 6.8%. Veterinarian …

Defensive Communication Between Professors And Students And Its Effects On Student Outcomes, Alexa Pomerenk

Honors Program Theses

This study investigated the relationship between defensive communication and student outcomes in college classrooms. The researcher hypothesized that students would perceive a greater defensive climate in classes taught by their least favorite professors, and that the defensive climate would encourage the use of coping mechanisms. Defensive communication was also hypothesized to negatively affect student grades, attendance, and course satisfaction and to increase student burnout. Surveys were administered to college students, and results supported all hypotheses. Findings showed that students linked defensive attributes to their least favorite professors more frequently than they did to their favorite professors, and they reported using …

Clean Up Our Home: Ellen Swallow Richards' Human Ecology And Emerging Environmental Ideologies, 1890-1915, Raeann Lillian Swanson

Honors Program Theses

In the late 1880s, after years of study and hard work, Ellen Richards began publishing her ideas on the home and the natural and urban environment. She called for the knowledge of basic scientific principles to be available to everyone. She believed that ignorance was holding back the public from altering their environment to make life healthier, happier, and safer. Over one hundred years later, Malcolm Gladwell wrote the book The Tipping Point. In his book, Gladwell explores the Broken Windows Theory that social scientists claimed they developed in the 1980s. The Broken Windows Theory states that there is a …

Uni's Dance Craze: A Psychological Analysis And Creative Documentary On 'The Interlude Dance' And 'The Dance Party', Ian Goldsmith

Honors Program Theses

The UNI campus has been part of an epidemic: a dance epidemic. “The Interlude Dance” and “The Dance Party” are two recent dance phenomena that have played a major role in my undergraduate experience. I sought to study these phenomena through an analytical approach. I sought to determine the psychosocial factors that lead to the initial and continuing success of “The Interlude Dance” and “The Dance Party”, and to build conceptual connections between both phenomena. This creative-research hybrid project culminated in a documentary short-film.

Exploring The Effect Of Arousal And Valence On Mouse Interaction, G. Mark Grimes, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, Joseph S. Valacich

Faculty Publications

Determining a user’s affective state can be an important element when trying to understand human-computer interactions. Accurately assessing affect during system use, however, can be very difficult, especially in a non-laboratory setting. Extensive previous research in neuroscience has shown that arousal and valence influence motor control. In this research, the prior relevant neuroscience findings inform the investigation of mouse movement behavior under conditions of low and high arousal as well as positive and negative valence. A controlled laboratory experiment was conducted, providing support for hypotheses predicting that arousal and valence may be inferred by monitoring for differences in the distance, …

Effective Rnai-Mediated Β2-Microglobulin Loss Of Function By Transgenesis In Xenopus Laevis, Hristina Nedelkovska, Eva-Stina Edholm, Nikesha Haynes, Jacques Robert

Biology

To impair MHC class I (class I) function in vivo in the amphibian Xenopus, we developed an effective reverse genetic loss of function approach by combining I-SceI meganucleasemediated transgenesis with RNAi technology. We generated transgenic outbred X. laevis and isogenetic laevis/gilli cloned lines with stably silenced expression of β2-microglobulin (b2m) critical for class I function. Transgenic F1 frogs exhibited decreased surface class I expression on erythrocytes and lymphocytes, decreased frequency of peripheral CD8 T cells and impaired CD8 T cell-mediated skin allograft rejection. Additionally, b2m knockdown increased susceptibility to viral infection of F0 transgenic larvae. This loss of function strategy …

Transience And Constancy Of Interactions In A Plant-Frugivore Network, Suann Yang, Reka Albert, Tomas A. Carlo

Biology

Plant-animal mutualistic interactions such as frugivory and seed dispersal display great variation in time due to fluctuations in fruit abundance, animal abundance, and behavior. In particular, some species participate in interactions with other species only transiently, while other species are active for longer periods of time. Species with a longer period of activity are able to interact with more species, and thus engage in constant participation in an interaction network. Species with high constancy would thus be expected to help maintain the biodiversity of a community; however, the manner in which constant species link to their partners may be critical …

The Effectiveness Of Negative And Positive Advertisements, Kristen Hora

Honors Program Theses

Whether we know it or not, we are faced with hundreds or even thousands of advertisements every day. Sometimes we acknowledge them and sometimes we do not, but whether or not we realize it, they can and do impact our decisions. The purpose for my senior year Honors Program Thesis was to determine the effectiveness of negative and positive advertising on people who are already favorable or unfavorable towards an industry. I chose to examine video advertisements with the topic of the pork industry. The basis of this research comes from my past experience in promotion for the pork industry. …

