Digital Commons Network^™

A Well Designed Goat Grazing Plan Can Reduce Noxious Weeds, Sterling Banks

All Current Publications

Goat grazing can be an effective tool in reducing noxious weeds, if the right grazing plan is designed and implemented. Areas where herbicides are not an option or limited, goat grazing can reduce noxious weeds by reducing seed production and plant growth.

Pediatric Near-Drowning And Drowning, Mohammed M. Jan

Saudi Medical Journal

Childhood water submersion remains a major public health problem. The aim of this article is to present an updated overview of the topic with data from our region and special attention to prevention strategies. Children less than 5 years and males are particularly at risk. Infants are at higher risk of drowning in bathtubs, toilets, or washing machines, while most drowning in older children occurs in swimming pools. Poor supervision by inexperienced caregivers is a common factor and contributes to most deaths. Adolescents drown more often during outdoor water activity. Acute management should start as soon as possible in order …

Oxidative Stress And Antioxidative Potency Are Closely Associated With Diabetic Retinopathy And Nephropathy In Patients With Type 2 Diabetes, Rika Naruse, Mariko Suetsugu, Tomoko Terasawa, Keishi Ito, Kenji Hara, Kohzo Takebayashi, Kimio Morita, Yoshimasa Aso, Toshihiko Inukai

Saudi Medical Journal

OBJECTIVE: To examine involvement of oxidative stress in the pathogenesis and vascular complications of diabetes. METHODS: This cross sectional study was conducted at the Joint Laboratory Office (JLO), Dokkyo Medical University Koshigaya Hospital, Koshigaya, Japan from April 2010 to December 2011. Fasting glucose, glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c), serum lipids, urinary albumin excretion (UAE), ankle brachial index and pulse wave velocity were measured in 51 patients with type 2 diabetes and 20 healthy controls. The fundus oculi and Achilles’ tendon reflex were also examined in the patients. Oxidative stress was measured by a reactive oxygen metabolites (ROM) test and antioxidant potency was …

Social Services For Sexual Minority Youth: Preferences For What, Where, And How Services Are Delivered, Elizabeth A. Wells, Kenta Asakura, Marilyn J. Hoppe, Kimberly F. Balsam, Diane M. Morrison, Blair Beadnell

School for Social Work: Faculty Publications

As part of an internet-based study to investigate experiences of sexual minority youth in the U.S., 544 youth, ages 14-19, were surveyed about their need for services, where they preferred to receive these services, and their preferred method of service delivery. The survey was anonymous and youth were recruited from LGBTQ-specific listservs and venues as well as through social networking sites as a way of reaching youth often not represented in LGBTQ surveys. Youth highly endorsed many types of services, settings, and modes of delivery. Some subgroup differences emerged. Transgender youth and those uncertain about their gender identity expressed stronger …

Critical Appraisal Of Axitinib In The Treatment Of Advanced Renal Cell Carcinoma, J Ansari, Sa Hussain, J Glaholm, A Ansari

Peninsula Medical School

A growing understanding of the biology of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) has led to the development and US Food and Drug Administration approval of seven new molecular targeted agents over the past 7 years. Axitinib is a potent, selective, second-generation inhibitor of vascular endothelial growth factor receptors and the latest to join the armamentarium of drugs available for the treatment of metastatic RCC. Despite recent advances in the development of molecular targeted agents for metastatic RCC, the ideal sequencing of these agents remains unclear.

Credit Scoring Using Machine Learning, Kenneth Kennedy

Doctoral

For financial institutions and the economy at large, the role of credit scoring in lending decisions cannot be overemphasised. An accurate and well-performing credit scorecard allows lenders to control their risk exposure through the selective allocation of credit based on the statistical analysis of historical customer data. This thesis identifies and investigates a number of specific challenges that occur during the development of credit scorecards. Four main contributions are made in this thesis. First, we examine the performance of a number supervised classification techniques on a collection of imbalanced credit scoring datasets. Class imbalance occurs when there are significantly fewer …

Brief 7: Building An International Court For The Environment: A Conceptual Framework, Philip Riches, Stuart A. Bruce

Governance and Sustainability Issue Brief Series

This issue brief considers the role and nature of existing and potential international dispute resolution fora in relation to international environmental law. It addresses impediments at the international level, such as limited access to justice by non-state actors and the lack of technical and scientific capability. As a conceptual paper, it highlights two possible remedial options: an international environmental tribunal and an international environmental court.

