Digital Commons Network^™

Impact Of Climate Change On Occupational Health And Safety, 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 …

Presence, Intensity, And Temporal Changes In Generalized Anxiety Disorder Maintenance Factors In Workers Undergoing Rehabilitation For Persistent Musculoskeletal Pain, Marie-France Coutu, Marie-José Durand, André Marchand, Marie-Élise Labrecque, Djamal Berbiche, Geneviève Cadieux

Rapports de recherche scientifique

Cliquez ici pour la version française de ce rapport

Problématique : La prévalence du trouble d’anxiété généralisée (TAG) est plus élevée chez les personnes ayant une lombalgie, comparativement à la population en générale. En présence d’un TAG, l’intolérance à l’incertitude sera élevée et des stratégies inefficaces entraîneront le maintien de l’anxiété. À long terme, une réduction de l’efficacité personnelle à résoudre des problèmes et l’apparition de symptômes dépressifs pourraient nuire au retour au travail. L’objectif général de cette étude exploratoire vise à mieux comprendre la nature des manifestations anxieuses de travailleurs ayant un TMS persistant. Pour ce faire l’objectif principal …

Characterization And Control Of Occupational Exposure To Nanoparticles And Ultrafine Particles, Maximilien Debia, Charles Beaudry, Scott Weichenthal, Robert Tardif, André Dufresne

Rapports de recherche scientifique

Cliquez ici pour la version française de ce rapport

De nombreux travailleurs sont exposés à un ensemble de particules présentes à une échelle nanométrique. En hygiène du travail, il est commun de différencier les nanoparticules (NP) manufacturées, des particules ultrafines (PUF) qui proviennent de sources naturelles, humaine ou industrielle. Étant donné qu’il existe des lacunes importantes dans les démarches usuelles d'évaluation du risque à ces particules, l’objectif de cette recherche était d’évaluer les expositions professionnelles à des PUF et des NP. L’objectif secondaire était de tester globalement les capacités d’évaluation des expositions professionnelles aux NP et aux PUF dans un …

Toward A Theory Of Interdisciplinarity: An Example Of Conceptual Integration/Blending In Teaching And Learning In Russian And East European Language-Based Area Studies, Anna Pleshakova, Kathleen M. Quinlan

Russian Language Journal

Most of problems in everyday and professional life are interdisciplinary, though most of our academic scholarship is contained within disciplines. To understand and solve such interdisciplinary problems, we must cross disciplinary boundaries. Yet, “the need to identify a method or/and logic of interdisciplinarity has, however, proven to be much easier to proclaim than to meet.”

Language, Politics, And History: An Introductory Essay, José Del Valle

Publications and Research

This book chapter examines different articulations of language and history and introduces a new configuration that focuses on the political dimension of language.

Strengths And Limitations Of Qualitative Approaches To Research In Occupational Health Psychology, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Joseph J. Mazzola

Publications and Research

Like all research methods, qualitative methods have strengths and limitations. This chapter describes seven strengths and five limitations. With an understanding of their strengths and limitations and how to minimize and/or balance them, occupational health psychology (OHP) researchers can benefit from qualitative methods. It is important to understand that qualitative findings do not establish generalizable cause-effect relations. However, qualitative methods can help an OHP researcher develop a theory of causality and derive hypotheses related to the theory and, thus, motivate quantitatively organized research designed to test the hypotheses. The challenge for the OHP researcher is to be mindful of what …

Investigations Into Alkene Hydration And Alkene Oxidation Catalysis, William Schreiter

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Bimetallic Ni complexes Ni21M and Ni21R and monometallic transition metal complexes were investigated as possible alkene hydration catalysts under a multitude of different reaction conditions. All attempts at performing this catalytic reaction failed to give any alcohol products. Catalytic screening experiments were conducted using a mixture of racemic-et,ph-P4 and meso-et,ph-P4, 1M and 1R, and various transition metals. These experiments gave several different products including 1-phenylethanol from styrene. During the course of the hydration experiments, an aldehyde product was identified from experiments conducted with the bimetallic complexes in air. Experiments have shown that the aldehyde is produced from the oxidative cleavage …

Carcinogens In The Workplace? Think About It!, France Labrèche, Brigitte Roberge, Sabrina Gravel, Marie-France D'Amours

Fiches

No abstract provided.