Essentialist Reasoning And Knowledge Effects On Biological Reasoning In Young Children, Patricia A. Herrmann, Jason A. French, Ganie B. Dehart, Karl S. Rosengren

Psychology

Biological kinds undergo a variety of changes during their life span, and these changes vary in degree by organism. Understanding that an organism, such as a caterpillar, maintains category identity over its life span despite dramatic changes is a key concept in biological reasoning. At present, we know little about the developmental trajectory of children's understanding of dramatic life-cycle changes and how this might relate to their understanding of evolution. We suggest that this understanding is a key precursor to later understanding of evolutionary change. Two studies examined the impact of age and knowledge on children's biological reasoning about living …

Libertarianism, Law And Economics, And The Common Law, Todd J. Zywicki

Chapman Law Review

No abstract provided.

“None Ends Where He Begun”: Astronomical And Polemic Revolutions In John Donne, Andrew Fleck

Literatures and Cultural Studies Faculty Publications

Some modern commentators welcome the alleged approach of the “post-human” era as a liberation from the constraints of essentialist identity. Others lament it as a harbinger of the death of the soul. But both groups will find it instructive to consider that the nature of humanity has always been a contested topic. The chapters collected here suggest that the emergence of the modern idea of the human was at least as fraught a process as its putative demise.

David Hawkes and Richard G. Newhauser have selected a wide array of contributions for this volume. Renowned scholars from several disciplines have …

A Novel Visual Stimulation Paradigm: Exploiting Individual Primary Visual Cortex Geometry To Boost Steady State Visual Evoked Potentials (Ssvep), Marta Isabel Vanegas Arroyave

Dissertations and Theses

The steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) is an electroencephalographic response to flickering stimuli generated in significant part by activity in primary visual cortex (V1). SSVEP signal-to-noise ratio is generally low for stimuli that are located in the visual periphery, at frequencies higher than 20 Hz, or at low contrast. Because of the typical "cruciform" geometry of V1, large stimuli tend to excite neighboring cortical regions of opposite orientation, likely resulting in electric field cancellation. In Study 1, we explored ways to exploit V1 geometry in order to boost scalp SSVEP amplitude via oscillatory summation, by manipulating flicker-phase offsets among angular …

Global Trends In Seasonality Of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (Ndvi), 1982-2011, J. Ronald Eastman, Florencia Sangermano, Elia A. Machado, John Rogan, Assaf Anyamba

Geography

A 30-year series of global monthly Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) imagery derived from the Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies (GIMMS) NDVI3g archive was analyzed for the presence of trends in changing seasonality. Using the Seasonal Trend Analysis (STA) procedure, over half (56.30%) of land surfaces were found to exhibit significant trends. Almost half (46.10%) of the significant trends belonged to three classes of seasonal trends (or changes). Class 1 consisted of areas that experienced a uniform increase in NDVI throughout the year, and was primarily associated with forested areas, particularly broadleaf forests. Class 2 consisted of areas experiencing …

Effects Of Chemotherapy On Sensory Inhibition And Sensory Memory In Breast Cancer Survivor, Raquel Bibi

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Toward Resolving The Problem Of Modern Piracy; A Case Study Of Somalia, Kamil Peter Kozlowski

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Application Of Computational Fluid Dynamics As A Simulation-Based Design Guide In A Microfluidic 3d Living Cell Array (3d Lca) Device, A.H. Rezwanuddin Ahmed

Dissertations and Theses

The use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as a tool in the aerodynamics and oil industry provides a reinforcement to efficiency in the design of aircrafts or for understanding the flow through pipes. A similar approach can be taken towards microfluidics, where traditionally devices have been designed based on experience or physiological replication, and a CFD simulation is shown post-manufacture to show the flow and diffusion patterns present. In this study, a reverse approach is suggested, by designing the device first in CFD and perform simulations on variations of alterable parameters to get insight on how the changing parameters affect …

Transport Pathway Across Hcaecs Uncer Convective Condtitions And The Role Of Apoptosis In Ldl Transport Through Hcaecs, Janpen Phupeerasupong

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Cognitive Function In Aging Cocaine Smokers, Saba Rastegar

Dissertations and Theses

Substance abuse disorders are becoming more prevalent in the aging population. Cocaine, specifically, is a major concern as it is the most commonly reported illegal drug associated with emergency room visits among older adults. The combined effects of aging and long-term cocaine use may significantly impact cognitive function in aging cocaine smokers; however, there is relatively little literature on this matter. The purpose of this study was to compare cognitive function in aging cocaine smokers and healthy aging individuals. The study enrolled a total of 20 participants between the ages of 50 and 60. Fourteen participants were in the aging …