Public Policy Against Religion: Doubting Thomas , Richard H. Seeburger

Pepperdine Law Review

In free exercise cases, the Supreme Court has adopted a least restrictive alternative test in an attempt to maximize protection for religiously motivated practices. Because the least restrictive alternative test only considers the importance of the governmental interest and the availability of alternative means to accomplish those interests, thereby ignoring the importance of the burdened religious activity to the individual and the degree of burden on religious activity, all religious interests are treated equally when asserted against a governmental interest. Under such an inflexible and brittle test, the Supreme Court has recently denied religious claims which had previously been recognized. …

The Manville Corporation Bankruptcy: An Abuse Of The Judicial Process?, Mark Kunkler

Pepperdine Law Review

Federal bankruptcy law offers a refuge to the honest debtor who is unable to pay his creditor's when his debts are due. Here, the twin aims of bankruptcy law, to give the debtor a fresh start and to provide roughly equal treatment for his! Creditors, are laudably accomplished. But what policies support the use of federal bankruptcy law when the "debtor" is in fact solvent and apparently seeks refuge only to escape liability for the products it manufactures? This comment examines the recent filing of the Manville Corporation for Chapter 11 protection under bankruptcy law with this question in mind.

The Use Of In Vitro Fertilization: Is There A Right To Bear Or Beget A Child By Any Available Medical Means?, Matthew R. Eccles

Pepperdine Law Review

The prodigious advancements of biomedical science in human reproduction have brought both blessing and cursing in recent years. Many join with childless couples and hail the opportunity to bear a child, while others fearfully contemplate the moral and ethical consequences that accompany the birth of that child. In view of those consequences, laws limiting access to the new methods of reproduction are bound to be drawn and couples are bound to challenge them as unconstitutionally limiting their right to privacy. This comment examines the arguments of both sides in determining whether the right of privacy protects the use of the …

The Law Of The Sea: Offshore Installations And Marine Pollution, John Warren Kindt

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Editing Law Reviews: Some Practical Suggestions And A Moderately Revolutionary Proposal , James C. Raymond

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Observer, Central Washington University

Student Newspaper

Student newspaper for Central Washington University for January 31-February 6, 2013. Vol. 93, No. 4.

The Daily Egyptian, January 31, 2013, Daily Egyptian Staff

January 2013

No abstract provided.

Synthesis And Characterization Of New Light Emitting Probes For Sensitive Detection Of Bio-Molecules And Live Cells, Shyamala Pravin Pillai

Dissertations

A variety of contemporary analytical platforms in technical and biological applications take advantage of labeling the objects of interest with fluorescent or luminescent tracers. Luminescent tracers take advantage of the unique property of some lanthanide metals to absorb and emit light. Long lifetime of lanthanide emission allows temporal gating of the signal, which avoids the short-lived background of interfering sample components. This property in combination with large Stokes shift contributes to extreme sensitivity of detection (ca. 10^-13-10^-14 M), which makes lanthanide-based probes suitable for large variety of challenging tasks ( e.g., intracellular detection of single DNA/RNA, or …

Separation Of Various Organic-Organic And Aqueous-Organic Solutions Via Pervaporation, John Tang

Dissertations

Pervaporation, an energy saving separation process, can be useful in pharmaceutical processing. However, the organic solvents involved in pharmaceutical product synthesis are chemically demanding; very few polymers are able to withstand them. An ideal membrane would be polymeric having a high thermal, chemical and mechanical stability. Such a membrane is made of a copolymer of polydimethyldioxole and tetrafluoroethylene known as PDD-TFE of the CMS-3 variety with a very high free volume. This novel membrane is used to separate a variety of organic-organic and aqueous-organic mixtures. An earlier study based on water-ethanol-isopropanol has shown evidence that the membrane selectivity may be …

Modeling Cell Proliferation In A Perfusion Tissue Engineering Bioreactor, Jeffrey Vincent Pohlmeyer

Dissertations

In this dissertation we develop a comprehensive model to simulate a tissue engineering experiment. The experiment takes place in a bioreactor in which a cell seeded porous scaffold is placed, and the scaffold experiences a perfused flow of a nutrient-rich culture medium. The goal of the model is to assist experimentalists in evaluation of different parameter scenarios as the time needed to simulate an experiment is significantly less than the time needed for the experiment itself. We provide the full two-dimensional model development, as well as investigation into possible variations of specific model choices, and we demonstrate the robustness and …

Particle Engineering Via Surface Modification During Micronization For Pharmaceutical Applications, Xi Han

Dissertations

Improving the dissolution rate of Biopharmaceutics Classification System (BCS) class II drugs is an important research area. Micronization which can increase the specific surface area is a promising method to improve the dissolution rate. Micronization alone, however, can lead to downstream processing problems related to poor flow and dispersion properties. The importance of the flowability of pharmaceutical powders is well-documented in the literature. It is, therefore, important to develop a method that can simultaneously overcome these processing issues and allow for micronizing the API. In this work, dry particle coating technique is investigated in the context of micronizing API powders …

Development Of Luminescent Probes For Ultrasensitive Detection Of Biopolymers, Their Complexes, And Living Cells, Laura A. Wirpsza