Des Cancérogènes En Milieu De Travail? Posez-Vous Des Questions!, France Labrèche, Brigitte Roberge, Sabrina Gravel, Marie-France D'Amours

Fiches

No abstract provided.

Reproductive Timing Of The Blotched Chub (Erimystax Insignis) In The Flint River System Of Northern Alabama, Candice Allen

Theses

Important details of the reproductive ecology of many freshwater fishes of the species-rich southeastern USA are still poorly known. One such species is the Blotched Chub, Erimystax insignis, which is found in northern Alabama. To determine timing and patterns of reproductive effort, collections were made of as many as 40 individuals monthly from August 2011 through July 2012. The collection site was a 10 km stretch of the Flint River in Madison County Alabama. Female gonadosomatic index (GSI) data averages for each collection indicate that the species peaks in reproductive activity in March. Fish had reproductively competent female GSI values …

A Novel Mammogram Registration Algorithm For Improving Breast Cancer Detection, Stephanie Cleveland Cunningham

Theses

Accurate mammogram registration is vital to future breast cancer research. In order to detect changes over time and/or bilateral asymmetry, computer aided detection algorithms must first be able to accurately align two mammogram images. The registration algorithm in this thesis is a novel process designed to accurately register two mammogram images using the Pompeiu-Hausdorff distance as a similarity measure. The algorithm identifies the optimal translation and rotation that can be used to properly align the two mammogram images by computing the optimized Pompeiu-Hausdorff distance between extracted feature point-sets and adaptively fine tuning the parameters with each iteration. This automated algorithm, …

Metal Nanoridge Surface Plasmon Waveguides, Zeyu Pan

Theses

Propagating two-dimensional surface plasmon waveguide modes supported by silver nanoridges with flat-top, triangular, and elliptical cross sections are investigated. Mode profiles, dispersion relations, propagation distances, mode sizes, and figures-of-merit are calculated for these nanoridge waveguides. There is only one guided mode associated with the nanoridge, which is a quasi-TEM mode with longitudinal field components one order of magnitude smaller than transverse field components. The quasi-TEM nature of the mode reveals that free electron oscillations located at the top of the nanoridge is the main contributor to tightly confined nature of plasmon modes. When the height of a triangular nanoridge or …

Woman Trouble: True Love And Homecoming In Pedro Almodóvar's Volver (2006), Corinne Ondine Pache

Classical Studies Faculty Research

A meditation on the notion of return, Pedro Almodóvar's 2006 Volver focuses on the modern experience of love, memory, and identity in a manner that is at once indebted to the past and resolutely contemporary. Some films represent the ancient world directly, drawing on historical or literary sources, but many that focus on contemporary narratives can be shown to be inspired—directly or not—by ancient myths whose history is so influential that they pervade many of our notions about the human experience. In particular, insofar as Homer's poem is the foundational text in Western culture of the very idea of homecoming—or …

Peerj, Michael J. Hughes

Library Faculty Research

PeerJ is the Open Access (OA) publisher of a biomedical journal, also called PeerJ. In addition to its peer-reviewed flagship, it runs a preprint server, PeerJ Preprints, to which authors can submit draft, incomplete, and final papers for informal peer review, and to establish precedent. The company’s chief innovation, however, is a novel if untried business model: extending to authors lifetime publication privileges in exchange for a one-time fee. This strategy adheres to the basic formula of fee-based Gold OA in that an upfront charge pays for the operations of the journal. PeerJ diverges from its predecessors in that it …

Biodiversity Heritage Library, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Deanna Marcum

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), created in 2006, is the result of a collaboration of ten natural history museum and botanical garden libraries seeking to digitize core taxonomic literature and to make it free and openly available throughout the world. Today, the BHL includes fifteen member institutions whose efforts have shaped a collection of over 60,000 titles. It is supported through a combination of membership dues, in-kind support from member institutions, contributions from the user community, and direct support from the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, and it reaches tens of thousands of users each year. While managing the complex partnership has …

A Multi-Scale Investigation Of Nutrient Dynamics In The Lake Pontchartrain Estuary And Basin, Eric Daniel Roy

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Humans are responsible for global-scale alteration of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) biogeochemical cycles to support food production. Increases in N and P inputs into soils and waste-streams has resulted in excessive nutrient loading to surface waters, including the Mississippi River, leading to eutrophication. Here I investigated N and P dynamics occurring in the Lake Pontchartrain Estuary and Basin. I measured two biogeochemical processes using intact sediment core incubations and quantified their importance in the context of nutrient-rich Mississippi River flood diversions through the Bonnet Carré Spillway. I show that diffusion of nitrate-N into sediments accounts for a substantial magnitude …