Dissertations

New luminescent probes with enhanced brightness convenient for bioconjugation were synthesized and tested in major biological applications including the detection of nucleic acids and living cells. The first project used luminescent lanthanide ion probes that take advantage of hyper-sensitive acquisition of their long-lived emission signal in time- resolved mode, which avoids short-lived background fluorescence of the medium. Two model carbostyril fluorophores (cs 124-CH₃ and cs 124-CF₃) were modified by inclusion of two spacers (diamino and bi-phenyl) for the attachment of amine and thiol reactive cross-linking groups. In this project, time-resolved measurements are presented for spectroscopy and microscopy. …

Fabrication And Evaluation Of A Collagen-Based Fiber-Gel Three-Dimensional Construct For Peripheral Nerve Repair, Mevan Lakmal Siriwardane

Dissertations

Nerve regeneration following a peripheral nerve injury often relies on growth cone- mediated guidance and the presence of Schwann cells to support the regenerating axons and remyelinate portions of denervated nerve pathways. The emphasis of this work is to develop a synthetic nervous tissue construct that contains similar basal lamina or extracellular matrix to peripheral nerve in order to achieve a level of effectiveness in nerve repair and future peripheral nerve regeneration applications. To this end, three- dimensional nervous tissue constructs consisting of type I collagen are fabricated into a composite biomaterial scaffold to promote contact-guided growth of neuronal and …

The University Of San Francisco Fact Book And Almanac 2013, Alan Ziajka

USF Fact Book and Almanac

No abstract provided.

Ucc Minutes January 31, 2013, Kutztown University Curriculum Committee

UCC Minutes

No abstract provided.

The Utah Statesman, January 31, 2013, Utah State University

The Utah Statesman

Weekly student newspaper of Utah State University in Logan.

Curriculum Committee Course Proposals 01/31/13, Curriculum Committee

Curriculum Committee Reports

No abstract provided.

Minutes, Arts And Sciences Executive Committee Meeting, Thursday, January 31, 2013, Arts And Sciences Executive Committee

Executive Committee Minutes

No abstract provided.

Astrocytes Modulate Microglial Phenotype And Dendritic Cell-Like Properties, Nischal K. Padala

Dissertations

Microglia are the resident immune cells of the CNS. In the healthy CNS, they express negligible levels of MHC II molecules as well as co-stimulatory molecules CD40, CD80 and CD86 necessary for antigen presentation to and activation of T cells. Co-stimulatory molecule expression can be induced in isolated microglia in vitro by sequential treatment with granulocyte monocyte colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) followed by lipopolysaccharide (LPS). Upon such treatment, they become mature dendritic cells (DCs), capable of activating T cells. However, microglia are not isolated in life, but rather exist in an environment enriched by other cells, notably astrocytes.

Therefore, to determine …

Mathematical Modeling Of Heavy Metals Diffusion And Removal From Cylindrical Cement Forms Coated With Bio-Film, Mojdeh Tabatabaie

Dissertations

A mathematical model is developed to predict bioleachi ng of heavy metals from long cylindrical shape cementitious samples. In this model, the metal concentration difference within the solid and its surface is considered as the main driving force for transport of metals to the surface of a sample at a given temperature and pressure. Fick’s first and second law are applied to explain the motion of contaminants in a long and uniform cylindrical solid. In addition, the model considers Michaelis-Menten type kinetics, a special case of the widely accepted Langmuir-Hinshelwood reaction mechanism, at the surface of the encapsulating cylinder. The …

Charger Times Vol. 1, No. 14, 2013-01-31, University Of Alabama In Huntsville

Charger Times (2012-2014)

No abstract provided.

On The Spatial Predictability Of Wireless Channels And Robust Networked Cooperation In Mobile Sensor Networks, Mehrzad Malmirchegini

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

The wireless sensor network revolution has created the possibility of exploring and controlling the environment in ways not possible before. The vision of a multi-agent network cooperatively learning and adapting in harsh unknown environments to achieve a common goal is closer than ever. In such networks, communication plays a key role in the overall performance of the network as each mobile agent improves its knowledge by processing the information received from others. Therefore, proper prediction of the communication signal strength and fundamentally understanding the spatial predictability of a wireless channel, based on only a few measurements, become considerably important. The …

Estimation And Stability Of Nonlinear Control Systems Under Intermittent Information With Applications To Multi-Agent Robotics, Domagoj Tolic

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

This dissertation investigates the role of intermittent information in estimation and control problems and applies the obtained results to multi-agent tasks in robotics. First, we develop a stochastic hybrid model of mobile networks able to capture a large variety of heterogeneous multi-agent problems and phenomena. This model is applied to a case study where a heterogeneous mobile sensor network cooperatively detects and tracks mobile targets based on intermittent observations. When these observations form a satisfactory target trajectory, a mobile sensor is switched to the pursuit mode and deployed to capture the target. The cost of operating the sensors is determined …