A Hybrid Framework Of Iterative Mapreduce And Mpi For Molecular Dynamics Applications, Shuju Bai

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Developing platforms for large scale data processing has been a great interest to scientists. Hadoop is a widely used computational platform which is a fault-tolerant distributed system for data storage due to HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) and performs fault-tolerant distributed data processing in parallel due to MapReduce framework. It is quite often that actual computations require multiple MapReduce cycles, which needs chained MapReduce jobs. However, Design by Hadoop is poor in addressing problems with iterative structures. In many iterative problems, some invariant data is required by every MapReduce cycle. The same data is uploaded to Hadoop file system in …

Creating A Framework For Systems-Based Graphic Analysis And The Assessment Of College-Level Introductory Biology Textbooks, Katherine Ellen Brooks

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Ecological literacy in students has become an increasing concern for educators. Mounting environmental problems along with a growing amount of nature deficit disorder seen in children and adults alike provides the impetus for research in this area. Since many college biology classes are modeled around the same style and emphasis found in the textbooks used for those courses, this provided an avenue for an examination of these materials. This research involved the selection of five popular introductory, college-level biology textbooks for analysis. Three rubrics were created to assess the graphical components of the introductory and ecology chapters in each textbook. …

Detection Of Microorganisms Using Maldi And Ion Mobility Mass Spectrometry, Juaneka Monet Hayes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Matrix-assisted laser ablation desorption ionization MALDI and ion mobility (IM) MALDI mass spectrometry (MS) were used for the detection and identification of microorganisms. MALDI MS is an analytical tool that separates ions by their mass-to-charge ratio (m/z) and is routinely used for bioanalysis because of its sensitivity, selectivity, general applicability, and tolerance to impurities. Ion mobility is a gas phase technique that separates ions based on their charge and collision cross-section. In this research, MALDI-TOF MS and MALDI-IM-TOF MS analysis were conducted in parallel to assess the effectiveness of MALDI-IM-TOF MS for microorganism identification. Whole cell bacteria Escherichia coli strain …

Silver Nanoparticles As Drug Delivery Systems, Ammar Tahseen Qureshi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this project is to study the potential applications of silver nanoparticles (SNPs) in the medical device and pharmaceutical industries. Bone cements have been used in the orthopedic surgeries for many years to anchor prosthetics while filling up the spaces between the prostheses and bone. Antibiotics are an active component of bone cements but the increasing bacterial resistance to these antibiotics and difficulty of shaping and molding the bone cements increases the need for new antimicrobial biomaterials. Adult stem cell based regenerative therapies have been one of the most widely researched areas of tissue engineering. This is due …

Synthetic Efforts Toward The Eastern Hemisphere Of Theonellamide C, Douglas D. Wong

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The theonellamides (TNMs) A-F are bicyclic dodecapeptides isolated from marine sponges of the genus Theonella and were shown to display potent antifungal activity. Despite considerable synthetic effort to produce TNM F by the Shioiri group in the early 1990s, a total synthesis of a TNM has yet to be reported. This dissertation describes our efforts toward some of the required amino acid residues of TNM C and the eastern hemisphere. The production of erythro-β-hydroxyasparagine (eHyAsn) followed the synthesis of threo-β-HyAsn by Boger and co-workers, utilizing a key Sharpless aminohydroxylation reaction. The eHyAsn building block, Boc-eHyAsn(OTBS)-OH, was coupled with HCl.Phe.OMe using …

Fluorescent Materials For Chemical Sensing, Brian Gerard Imsick

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Materials incorporating fluorescent π-electron conjugated molecular species for sensing and imaging are advantageous over other detection or identification methods such as colorimetric reporters. Fluorescent materials offer easy recognition of binding events due to the highly sensitive nature of fluorescence techniques down to the single molecule level. The properties of fluorescent molecules allow for rapid attenuation of observable readout due to the facile transport of excited state energy via both inter- and intramolecular pathways. This dissertation primarily focused on the development and study of a general platform for ratiometric fluorescent chemosensing using surface-immobilized oligomers, as well as in depth explorations of …

Adjustments, Extensions, Disclaimers, And Continuations: When Do Patent Term Adjustments Make Sense?, Stephanie Plamondon Bair

Faculty Scholarship

The United States patent system represents a measured trade-off between two competing policy considerations: providing sufficient incentives to encourage the innovation and development of new and socially useful inventions; and ensuring that such inventions are readily available to the public at an affordable price. Although the default patent term is now twenty years from filing, various features of, and changes to, the patent system over the years have allowed patent owners to extend the duration of their patent monopolies, sometimes for several years. Such extensions, though seemingly insignificant when compared to the full patent term, have an enormous impact on …

Asleep Behind The Wheel: Experiences Of Night Shift Nurses On The Commute Home, Shirley A. Sargent

Open Access Dissertations

Aim: The aim of this study was to obtain descriptions of nurses’ perceptions and experiences of falling asleep behind the wheel on the drive home after a worked night shift.

Background: While the evidence suggests that the problem of drowsy driving and fall asleep driving is a strong contributor to vehicular accidents, little is known about nursing perceptions of the issue.

Methods: The design of the study is qualitative and descriptive. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 12 registered nurses who had experienced falling asleep behind the wheel on the drive home from work after a worked night shift. The interviews …

Prediction Of Heptatic And Renal Clearance In Pediatric Populations: A "Bottom-Up" Approach Versus "Top-Down" Recognition Of Covariates, Hong Lu

Open Access Dissertations

Medications, including many that are widely used in children, are rarely tested in children. Their safety and effectiveness have not been established in children or have been established only for children of a certain ages. For example, 53 of 140 new medications were labeled for use in children when they were initially approved. Much of pediatric practice, particularly in hospitals and by specialists, has involved "off-label" use of medications. As a consequence, about one-third of the drugs prescribed in office-based pediatric practices and about two-thirds of those prescribed to children in hospital settings are unlicensed or off-label. This proportion reaches …

A Comparison Of Carbonic Anhydrase Among Invertebrates, With A Focus On Cephalopods, Albert C. Nyack

Open Access Dissertations

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is both an unavoidable waste product of aerobic carbohydrate metabolism and a fuel source for autotrophic and chemoautotrophic organisms. At biological pH, CO₂ rapidly reacts with interstitial and intracellular water to form carbonic acid (H₂CO₃), that then dissociates into protons (H⁺) and bicarbonate (HCO₃^-). While CO₂ and H⁺ readily diffuse across biological membranes, the majority of the CO₂ in living tissues is in the membrane-impermeable form HCO₃^-. The enzyme carbonic anhydrase (CA) catalyzes the reversible hydration of CO_{2 …}

Trophic Ecology Of Oxygen Minimum Zone Zooplankton Revealed By Carbon And Nitrogen Stable Isotopes, Rebecca Williams

Open Access Dissertations

Oxygen minimum zones (OMZs) are areas in which midwater oxygen concentration can be significantly lower than in non OMZ areas at comparable depths. OMZs are of great interest because of the limits oxygen availability places on life. The potential for OMZ expansion with warming of the oceans has refocused attention on the importance of these areas and their potential impacts on the global carbon cycle. The large open ocean OMZs of the Eastern Tropical Pacific and Arabian Sea are notable for their size, thickness, and the intensity of oxygen depletion (

Here, I use measurements of natural abundance carbon and …

Y A-T-Il Des Cancérogènes Dans Votre Milieu De Travail? Passez À L'Action! (Plan D'Action - Inscriptible), France Labrèche, Brigitte Roberge, Sabrina Gravel, Marie-France D'Amours

Fiches

No abstract provided.

Are There Carcinogens In Your Workplace? It's Time To Act! (Action Plan - Writable), France Labrèche, Brigitte Roberge, Sabrina Gravel, Marie-France D'Amours

Fiches

No abstract provided.

Neofeminism, Aya Gruber

Publications

Today it is prosaic to say that "feminism is dead." Far from being moribund, feminist legal theory is breaking from its somewhat dogmatic past and forging ahead with new vigor. Many modern feminist legal scholars seek innovative ways to better the legal, social, and economic status of women while simultaneously questioning some of the more troubling moves of second-wave feminism, such as the tendency to essentialize the woman's experience, the turn to authoritarian state policies, and the characterization of women as pure objects or agents. These "neofeminists" prioritize women's issues but maintain a strong commitment to distributive justice and recognize …